MAGA Report Cards — Wisconsin

Tom Tiffany Turned Down the Debate Wisconsin Broadcasters Have Held Since 1990. It's Canceled, and He Says One Debate Is 'Sufficient.'

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:50:19 +0000

The Wisconsin Broadcasters Association Foundation has put the candidates for governor of Wisconsin on television, in front of the whole state, every cycle since 1990. It announced this year's October debate back in April.

On September 9, it canceled.

The reason is not a scheduling accident. Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for governor, would not accept the invitation. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, the Democratic nominee, was planning to participate. The foundation needed both.

"Based on legal precedent, for the foundation to air a debate, multiple candidates must participate. Two invitations were sent and both had to be accepted in order to have a debate. That did not happen."

That is the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association's own statement, reported by the Wisconsin Examiner. A statewide tradition running since 1990 ended because one candidate did not send an acceptance.

What Tiffany said about it

Tiffany explained himself on Tuesday, on conservative radio host Dan O'Donnell's show. Here is the explanation:

"I had no time. There was lots of negotiations going on behind the scenes," he said. "One debate is sufficient to be able to cover the issues that need to be covered."

He is doing one debate — an October 21 event hosted by WISN-12 that Crowley has also agreed to. Tiffany said he had watched the station's reporters and thought they were fair. "It's only going to take one debate to get the information out there for the people of Wisconsin," he said.

One debate. For the office of governor — the job that signs or vetoes every bill that passes in Madison.

Crowley's answer was to say he had looked forward to "continuing the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association's more than 30-year tradition of putting candidates directly before voters statewide." The Cap Times editorial board asked the obvious question — why is Tiffany avoiding multiple debates? — and noted that Jill Geisler, the veteran broadcast journalist slated to moderate the canceled debate, called the decision "truly disappointing."

The same week, he wouldn't answer a question about your ballot

Tiffany's reluctance to appear is not limited to debate stages.

The same Tuesday, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked him about President Trump's highly publicized push to restrict mail-in voting — an effort that would affect Tiffany's own race for governor. Tiffany said he did not know enough about it to say whether he supported it.

He is the Republican nominee for governor of Wisconsin. The proposal in question would change how the voters in his election cast their ballots. It has been national news for weeks.

And "election security" is one of the announced topics for the single debate he agreed to.

Why fewer appearances is the strategy

Tiffany has a record in Congress, and it is not a record that gets easier to defend the more often he has to talk about it.

Forty-five thousand Wisconsinites have already lost health coverage, and Tiffany called the budget bill's new Medicaid work requirements a "common-sense requirement" — requirements that do not take effect until January 2027, after the election he is running in. He has called union leaders "kingpins" while voting against workers. He has missed votes on housing legislation.

The Cap Times editorial board's read is that Tiffany would rather let television advertising do the talking, funded by out-of-state donors, than stand next to his opponent and answer questions. A candidate who is confident in his answers takes more debates, not fewer.

He is not the only one

This is a pattern across the Republicans on this site, not a Wisconsin quirk. In Virginia's 9th District, Morgan Griffith hasn't held an in-person town hall in over ten years and now won't debate his opponent. In Ohio, the Dayton Daily News asked Mike Turner whether he'd debate or hold a town hall and got an answer to a different question. In Arkansas, Sarah Sanders skipped the debate entirely.

The common thread is that a debate is the one campaign event a candidate cannot script. Everything else — the ad, the radio hit with a friendly host, the press release — they control.

The short version

The Wisconsin Broadcasters Association Foundation has aired a governor's debate every cycle since 1990. It canceled this year's after Tom Tiffany declined to accept an invitation his Democratic opponent had planned to accept. Tiffany's reason was that "one debate is sufficient," and the one he agreed to is on October 21. On the same day he said that, he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he did not know enough about Trump's effort to restrict mail-in voting in his own election to say whether he supports it.

Source

Wisconsin Examiner, Wisconsin Broadcasters Association cancels debate for first time in over 30 years, by Baylor Spears. Photos by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner.

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

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

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

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

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

How the spending breaks down

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

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

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

Nearly three-quarters of the money is an attack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the man writing the checks wanted

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

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

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

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

Why this matters where you live

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

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

What the filings show

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

Source

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

Tom Tiffany Says Wisconsin Has 'Successfully Managed Wildlife for Generations.' The Last Time It Managed Wolves, Hunters Killed 218 in Under Three Days Against a Quota of 119.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 06:01:36 +0000

On September 4, 2026, President Trump ordered the Interior Department to decide within 90 days whether gray wolves should lose their protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Tom Tiffany, the Republican nominee for governor of Wisconsin, put out a statement the same day:

"The gray wolf has recovered, and the impacts are being felt across rural communities in Wisconsin. Farmers are dealing with livestock depredations, families are losing pets, and wolves are showing up closer to homes. Wisconsin has successfully managed wildlife for generations. It is time to get out-of-state judges and bureaucrats out of the way and let Wisconsin responsibly manage its wolf population."

We know what Wisconsin managing its wolf population looks like, because it happened five years ago.

February 2021

Gray wolves were briefly delisted at the end of the Trump administration's first term. A hunting season opened in Wisconsin in February 2021.

The state set a quota of 119 wolves for licensed hunters, made 2,380 harvest authorizations available and sold 1,547 tags — roughly 13 for every wolf in the quota.

Hunters and trappers killed 218.

They did it in under three days. The Department of Natural Resources shut the season down early and still couldn't stop it in time, because the closure of a zone did not take effect until 24 hours after the DNR posted notice of it — so the killing continued while the notice ran.

That is what the management system Tiffany is describing produced the one time it was switched on: nearly double the state's own limit, in a weekend, with the agency legally unable to hit the brakes.

What it did to the population

Wisconsin's DNR said the population dropped 14% after the hunt.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison — Adrian Treves, Francisco Santiago-Ávila and Karann Putrevu — put the real figure much higher: between 27% and 33% of the state's wolves were lost between April 2020 and April 2021, a total of 313 to 323 animals.

About a third of that loss wasn't the licensed hunt at all. It was hidden deaths — a majority of them, the researchers estimated, illegal killing that spikes when protections are relaxed. Santiago-Ávila described the pattern this way: "Those wolves disappear and you never find them again."

The finding is that the delisting itself killed wolves beyond the hunt, because it told people the animals were no longer valued.

This is Tiffany's signature issue

Tiffany is not a bystander cheering an executive order. He has been trying to do the same thing permanently by law. In January 2021 he introduced the Managing Predators Act, which would have stripped gray wolves in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Wyoming of federal protection outright; it died in subcommittee. He is now the lead original cosponsor of the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, Lauren Boebert's bill ordering Interior to reissue the 2020 delisting rule, which passed the House 211–204 in December 2025 and is waiting on the Senate. His office says he authored it.

So the order is Trump doing administratively what Tiffany has been trying to legislate.

What the conservation groups say

Wolf delisting arrived bundled with a set of Trump orders aimed at beef and ranching, and the groups that work on this responded to the package together.

Western Watersheds Project made the point most directly about the economics Tiffany is invoking:

"The impact of wolves on the livestock industry [pales] in comparison to the impacts of recent trade agreements and the reality of ranching in the arid West under changing climate conditions."

Humane World for Animals said "the war on wolves needs to end, not escalate," and that the decisions should be "based on science, not political favors."

Food & Water Watch said the orders "will do nothing to reverse the last two years of Trump's disastrous food policy," pointing out that "consumer beef prices are at record highs, and ranchers can't make ends meet."

None of that says wolves never take livestock. They do. It says the wolf is being offered as the explanation for a squeeze that has other causes — and that Tiffany, running for governor, is happy to let it be.

The pattern on Wisconsin's natural resources

This is the same candidate who wants to break up the Department of Natural Resources "for sportsmen," when the state's own audit found 90% of that money already goes to them.

What the record shows

Tom Tiffany cheered Trump's order to strip gray wolves of federal protection and said Wisconsin has "successfully managed wildlife for generations." The last time Wisconsin managed wolves, in February 2021, hunters killed 218 against a state quota of 119 in under three days, and the DNR could not legally stop them. University of Wisconsin researchers estimated the state lost 27% to 33% of its wolves that year, roughly a third of it to hidden deaths, mostly illegal killing, that rose when protections came off. Tiffany wrote a bill to delist the wolf in 2021 and is the lead original cosponsor of the one that passed the House in December.

Sources

Tiffany Applauds White House's Action to Delist Gray Wolves, Office of Rep. Tom Tiffany (September 4, 2026).
Trump signs order pushing to remove gray wolf protections, Northern News Now (September 4, 2026).
Harvest Exceeded in 2021 Wisconsin Wolf Hunt, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
February Wolf Harvest Season Feb. 22-28, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (February 22, 2021).
February 2021 Wolf Hunting and Trapping Regulations, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
Wisconsin's Wolf Quota Was 119. Hunters Killed Almost Twice as Many., Backpacker.
DNR: Wisconsin wolf population dropped 14 percent after controversial wolf hunt last year, Wisconsin Public Radio (September 30, 2022).
Hunting and hidden deaths led to estimated 30% reduction in Wisconsin's wolf population, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Critics Warn Trump Beef Orders 'Won't Help Consumers or Ranchers' and Could Kill Protected Wolves, Common Dreams (September 4, 2026).

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

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

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

Not immigration money. Housing money.

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

Any grant. All of them.

What that money actually pays for

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

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

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

How wide the net is

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

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

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

The Montana communities in the crosshairs

Downing has said what he thinks:

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

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

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

Downing did not respond.

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

Nineteen Republicans on this site signed it

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

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

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

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

The part nobody is saying out loud

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

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

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

What the bill does

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

Sources

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

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

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.

Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany Voted for a Budget That Locks In the Loss of Food Inspectors. Food Safety Complaints Had Just Jumped 40%.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:32:57 +0000

In fiscal 2025, consumer complaints to the federal government about meat, poultry and egg products jumped by nearly 40% — from 1,443 to 2,016 — according to the USDA's own Food Safety and Inspection Service.

On June 4, 2026, Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany voted for a spending bill that leaves the agencies responsible for catching that food with the staffing losses they have already taken — and writes those losses into the budget.

The vote

The bill was H.R. 8646, the agriculture and Food and Drug Administration spending bill for 2027. It passed the House 213 to 210 — Republicans 208 to 5, Democrats 4 to 205.

Van Orden voted yes. Tiffany voted yes. Only five House Republicans in the entire chamber voted no.

Be precise about what the bill does, because Republicans dispute the word "cut." By the Appropriations Committee's own account, the bill provides a total discretionary allocation of $26.27 billion — $380 million, or 1.4%, below what was enacted for 2026. It gives the FDA $7.1 billion, and the committee says it increases money for the Food Safety and Inspection Service to fund frontline meat and poultry inspectors.

Then there is this line, in the committee's own list of what the bill does:

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

That is the part that matters. Congress is not restoring the people who were fired. It is adjusting the budget downward to match the fact that they're gone.

The people who do the inspecting are already gone

This is the part that makes a 1.4% cut land differently than it would have in 2024.

Since the beginning of 2025, according to the federal government's own workforce data:

The FDA has lost nearly 4,300 employees.
The Food Safety and Inspection Service — the branch that puts inspectors physically inside slaughterhouses and processing plants — has lost roughly 900 positions, out of a workforce that now stands at about 7,500.

Those losses trace back to the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting operation President Trump ordered at the start of his term. We've covered what the same push did elsewhere in the department: the USDA told more than 2,500 Washington-area employees to move across the country or find another job, and lost more than 20,000 workers along the way.

The FDA's own head of the food division, Jim Jones, quit over it on February 17, 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 continuing in the job would be "fruitless" given the administration's "disdain for the very people necessary to implement" its own agenda, and that the people fired "represent the future of the agency."

He was reacting in part to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had said in a November 2024 MSNBC interview, months before his confirmation, that FDA's nutrition staff should be cleared out entirely: "Their entire departments, like the nutrition department in the FDA … have to go." Jones answered Kennedy's charge that the agency is corrupt, writing that his "comments impugning the integrity of the food staff, asserting they are corrupt based on falsities is a disservice to everyone" — and noting that the food program is more than 99% funded by Congress, not by industry fees.

Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, called Jones's departure "a huge step backward for the FDA and the safety of our food."

The FDA also stopped checking the labs that test milk

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, according to an internal agency email obtained by Reuters. The reason the email gave was that the agency's Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory "is no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis." It was the same staffing problem.

Be precise about this one too, because it was widely misreported as the FDA halting milk testing. It wasn't. The suspended program is a check on laboratories, not a test of milk: the FDA spikes milk samples with microbes, animal drugs and chemical contaminants, sends them to the labs that test Grade A milk, and scores whether their answers match its own. 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.

What each of them has been telling voters

Both men represent rural districts where agriculture is the economy.

Van Orden's 3rd District runs along the Mississippi and includes some of the state's densest dairy country. He is facing Rebecca Cooke again in November.

Tiffany, who represents the northern 7th District, is running for governor. His campaign is built on affordability — on August 27 he unveiled an eight-point affordability plan whose fourth point is returning the entire state surplus to taxpayers. He has also spent the summer attacking data center subsidies while collecting money from the industry's registered lobbyist.

Neither has explained why the answer to a 40% jump in food safety complaints is a budget written around the inspectors who are already gone.

The bill now goes to the Senate, which will decide whether the FDA and FSIS staffing and funding levels in it survive into a final agreement.

What the record shows

Consumer complaints about meat, poultry and egg products rose nearly 40% in fiscal 2025, to 2,016. The FDA has lost nearly 4,300 employees and the federal meat inspection service about 900 since the start of 2025. On June 4, 2026, Derrick Van Orden and Tom Tiffany both voted for a spending bill that comes in $380 million below last year and, in the Appropriations Committee's own words, reduces salaries and expenses "to account for staffing reductions" — joining 206 other Republicans, while five voted no. The FDA has also suspended the annual program that checks whether the laboratories testing Grade A milk are getting the right answers.

Source

Van Orden and Tiffany voted for another food safety cut as FDA, USDA lose inspectors, UpNorthNews, August 28, 2026. Photo: David Goldman / AP. Vote totals verified against the official House roll call.

Twelve Republicans We Track Told Voters High Prices Aren't Really a Problem. One Said to Pick a Different Protein.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:08:19 +0000

Groceries cost more. Gas costs about a dollar more per gallon than it did when Trump took office. Only 16 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction.

This week NOTUS published a column by Dana Milbank collecting what Republican candidates have been telling voters about all of this. The answer, over and over, was some version of: you're wrong, or you're whining, or you should try harder.

Twelve of the Republicans he quoted on the cost of living have report cards on this site. Here is what each of them said.

"You have so many proteins to choose from"

Cindy Hyde-Smith is a senator from Mississippi. She is also a cattle rancher and sits on the Senate Agriculture Committee — which is to say, beef prices are her actual subject.

In February 2026 a host at the Gulf Coast station WLOX asked her what Republicans were doing about the cost of living, and specifically about the price of beef. Her answer, as the Mississippi Free Press reported, was: "You have so many proteins to choose from." She added that all commodities go through peaks and valleys.

The advice to people who could no longer afford meat was to buy different meat.

"The Democrats invented this term 'affordability'"

Derrick Van Orden represents western Wisconsin. On Fox Business in July 2026 he said the quiet part out loud: the Democrats invented the word.

Not that affordability is improving. That it isn't a real thing.

"Earn more"

Jon Husted was appointed to Ohio's Senate seat at the start of 2025. His advice to Ohioans struggling with affordability was two words: earn more.

In a January 16 interview with WOWO radio in Fort Wayne, discussing a bill he wrote to let states impose stricter work requirements on public assistance, Husted said, "Our work ethic is broken." He has also said that people living in poverty are "not very experienced at navigating the real world."

This week the Ohio Capital Journal reported that his wife held Intel stock while he worked to push federal money to the company.

"Gasoline prices are down 40 percent"

Michael Whatley is the Republican Senate nominee in North Carolina. In June 2025, when he was chairman of the Republican National Committee, he told a New York State Conservative Party dinner: "Gasoline prices are down 40 percent. Grocery prices are down … and inflation is dramatically down. Everything [Trump] said he was going to do, he has done."

Gas averaged $4.12 a gallon in April and sits around there now — roughly a dollar above where it was when Trump took office. The 40 percent claim was not true when he made it, either. In June 2025 the national average for regular gasoline was about $3.15 a gallon — slightly more than the $3.11 it cost the week Trump was sworn in.

Whatley is the same candidate who holds Duke Energy stock while the utility pursues a rate increase on North Carolina customers.

"Gas prices are at five-year lows"

Ashley Hinson is the Republican Senate nominee in Iowa. In an opinion column in January she wrote that "Under President Trump's leadership, America is back on the right track," that "Gas prices are at five-year lows," and that paychecks "finally go further at the grocery store."

By the time Milbank was writing, gas was about a dollar higher than at the start of the administration. Hinson's own money helps explain the enthusiasm: she has taken $64,500 from oil and gas companies and voted six times to keep the Iran war going — the war that pushed pump prices up.

The rest of the list

Mike Lawler, of New York's Hudson Valley, told NewsNation last year that the long-term benefits of Trump's tariffs were worth "a little bit of short-term pain." On CNN in July he said eliminating the threat from Iran was worth it — meaning worth the higher gas prices.
Mike Rogers (MI) is the Republican Senate nominee in Michigan. At a town hall in Metamora in September 2025 he mocked what he expected to hear "when the Democrats start getting at us" over prices: "Oh my gosh, coffee went up."
Zach Nunn represents central Iowa. In Politico in May he said inflation driven by the Iran war was "overhyped, candidly, by the media."
David Valadao represents California's Central Valley. He told a local station in March that "to pretend that Iran is the first reason why fuel prices are going up is false."
Dan Sullivan is a senator from Alaska. In February he still thought things were going in the "right direction." In May he sent out a fundraising email asking for donations in part to "pay for gas as we visit isolated rural areas of Alaska."
Mike Collins is the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia. As recently as June he still believed "the economy is moving."
Jim Desmond is a Republican running for the House in California. In a March interview on Real America's Voice he said of high oil prices: "No pain, no gain."

What they have in common

None of these are gaffes in the ordinary sense. A gaffe is a slip. This is a position, and it is remarkably consistent across twelve people in ten states: the prices are fine, or the pain is worth it, or the problem is the person complaining.

Nine of the twelve currently serve in Congress, and their voting records are part of why the prices are what they are. Every one of the twelve has a record on this site, and the pattern is the same — the Iran war that moved gas prices, the tariffs that moved grocery prices, the Medicaid and food-assistance cuts that moved what families have left over.

There is one honest note in the whole collection, and it is Dan Sullivan's fundraising email. When he was talking to voters in February, things were headed in the right direction. When he was asking his donors for money in May, gas was expensive enough to itemize.

The short version

Twelve Republicans with report cards on this site — three sitting senators, four House members, four Senate nominees and a House candidate — publicly told voters that the cost-of-living crisis was overhyped, invented, worth it, or their own fault. A senator on the Agriculture Committee told people priced out of beef to choose another protein. A Senate nominee said gasoline was down 40 percent at a moment when the pump price had not fallen at all, and it is about a dollar a gallon higher now than when this administration started. And a senator who said things were going in the right direction in February asked donors three months later to help cover his gas.

Source

Dana Milbank, NOTUS: "The Republican Midterm Message on Inflation? Stop Whining!". Photo by Mark Schiefelbein/AP.

Tom Tiffany Calls Union Leaders 'Kingpins' He Doesn't Worry About. He Was the Only Member of the Entire House Who Skipped the Vote on Workers' Right to Organize.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:27:51 +0000

About 200,000 people in Wisconsin go to work under a union contract. At a voter event in Superior this month, Tom Tiffany was asked whether he cared about their support.

He said he didn't worry about their leaders.

"Those couple people that are kingpins, I don't worry about them."

In the same answer he said "who I'm after is the rank-and-file voter." Audio of the exchange was obtained by the Milwaukee Courier and reported by Civic Media on August 25, 2026.

It's a clean line — the bosses versus the workers, and he's for the workers. There is a way to check it. Congress votes, and the votes are public.

The vote he didn't cast

On March 9, 2021, the U.S. House passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. It's the biggest rewrite of labor law in decades: it would penalize employers who retaliate against workers for organizing, narrow the loophole that lets companies call employees "independent contractors" to strip their rights, and override the state right-to-work laws that let people opt out of paying for the union bargaining they benefit from.

It passed 225 to 206. One member of the House did not vote.

That member was Tom Tiffany.

Not one of a handful. Not part of a bloc making a point. Out of every member of the House, on the single largest labor bill to reach the floor in a generation, exactly one person's name has "Not Voting" beside it, and it is his. The roll call is on the Clerk of the House's own website. Anyone can open it.

Voting no would at least be a position. This is the rank-and-file voter he says he's after, asking where he stood, and the record answering: he wasn't there.

The vote he did cast

Eleven months later he was there, and it was worse.

On February 7, 2022, the House voted on the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act. Forced arbitration is the clause buried in a lot of employment contracts that says if something happens to you at work, you can't sue — you go to a private arbitrator the company picked, in secret, with no appeal. For years it was the standard way a company made a harassment complaint disappear. The bill said that clause can't be enforced against someone alleging sexual assault or sexual harassment.

It was not a close call, and it was not a partisan one. It passed 335 to 97. Every single Democrat voted yes. So did 113 Republicans — more than half the Republican conference.

Tiffany was one of the 97 who voted no. President Biden signed it into law anyway.

A month after that, on March 17, 2022, the House passed the broader FAIR Act, which would have banned forced arbitration clauses in employment, consumer and civil rights disputes generally. It passed 222 to 209. Tiffany voted no on that one too.

What this adds up to

Put the three next to each other and the pattern isn't about union leadership at all.

The PRO Act protects the worker who wants to organize. He didn't vote.
H.R. 4445 protects the worker who was harassed. He voted no, while 113 Republicans voted yes.
The FAIR Act protects the worker who signed away her right to a courtroom on her first day. He voted no.

Two of the three have nothing to do with unions at all. All three are about what happens to an individual employee when the employer has all the leverage — which is the exact person Tiffany says he's after.

This is not new for him either. He cosponsored a national right-to-work bill in three different terms after voting for Act 10 as a state legislator. Associated Builders and Contractors, the construction lobby that fights union project-labor agreements, is on the list of top donors to his congressional campaign account this cycle, at $2,500 from its PAC. And he voted for Trump's budget bill, which Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski says could cost "potentially 270,000 Wisconsinites" their health coverage — coverage a lot of those 200,000 union members bargained for.

The endorsement gap

Tiffany's Democratic opponent, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, has picked up endorsements from nearly every local labor union. Asked about his own, Tiffany said: "As of now, I don't know that we have any labor union endorsements."

Crowley's response to the "kingpins" line was that Tiffany is "selling out hard-working Wisconsinites," and pledged to "always protect their right to organize and to fight for fair wages."

You don't have to take a Democrat's word for it. The roll calls above are on a government website, they take about a minute to read, and none of them has a union president's name anywhere in it.

What the record shows

Tom Tiffany told a Superior audience he doesn't worry about the union "kingpins," only the rank-and-file. He was the only member of the entire U.S. House who did not vote on the PRO Act in 2021, the biggest labor bill in decades. He was one of 97 Republicans — against 113 in his own party who voted yes — to oppose ending forced arbitration for sexual harassment claims in 2022, and he voted against the broader FAIR Act a month later. Every one of those bills protects an individual worker, and two of them have nothing to do with unions at all. About 200,000 Wisconsinites work under a union contract, and by his own account he does not know of a single labor union endorsement.

Source

"Tom Tiffany says he doesn't care about labor union support: 'kingpins, I don't worry about them'", Civic Media, August 25, 2026, and "Tom Tiffany's anti-worker record includes votes weakening protections for sexual harassment victims", The Milwaukee Courier, August 25, 2026. Photo: Getty Images via Civic Media.

Tom Tiffany Campaigns as a Small-Business Success Story. He Paid Wisconsin No Personal Income Tax at All in Six Different Years.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:25:03 +0000

Tom Tiffany's campaign for governor is built on one story. He ran a boat.

"Tom and his wife Chris owned and operated Wilderness Cruises in Wisconsin's beautiful Northwoods for 20 years, and he served as the dam tender on the Willow Flowage for 29 years," his campaign website says. "Yes, he was a dam man!" His television ads run with the slogan "Time to send in the dam man."

It's a good story. A small-business owner from up north, someone who met a payroll and knows what things cost. That's the pitch for why he should be trusted to run the state's finances.

On August 26, 2026, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published what the state's own tax records show about that business. Tiffany and his business went years without paying state income taxes.

What the Department of Revenue records show

Wisconsin's Department of Revenue tracks a line on every return called "net tax" — what you actually owe after your deductions and credits are applied. Here is Tiffany's:

2005: he paid $681 in personal state income taxes.
2006 through 2010: he had zero net state liability. He owed nothing, and he paid nothing. That's five years in a row.
2011, the year he was sworn into the state Assembly: $2,212.
2012 through 2018: between $1,680 and $2,445 a year.
2019: zero again.
2020 onward, after he was elected to Congress: between $4,613 and $8,432 a year.

That is six separate years — 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2019 — in which the man now asking to run Wisconsin's finances owed Wisconsin's treasury no personal income tax at all.

The businesses are a more complicated story, and the paper spells out why. Tiffany ran two of them, one after the other. Willow Inc. ran the boat on the Willow Flowage; it owed and paid the state no income taxes for more than a decade through 2016, then paid $65 in 2017, $308 in 2018 and $240 in 2019. Wisconsin River Cruises Inc., which took the operation to the Wisconsin River in Rhinelander in 2007, owed and paid no state income taxes at all between 2007 and 2013 — but it was an S corporation, and an S corporation's income and losses pass through to the owner's own return instead of being taxed at the corporate level. Willow Inc. was a C corporation, which does owe tax in its own right.

Sixty-five dollars. That is what the C corporation at the center of his campaign biography paid Wisconsin in income taxes in 2017.

What Tiffany says

Tiffany, 68, didn't dispute the records. He told the Journal Sentinel that the tour boat business had hard years, and he pointed at the economy.

"As any small business owner will tell you, it isn't always easy. During the times surrounding the financial crisis and recession, times were tough for all businesses, especially seasonal businesses like ours that relied on tourism."

He said the business averaged about 15 employees a year, and that before he and his wife took home a dollar there were employees, fuel, boat repairs and equipment to pay for. He said they paid property taxes, personal property taxes, unemployment insurance and payroll taxes like Social Security and Medicare. And he said the zero year in 2019 came from depreciation on the boat and other equipment.

That is a real answer, and part of it checks out. Rachel Detert, an accounting professor at Marquette University and a certified public accountant, told the paper that a tax loss doesn't automatically mean a business was failing — taxable income is calculated under tax rules and can differ from what a business actually takes in. Depreciation lets a business write off the cost of equipment over time, and Wisconsin lets losses be carried forward against income for as many as the next 15 tax years.

But Detert was careful about how far that goes. Without the underlying corporate and individual returns, she said, she could only offer "viable explanations rather than definitive conclusions." Those returns are not public.

Scot Ross — a Democratic analyst who ran the liberal group One Wisconsin Now when it found Willow Inc. had no tax obligations going back to 2001 — put the blunt version on the table:

"Either Tiffany schemed to avoid paying his taxes or he was lying when he said he was a successful business owner."

Ross also noted that Tiffany's business had no state tax liability under two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It wasn't one bad quarter.

The part that matters for the rest of us

Wisconsin runs on income tax. It pays for the schools, the roads, the university system, the plow that comes down your road in February, and the share of Medicaid the state has to cover. When one person owes nothing, someone else covers it. That is the whole arrangement.

And Tiffany is not running on a promise to leave taxes alone. In April 2026 he pledged to end Wisconsin's state income tax on tips and overtime if he's elected governor, telling a Wausau audience that "whether you're a food server, a bartender, waitress, nurse, construction worker, a machinist, you're going to see more money that's going to come back to you."

Set that beside the record. The nurse and the machinist paid their state income tax every one of those years. Tiffany, in six of them, did not.

This is the same shape as the rest of his campaign. He says he would end the subsidies Wisconsin hands data centers — while taking $5,000 from the only registered lobbyist for the state's data center coalition. He introduces himself as a dairy-farm kid who understands working people, and he has cosponsored a national right-to-work bill in three different terms after voting for Act 10. He voted for Trump's budget bill, which Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski says could cost "potentially 270,000 Wisconsinites" their health coverage. The words are always about the person working the shift. The record is always somewhere else.

What his opponent's records look like

The Journal Sentinel pulled the same records for the other candidate, and the comparison is not close.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, 40, the Democratic candidate for governor, owed and paid no state income taxes for exactly two years — 2006 and 2007, when he was 20 or 21 years old. Every year since, he has owed between $380 and nearly $8,000.

Tiffany is not the first Wisconsin candidate to face this. In 2010 the Wisconsin State Journal reported that Republican U.S. Senate candidate Terrence Wall, a millionaire real estate developer, hadn't paid personal state income taxes in nine of the previous 10 years. In 2021 the Journal Sentinel reported that Sarah Godlewski, then running in a Democratic Senate primary and now running for lieutenant governor, owed and paid no state income taxes in 2017 and 2018.

What's different here is the campaign built on top of it — the ads, the slogan, the biography.

The bottom line

Wisconsin Department of Revenue records show Tom Tiffany had zero net personal state income tax liability for 2006 through 2010 and again in 2019 — six years in which that line came to zero. Willow Inc., the C corporation that ran the boat on the Willow Flowage, owed nothing for more than a decade through 2016 and then paid $65; Wisconsin River Cruises, an S corporation whose income and losses pass through to his own return, owed nothing from 2007 through 2013. He is running for governor on that business record, and on a promise to cut the income tax for tipped and overtime workers who paid theirs every one of those years. The returns that would explain it are not public.

Source

Mary Spicuzza, "Tom Tiffany touts business success, but for years owed no taxes", Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 26, 2026. Photo: Hannah Schroeder / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Seven Republicans Are Running on 'Local Control' of Data Centers. All Seven Voted to Take It Away for Ten Years.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:21:04 +0000

A data center is a warehouse full of computers that run artificial intelligence. It drinks electricity and water on a scale most towns have never had to plan for, and somebody has to pay for the power plants and the pipes. Across the country, towns and counties have started saying no — or at least not like this.

So this year, a lot of Republicans started saying the same thing. Let the community decide. Local control. Your town, your call.

There is a problem with that. On May 22, 2025, almost every Republican in the U.S. House voted for a bill that would have made local control over data centers illegal for the next ten years.

That is the finding of a report published August 24, 2026 by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, written by its vice president of technology policy, Adam Conner. We pulled the roll calls ourselves. They are exactly what the report says they are.

The vote

Buried in the House version of Trump's budget bill was a section called the "Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology Modernization Initiative." One paragraph of it said that for ten years, no state and no city or county could enforce any law limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models or systems.

That word "systems" is the whole ballgame. The bill did not define an AI system as software. It defined it as "any data system, hardware, tool, or utility that operates, in whole or in part, using artificial intelligence" — the buildings, the chips, the cooling, the power hookups. A data center is all of those things in one place.

The National Conference of State Legislatures, which exists to advise state lawmakers, read the language and wrote to the House Energy and Commerce Committee in May 2025 to warn exactly what would happen. Restricting states this way, the group told the committee, would "circumvent their authority to regulate the permitting, construction and operation of data centers within their borders" — "raising costs for ratepayers, jeopardizing zoning decisions that protect our mutual constituents and impacting existing infrastructure such as power grids and generating facilities."

The bill was not neutral about which direction the rules could run, either. It carved out an exception for state and local laws whose purpose was to "remove legal impediments to" AI or to "streamline licensing, permitting, routing, zoning, procurement, or reporting procedures" for it. Rules that made it easier to build a data center were fine. Rules that made it harder were banned.

The House passed the bill anyway. The roll call records 215 Republicans voting yes and two voting no — Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio. Every Democrat voted no.

The provision never became law. The Senate stripped it out at 4:08 in the morning on July 1, 2025, on a 99–1 vote. Ninety-nine senators, both parties, agreed it had to go.

But the House vote happened. It is on the record, and it belongs to everyone who cast it.

Four of them voted for it four separate times

The floor vote is the one a member can shrug off as a vote on a thousand-page bill. Four of the members named here cannot use that excuse, because they sat on the committee where the provision was written and had to vote on it by itself.

Gabe Evans of Colorado, John James of Michigan, Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey and Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa all serve on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The committee's markup ran through the night of May 13, 2025; Politico reported that the panel cleared the communications section — the one that "would most notably institute a 10-year moratorium on state AI legislation" — shortly after midnight. Three recorded votes touched it:

The committee's ranking Democrat offered an amendment, COMM19, to delete the ten-year ban from the bill entirely. It failed, 24 yeas to 29 nays. Evans, James, Kean and Miller-Meeks all voted no — they voted to keep it in.
The committee then voted 29–24 to send the section containing the ban to the Budget Committee. All four voted yes.
The committee voted 30–24 to transmit its full recommendations, ban included. All four voted yes.

Then they voted for it again on the House floor nine days later. Four votes. One of them was a straight up-or-down question — should this ban be in the bill, yes or no? — and they answered it.

Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin: the promises

Andy Biggs is the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona. Asked in a July 2026 interview how he would handle the state's data center boom, he told KTAR News that "it becomes a local jurisdiction issue and the state's just got to make sure we take care of the water and the power situation." The bill he voted for would likely have made a state water-or-power requirement aimed at data centers unenforceable.

Ashley Hinson is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Iowa. In an August 10, 2026 interview, she told Iowa's News Now that "these decisions are best decided at the local level," and that Iowans "want to know that their utility rates are not going to go skyrocketing" and that when they "turn on the faucet, not only is there going to be water that comes out, but that it's going to be safe to drink." She did not mention her vote.

Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who voted for the ban four times, told the same station in July that "people are rightly concerned about water usage and electricity rates going up," and that AI growth "needs to be done transparently. You need to have community involvement in this." Transparency rules and community sign-off are precisely the kind of documentation and permitting obligations that the ban she voted for four times would likely have blocked.

John James, also a four-time yes vote, is the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan. Asked in June 2026 for his data center position, he gave Spectrum News a five-part answer and led with it: "Local control. Don't increase my bills. Take care of my water. No pollution. Prioritize brownfields over productive farmland." Every item after the first would have to be written into a state or local rule to mean anything, and the ban James voted for four times is a ban on writing exactly those rules.

Tom Barrett of Michigan's 7th District is running ads on this. We covered one of them: a spot in which he says he "stood up to my own party" on data centers, built on a 2015 state legislative vote about a single building in Grand Rapids. On August 19, 2026, Semafor's Dave Weigel posted a clip from Barrett's virtual town hall in which Barrett denounces "proposals to nationalize decisions that would override local communities about their decisions around data centers." He had voted for one.

Tom Tiffany is the Republican nominee for governor of Wisconsin. "Data Centers" is the only page under the solutions section of his campaign site, and the second of his five standards is titled "Give local communities the final say." Under it: "No data center should be forced on a community that doesn't want it. Local residents should have the final say over what gets built in their backyard." His other four standards — ending tax breaks, protecting farmland, making data centers pay their own energy costs, banning secret nondisclosure agreements — are each a tax, a zoning rule, a fee or a documentation requirement aimed at data centers. Those are the words the bill he voted for used: a "substantive design, performance, data-handling, documentation, civil liability, taxation, fee, or other requirement" on an AI system. We have also written about the $5,000 Tiffany took from the only registered lobbyist for Wisconsin's data center coalition.

Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin's 3rd District posted on August 7, 2026: "My conditions for data centers have not changed and are not negotiable: 1) must have local buy in 2) cannot cover our farm land 3) zero increase in electric rates 4) must utilize a closed loop cooling system." Three of those four conditions are rules a state or a town would have to write and enforce, which is the thing he voted to ban. Van Orden is also one of seven Republicans who suggested the people opposing data centers might be working for China.

The other seven, and what their states are doing right now

The remaining members named in the report are not quoted promising local control. Three of their states have simply been exercising it — and every one of those actions is the kind of thing the ban would likely have stopped.

New Jersey. In July 2026, Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a law putting large data centers in their own ratepayer class and making them pay for the grid upgrades they cause, so that everyone else's bills don't absorb the cost. The bill's own summary describes it as requiring utilities to "develop and apply special rules for certain data centers." A law that singles out data centers for special treatment is close to a textbook example of what the moratorium barred. Tom Kean Jr. voted for that moratorium four separate times.

New York. On July 14, 2026, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order holding in abeyance permit applications for data centers of 50 megawatts and up while the state develops statewide standards. Mike Lawler has attacked her for it. In an August 18, 2026 Fox Business interview, he said the message the policy sends businesses is "don't come here. Go do your business elsewhere." It was not his first. On July 17, 2026 — nine days after a planning board in his own district halted a data center expansion beside a reservoir that supplies drinking water across the New Jersey line — he went on the same network to argue that limits like New York's hurt innovation and push the industry toward China. Lawler at least isn't claiming to want local control. He had simply already voted for the ban that would likely have made New York's pause impossible.

Pennsylvania. The legislature passed an energy-and-water reporting requirement for data centers in July 2026, and on August 18, 2026 Gov. Josh Shapiro signed an executive order requiring developers to make legally binding commitments: pay the full cost of the electricity infrastructure they need "without shifting costs to Pennsylvania households and businesses," meet "strict water conservation requirements," drop nondisclosure agreements — and get local community approval before a permit issues. Brian Fitzpatrick, Ryan Mackenzie, Rob Bresnahan and Scott Perry all voted for the ban that would likely have made those requirements unenforceable. We wrote about that vote when all ten of Pennsylvania's House Republicans cast it.

Colorado. Gabe Evans is the fourth Energy and Commerce Republican. He voted four times.

Why "local control" is such a useful thing to say

Somebody pays for a data center, and it is not the company that builds it. It's the household on the same grid. We have laid out what that looks like in five states where the bills are already climbing, and what happened in one Kentucky district where three counties voted to slow the buildout.

The repositioning is not subtle, and it is not confined to these fourteen. A year ago Americans were split on data centers; now three out of four oppose one near their home, and we have already documented eight Republicans who spent that year banking checks from the industry and then discovered concerns.

Saying "let the community decide" in 2026 costs a candidate nothing. The vote that would have actually settled the question came 15 months earlier, when almost nobody was watching and the pressure inside the party ran entirely the other way. Since then the Trump administration has made preempting state AI laws an explicit goal — and, as the CAP Action report notes, its own proposals now claim to carve out local control of data centers specifically, which the report suggests is because the White House has noticed how unpopular the issue has become.

What the record shows

Two hundred and fifteen House Republicans voted for a ten-year ban on states and towns enforcing any law that limits AI systems, data centers included. Four of the fourteen named here — Gabe Evans, John James, Tom Kean Jr. and Mariannette Miller-Meeks — voted for it four separate times, including one straight up-or-down vote on whether to strike it from the bill. Seven of the members named here are now campaigning on giving communities the final say over data centers. The rules their own states have written this summer — New Jersey's ratepayer protections, New York's permit pause, Pennsylvania's requirement that a developer get local approval first — are the kind of rules that vote would likely have made unenforceable for a decade.

Source

Adam Conner, "Almost Every House Republican Voted To Block State and Local Governments' Ability To Protect Residents From AI Data Centers," Center for American Progress Action Fund, August 24, 2026. Photo: the Meta El Paso Data Center seen from above on August 13, 2026, in El Paso, Texas, by Brandon Bell / Getty Images, via CAP Action.

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

Tom Tiffany Voted for the Law That Took 8.5% Off a $50,000 Public Worker's Take-Home Pay. Now He's Signed On to Take Right-to-Work National.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:58:34 +0000

Tom Tiffany wants to be Wisconsin's next governor, and the story he tells about himself is that he grew up on a dairy farm and understands people who work for a living.

His voting record tells a different story. The Milwaukee Courier and Civic Media went back through fifteen years of it, and what they found is a straight line: from the law that gutted public unions in Wisconsin, to a bill he keeps signing that would do a version of it to every state in the country.

Act 10, and what it took out of a paycheck

In 2011, Tiffany was a freshman in the state Assembly and a reliable ally of Governor Scott Walker. He voted for Act 10 — the law that stripped collective bargaining rights from public employees and brought as many as 100,000 people to the Capitol in weeks of protest.

The part that gets lost in the shouting is what it did to household budgets. The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau analyzed it at the time: a public employee earning $50,000 a year saw take-home pay shrink by about 8.5%, because the law forced them to pay far more toward their own benefits.

That hit teachers, snowplow drivers, county clerks. Not a tax. A pay cut, written into law.

Then came the longer effect. Between 2010 and 2019, Wisconsin lost about 137,000 union members, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Tiffany does not regret it. He brags about it.

"I was in the state assembly at the time and I voted for it. Saved property taxpayers billions of dollars."

That was Tiffany in January, on a conservative talk show, attacking former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes for promising to restore bargaining rights.

The court said it was unconstitutional. He called the judge radical.

In 2024, a Dane County judge ruled Act 10 unconstitutional. The ruling is on appeal and the law stays fully in effect until the Wisconsin Supreme Court hears it.

Tiffany's response on X was not a legal argument:

"Today's Act 10 ruling is yet another example of judicial activism by a radical Dane County judge. The Left's relentless efforts to undermine Act 10 are nothing more than an attempt to raise your taxes and expand government control."

He has also said plainly he hopes the court leaves it alone. "There's no reason for them to overturn this," he said on another radio show in January, "and I hope they see the light of day in regards to this."

Then he tried to do it to the whole country

Act 10 hit public employees. The 2015 "right-to-work" law hit private ones — it banned requiring union dues at private businesses, and union strength across Wisconsin fell further.

Tiffany campaigned on that record when he ran for Congress in 2020:

"Thanks to my work with @ScottWalker, Wisconsin is a right-to-work state. Congress should support freedom for workers, not force them to be members of unions they don't want to join."

In Washington he went further. In 2021 he backed H. Res. 620, a resolution opposing any federal law that would override state right-to-work laws. And in three separate terms he has cosponsored the House bill to make right-to-work the law nationwide.

The current version is H.R. 1232, the National Right-to-Work Act, introduced in February 2025. By its own description, it repeals the parts of the National Labor Relations Act and the Railway Labor Act that let an employer and a union agree to require employees to join the union as a condition of employment. Tiffany is one of its cosponsors — 124 House Republicans signed on.

What right-to-work actually does to wages

Supporters call it worker freedom. The research says it's a pay cut.

An August 2014 study by researchers at the University of Illinois and the Illinois Economic Policy Institute found that, after 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%.

Robin Clark-Bennett, director of the labor center at the University of Iowa College of Law, told Axios in 2022 that for decades the laws have been a way to depress union membership and pull resources away from bargaining.

There's also a simpler problem with the design: a worker can stop paying dues and still collect everything the union negotiates — the raises, the grievance process, the safety rules. Do that at scale and the union runs out of money to negotiate with. That's not an accident of the law. That's the mechanism.

The pattern

This is the same move we keep documenting from Tiffany. He runs as the plain-spoken guy from the farm while his actual votes go the other way.

He is currently attacking David Crowley as a friend of Big Tech — while the only registered lobbyist for Wisconsin's data center coalition gave his campaign $5,000. He voted for Trump's budget bill, and a year later Wisconsin's secretary of state put the cost at 270,000 Wisconsinites who stand to lose healthcare and tens of thousands who could lose food assistance.

Tiffany's campaign did not respond to the Courier's request for comment. Wisconsin's major labor unions have endorsed Crowley.

Election Day is November 3.

Source

From Wisconsin to D.C., Tiffany has pushed the anti-union agenda from the start — Civic Media / Milwaukee Courier, August 21, 2026. Photo: Getty Images.

Wisconsin Passed a Law Saying Political AI Videos Must Say 'This Video Content Generated by AI.' Derrick Van Orden Is Posting Fake Videos of His Opponent Without It.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:39:20 +0000

Derrick Van Orden posted a video of his opponent this month with the caption "I wish this was a joke."

It is a joke. The video is fake. He made it.

In the fake video, Democratic challenger Rebecca Cooke says things she has never said:

"Do you really think it matters what you peasants think?"

"I am the anointed one."

She didn't say either one. An AI tool did, in a synthetic version of her voice and face, and the sitting congressman for Wisconsin's 3rd District put it on social media as though it were something his constituents ought to see.

UpNorthNews founding editor Pat Kreitlow reported the story on August 21, and noted this is not a one-off — Van Orden has posted deepfakes repeatedly.

Wisconsin already thought about this

Here is what makes it worse than an ordinary campaign stunt: Wisconsin passed a law about exactly this behavior, and it passed with Republican votes.

In March 2024, Gov. Tony Evers signed 2023 Wisconsin Act 123, which added a synthetic-media disclosure requirement to state law. It cleared a Republican-controlled Legislature and was signed by a Democratic governor. "Synthetic media" is defined as audio or video content substantially produced in whole or in part by generative artificial intelligence.

The requirement in Wis. Stat. 11.1303(2m)(c) is not vague. A covered political video containing synthetic media must display, "throughout the duration of each portion of the communication containing synthetic media, in writing that is readable, legible, and readily accessible," the words:

"This video content generated by AI"

Or, if there's fake audio too, "This content generated by AI." The law sets a penalty of up to $1,000 for each intentional violation.

That's the whole ask. Put a label on it. Tell people the thing they're watching didn't happen.

Van Orden's posts don't carry it. The only marker anywhere near the video was fine print underneath it on X reading "Made with Grok imaging" — which is not the statutory language, is not on the video, and does not run throughout it.

"Certainly isn't within the spirit of the law"

There's a technicality Van Orden gets to hide behind, and it's worth naming honestly.

The disclosure requirement attaches to political communications of the kind Wisconsin's campaign finance law regulates. Van Orden's deepfakes were posted to his own social media accounts, not bought as paid advertising, so as a legal matter they likely fall outside it.

Rep. Jodi Emerson, a co-sponsor of that law, told UpNorthNews that Van Orden's behavior, though technically legal, "certainly isn't within the spirit of the law."

That is the whole story in one sentence. The Wisconsin Legislature — Republicans and Democrats together — looked at the arrival of tools that can make any candidate appear to say anything, and agreed on a minimum standard of decency: if it's fake, say it's fake.

A sitting member of Congress found the seam in it and drove through.

Why the label matters more than the joke

Defenders will say it's obviously satire, that nobody's fooled, that everyone knows Rebecca Cooke never called voters "peasants."

Two problems with that.

First, that's not how any of this travels. A clip gets screenshotted, cropped, re-uploaded, and stripped of context within hours. The "Made with Grok imaging" fine print does not survive the second repost. The quote does. Six weeks from now, some share of voters in western Wisconsin will believe Rebecca Cooke said the word "peasants," because the last version they saw had no label on it at all. That is precisely the harm the Legislature wrote the law to prevent.

Second, "I wish this was a joke" is not a satire caption. It's a caption designed to read as outrage at something real. Van Orden did not post the video saying look at this funny thing I made. He posted it in the voice of a man appalled by what his opponent said. That is the opposite of a disclosure.

UpNorthNews also raises a question worth sitting with: this is a man using AI to generate video of a woman saying things she never said, for his own political benefit. His own chamber understands why that's a problem — it voted 409 to 2 for the TAKE IT DOWN Act, a law aimed at a different and far more serious use of the same technology. Van Orden's videos aren't that. But a congressman who knows the House took AI impersonation seriously enough to pass a law about it does not get to plead ignorance about what a fake video of a real woman does.

Not the first time his phone has been the problem

Van Orden's social media habits keep becoming news, and never the good kind. We've written before about how he spends his time smearing Muslims online.

Meanwhile, the things his district actually needs attention on go elsewhere. He voted to cut Medicaid by roughly $900 billion and then asked Wisconsin for credit when the state got an exemption.

Wisconsin's Legislature — Republicans included — looked at this technology and asked political candidates for one thing: six words on the screen, so voters know what's real.

Derrick Van Orden couldn't manage six words.

Source

Van Orden mocks state law against using AI deepfakes with videos depicting Cooke — UpNorthNews, August 21, 2026, by Pat Kreitlow.

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

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

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

That somebody is usually you, on your electric bill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Barrett is running on a vote from 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Cotton asked the Justice Department to investigate the objectors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Derrick Van Orden and Tim Burchett skipped the paperwork

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

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

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

Tommy Tuberville called his neighbors' concerns "bull crap"

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

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

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

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

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

Somebody actually checked

This is the part that should end the argument.

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

"We haven't found much."

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

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

And on the people organizing:

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

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

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

The debate existed already. Seventy-one percent.

What this actually is

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

45,000 Wisconsinites Have Already Lost Health Coverage. Tom Tiffany Says the Work Requirements Are 'Common-Sense.'

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:39:58 +0000

For a year, the argument over Trump's budget bill was about projections. How many people might lose coverage. What the cuts would mean.

That part is over. The numbers are in, and they are not forecasts anymore.

ACA marketplace coverage in Wisconsin fell 16% this year — about 45,000 people — after congressional Republicans let the enhanced insurance subsidies expire at the end of 2025. Nationally, KFF reported on July 28 that effectuated enrollment dropped by nearly 3 million people, a 12% decline in a single year, after seven straight years of growth.

Tom Tiffany voted for the bill that left them to expire. He is now running for governor of Wisconsin, and this week he defended the part of it that hasn't even taken effect yet.

What he said this week

Asked by CBS 58 about Medicaid work requirements, Tiffany sent a statement on August 18:

"We must preserve Medicaid for our most vulnerable while promoting responsibility among those who are able to work."

He said nearly 80% of Wisconsin voters supported welfare work requirements in a 2023 referendum, and described his vote as being for "a common-sense requirement that able-bodied, childless adults work, volunteer, or participate in job training for at least 20 hours per week, with exceptions for vulnerable populations."

Set aside for a moment whether that requirement is reasonable. Notice what the answer does: it moves the conversation to a rule that starts in January 2027, and away from the thing that already happened in January 2026.

Because the 45,000 Wisconsinites who lost marketplace coverage this year did not lose it to a work requirement. They lost it because their premiums went up when the enhanced subsidies expired — and Republicans, repeatedly, declined to extend them.

What it looked like in DeForest

Macy Buhler owns the Yahara River Learning Center, a childcare center in DeForest. She can't afford to provide health insurance to her teachers directly, so she gives them a stipend to buy their own coverage on HealthCare.gov.

When premiums jumped, she doubled the stipend for 2026 — a $40,000 increase in that one line item.

It wasn't enough.

"I've lost some staff and closed a classroom because they can no longer afford to be an early childhood educator, a teacher."

She told CBS 58 she's looking at $150,000–$175,000 in added costs over the next year that would land "on the backs of working parents," and that she has already reduced how many children she takes in because she can't keep staff.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Buhler put it directly:

"Early childhood teachers deserve real access to healthcare and medication, not a Congress who makes it impossible for them to afford both. Tom Tiffany voted for this bill. We cannot trust him with our healthcare."

That is one small business, in one Wisconsin village. A closed classroom means families who can't find childcare, and teachers who left a profession they trained for.

The doctors in his own district

Dr. Kristen Dall-Winther owns a medical practice in Wisconsin's 7th Congressional District. Tiffany has been her representative since 2020.

"I see first hand what happens when patients struggle to afford care, when rural hospitals are under financial pressure, and when people put off seeing a doctor because they are worried about what it will cost. Tom Tiffany has repeatedly voted for policies that make those problems worse."

She cited forecasts that the bill could eventually cost more than 250,000 Wisconsin residents their health coverage.

Dr. Sophie Kramer, a Madison internist, described what that does in an exam room:

"I treat patients with chronic diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart disease, hypertension — and those don't disappear when someone loses insurance, they just become harder to manage."

What Tiffany promised at the time

Here is the part that should follow Tiffany through this campaign.

After the bill passed in July 2025, he issued a statement praising it for "providing tax cuts for seniors, parents, workers and small businesses." In the same statement, he said he would:

"remain committed to protecting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for our seniors and the most vulnerable, while rooting out waste and curbing the reckless spending that threatens future generations."

He said that about a bill projected to cut $900 billion to $1 trillion from Medicaid over ten years. Rep. Mark Pocan put the healthcare total at $1.1 trillion and called it "the biggest cut we've ever seen in this country."

You cannot promise to protect Medicaid in the press release announcing your vote to cut it by a trillion dollars. Those are two different positions, issued the same afternoon.

Gov. Tony Evers, responding this week, was blunt about the subsidies:

"Congressional Republicans' refusal to extend the tax credits caused healthcare coverage costs to skyrocket, pricing families in Wisconsin and across the country out of having coverage at all."

The pattern for a man who wants to be governor

We wrote in July that Wisconsin was still paying for Tom Tiffany's "Big Beautiful Bill" vote, when the harm was still a projection and protesters parked a decommissioned ambulance outside state GOP headquarters to make the point.

The ambulance was a metaphor. The 45,000 people are not.

And this is how Tiffany tends to handle a record that has become inconvenient. When his position on abortion stopped polling well for a statewide race, he erased his support for a national ban from his website. He has also attacked his opponent over data centers while taking $5,000 from the only registered lobbyist for Wisconsin's data center coalition.

The through-line is a candidate who wants the policy and not the responsibility for it.

What's still coming

The Medicaid changes Tiffany calls common-sense don't start until January 2027 — after the election he's running in.

Nancy Higgs, a self-employed interior designer who switched to BadgerCare when her income dropped, told the Wisconsin Examiner she doesn't know yet what will happen to her coverage.

That's the honest summary of where Wisconsin stands. Forty-five thousand people have already lost coverage. Hundreds of thousands more are waiting to find out, and the man asking to run the state is campaigning on the vote that put them there.

Wisconsin deserves a governor who counts the people losing coverage, not the referendum results.

Sources

Advocates say Tiffany's vote for 2025 Medicaid cuts bodes ill for healthcare — Erik Gunn, Wisconsin Examiner, August 19, 2026. Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner.
Small businesses raise healthcare concerns; Tiffany defends Medicaid work requirements — Meredith Hackler, CBS 58, August 18, 2026.
How Has ACA Marketplace Enrollment Changed Across States in 2026? — KFF, July 28, 2026.

The Republicans With the Worst Records on Workers and Unions

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:01:46 +0000

On Monday, five of the biggest unions in Wisconsin — teachers, state workers, service workers, Teamsters — asked the state Supreme Court to reinstate a ruling that Act 10 is unconstitutional.

Act 10 is the 2011 Wisconsin law that stripped collective bargaining rights from most public employees. Fifteen years later, it is still in court.

That's a useful reminder of something worth saying plainly: taking away a worker's right to bargain is not a one-news-cycle event. It's a thing that shapes paychecks for a generation, and the people who did it usually get promoted.

Here is a look at Republicans in Congress with the worst records on workers — including the man who ran Act 10 through the Wisconsin Senate.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote the playbook

Scott Fitzgerald was Wisconsin's Senate Majority Leader when Act 10 passed. His brother Jeff was Assembly Speaker. Between them, the Fitzgerald brothers controlled both chambers of the legislature that sent the bill to Scott Walker's desk.

It is still the most consequential thing he has ever done.

And the reason Act 10 is still in court traces to which workers the law let off the hook. It exempted certain public safety employees — including the State Patrol. Three days before the bill was introduced, the Walker administration had named Stephen Fitzgerald — Scott's father — superintendent of that same State Patrol.

The Wisconsin State Journal's editorial board called the appointment out at the time under the headline "Fitzgerald pick to head State Patrol smacks of favoritism." We laid out the full timeline here.

The dissenting appeals judge in this case made the point sharper: the unions that kept their bargaining rights under Act 10 had backed Walker's election months earlier. Your rights depended on which side you'd been on.

Glenn Grothman called the overnight protesters "slobs"

When tens of thousands of Wisconsinites filled the Capitol to protest Act 10, then-state senator Glenn Grothman called the ones staying overnight "a bunch of slobs taking up the building" — "college students who are having a fun party."

That was not a one-off mood. It's a worldview, and he's kept at it in Congress.

He asked Trump to cut 100,000 to 200,000 federal jobs, explaining that "a lot of these people are not working very hard at all". And he wrote a bill making it easier to pay workers with disabilities a median of $3.46 an hour — stripping out 2014 protections that keep teenagers with disabilities from being funneled straight into subminimum-wage jobs.

Pete Stauber wrote a union bill, then voted twice to kill it

This one is in a category of its own, because Pete Stauber didn't just vote wrong. He wrote the bill.

In September 2025 he co-authored the Faster Labor Contracts Act with a New Jersey Democrat. It addresses a real problem: workers vote to unionize, and the employer simply runs out the clock instead of bargaining. Stauber's own release said it takes an average of 458 days to reach a first contract.

He sold it on his biography: "As a former police office who organized my union, I've seen firsthand how unfair and frustrating this process can be for some." The Teamsters' general president praised him. Nearly 20 national unions endorsed it.

Then, on June 9, 2026, the bill needed procedural votes to actually reach the floor.

He voted no. Twice. On his own bill.

There is a way to tell whether a politician wants a bill to pass, and it isn't the press release at the Teamsters hall.

Byron Donalds: no water, no shade, no break

OSHA proposed the first federal rule ever written to protect workers from extreme heat. When the temperature passes 80 degrees, employers would have to provide rest breaks, shade, and clean drinking water.

That's the whole rule. Water, shade, and a break.

Byron Donalds — running to be Florida's next governor, in a state where people roof houses and pick crops in July — is one of 60 Republicans co-sponsoring a bill to block it, and to bar OSHA from ever issuing anything "substantially similar."

Rich McCormick wants you fired for using the Fifth Amendment

Rich McCormick revived a bill that would bar people from federal employment if they decline to answer certain questions from members of Congress, and let lawmakers refer them to the Justice Department for prosecution.

His pitch: "If you don't want to answer questions about what you did wrong, we should be able to fire you."

The Fifth Amendment is not a loophole. The Supreme Court settled in 1968 that a public employee cannot be fired simply for invoking it. McCormick's bill would put roughly two million federal workers to a choice between their constitutional rights and their jobs.

Robert Aderholt deleted the job training

Robert Aderholt chairs the House subcommittee that writes the spending bill for Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education — the panel deciding what goes to worker training and to the agencies that enforce wage laws.

In the bill his subcommittee advanced in June 2026, the job training programs aren't trimmed. They're zeroed out. He then announced $22 million for his own district.

He described the bill as one that "restores accountability."

Tom Tiffany takes the anti-union lobby's money

Tom Tiffany's donor list includes Associated Builders and Contractors, the anti-union construction lobby — an organization whose central purpose is keeping job sites non-union.

He also promoted DOGE while it brought office closures and funding cuts to a state where 18,000 people work for the federal government.

This isn't seven bad apples

The tell isn't any one of these records. It's what happened when the whole conference had to vote.

Two executive orders, plus an earlier move against TSA screeners, stripped collective bargaining from 84.4% of the unionized federal workforce. A bipartisan bill to restore it passed the House 231-195 — not one Democrat voted against it, and 195 Republicans did. The Senate has sat on it for eight months.

Meanwhile the administration has been subpoenaing the financial records of labor unions and putting a teachers' local on a criminal conspiracy chart shown to a grand jury.

Fifteen years after Act 10, Wisconsin's public workers are still in court trying to get back what was taken. That is how long this fight lasts once you lose it — which is exactly why the people who take it away count on you forgetting who they were.

They're on the ballot in November.

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.

Tom Tiffany Says He'd End Data Center Subsidies. The Only Lobbyist for Wisconsin's Data Center Coalition Gave Him $5,000.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:40:58 +0000

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

So it makes sense that Tom Tiffany, the Republican running for governor, has spent the days since Crowley won the August 11 primary cutting up clips of the Democrat talking about data centers and posting them online. It's the popular position, and Tiffany found a way to be on it.

There is a problem with the pose. It's in his campaign finance report.

The $5,000

On June 3, Tiffany for Wisconsin received $5,000 from Robert Marchant, the Milwaukee Courier reported.

Marchant is the only registered lobbyist for the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition, according to the group's own registration form.

The coalition says its advocacy goal is championing "Wisconsin's role in the data center economy" and "advocating for smart growth." In February, it circulated a study claiming data centers don't raise electricity rates.

That's the group. Now here's what its lobbyist's client actually lobbied for.

The two things Tiffany says he wants — and the coalition fought both

Tiffany has said he wants to ban non-disclosure agreements for data centers, and to end the sales tax exemption they get in Wisconsin. He has put it flatly: "I would end all subsidies for data centers in Wisconsin," and "I would ban nondisclosure agreements that keep communities in the dark about proposed projects."

Both of those were live bills in the state legislature. The coalition took a position on each:

SB 969, which would prohibit NDAs meant to conceal information about a data center from the public — the coalition was against it, in February.
AB 245 and SB 244, modifying the sales and use tax exemption for qualified data centers — the coalition supported them, in November, according to the same registration.

So the sole lobbyist for a group that fought the NDA ban and pushed the tax break wrote Tiffany a $5,000 check in June. And Tiffany's public position is that he wants the NDA ban and wants the tax break gone.

One of those two things is not being said in earnest. The check does not appear to have been written by someone worried about it.

The votes he already cast

Tiffany doesn't have to speculate about where he stands on AI infrastructure. He was in Congress. He voted.

He voted for the SPEED Act, written to speed up the build-out of the infrastructure that artificial intelligence runs on. The bill was backed by tech giants including OpenAI, Micron and Microsoft.

And on May 22, 2025 he was one of the 215 votes that pushed Trump's budget bill through the House — a bill that, as the House wrote it, included a 10-year ban on state and local governments enforcing any AI regulation. That's the opposite of "communities should decide." It's a decade-long federal gag order on exactly the local rules Wisconsin towns are now asking for.

The Senate stripped that provision 99 to 1 on July 1, 2025. Ninety-nine senators, of both parties, looked at a ten-year ban on state AI rules and voted it down. Tiffany had already voted for it — and he voted for the finished bill again on July 3.

Crowley's campaign summarized the record this way:

"He has never introduced legislation regulating data centers in Congress, has never backed a moratorium, and is pushing to keep aging coal plants online to help power the very data centers he claims to be tough on."

Crowley has a data center platform on his campaign website. Tiffany's issues page does not mention data centers at all.

"Toxic Tom" is not a new nickname

Tiffany's response, through his campaign, is that he doesn't share Crowley's vision of "turning Wisconsin into a data center hub for the 'entire globe,'" and that "no new data centers should move forward without standards that protect Wisconsin's land, water, and environment."

That is a striking sentence from this particular politician.

Tiffany earned the nickname "Toxic Tom" as a state legislator for an anti-DNR, pro-mining record — at one point admitting the legislation he authored was harmful to the environment. The Bad River Chippewa Tribe spoke out against it, because its reservation and its wild rice beds sit a few miles downstream from the proposed mine.

He has since told a tavern crowd he is open to splitting up the Department of Natural Resources — the agency that would enforce the water and land standards he now says data centers must meet. A former DNR secretary said in 2016 that splitting the agency gives Republicans "one agency they can feed and one they can starve."

And over his congressional career he has taken $135,765 from the energy and natural resources sector, according to OpenSecrets.

We have seen this exact move before

The pattern here is not unique to Wisconsin. It is, at this point, the standard Republican play on data centers: run against them in public while the industry funds you.

Pennsylvania's Stacy Garrity spent two years saying the state should deregulate to attract data centers, then demanded a "pause" once the polling turned.
Marsha Blackburn promised to "hold Big Tech accountable" right after Big Tech gave her $100,000.
Ohio's Jon Husted says he'll protect your electric bill while the companies raising it fund his campaign.

Three states, three Republicans, the same script. Tiffany's version is just unusually well documented, because the coalition's entire Wisconsin lobbying operation is one man and that man's name is on the report.

What to ask him

Tiffany says he'd end all data center subsidies in Wisconsin. Two questions follow naturally:

Will he return the $5,000 from the lobbyist whose client fought the NDA ban and pushed the tax exemption he says he opposes?
If a ten-year federal ban on state AI regulation was worth voting for in May 2025, what changed by August 2026 besides the polling?

Neither question requires new reporting to answer. They require Tiffany to answer them.

Source

Drake Bentley, The Milwaukee Courier: "'Toxic Tom' Tiffany accepted campaign contribution from data center lobbyist, voted for more AI infrastructure." Photo: Mario Tama / Getty Images.

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

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

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

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

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

What they actually said

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

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

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

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

Somebody actually checked

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

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

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

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

"We haven't found much."

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

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

And on the people actually organizing against these projects:

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

What the one real case actually showed

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

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

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

The debate existed already. Seventy-one percent.

What happens when someone names names

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why this particular smear is useful

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

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

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

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

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

The people they're talking about

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One said yes.

The tally

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

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

Husted is the one to look at

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

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

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

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

What Van Orden said

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

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

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

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

The pattern, not the exception

None of this is new behavior around Max Miller.

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

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

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

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

Why it matters where you live

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the judge did

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

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

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

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

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

What the letter asks for

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

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

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

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

The man who led it sells the products

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

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

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

Who signed

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

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

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

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

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

What registration was actually doing

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the gloves are

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

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

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

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

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

The warnings come from the company that sells them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote guardrails. They were about equipment.

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

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

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

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

Two votes made this possible

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

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

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

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

The 201 with report cards on this site

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

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

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

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

Source

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

Derrick Van Orden Wrote a Bill About Motorcycle Helmets in Washington, D.C. He Represents Western Wisconsin.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:35:47 +0000

On August 6, 2026, Derrick Van Orden introduced a bill in the House of Representatives. He is its sole sponsor. It has no cosponsors.

Its entire purpose, per the official title, is "to prohibit the District of Columbia from requiring a person to wear a protective helmet to operate, or ride on, a motorcycle or motor-driven cycle."

He calls it the Ride in Freedom Act. He represents Wisconsin's 3rd District — La Crosse, Eau Claire, and the farm country along the Mississippi. Nobody in it lives under the District of Columbia's traffic code.

What the bill does

D.C. requires every motorcycle rider to wear a helmet, regardless of age. Van Orden's bill would take that away. Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana introduced the companion in the Senate the same day.

Congress can do this because D.C. isn't a state. Its laws, written by a city council its residents elect, can be overridden by members of Congress those residents didn't vote for and can't vote out. That's the mechanism Van Orden is using.

D.C. Council member Charles Allen, who chairs the council's transportation committee, put it on X:

"An unserious & unsafe proposal. A Congressman from Wisconsin has nothing they can do to make life a little more affordable or a little bit better for their own constituents, so they spend their time trying to repeal helmet laws for motorcycles in DC?"

He added: "I really think they can be better than this."

It isn't really about D.C.

Van Orden's own office says the quiet part on the record. His communications director, Grace Kim, told Straight Arrow News:

"The federal government has had a hand in helmet requirements going back to the Highway Safety Act, which used highway funding as leverage to get states to adopt helmet laws. That's part of why D.C. is an important place to start. If Congress can change the policy here, it opens the door to having a larger conversation about the federal government's role in helmet mandates across the country."

"An important place to start." D.C. is the test case. The target is the helmet laws in the rest of the country.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have universal helmet laws. Thirty states cover only some riders, usually those under 18. Wisconsin is in that second group: the state's law reaches riders 17 and younger and nobody else, so an adult can legally ride there bareheaded today.

So Van Orden isn't fighting for a freedom his own constituents lack. He already has it. He wants to take the other version away from the places that chose it.

What happens when helmet laws go away

This is one of the most thoroughly studied questions in road safety, because states have run the experiment over and over. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety keeps the record:

Helmets reduce the risk of death by 37% to 42%.
Riders without helmets are three times more likely to suffer a traumatic brain injury.
Texas weakened its law in 1997 to cover only riders under 21. Operator deaths rose 31% in the first full year.
Kentucky repealed its universal law in 1998 and Louisiana in 1999. Motorcyclist deaths rose 50% and 100%.
Florida weakened its law in 2000. The death rate went up about 25%, and hospital admissions for head injuries climbed 82% over 30 months.
Across 1976 to 2022, IIHS estimates more than 22,000 motorcyclists died because of lower helmet use in states without universal helmet laws — 11% of all motorcyclist deaths in those years.

The Governors Highway Safety Association reports the split plainly: in states without universal helmet laws, 51% of motorcyclists killed in 2023 weren't wearing a helmet. In states with them, it was 10%.

And the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's summary is one sentence long: "If you're ever in a serious motorcycle crash, the best hope you have for protecting your brain is a motorcycle helmet."

None of this is contested. It's why the law Van Orden wants to repeal exists.

The timing

Six people have died in motorcycle crashes in D.C. so far this year. Last year the total was two.

Van Orden filed the bill in the middle of that.

What his district is actually dealing with

Van Orden is heading into a competitive November race. Western Wisconsin has real problems: grocery and energy costs, farm income, rural hospitals.

His record on those is not a mystery. He voted for the 2025 budget bill that cut Medicaid by roughly $900 billion — and then asked for credit when federal regulators grandfathered Wisconsin's hospital provider tax, shielding the state from one provision of the law he'd voted for. Wisconsin still loses about $7 billion.

When he isn't doing that, he's posting. A June 2026 review of his social media by the Milwaukee Courier documented a pattern of anti-Muslim and racist comments, and the Wisconsin Muslim Civic Alliance called it a "documented pattern of anti-Muslim rhetoric."

Now the legislative output is a bill about who has to wear a helmet in a city he doesn't represent, written — by his own office's account — as a wedge to pry open the helmet laws in seventeen states that decided they wanted them.

Charles Allen's question was rhetorical, but it's a fair one to ask in La Crosse too. If a member of Congress has nothing left to do for the people who sent him, this is what he does instead.

We deserve better.

Source

Shea Taylor, "How a GOP effort to repeal DC's motorcycle helmet mandate could affect highway safety nationwide," Straight Arrow News (August 10, 2026), and the bill text and status for H.R. 10067. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.

134 Northeast Wisconsin Households Were About to Lose Their Rent Help. Tony Wied Said the Money Should Wait.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:19:45 +0000

On the last day of March 2026, a Green Bay nonprofit called Newcap shut its doors and started telling its roughly 100 employees they no longer had a job.

Newcap's stated mission was to move people out of poverty. Among other things, it administered about $2.1 million in federal housing grants that paid rent for 134 households across a 10-county stretch of northeast Wisconsin.

Those 134 households were not abstractions. FOX 11 counted them: 80 had been chronically homeless — homeless for more than a year, with a diagnosed disability — 33 were fleeing domestic violence, and 21 were young people between 18 and 24 who had been homeless before they entered the program.

The grants were federal. The money was already appropriated. It just needed to be handed to a different agency so the rent checks could keep going out.

Tony Wied said not yet.

What he said, and when

On April 2, with the rent question hanging, FOX 11 set the two positions side by side.

Senator Tammy Baldwin, speaking at a housing event in Green Bay, wanted the money moved now and the investigating done in parallel: "I do not want to see them uprooted from homes because of the misfortune that we're experiencing here as a community. I want to see HUD redirect these funds to the appropriate agencies that can assure that the families here will not be uprooted, will not be displaced, while other investigations continue."

Wied's written statement to the station was the reverse: "Before any tax dollars can be transferred, we need to ensure there is no widespread fraud."

It took until April 24 for HUD Secretary Scott Turner to tell Baldwin the funds would be transferred after all. In the meantime, tenants like Steven Solway were stacking moving boxes, not knowing whether April's rent was covered.

To be fair to him: Newcap really was a mess

This part matters, because a fair accounting has to include it.

Wied wasn't inventing a scandal. On March 16, two weeks before the shutdown, he and Rep. Bryan Steil wrote to HUD asking for an investigation into Newcap, and what they laid out was damning:

Newcap reported a $2 million deficit in both 2023 and 2024, despite taking in nearly $11 million from the federal government and nearly $3 million from the state.
Its CEO's compensation was nearly $240,000 a year — more than double her 2018 salary, and higher than all 14 peer agencies in Wisconsin.
Grant funds allegedly went to first-class plane tickets and "team building activities" including high-end dinners and cooking classes.
The CEO got a $50,000 bonus drawn off a Bezos Family Grant, a practice a charity watchdog called "frowned upon in the nonprofit sector."

"Money that should have gone towards helping Wisconsinites find safe and stable housing may have instead padded executive salaries and funded staff outings," the release said. He was right to say that. In July, Wied said HUD's inspector general had told him an investigation of Newcap and its former leaders had started — federal officials would neither confirm nor deny it.

So where's the problem?

The problem is what he did with being right.

The fraud was at Newcap. The grant money follows the tenants — it pays their rent, and it can only be spent on that. Nobody proposed handing Newcap another dollar. The question on the table was whether to move the grants to a different, qualified agency so 134 households wouldn't be evicted while the investigators worked.

Baldwin's answer was: do both at once. Investigate the executives, protect the tenants.

Wied's answer was: the tenants wait until we're sure.

That trade was never necessary. Investigating an agency's former leadership and continuing rent payments to that agency's clients are not competing uses of the same dollar. They're different activities, and one of them has a clock on it — the first of the month.

The people who paid for the delay weren't Newcap's executives. They were a woman fleeing domestic violence, a 19-year-old, a man who'd been homeless for a year, all of whom had done nothing but be served by the wrong nonprofit.

The pattern

Wied's public posture is fiscal vigilance: every penny accounted for, no tolerance for waste. His press release said Northeast Wisconsin families "work hard for their money, and it is our duty to ensure that every single one of their taxpayer dollars is used efficiently."

That vigilance is selective. Wied voted for Trump's budget bill that Wisconsin's own health department projects will strip health coverage from 270,000 Wisconsinites — after telling voters in his 2024 campaign that he would "never do anything to pull" the Affordable Care Act. That bill's tax provisions weren't held up pending an audit. He's one of the most active stock traders in Wisconsin's delegation, and nobody made him wait three weeks on those.

The scrutiny gets applied at the bottom of the ladder. When the money is going to 134 low-income households in northeast Wisconsin, 84 of them in Brown County, suddenly the standard is prove there's no fraud first.

We wrote earlier about Wied spending his platform on a Fox News op-ed about socialism in New York while his district lost jobs and health coverage. This is the same instinct pointed at a smaller target: a rhetorical fight he can win, and a group of constituents who don't have a lobbyist.

Sources

Should investigation precede transfer of Newcap grants? 134 households waiting for answer — FOX 11 Investigates, April 2026
Baldwin, Wied disagree on when Newcap grants should be transferred — FOX 11 Connect to Congress, April 2, 2026
Senator Baldwin says HUD will transfer Newcap's grants — NBC 26, April 24, 2026

Photo: FOX 11 News.

Tony Wied Agreed to Headline a Fundraiser for a Lawmaker Police Wanted Charged With Felony Child Abuse. He Won't Say Why.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:17:30 +0000

In July 2026, Tony Wied — the Republican congressman for Wisconsin's 8th District — agreed to be the headline guest at a birthday fundraiser for a state legislator near Green Bay.

The legislator is Rep. Shae Sortwell. And there's a reason the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote about the invitation.

What police found in 2013

The story dates to January 2013, before Sortwell was elected to the Assembly but after he had started working in state and national politics.

A relative found five four-inch bruises on Sortwell's child and took the child to a hospital in Two Rivers. That set off a four-day investigation involving police officers, social workers, a child forensic officer, a child advocacy staff member and a nurse practitioner.

According to the Journal Sentinel's account of the investigative records, Sortwell told officers that the Bible was "very specific" about corporal punishment. He said he and his wife used an object to discipline the child, and he estimated he had struck the child three days before the hospital visit. He described corporal punishment as causing "some pain, but damage is not intended."

The responding officer called the marks left on the child "not reasonable" — and told Sortwell he would have arrested him had he been working the day the incident was reported.

Police recommended a felony child abuse charge against Sortwell, and a felony failure-to-act charge against his wife.

The Brown County District Attorney's office never filed them, citing an inability to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and the parental reasonable-discipline defense available under Wisconsin law.

What that means, and what it doesn't

Being fair here matters, so let's be precise.

Sortwell was never charged, and never convicted. A prosecutor looked at the file and decided the case couldn't be proven. That decision is real and it counts. Sortwell himself now blames a "disgruntled family member," and says "the police appropriately did their jobs and looked into the concern and then forwarded their findings onto the Brown County Attorney's Office who rightfully decided to drop the matter."

But "not chargeable" and "nothing happened" are different things. A relative found bruises. A hospital saw them. Investigators built a file. And the man at the center of it explained to police, in his own words, that he had hit the child with an object and that scripture instructed him to.

None of that is the relative's allegation. That is what the police reports say he told them.

Wied's part

Nobody is asking Wied to prosecute anyone. He's a congressman, not a district attorney.

What he did was make a choice about his own name. Sortwell is running for reelection in northeast Wisconsin, and a headline appearance by the area's member of Congress is a real asset — it fills a room and it signals that the party's federal leadership is behind you.

Wied agreed to be that asset.

Then the Journal Sentinel asked him about it. According to the paper, Wied did not reply to multiple requests for comment on whether he supports Sortwell despite the allegations.

That's the part that's on Wied, and it's the part he could have fixed in one sentence. He could have said he'd looked at the record and concluded a man never charged deserves to be treated as such. He could have said he didn't know and would look into it. He could have pulled out.

Instead: nothing. Multiple times.

The pattern of not answering

This is not a one-off for Wied. Declining to engage with his own constituents is arguably the defining feature of his time in Congress.

He does his town halls by telephone rather than in person. After the head of the House Republicans' national campaign arm told members to stop holding in-person town halls, Wied's first-ever town hall was held over the phone on March 10, 2025 — and later that month constituents protested outside his office, urging him to talk face to face.

And when he does use his platform, he uses it on things happening somewhere else. In July he published a Fox News op-ed about socialism in New York — we wrote about that one, because his own district was losing jobs and health coverage at the time.

The through line is a politician who is available for the events he chooses and unavailable for the questions he doesn't.

Why a fundraiser is a fair thing to ask about

Politicians raise money together constantly. Most of it is unremarkable, and voters shouldn't have to audit every rubber-chicken dinner in Wisconsin.

But an endorsement is a transfer of credibility. When a member of Congress lends his name to a colleague's campaign, he is telling the voters of that district: this person is fine, I vouch for him. That is exactly the kind of judgment a voter is entitled to examine — especially when there's a police file with five bruises in it and the candidate's own explanation on the record.

The voters of northeast Wisconsin asked, through their newspaper. Wied decided they didn't need an answer.

Source

Wied to fundraise with lawmaker once referred for felony child abuse — Clara Strecker, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 10, 2026. Photo: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.