MAGA Report Cards — West Virginia

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

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

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

The argument they signed is the part worth reading twice.

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

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

What the brief actually argues

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

Some of these names carry their own history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the argument matters beyond this case

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

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

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

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

What the filing shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

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

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

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

This is control, not freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Two Republicans said no

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

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

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

Every Republican we track who voted yes

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

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

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

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

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

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

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

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

The emergency the resolution describes

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

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

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

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

What was actually in front of them that week

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

Outside the chamber:

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

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

In their own words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 189 who voted yes

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

The number nine is not in the Constitution

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

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

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

What they were actually voting on

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

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

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

The timing

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

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

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

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

Who pushed it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted to freeze the Court

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

Then a second missile killed them.

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

Congress never voted to authorize any of it.

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

We do not know who most of these people were

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

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

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

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

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

What the Senate actually voted on

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

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

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

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

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

It failed, 48 to 51.

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

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

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

Two of them switching sides would have carried it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legal case for all this is classified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House looked into it for ten days

The Senate is not the only chamber that folded.

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man who quit over this said so at the time

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

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

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

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

The 188 who voted yes

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

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

The four who voted no

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

He told them it had nothing to do with vaccines.

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

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

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

What Kennedy did not tell the senators

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

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

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

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

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

The fourteen votes

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

Fourteen of those yes votes came from Republicans we track:

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

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

What Susan Collins was promised

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

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

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

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

What happened to the promises

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

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

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

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

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

The MMR vaccine is now the target

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who would have to investigate

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

Joe Wilson wrote it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ohio said no in 2011. Jim Jordan signed anyway.

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

Jim Jordan is Ohio's signature on this bill.

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

Pennsylvania sent five signatures on a law it never wanted

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

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

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

What it costs a paycheck

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

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

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

This is not a one-off

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They wrote the rules: Aaron Bean and Ashley Hinson

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

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

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

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

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

He promised in writing: Jeff Hurd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That rescue bill has three cosponsors and has never moved.

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

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

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

He let the subsidies lapse: Jon Husted

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

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

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

The pattern

Read those seven together and the defense falls apart.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Shelley Moore Capito Was "Pretty Comfortable" With DOGE. Eight Weeks Later It Fired Everyone Who Screens West Virginia's Coal Miners for Black Lung.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:59:38 +0000

On February 6, 2025, Shelley Moore Capito was asked what she made of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency tearing through federal agencies.

"But for right now, I'm pretty comfortable with the direction that we see," she said in answer to a WV MetroNews question at a news briefing. "I think people wanted things to be disrupted and looked at in a different way." That, she said, "is what Elon Musk brings and his Department of Government Efficiency."

Fifty-four days later, DOGE fired essentially everyone at the one federal facility in West Virginia whose job is to keep coal miners from suffocating.

What happened in Morgantown

On April 1, 2025, West Virginia Watch reported that roughly 200 federal jobs were being eliminated at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health facility in Morgantown.

Cathy Tinney-Zara, president of the union local there, said all 185 bargaining-unit employees were in the reduction in force, management was put on administrative leave, and she put the total at about 210 positions. She got word at 5 a.m. that she was fired and would lose building access by midnight. She gave that interview while cleaning out an office she had worked in for more than 30 years.

"It's devastating. People will die," she said.

Officials at the facility, she said, were told the cuts were because the services there were not needed or were duplicative.

"There is no one else in the government that does occupational safety and health. There's no one else in the U.S."

The Morgantown facility runs the Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program — the free, confidential black lung screening that comes to mining communities in a mobile unit. It can process as many as 5,000 chest X-rays a year from current and former miners, read by specially trained radiologists — and NIOSH is the only body qualified to certify the X-ray that lets a sick miner transfer out of a dusty job.

Take away the readers and the screening stops. Take away the screening and a miner in his thirties keeps cutting rock while his lungs fill in, and nobody tells him until it is too late to matter.

The facility's 674 mice and 37 rats — some in studies running for decades — were expected to be euthanized. The veterinarian required by law to be present had already been let go.

Who actually stopped it

Not the Senate.

It was Harry Wiley, an underground electrician in Raleigh County who had been diagnosed with black lung, who filed a class action against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On May 13, 2025, U.S. District Judge Irene Berger of the Southern District of West Virginia ordered Kennedy and HHS to restore the Respiratory Health Division and the Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program.

Judge Berger wrote plainly about what was at stake for Wiley: "Remaining in a dusty job may reduce the years in which Mr. Wiley can walk and breathe unassisted, in addition to hastening his death."

The United Mine Workers of America joined a coalition of labor and safety groups in a suit of its own, charging that the administration had bypassed Congress to eliminate the programs. The mobile screening units did not roll again until July 2025. Full staffing was not restored until January 15, 2026 — nine months after the firings.

The union's press release announcing that win is titled "NIOSH Restoration is a Win for Miners, but Progress Delayed has Already Cost Lives."

"While we are glad to see these positions restored, we are disappointed these cuts were made in the first place," UMWA President Brian Sanson said.

Secretary-Treasurer Michael Phillippi spelled out the cost of the gap: freezing the labs forced a pause in enforcement of the new silica dust rule, and "within the mining industry today, we are seeing younger workers in their thirties being diagnosed with advanced black lung because they are cutting more rock than ever before. Every day those labs were empty was a day miners were left unprotected."

Capito's part in it, fairly stated

She did work to get NIOSH back. That is real and it belongs in this story. In the same release, Sanson said: "I want to thank those in and out of Congress who worked with us to get NIOSH back to full staffing, especially Sen. Shelley Moore Capito."

So give her that. Then ask the harder question, which is why a West Virginia senator was ever in the position of begging for it.

Capito is not a bystander to this agency. She chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education — the subcommittee that writes NIOSH's funding bill. She also voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man whose department carried out the firings.

And when she raised it with him, at a budget hearing on May 20, 2025 — a week after the judge had already ordered the program restored — here is how she put it:

"I support the president's vision to right-size our government, but as you and I have discussed, I don't think eliminating NIOSH programs will accomplish that goal. I encourage you to look at this closely."

Read that as a West Virginian. Her own state's coal miners had just lost their black lung screening. Her ask was not that the administration stop firing people who keep workers alive. Her ask was that this particular program be spared, while she reaffirmed her support for the project doing the firing. "I encourage you to look at this closely" is not the sentence of someone who controls the money.

She had the power before April 1, not just after. Being "pretty comfortable" in February was a choice about what she would use it for.

It is happening again right now

This is not history. On April 3, 2026, HHS published its fiscal 2027 budget request, and Safety+Health Magazine reported what is in it: NIOSH would be folded into a new National Center for Chemicals and Toxins inside the CDC, and three line items are proposed for elimination — the National Occupational Research Agenda ($120.5 million), "other occupational safety and health research" ($115.1 million), and education and research centers ($32 million).

That is roughly $268 million of occupational safety and health research on the chopping block, one year after the first attempt. NIOSH's mining research program survives the proposal; the cross-industry research agenda that surrounds it does not.

"Congress is expected to weigh in with its budget bills over the coming months," the magazine noted.

Congress, here, means Shelley Moore Capito. It is her subcommittee. She writes the bill.

The pattern is the point

We have watched this same sequence with her before. In July 2025 she cast one of the 50 votes for the budget law that takes more than $1 billion a year from West Virginia's hospitals — and a year later cosponsored a bill to keep rural hospitals from closing. Support the cut, then work the wreckage.

The NIOSH story is the same shape with a sharper edge, because here the fix did not come from Congress at all. It came from a sick coal miner with a lawyer and a federal judge who read the statute.

Capito has represented West Virginia in the Senate since 2015. She is the chair of the Senate Republican Policy Committee and chair of the subcommittee that funds HHS — about as much leverage over this as any single senator gets. A West Virginian is entitled to ask why all of it was pointed at cleanup instead of prevention, and whether, with the same proposal back on her desk in 2026, anything will be different.

Source

"Department of Health and Human Services proposes trimming NIOSH programs," Safety+Health Magazine, April 8, 2026. Photo: G. Edward Johnson/Wikimedia Commons, via Safety+Health Magazine.

Riley Moore Blacklisted Five of the Biggest Banks in America for West Virginia. Analysts Estimate It Added Up to $29 Million to the Interest on One Year's Borrowing.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:03:00 +0000

Before he was in Congress, Riley Moore was West Virginia's state treasurer. The treasurer's job is unglamorous: manage the state's cash, run its banking relationships, and get West Virginia the best terms it can when it borrows money.

Moore used it to run a political campaign against banks.

In July 2022 he published a "Restricted Financial Institution List" barring five of the largest financial firms in the country from new state banking business: BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo. Their offense, as Reuters reported at the time, was being deemed to "boycott" fossil fuel companies — which in practice meant weighing climate risk when deciding where to put money.

Then he did it again. In February 2024, Moore sent notices to six more banks — BMO, Citibank, Fifth Third, Northern Trust, TD Bank, and HSBC — warning they were headed for the same list.

What he said he was doing

Moore's framing was that he was protecting West Virginia's industries from coordinated financial pressure. Here is how he put it in 2024:

"While we have been effective in our fight against ESG activism, we must remain vigilant to ensure we do not entrust state funds to banks that are engaged in coordinated political efforts to destroy our state's critical industries."

He wanted the banks, in his words, "to return to fairer, more objective treatment of our coal, oil and natural gas industries."

That's a coherent political position. The question is who pays for it.

What it costs

When a state tells the biggest underwriters in the country they can't bid on its business, fewer firms compete to handle its bonds. Fewer bidders means worse pricing. Worse pricing on borrowing means higher interest — and interest on state debt is paid by taxpayers, out of the same budget that funds schools, roads, and water systems.

This is not a theoretical objection. Somebody has put a number on it.

The consulting firm Econsult Solutions, engaged by the climate group the Sunrise Project, studied Texas, which passed similar laws, and put the extra interest on the bonds Texas issued in one year at between $303 million and $532 million — spread over the life of those bonds. Applying the same model to West Virginia, Econsult estimated that if Senate Bill 262 worked the way the Texas laws did, the extra interest on West Virginia's own bonds from that year would run $9 million to $29 million.

Nine to twenty-nine million dollars in extra interest, on a single year's borrowing. In one of the smallest and poorest states in the country.

For comparison: in June 2026, Moore stood in front of the House Appropriations Committee holding a jar of brown tap water from a McDowell County home and asked for $50 million to fix southern West Virginia's drinking water. The committee said no.

The high end of what his bank blacklist may have added to the interest on one year of West Virginia's borrowing is more than half of the water money he couldn't get.

Who this was actually for

Moore's line is that the banks were attacking West Virginia's industries. Look at whose money moved when he ran for Congress.

Three outside groups spent more than $1 million electing him — led by the cryptocurrency industry's super PAC at $726,377 and the Koch network's at $265,673, against the $924,000 he raised from PACs directly. His direct donors include the corporate PACs of Marathon Petroleum, Valero Energy and the steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs. Only 9% of his money came from small grassroots donors; he ranks #344 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding.

Whatever the five banks on that list were doing to West Virginia's coal industry, blacklisting them did not put a miner back to work or keep a plant open. What it did do was give a state treasurer a national fight to be seen having — and, as it turned out, a profile that converted into more than $1 million of outside money when he ran for Congress two years later.

Moore carried the same approach into Congress, where he now has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025. A perfect zero in his first year.

The trade he made

West Virginia is a state that needs cheap money. It has old water systems, old bridges, and a tax base that can't absorb a bad borrowing year the way Texas can.

Its treasurer decided the state should pay more to borrow, in order to make a point about how five banks in New York think about climate risk.

He got the point made, and the profile that came with it. The bill for the point is in the interest line of West Virginia's bond payments, where nobody has to look at it.

Sources

Lamar Johnson, "West Virginia warns 6 banks they're headed for restricted list over fossil fuel stances", ESG Dive, March 1, 2024; and "West Virginia bars five financial firms for deemed fossil fuel 'boycotts'", Reuters, July 28, 2022. Photo: Archive Photos via Getty Images, via ESG Dive.

Riley Moore Wrote to the Fed Demanding One Named Executive Be Removed From an Advisory Panel. Her Company Says the Layoffs Had Nothing to Do With Visas.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:02:00 +0000

In July 2026, Riley Moore did something members of Congress do not normally do. He wrote to the chair of the Federal Reserve and demanded that a specific private citizen be removed from an advisory panel.

The citizen was Asha Sharma, who became CEO of Microsoft Gaming earlier in 2026 and runs Xbox. She had been named a co-leader of the Federal Reserve's Productivity and Jobs Task Force, which studies how new technology — mostly artificial intelligence — affects employment. She serves on it alongside the economist Charles I. Jones and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Moore's letter to Fed Chair Kevin Warsh called for Sharma's removal, arguing that her recent corporate decisions raise questions about whether she belongs on a panel about productivity and jobs. On social media he framed it more directly: the "first question should be why Xbox CEO Asha Sharma" was picked while the company was cutting American jobs and hiring through the H-1B visa program.

The claim he built it on

Here is the difficulty. The thing Moore is accusing her of is not established.

Microsoft announced roughly 4,800 job cuts in the round that set this off, with about 1,600 falling in the Xbox division. Microsoft is separately one of the country's largest H-1B sponsors. Those two facts are true and they happened at the same time.

That is not the same as the second thing being the cause of the first, and Microsoft has said flatly that it isn't. Microsoft told Newsweek:

"These decisions are based on business need, not visa status. H-1B employees were also impacted by job eliminations in the U.S."

Independent experts quoted in the same piece describe the overlap as real but ambiguous. Immigration attorney Richard T. Herman: "A company can legally lay off workers and still file H-1B LCAs, but it doesn't make the optics easy to defend."

"Optics that are hard to defend" is a fair criticism of Microsoft. It is not evidence that a named executive personally fired Americans to import cheaper replacements — which is the viral version of the story, and the version Moore's demand rests on.

He did not write an H-1B bill of his own. Eight days before the letter he added his name to somebody else's — Eli Crane's End H-1B Visa Abuse Act, introduced in April 2026. What he did on his own initiative was write a letter asking that one woman lose her seat.

The pattern

This is not the first time Moore has gone after people by category rather than conduct.

In March 2025 he introduced the "Stop CCP VISAs Act", which, despite what the name suggests, would bar every citizen of China from getting a U.S. student visa — not party members, not anyone screened for anything. Every one. Chinese American organizations including the Committee of 100 and Asian Americans Advancing Justice called it discriminatory for treating every Chinese student as a suspect based on nationality.

On the visa program itself, Moore is unambiguous. He told Fox News in July 2026:

"I think the H-1B visa program is a scam, and it's one that has been perpetrated on the American worker for far too long."

"Essentially, we shipped all our manufacturing jobs overseas and people were told to 'learn how to code.' Well, now they're being replaced with the H-1B visa workers on the coding jobs as well. So when is the American worker actually going to get a win here?"

And on his standing in the fight: "I'm certainly not the lone voice in this. I might be the loudest."

The part West Virginians should notice

Set aside what you think of the H-1B program. There's a real argument that it's used to hold down wages, and serious labor economists make it.

Look instead at what Moore does with the argument.

The workers he says he's defending are American software engineers at a company headquartered on the other side of the country. The remedy he pursued on his own was not a bill — it was getting one executive removed from an advisory panel at the Federal Reserve.

Meanwhile, the thing actually happening to workers in West Virginia's 2nd District runs through his own committee. Moore sits on House Appropriations. He led the Republican Study Committee's task force charged with turning DOGE's cuts into permanent law, calling the $9.4 billion package "only the first step — more cuts are coming." Those cuts fall on federal jobs and federal grants in a state that has fewer of both to spare than almost anywhere else.

When he asked that same committee for $50 million to get clean drinking water to McDowell County — holding up a jar of brown tap water from a home in the county — it voted him down.

A letter about one executive's seat on a Fed panel gets written and gets covered. A jar of brown water gets voted down. Both of those are things Riley Moore did this year.

Source

Jayujyoti Mullick, "Riley Moore demands removal of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma", The American Bazaar, July 22, 2026. Photo via The American Bazaar.

Before He Was a MAGA Congressman, Riley Moore Was a Registered Lobbyist on the Account That Fronted for a Kremlin-Aligned Ukrainian President

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:01:00 +0000

Riley Moore has built a political identity on being tough about foreign influence. He wrote a bill to bar every Chinese citizen from getting an American student visa. He calls the H-1B program "a scam." He introduced something called the DEPORT Act.

Before all of that, from 2013 to 2017, he was a vice president at the Podesta Group — a Washington lobbying firm — and he worked on the client team for the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine.

That name won't mean much on its own. It should.

What the ECFMU actually was

The European Centre for a Modern Ukraine presented itself as a Brussels-based think tank promoting Ukraine's ties with Europe.

It wasn't one. As WV MetroNews reported in 2017, federal prosecutors alleged in the Paul Manafort indictment that the ECFMU — while presenting itself as a think tank — actually operated under the direction of the Ukrainian government, and was funded through offshore accounts connected to Manafort and his associates.

The ECFMU was formed to represent Viktor Yanukovych — the Ukrainian president whose Party of Regions was the pro-Moscow party in Ukrainian politics, and who was driven from office in 2014 and took refuge in Russia.

So the client wasn't a think tank. It was a vehicle for a Kremlin-aligned foreign government to influence Washington without registering as what it was — which is the conduct the Foreign Agents Registration Act exists to prevent, and which is why the Podesta Group ended up inside the Mueller investigation.

Riley Moore was on that account. The Podesta Group's own lobbying disclosures name him as one of the lobbyists working it, in the first, second and fourth quarters of 2013.

What he says about it

Moore has never been accused of a crime in connection with any of this, and he was never identified as a person associated with the Manafort case. He has been consistent about his answer, and it is worth quoting exactly.

When Tony Podesta stepped down in October 2017 after the firm was linked to the Manafort indictment, Moore — then a West Virginia delegate — told WEPM News:

"It's hurtful and upsetting since I had no idea that this was going on."

And:

"I think it's terrible, and I think there's a lot of good people who are being dragged into this that don't have anything to do with it."

Take that at face value. Assume every word is true. He didn't know.

That is still a remarkable thing to be able to say about your own job.

The standard he applies to everyone else

Here is why "I had no idea" doesn't settle it.

In March 2025, Moore introduced the "Stop CCP VISAs Act". Despite the name, the bill would bar every citizen of China from receiving a U.S. student visa — not Communist Party members, not people with security-relevant backgrounds. Every one. A 19-year-old from Chengdu who has never heard of the Party's foreign influence operations is barred on the theory that she might be a vector for them, whether she knows it or not.

Chinese American groups including the Committee of 100 and Asian Americans Advancing Justice condemned it as discriminatory, warning that it treats every Chinese student as a suspect on the basis of nationality alone.

Notice the asymmetry. For a Chinese student, not knowing about a foreign government's influence operation is no defense — the mere possibility of being used is enough to bar her from the country. For Riley Moore, being a registered lobbyist on an actual foreign influence operation’s account, at a firm that later dissolved over it, is fully answered by "I had no idea that this was going on."

One standard for a college kid he'll never meet. Another for himself.

Why it matters now

Moore now sits on the House Appropriations Committee, which controls federal money, and he has spent his first term positioning himself as a hardliner on who gets to come to America and who gets to work here.

The relevant question isn't whether a 33-year-old lobbyist should have known who was really paying the bills at his client. It's what someone who lived through that experience learned from it.

What he appears to have learned is that when the person who didn't know is him, ignorance is a complete defense — and when the person who didn't know is a foreign student, ignorance is irrelevant.

It is not a secret. It is in the public record, it was reported in West Virginia at the time, and Moore answered questions about it nine years ago. It's just not the part of the résumé that leads — the story West Virginia voters hear — the one on his own House biography — starts with welder, then delegate, then treasurer, then congressman.

Source

Hans Fogle, "Moore says he had 'no idea' what was happening at Podesta Group", WV MetroNews, October 31, 2017.

Shelley Moore Capito Voted to Confirm Her Own Son as a Federal Prosecutor. She Did Not Recuse.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:16:00 +0000

On October 7, 2025, the United States Senate confirmed a batch of Trump administration nominees, 51 to 47. Tucked into that list, among 107 names, was this one:

"Arch Capito, of West Virginia, to be United States Attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia for the term of four years"

Arch Capito goes by Moore. He is the son of Shelley Moore Capito, the senior senator from West Virginia.

She voted yes.

What she could have done instead

There is a word for what a senator does when a matter before them involves their own family. The word is recuse. You step aside. You don't cast a ballot on your own child's job.

Capito didn't step aside. She voted to confirm him.

To be precise about it, and precision matters here: her vote was not the one that put him over the top. The tally was 51–47. If she had abstained it would have been 50–47, and her son would have been confirmed anyway. Some outlets have described this as a deciding vote. It wasn't, and we're not going to say it was.

What it was is a choice. Faced with a vote on her own son's federal appointment, Capito had the option to sit it out and lose nothing. The outcome was never in doubt. Recusing would have cost her exactly zero and answered the question before anyone asked it.

She voted anyway.

She announced the nomination herself

This wasn't a case of a senator quietly finding her relative buried in an en bloc list.

On July 1, 2025, Capito publicly announced both of West Virginia's U.S. Attorney nominations — her son's included:

"Thrilled and extremely proud that @POTUS has chosen two stellar candidates to be West Virginia's U.S. Attorneys, Matt Harvey in the Northern District and Moore Capito in the Southern District. I look forward to supporting their quick confirmations so they can get to work on behalf of West Virginia."

Understand what it means that the announcement came from her.

U.S. Attorneys are federal prosecutors, and by long Senate custom a nomination for one doesn't move without the support of the home-state senators. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee put it plainly six weeks before this vote: "there are not enough votes in the Senate to advance a district judge, U.S. Attorney or U.S. Marshal nominee who doesn't have a blue slip." That courtesy is real power. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi used the same custom in reverse to single-handedly kill a federal judicial nomination — no vote, no debate, just a slip of paper she declined to return.

Capito is one of West Virginia's two senators. Her son's nomination needed a senator like her not to object. She didn't object. She announced it, celebrated it, and then voted for it.

Who Moore Capito is

Moore Capito served in the West Virginia House of Delegates from 2016 to 2023 and ran for governor in 2024, losing the Republican primary. He practiced corporate and energy law before the appointment.

That is a normal résumé for a political appointee. Nothing about it is disqualifying. The question was never whether he's a plausible lawyer — it's whether a sitting senator gets to vote on her son's confirmation.

The office his grandfather knew

Here is the part that makes this more than an etiquette problem.

The U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of West Virginia — the office Moore Capito now runs — is the office that sent a West Virginia governor to federal prison. Michael Carey held that job from 1987 to 1993, and his team brought the charges. The target was Arch A. Moore Jr.: three-term governor of West Virginia, Moore Capito's grandfather, and Shelley Moore Capito's father.

In May 1990, Arch Moore pleaded guilty to five felonies — mail fraud, tax fraud, extortion, and obstruction of justice. He had taken illegal campaign money and kept it off his tax returns, and he had extorted $573,721 from a coal company in exchange for helping it obtain a $2.3 million refund from the state's black lung program. He was sentenced to five years and ten months in prison and fined $170,000.

Thirty-five years later, his grandson took over the office, with his daughter voting yes.

We're not saying the son is his grandfather. We're saying that of all the offices in the federal government, this is the one where a Capito ought to have understood, without needing it explained, why the appearance of the thing matters — and why a senator with the family name should have handed the vote to somebody else.

Why any of this matters to West Virginians

A U.S. Attorney is not a ceremonial job. That office decides who gets charged in the southern half of the state — public corruption, opioid trafficking, fraud against federal programs. It decides which powerful people get investigated and which don't.

West Virginia has an unusually direct stake in that. It is a state where public corruption has reached the governor's mansion and been prosecuted by this very office, within living memory, in a case that sent the sitting senator's father to federal prison.

The person who now makes those calls owes his job to a process his mother helped run and personally voted to complete. If his office ever has to decide whether to investigate someone connected to the state's Republican establishment — the establishment his mother sits atop as the fourth-ranking Republican in the Senate — every West Virginian is entitled to wonder whether that call was made on the merits.

That doubt is the cost. And it was completely avoidable. Capito could have released a one-sentence statement saying she was recusing from her son's confirmation vote out of respect for the office. Her son gets confirmed either way, and nobody writes this article.

Instead she voted, and now the question follows the office.

Sources

Shelley Moore Capito Cast One of the 50 Votes That Will Cost West Virginia Hospitals $1 Billion a Year. Last Month She Signed On to a Bill to Save Rural Hospitals.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:12:00 +0000

On July 29, 2026, Shelley Moore Capito signed on to a bill to keep rural hospitals from closing.

It's called the Rural Emergency Hospital Designation Improvement Act. Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas leads it, Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota is the lead Democrat, and Capito is one of five Republican cosponsors. It would let more small hospitals qualify for a special Medicare designation, reopen some that already closed, and add back services like obstetrics and psychiatric care.

Here's what Capito said about it:

"Across West Virginia and in rural communities nationwide, far too many hospitals are facing challenges that threaten their ability to maintain operations."

She's right. That is exactly what's happening.

She should know. Thirteen months earlier, she cast one of the fifty votes that made it happen.

July 1, 2025: the vote she could have stopped

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act came to the Senate floor after an all-night session. It extended and expanded the 2017 tax cuts, and to help pay for them it slashed Medicaid and pushed major food-aid costs onto the states for the first time.

The Senate split 50 to 50. Vice President JD Vance broke the tie.

Capito voted yes.

Think about what a 50–50 vote means. Not one of those fifty senators was extra. Any single Republican who walked away kills the bill. Capito wasn't one voice in a landslide — she was one of exactly the number required.

And she wasn't reluctant about it. In a statement that day she celebrated, calling it a bill with "significant wins" for the state:

"I was proud to vote in favor of this commonsense legislation that not only delivers on the promises we've made to the American people, but will put West Virginia and our entire nation on a path to greater economic growth, national security, energy independence and opportunity."

More than 500,000 West Virginians rely on Medicaid or CHIP. One in six gets SNAP food benefits. The week before the vote, six protesters were arrested attempting a sit-in against the bill at Capito's own Charleston office.

Nobody had to guess what was coming. Lynette Maselli, state director of Protect Our Care, said at the time that Capito and Sen. Jim Justice had the power to stop the bill, and that instead they "put billionaires over West Virginians" and voted to "close rural hospitals."

That was not a prediction that required a crystal ball. It's in the bill.

What it does to West Virginia hospitals

Here's the mechanism, in plain terms.

West Virginia charges hospitals a 6% provider tax — the maximum allowed — and uses that money to draw down a 3-to-1 federal match for Medicaid. That money goes back out to hospitals based on how many Medicaid patients they serve. Starting in 2028, the law Capito voted for forces the state to cut that tax to 3.5%. It also drops Medicaid payment rates down to Medicare levels, which don't cover the full cost of care.

Jim Kaufman, president and CEO of the West Virginia Hospital Association, put the damage in one number: when the law is fully in effect, West Virginia hospitals will lose more than $1 billion per year.

"That will have an impact, and hospitals will have to figure out what they do to ensure access with fewer resources," Kaufman said. "And that may radically change what they can offer in certain communities."

Researchers at the University of North Carolina have named seven West Virginia hospitals as most at risk of closing: Logan Regional Medical Center, Welch Community Hospital, Broaddus Hospital Association, Minnie Hamilton Health Care Center, Grafton City Hospital, Jackson General Hospital, and Montgomery General Hospital.

"We will see hospital closures," said Rich Sutphin, executive director of the West Virginia Rural Health Association.

Capito's explanation for the Medicaid cuts was that the goal "is to root the waste, fraud, and abuse out of the program." Mountain State Spotlight reported that she also said she didn't know the extent of fraud, waste and abuse in West Virginia.

She voted to take the money anyway.

The rescue fund that doesn't rescue

Republicans saw this coming too. That's why they put a $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program into the same bill — a fund created in response to the threat of rural hospitals closing because of the Medicaid cuts in the very same legislation.

It does not come close.

West Virginia may receive at least $100 million a year from it. The state's hospitals are losing more than $1 billion a year. That's roughly ten dollars going out for every one coming back.

And the incoming dollars are restricted. Kelly Allen, director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, explained that the federal government's own rules say the money isn't meant to fill the hole:

"In their notice of funding, they specify that no more than 15% of the funding can go to provider payments that would help fill in the gaps of the deepest cuts to Medicaid in our nation's history."

Sutphin was blunt about the limits: "You can't do capital expenditures beyond minor alterations to a facility. You can't use it to replace any provider revenue that is already being paid for."

It's also one-time money. As Kaufman asked: "The biggest thing is, how do you support the sustainability in year six, when the dollars dry up?"

Break the leg, then sell the crutch

So put the sequence together.

July 2025: Capito casts a decisive vote for a law that strips more than $1 billion a year from her state's hospitals, and calls it commonsense legislation she was proud to support.

October 2025: Hospital leaders confirm the replacement fund won't cover the loss, and can't legally be used to try.

July 2026: Capito cosponsors a bill to help rural hospitals avoid closure, saying too many face challenges that threaten their ability to operate.

The Rural Emergency Hospital bill isn't a bad bill. Letting a closed hospital reopen as an emergency facility, or adding back a psychiatric unit, is a real thing that helps real people. If it passes, some West Virginia town will be better off.

But it is a fraction of a fraction of what she voted to take away. And it arrives in an election year — Capito won West Virginia's Republican Senate primary on May 12, 2026 with Trump's endorsement, and faces Democrat Rachel Fetty Anderson in November.

We've watched this pattern in other states. Florida's Maria Elvira Salazar spent years handing out oversized checks for money she voted against, and when a reporter asked about the votes, she said she couldn't remember them. The move works because most people never line up the dates.

So line up the dates.

Capito chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that funds the Department of Health and Human Services. She is also chair of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, which made her the fourth-ranking Republican in the Senate. When she says rural hospitals are in trouble, she is not a bystander describing the weather. She is one of the people who made it rain.

West Virginia ranks 42nd of 50 states on the measures we track. It has one of the smallest cushions in the country to absorb a billion-dollar hit to its hospitals. Seven of them already have their names on a list.

A cosponsorship doesn't undo a vote.

Sources

S. 5164, the Rural Emergency Hospital Designation Improvement Act — official bill status and cosponsors
WVVA: Capito co-introduces bipartisan bill to prevent rural hospital closures, expand healthcare access (July 31, 2026)
Senate Roll Call Vote 372 — passage of H.R. 1, July 1, 2025 (Capito: Yea)
West Virginia Watch: West Virginia's Capito, Justice vote for Republicans' "big, beautiful bill" (Lori Kersey, July 1, 2025)
West Virginia Watch: Federal program won't make up for Medicaid funding loss to WV hospitals (Lori Kersey, October 21, 2025)
Mountain State Spotlight: West Virginia's health care crisis is about to get worse (Erin Beck, July 2, 2025)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the money is for

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

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

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

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

The only limits Congress wrote were about equipment

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

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

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

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

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

Why the margin matters more than the bill

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

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

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

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

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

The 187 with report cards

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

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

How they voted

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

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

Carol Miller's Family Businesses Got $3.1 Million in Forgiven Pandemic Loans. She Voted to Keep the List Secret.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:20:02 +0000

In the spring of 2020, Congress shoveled money out the door as fast as it could. The Paycheck Protection Program put more than $700 billion of federally backed loans into American businesses, and most of it was forgiven — meaning the taxpayer, not the borrower, paid the bill.

Two things happened to Carol Miller in that period, and they are worth putting next to each other.

Thing one: $3.1 million

Five car dealerships owned by Miller's husband — DM Motor, Dutch Miller Chevrolet, Dutch Miller Subaru, Dutch Miller of Charleston and Dutch Miller of Charlotte — received a combined $3.1 million in PPP loans. Every one of those loans was later forgiven.

That's not a claim from a partisan mailer. PolitiFact ran it down in August 2022 and rated it True.

There is nothing illegal about it. Car dealerships were eligible, the loans were applied for through banks like everyone else's, and forgiveness was the design of the program. Plenty of businesses in West Virginia took the same deal and were right to.

Thing two: the vote

On May 8, 2020 — five weeks into the program, while the money was still going out — Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota introduced H.R. 6782, the TRUTH Act.

The heart of the bill was one requirement. It ordered the Small Business Administration, within 30 days, to publish online — "sortable and searchable for key words and downloadable" — the identity of every recipient of PPP and disaster-loan money, the number of employees each one had, the date the money went out, the lender that issued it, and an explanation of how the agency decided who got it.

No clawbacks, no penalties, no new restrictions. A list.

As introduced, that list had no dollar floor on it at all. It named every borrower — which in West Virginia would have meant five car dealerships in Huntington and Charleston, among everybody else.

Twenty days later, when the bill came up for a vote, the cutoff was $2 million. Steve Chabot of Ohio, the ranking Republican on the Small Business Committee, described the trade in his own speech against it: "the bill we have before us attempts to name — and some would say, shame — businesses that are recent PPP loan recipients above $2 million. And I do appreciate Chairwoman Velázquez going from $250,000 to $2 million."

Four of the five Dutch Miller loans are individually on the public record, running from $448,900 to $904,500 and totalling a little over $2.6 million. Since all five together came to $3.1 million, the fifth was not large either. The cutoff had moved up past every one of them.

It came to the floor on May 28, 2020 under suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds majority. It got 269 votes to 147 — a solid majority of the House, and not enough. It failed. Republicans voted against it 146 to 38.

Carol Miller voted no.

Why the list mattered

The SBA did not want to publish the names, and it fought to avoid it.

For months the agency released only summarized, anonymized data for loans under $150,000 — about 4.5 million of the 5.2 million loans made — arguing that naming borrowers would expose private payroll information. Eleven news organizations sued under the Freedom of Information Act.

In November 2020, federal judge James Boasberg ordered the data released, writing that "the significant public interest in shedding light on SBA's administration of the PPP and EIDL program dramatically outweighs any limited private interest in nondisclosure." He called the agency's payroll-privacy argument "fundamentally flawed," and noted that the loan application form itself told borrowers their names and loan amounts would be "automatically released" upon a FOIA request.

The agency, he wrote, had offered "a series of arguments that essentially all reduce to the unavailing contention that the agency did not mean what the loan-application forms actually said."

The full data came out on December 1, 2020, five months after the TRUTH Act would have required it — and only because a judge made it happen, not because Congress did.

That's the vote in context. Had Miller and the other 146 no votes gone the other way, the public would have had the biggest borrowers' names in June 2020, from the agency, in a searchable file. Instead it took a lawsuit, a court order, and half a year. The judge ordered every borrower disclosed, not only the ones above $2 million — which is why that release, and not the bill, is where the public learned about the Dutch Miller dealerships.

The standard she applies to everyone else

Miller's public posture is that federal money must be watched closely and that people who receive help should have to prove they deserve it.

She sits on the Ways and Means Committee and spoke on the House floor for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in May 2025, the law the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy describes as containing the largest cuts to Medicaid and SNAP food assistance in program history. A large share of the savings comes from new documentation requirements — people proving they worked enough hours, re-verifying eligibility more often, and losing coverage when the paperwork doesn't arrive on time. The WVCBP's assessment of who that hits in West Virginia: "parents of older children, rural residents, and coal miners who lose their jobs through no fault of their own."

Asked in April 2026 whether Washington should restore the money her state lost, she pointed at the debt: "with the $37 trillion in debt, we're trying to figure out how to be fiscally responsible."

So a laid-off coal miner in her district now has to document his hours to keep his health coverage. When the question was whether the public should get a searchable list of who received millions in forgiven federal loans — by then a list narrowed until it would not have named her — Miller voted no.

The one she was caught on later

This is also not the only disclosure Miller has been on the wrong side of. In 2022, Business Insider reported that she had failed to properly disclose her husband's 2021 trades in 21 separate stocks, worth between $217,021 and $805,000 — a violation of the STOCK Act, the law requiring members of Congress to report their household's trades within 45 days. Her office called it a technical error.

Twice now, the thing that didn't get disclosed on time was money moving through her husband's businesses and accounts. Both times the public found out anyway — from a court order in one case and a reporter in the other.

The bottom line

Taking a PPP loan is not a scandal. Voting to keep the recipients secret while you are one of them is a choice about who the government works for, and she did it after the list had already been narrowed past her own household's loans.

The TRUTH Act asked for a spreadsheet. A majority of the House said yes. Carol Miller said no, and the public had to sue.

We deserve better.

Sources

Andy Nguyen, "Businesses associated with these GOP politicians had pandemic loan program borrowings forgiven" — PolitiFact, August 30, 2022 (rated True)
H.R. 6782, the TRUTH Act, introduced May 8, 2020; the amended text as read on the floor and the debate on it, Congressional Record, May 28, 2020, H2330-2332; House Roll Call 113, May 28, 2020 (Miller: Nay)
Dutch Miller of Charleston, Inc. — Tracking PPP, ProPublica, from SBA loan data
Ben Popken and Andrew W. Lehren, "Judge orders Trump administration to reveal PPP loan data it sought to obscure" — NBC News, November 6, 2020
Photo: official congressional portrait, 118th Congress

'I Can't Second-Guess What the President Does' — Carol Miller Explains Her Job

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:20:01 +0000

On Thursday, April 9, 2026, Carol Miller was home in West Virginia during a congressional recess, touring a manufacturing plant in Eleanor. A WOWK reporter asked her about three of the things Washington had done to her state.

She had a different answer for each one, but they came out the same way.

On the cuts she wrote

Miller sits on the House Ways and Means Committee, and on its Health Subcommittee. Ways and Means wrote the tax title of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — the law that paired permanent tax cuts with what the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy called the largest Medicaid and SNAP cuts in program history.

She didn't just vote for it. She spoke for it on the House floor on May 22, 2025:

"Ways and Means Republicans have worked tirelessly for two years, traveling across America and hearing from real people about the impact that the 2017 Trump Tax Cuts had on them... This bill gives the average working family a $1,300 tax cut. It delivers on President Trump's promises of no tax on tips and no tax on overtime pay."

Her speech runs about 250 words. It mentions the tax cut, the tips provision, the overtime provision, the small business deduction, and a reporting threshold for gig workers. It does not mention Medicaid or SNAP once.

The cuts landed on West Virginia anyway. State lawmakers spent the 2026 session trying to figure out what to do about it, and the answer was mostly nothing. Mountain State Spotlight's Henry Culvyhouse totted up the results: an $83 million Medicaid shortfall, the Flood Resiliency Office cut from $25 million to $5 million, $8 million less for public schools, and $30 million for clean water projects. The Hope Scholarship voucher program, meanwhile, went up to nearly $300 million.

"We're digging through the couch cushions to fund Medicaid," said Kelly Allen, executive director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.

So the reporter asked Miller the obvious question: should the federal government restore the money?

"I think the federal government will consider what they need to do. You know, with the $37 trillion in debt, we're trying to figure out how to be fiscally responsible. And, of course, health care is so, so important."

"The federal government will consider what they need to do." She is the federal government. She sits on the committee with jurisdiction over Medicaid. The debt she cites went up because of the bill she spoke for — the tax cuts in it are the expensive part.

On the war

At the time of the interview the United States had struck Iran and entered a ceasefire. Miller said she fully supports "what needs to be done to make sure that we don't have a nuclear power over there and that we do have the [Strait of Hormuz] open."

The reporter then asked whether Trump's 2018 withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal had contributed to the threat of a nuclear Iran.

"I wasn't there when he pulled out… I can't second-guess what the president does because he has so much at his fingertips that he knows about that I won't know about until I'm back there."

That is not a defense of the withdrawal. It's a refusal to evaluate it.

Second-guessing the president is the job. It is the specific thing Article I of the Constitution puts Congress there to do — declare war, appropriate the money, oversee the executive. A member of Congress who cannot assess a past presidential decision, seven years after the fact, using the public record available to any voter, has described herself out of the branch she serves in.

She also told the reporter she'd need to see the bill before voting on the White House's request for more war money, and did not object to a longer engagement.

On the tariffs

The reporter also asked about tariffs. Chris Hamilton, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, had described the president's tariffs as having severely impacted the coal industry's international operations and supply chain.

Miller is on the Trade Subcommittee of Ways and Means. Tariffs are her committee's jurisdiction, and Article I, Section 8 gives the taxing and tariff power to Congress, not the president. If any single member of the West Virginia delegation has standing to push back on a tariff hurting West Virginia coal, it is her.

Her answer:

"It was just a business move on his part to level the playing field and let them know we are serious. China is not our only customer, but China does consume a lot of coal. And, you know, we had other problems as well — getting the coal out."

Miller is an outspoken coal advocate. She has written an op-ed arguing tariffs are necessary. Chris Hamilton — the coal association president saying they're hurting — is a donor to her campaign, along with the employee PACs of Sempra Energy and Duke Energy, ConocoPhillips's Spirit PAC and West Virginians for Coal. When his industry's own lobbyist says the policy is causing damage and she calls it "a business move on his part," she has picked the president over the constituency.

The pattern

Three questions. A health program her committee cut, a war her chamber funds, a trade policy her subcommittee governs. Each one is squarely inside her actual authority.

On Medicaid: the federal government will consider what they need to do.
On Iran: I can't second-guess what the president does.
On tariffs: it was just a business move on his part.

There is a name for an official who holds a constitutional power and declines to use it on the grounds that someone else knows better. It isn't representation.

West Virginia already ranked 42nd of 50 on the measures we track before any of this. Its people are being asked to absorb an $83 million Medicaid hole, higher costs from tariffs, and a bill for a war — and the member who sits on the committee that wrote the first one says Washington will "consider what they need to do."

We deserve better.

Source

Maddy Sperling, "'I can't second-guess what the president does': Rep. Miller addresses Trump policies" — WOWK 13 News, April 10, 2026. Photo: WOWK.

Carol Miller Voted Against the Biggest Water Investment in U.S. History. Now She's Asking Washington for Water Money.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:20:00 +0000

In nine counties of southern West Virginia, people don't drink what comes out of the tap.

Families in Boone, Fayette, Lincoln, Logan, McDowell, Mercer, Mingo, Raleigh and Wyoming counties report skin rashes, cancers, and water that stains their clothes and ruins their appliances. Some pay hundreds of dollars a month for bottled water on top of the water bill they already can't use the water from. In 2024, West Virginia had the country's highest percentage of public water systems with health-based federal Safe Drinking Water Act violations — 29.2%.

All nine of those counties are in Carol Miller's district.

What she asked for

In May 2026, Miller and fellow West Virginia Rep. Riley Moore submitted appropriations language asking for $250 million in targeted federal water funding, with at least half of it directed to those nine southern coalfield counties. Nearly 40 organizations and nine West Virginia state lawmakers from both parties signed the letter backing the request.

The need is not in dispute. The highest-ranked projects in those counties carry a combined price tag of over $291.9 million, and only about $139.1 million of that can be covered by the state revolving fund. Statewide, West Virginia's drinking water needs run to roughly $1.73 billion across its 414 community water systems.

"This is a public health emergency," said Caitlin Ware, co-director of the group From Below. "Loss of fire services, skin rashes and unsafe drinking water are dangers southern coalfield communities need not endure any longer."

What happened to it

On May 20, 2026, the House Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee released its draft funding bill for the next fiscal year. The $250 million wasn't in it.

"We are deeply disappointed that the subcommittee did not include the funding for Southern West Virginia communities as requested," said Quenton King of Appalachian Voices.

Two weeks later, at the full committee, Moore offered a scaled-down amendment — $50 million, one-fifth of the original ask, with a 25% state match attached. Mike Simpson of Idaho, who chairs the Interior, Environment and Related Agencies subcommittee, said he "fully admit[ted]" the need but argued the proposal hadn't been "properly vetted" by other panels that advance funding plans — like his. It failed on a voice vote.

"Let's not abandon these folks," Moore said on the record. "Let's not forget them. These are American citizens that literally do not have water."

The same bill that couldn't find $50 million for West Virginia water cut capitalization grants for state revolving funds and performance partnership grants — the main federal pipeline for exactly this kind of project — by roughly $683 million, nearly 16% below the Fiscal Year 2025 level.

Rev. Caitlin Ware's assessment of the result: "It's abandonment on full display, and the blood is on their hands."

The part Miller doesn't mention

Here is what makes this Miller's story and not just a bad week in an appropriations markup.

The fund she was asking to draw from is an EPA grant program the Trump administration has proposed cutting to roughly one-fifth of its current size over the last two budget cycles, as Mountain State Spotlight reported in May. She is asking a fund to pay out while her own party's president works to drain it.

And she voted against filling it in the first place.

On November 5, 2021, the House passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Miller voted no. That law sent more than $50 billion to the EPA for water infrastructure — by the agency's own description, "the single largest investment in water that the federal government has ever made." The money flows through the state revolving funds. It is the same account the coalfield request was aimed at.

Eight months earlier, on March 10, 2021, the House had passed the American Rescue Plan Act, the other law that sent West Virginia significant water money. Miller voted no on that one too.

Mountain State Spotlight's Henry Culvyhouse put the pattern plainly: Miller voted against two Biden-era spending bills that helped expedite water projects in her own state, then turned around and asked the federal government for water money. Those are the two, and between them the state is projected to receive almost $1 billion for water and sewer work.

Her office's answer:

"Congresswoman Miller is committed to being a good steward of taxpayer dollars and believes that spending an efficient amount of tax dollars to build infrastructure projects that deliver clean water to our communities is a good use of money."

That is a description of a bill she voted against.

What she did get

To be fair to Miller: the draft bill does contain $8.3 million in Community Project Funding for 10 water and wastewater projects she requested. That is real money and it will help real towns.

It is also about 3% of what she said the coalfields need, and less than a hundredth of the statewide gap. Earmarks for ten projects are what a member gets when the underlying program is being cut. They are not a substitute for the program.

The record underneath

Miller has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 and 5% lifetime — not one pro-environment vote last year.

Her campaign account tells the same story. Through March 31 of this election cycle she had raised more than $1.38 million, with $977,388 of it from political committees against $418,353 from individual donors, according to a Charleston Gazette-Mail analysis of her FEC filings. The named energy donors in that filing include the employee PACs of Sempra Energy and Duke Energy, ConocoPhillips's Spirit PAC, the American Exploration & Production Council's US Energy PAC, West Virginians for Coal, and the president of the West Virginia Coal Association.

The bottom line

There is a version of this story where a member of Congress fights the cuts, loses, and can at least say she tried. Miller didn't lose that fight — she was on the other side of it, twice, in 2021, before the water crisis was a line item anybody was fighting over.

Nine counties in her district have been living with this for decades. The federal money that would have started fixing it existed, passed the House, and became law without her vote. Now the program is being cut, the earmark request was denied, and her constituents are still buying water at the store.

We deserve better.

Sources

"Water advocates and lawmakers urge Congress to appropriate funds to address legacy water issues in West Virginia" — Appalachian Voices, May 7, 2026
"House Appropriations Subcommittee declines to fund Southern West Virginia water needs in draft funding bill" — Appalachian Voices, May 20, 2026
"House appropriations committee rejects amendment to fund West Virginia water needs" — Appalachian Voices, June 3, 2026
Henry Culvyhouse, "Riley Moore and Carol Miller asked for clean water money from a fund Trump wants to cut" — Mountain State Spotlight, May 24, 2026
Mike Tony, "'Abandonment': Outlook dims for southern WV water funding boost despite mounting need" — HDMedia, June 14, 2026
Photo: Jay Mallin / Appalachian Voices

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer is 45.

What the STOCK Act actually asks

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

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

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

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

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

The roll call

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

The biggest offenders:

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

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

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

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

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

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

"My broker did it"

Read the responses side by side and a script emerges.

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

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

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

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

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

The penalty is $200

Here's why none of them seem especially worried.

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

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

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

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

Why the timing is the whole story

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

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

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

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

The ones who campaigned on this

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He has been late on his own disclosures twice.

Back to that July vote

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

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

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

The bottom line

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

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

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

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

It sued the United States Department of Justice.

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

The lawsuit names acting Attorney General Todd Blanche personally.

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

What New Mexico is asking for

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

Here's the part that should make you angry.

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

They never did.

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

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

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

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

What they're looking for

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twenty years. Nobody wrote it down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now: the part that's on Republican senators

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

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

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

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

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

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

They already voted to keep these files sealed once

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

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

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

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

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

Thirteen for thirteen.

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

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

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

Who this actually hurts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

Source

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

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

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

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

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

One vote. That's the whole margin.

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

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

What they actually voted for

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

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

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

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

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

That was enough for fifty senators.

The letters aren't worth much

Here is the part nobody should skip past.

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

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

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

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

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

Thirteen of them had already done this once

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

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

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

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

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

What Blanche did to the Justice Department

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

Their director, Stacey Young, put it this way:

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

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

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

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

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

The Epstein survivors told them, too

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

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

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

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

The fourteen we track

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

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

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

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

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

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

The three who talked tough and voted yes anyway

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

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

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

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

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

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

What they did with the night

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

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

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

Source

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

Seventeen Republicans Have Tried to Rename Dulles Airport After Trump. Three Signed On While Air Traffic Controllers Were Getting $0 Paychecks.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:51:40 +0000

On March 29, 2024, a member of Congress from western Pennsylvania sat down and used his lawmaking power on this:

Renaming an airport.

Guy Reschenthaler introduced H.R. 7845, a bill to change the name of Washington Dulles International Airport to the "Donald J. Trump International Airport." Six other Republicans signed on the same day. Five more joined over the next two weeks.

Then it died in committee without a single hearing.

So they did it again. And the second time around, three of them added their names while the federal government was shut down and the people who keep planes from hitting each other were working for free.

"No better symbol of freedom"

Reschenthaler isn't a backbencher. He's the House Chief Deputy Whip — his actual job is counting votes and making sure his party's bills pass. This is what he chose to spend that influence on.

Here's how he explained it in his own press release:

"In my lifetime, our nation has never been greater than under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump. As millions of domestic and international travelers fly through the airport, there is no better symbol of freedom, prosperity, and strength than hearing 'Welcome to Trump International Airport' as they land on American soil."

The press release didn't stop at the bill. It ran a long list of things it credited Trump with — "the best economy in history," "the world's most robust and advanced border wall," a "40 percent increase in net worth" for the bottom half of American households. A bill about airport signage came packaged with a campaign brochure.

The six Republicans who put their names on it that first day were Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Barry Moore of Alabama, Troy Nehls of Texas, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, and Mike Waltz of Florida.

Barry Moore explained his reasoning to the Guardian like this:

"In 1998, Congress renamed the National airport in Washington after one of our great presidents, Ronald Reagan."

It was only fitting, he went on, to do the same for "another one of our greatest presidents."

The Guardian ran a one-line correction directly underneath his quote: Reagan National is actually in Virginia. So is Dulles.

Over the following two weeks, five more Republicans signed on: Claudia Tenney of New York, William Timmons of South Carolina, Bob Good of Virginia, Gus Bilirakis of Florida, and Andy Harris of Maryland.

Remember that last name.

Round two

In January 2025, with Trump back in office, a freshman from North Carolina picked the idea back up. Addison McDowell introduced H.R. 691 on January 23 — an identical bill, same airport, same name.

Trump had been sworn in three days earlier. McDowell was a freshman, less than three weeks into the job. He told local outlet FFXnow:

"We have entered the golden age of America largely thanks to President Trump's leadership. It is only right that the two airports servicing our nation's capital are duly honored and respected by two of the best presidents to have the honor of serving our great nation."

Reschenthaler signed on as a cosponsor of his own idea under someone else's name. So did Brandon Gill of Texas, Riley Moore of West Virginia, and Brian Jack of Georgia — all on day one.

The Democrats who actually represent the ground the airport sits on were not impressed. Rep. Suhas Subramanyam — one of the two members whose districts cover the Fairfax and Loudoun county land Dulles occupies — said House Republicans "would rather focus their efforts on renaming airports to honor their dear leader than tackling the real issues facing Americans."

Then the government shut down

On October 1, 2025, the federal government closed. It stayed closed for 43 days — the longest shutdown in American history.

Air traffic controllers are "essential." That means they don't get to stay home. They report to the tower every day and they don't get paid. On October 28, controllers across the country received their first $0 paycheck.

Three days later — October 31 — Andy Harris added his name to the bill to rename Dulles after Donald Trump. So did Andy Ogles. Troy Nehls had signed on ten days before that.

Harris is the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. Two days before the shutdown began, he told the Daily Signal that people were overreacting — that Trump's budget director would keep the essential things running, and that "it is not really a government shutdown."

Essential services did continue. Air traffic control is one of them. What Harris didn't mention is that "essential" is the category that means you show up anyway and the paycheck says zero.

By November 6, it wasn't holding. The FAA announced it would cut flights by up to 10% at 40 major airports, citing "increased reports of strain on the system." The agency's own statement said it plainly: "Since the beginning of the shutdown, controllers have been working without pay."

Washington Dulles International Airport — IAD — was on that list of 40.

So the actual sequence is this. The airport these Republicans wanted to rename in Trump's honor was having its flights cut because of a shutdown Trump's party was running, staffed by workers getting zero-dollar paychecks. And in the middle of it, three members of Congress found the time to put their names on the naming bill.

Jimmy Patronis of Florida signed on November 20 — eight days after the government reopened.

This is a whole genre now

The Dulles bill isn't a one-off. It's part of a pattern we keep running into:

Claudia Tenney — who cosponsored the Dulles bill in 2024 — also filed a bill to make Trump's birthday a federal holiday. Eighteen months later, not one other member had signed it.
Anna Paulina Luna introduced legislation to carve Trump's face into Mount Rushmore, eight days into his second term. Geologists say the rock can't support it.
Greg Steube tried to rename 4.3 million square miles of ocean after Trump, and separately moved to choke off funding for DC's subway until it was renamed the "Trump Train."
Mike Simpson used his appropriations gavel to name a Kennedy Center theater after Melania Trump — in the same bill that cut arts and humanities funding by 35%.

None of it does anything for anybody. That isn't an accident; it's the point. These bills exist to be noticed by one person.

What the job was supposed to be

While Reschenthaler was writing press releases about airport signage, here's what was happening in Pennsylvania's 14th District.

An estimated 24,868 people in PA-14 are projected to lose health coverage because of the health care cuts he voted for. 60,518 households in his district rely on SNAP to buy groceries — about 18% of every household in the district. And more than 216,000 of his constituents depend on Social Security, the most of any congressional district in Pennsylvania.

There's a sharper version of this. In July 2025, nine of Pennsylvania's ten House Republicans signed a letter asking the Trump administration to exempt cocoa from his tariffs, to protect the state's chocolate manufacturing jobs. Reschenthaler was the only one who didn't sign it.

He'll put his name on a bill to rename an airport in another state after Donald Trump. He wouldn't put it on a letter to protect Pennsylvania jobs.

Where the bills stand

H.R. 7845 never got past a committee referral and died when that Congress ended. H.R. 691 was sent to the Aviation Subcommittee on February 1, 2025, and hasn't moved an inch in the year and a half since. Neither bill ever got a hearing, a markup, or a vote — even with Republicans running the House the whole time.

There's one last thing worth knowing. When Congress renamed National Airport after Ronald Reagan in 1998, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association objected — because Reagan had fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981.

Nearly thirty years later, the same party went after the other Washington airport for another president. And they kept signing the bill while controllers worked that airport for free.

Source

Republicans propose renaming Dulles airport after Trump as 'symbol of freedom' — Martin Pengelly, The Guardian, April 2, 2024. Lead photo of Dulles International Airport by Jeff Greenberg/Alamy.

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

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

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

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

Then the senators went home for a month.

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

The bill was three days old

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the same fight, wearing a different hat

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

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

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

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

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

The fifteen we track

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What they didn't do before they left

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

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

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

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

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

Source

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

ICE Is Reading Your Posts. Congress Paid for It.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A round-the-clock dragnet

Here is what the Journal found.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reddit said no. The government kept going.

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

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

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

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

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

No charges have been filed in any of them.

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

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

What actually counts as "doxxing"

The administration has been rewriting a word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The number they won't show you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote the check

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

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

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

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

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

The Senate: 52 to 47

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

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

The House: 214 to 212

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ohio families lose the most

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

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

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

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

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

It was a one-page vote

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

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

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

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

The senators who voted no

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

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

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

The part that should stick

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

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

How they voted

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