MAGA Report Cards — Checks & Balances

Russell Fry's Whole Career Started by Firing the Republican Who Voted to Impeach Trump. Tomorrow He Asks South Carolina for a Promotion.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:25:33 +0000

Tomorrow, August 11, 2026, South Carolina Republicans pick a nominee for the U.S. Senate seat Lindsey Graham held until his death in July. Russell Fry is on that ballot.

It's worth remembering how he got to Congress in the first place, because it is the single most important fact about him — and it is not a policy position. It's a job he was hired to do.

The seat he took

Tom Rice represented South Carolina's 7th District for five terms. He was, by his own account and by his voting record, a conservative who backed Trump's agenda.

On January 13, 2021, he was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump over January 6.

Rice never took it back. He explained it this way:

"I'm all about Trump's policy. But absolute pledge of loyalty, to a man that is willing to sack the Capitol to keep his hold on power is more than I can stomach."

And, more simply: "Republicans are supposed to protect the Constitution. We take an oath to protect the Constitution, not a man."

The job Fry was hired for

On February 1, 2022, Trump endorsed Fry with a statement that named the assignment out loud:

"Congressman Tom Rice…the coward who abandoned his constituents by caving to Nancy Pelosi and the Radical Left, and who actually voted against me on Impeachment Hoax #2, must be thrown out of office ASAP."

Fry's response was not "here is my agenda for the Pee Dee." It was:

"Radical Leftists, enabled by RINOs like Tom Rice, are trying to erase President Trump's legacy."

He was also candid about what the race was actually about. He told Fox News: "the impeachment is the big elephant in the room and the voters are incredibly frustrated by that."

He was right about that. On June 14, 2022, Fry beat Rice 51% to 24% — clearing the field outright, no runoff needed. He won every precinct in the district.

Fry became the first Trump-endorsed challenger of that cycle to unseat a Republican incumbent who had crossed him.

Trump took the credit himself, posting that Fry "beat Impeach Master Tom Rice with a Vote of more than 51%, therefore WINNING OUTRIGHT with no need for a run-off." Matt Moore, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, agreed: "Donald Trump powered Russell Fry to victory. There was no doubt about it."

Dr. David White, a political scientist at Francis Marion University, watched the returns and summarized the race in five words: "This was about Donald Trump and Tom Rice."

Rice's own last word on it: "I know I did the right thing. I know I defended the Constitution."

Why it still matters four years later

Congress works on a simple incentive. A member decides whether to check a president partly by asking what happens to members who do.

Tom Rice is the answer everyone in the House Republican conference learned. He voted his oath, said so out loud, refused to walk it back, and was removed by his own party's voters with a 27-point margin in a race his replacement openly described as being about the impeachment.

Russell Fry is not a bystander to that lesson. He is the instrument of it. His seat in Congress is the reward for administering it.

That's not an inference — it's the campaign he ran and the endorsement he sought.

What he does with the seat

The record since is what you'd expect from someone who got the job that way.

He voted for the budget blueprint ordering $880 billion in cuts from the committee that runs Medicaid, and then for final passage of the bill that made them law — a law projected to take health coverage from 37,124 people in his own district, the most of any district in South Carolina. He then told constituents on a telephone town hall that "there are a lot of people who are on it who quite frankly shouldn't be."

He voted twice to hand the president the power to cancel spending Congress had already approved — in June 2025, when the $9 billion package passed by two votes, and again in July.

He would not attend a constituent-organized town hall in Myrtle Beach, telling the local ABC station it was a "sham 'town hall'" run by "a partisan, liberal organization." When constituents heckled him at a March 2025 wildfire press conference, he accused them of being funded by George Soros.

And this summer he filed for the Senate while also filing to keep his House seat — an arrangement under which he cannot lose his job, and his district could lose its congressman until May.

He is not the only one

The party spent four years turning those ten votes into a cautionary tale — and the accounting for January 6 got buried along with them.

In Florida, Scott Franklin said a week after the attack that Trump bore "some responsibility" and called for a bipartisan investigation, then voted against creating one four months later. In Alabama, Robert Aderholt voted to throw out two states' electoral votes hours after the Capitol was cleared, and then voted twice against investigating why it was attacked.

Those are members who moved with the current. Fry is something else: a candidate recruited to punish the man who didn't.

Tom Rice is out of Congress. Russell Fry is running for the Senate.

Tomorrow

Fry goes into the primary in third place. An Emerson College poll taken July 28–29 had Ralph Norman at 22%, interim Sen. Darline Graham at 19%, and Fry at 12%, with a quarter of voters undecided.

Whatever happens, the record stands. Four years ago, South Carolina's 7th District had a congressman who said an oath outranked a man. It replaced him with one whose entire path to Washington ran through proving otherwise.

We deserve better.

Source

Split decision for Trump in high profile South Carolina GOP congressional primaries — Fox News, June 2022; Tom Rice's impeachment vote draws Trump-endorsed primary challenger — Ballotpedia News, May 24, 2022; and "This was about Donald Trump and Tom Rice": Professor says Fry won from Trump endorsement — ABC News 4, June 2022. Photo: ABC News 4.

Mario Diaz-Balart Writes America's Foreign Aid Budget. He Cut It 22%, Called It a Promise Kept, and Says PEPFAR "Cannot, and Should Not, Go On Forever."

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:15:20 +0000

Most members of Congress vote on the foreign aid budget. One member writes it.

Mario Diaz-Balart is Vice Chair of the House Appropriations Committee and chairman of its subcommittee on National Security, the Department of State, and Related Programs — the panel that decides how much money the United States spends on diplomacy, global health, famine relief and every other form of foreign assistance. When that bill comes to the House floor, he is the one standing at the microphone explaining it.

He has used that job to make American foreign aid smaller every single year, and he says so proudly.

"I am proud of these efforts"

In July 2025, after the House passed the Rescissions Act of 2025 — the bill cancelling $9 billion Congress had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting — Diaz-Balart put out a statement headlined "Another Promise Made and Kept":

"Today, I joined my colleagues in passing the $9 billion rescissions package … In addition, earlier this week, I was proud to release my FY 2026 NSRP funding bill, which builds upon prior achievements and advances President Trump's America First foreign policy, delivering a 22 percent reduction in funding compared to FY 2025 enacted levels."

His press release then listed what taxpayers were no longer paying for. Some of it was written for laughs — "$3 million for Iraqi Sesame Street," "$500,000 for electric buses in Rwanda." Some of it was not funny at all: $135 million in U.S. contributions to the World Health Organization, $33 million to the UN Population Fund, $8 million to the UN Human Rights Council.

Then he did it again. In the FY2027 bill, Diaz-Balart told the House floor:

"Under Chairman Cole's leadership, House Republicans have delivered nearly $12 billion in responsible cuts within the purview of this subcommittee since 2023. The FY27 bill continues this work with another $2.7 billion reduction."

Assessed U.S. funding for the United Nations: cut by $1.8 billion. No money at all for the UN regular budget. Funds prohibited to the World Health Organization.

What "cannot go on forever" means

The line in that speech that deserves the most attention is about PEPFAR — the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, started by George W. Bush in 2003, the most successful thing the United States has done in global health in living memory.

Here is Diaz-Balart, in his own words on the House floor:

"Last year, the NSRP Subcommittee focused on responsibly transitioning PEPFAR programs to capable partner countries. PEPFAR is a great success story, but most of us agree the program cannot, and should not, go on forever. Working alongside the Administration, countries are now investing significant resources toward their own health, allowing this Committee to reduce funding, while maintaining the same outcomes."

Read that last clause again: reduce funding, while maintaining the same outcomes.

The State Department's own numbers say PEPFAR has saved 26 million lives since 2003 and allowed 7.8 million babies to be born HIV-free. Those outcomes are people taking antiretroviral drugs every day. When the money stops, the drugs stop. There is no version of HIV treatment where you cut the funding and the patient stays alive on optimism.

Diaz-Balart's assurance that partner countries are picking up the tab is an assertion, not a finding. He offers no evidence for it in the speech, and he is the person whose bill depends on it being true.

What the aid cuts have already cost

We do have evidence on the other side of the ledger.

In July 2025, The Lancet published a study modeling what happens if U.S. aid funding stays cut. Researchers looked at data from 133 countries and estimated that USAID-supported programs had prevented 91 million deaths between 2001 and 2021 — about 30 million of them children.

Their projection for what an 83% cut produces by 2030: more than 14 million additional deaths, including more than 4.5 million children under five. That's roughly 700,000 extra child deaths a year.

One of the study's authors, Dr. James Macinko of UCLA, put the price in perspective:

"U.S. citizens contribute about 17 cents per day to USAID, around $64 per year. I think most people would support continued USAID funding if they knew just how effective such a small contribution can be to saving millions of lives."

Seventeen cents a day. That is the "wasteful spending" a senior appropriator is proud of "dramatically reining in."

He knows exactly what this money does

Diaz-Balart is not a newcomer to foreign policy who wandered into this job. He is the son of a Cuban politician, he co-founded the Congressional Hispanic Conference, he sits on the Cuba Democracy Caucus, and for 23 years he has made the case that American power should be used on behalf of people living under repressive governments.

The FY2027 bill he wrote does keep money flowing to the causes he cares about: $3.3 billion in security assistance for Israel, $500 million in military assistance for Taiwan, $1.8 billion for Indo-Pacific partners, and continued support for democratic transitions in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

So the cuts are not really about the size of government. They're a set of choices about who counts. Weapons and allies: funded at or above prior-year levels. Vaccinations, HIV medicine, maternal health, famine relief, the UN's human rights machinery: cut, cut, cut, and prohibited.

It is also worth noticing what he does with the appropriations power when it points at his own district. In March 2026, Florida Bulldog documented how Diaz-Balart earmarked $12 million toward a Sweetwater development whose owner then gave $250,000 to his joint fundraising committee. Foreign aid is where "every dollar must be justified." Home is where the money flows.

The part that should worry everyone

Congress's power over spending is the check that makes the executive branch answerable to voters. Diaz-Balart's own framing of his bill gives that away:

"This bill is very straightforward. If you are a friend or an ally of the United States, this bill supports you. But, if you are an adversary or are cozying up to our adversaries, then, frankly, you will not like this bill."

That is not a description of an appropriations bill. It's a description of a loyalty test — one that includes a provision requiring the Secretary of State to weigh countries' UN voting records when handing out money, and one that funds "full implementation" of the president's executive orders on DEI, speech and the border.

An appropriator's job is to decide what America should pay for and hold the executive branch to it. Diaz-Balart has redefined it as delivering what the president wants and announcing the total as a promise kept.

Twenty-three years in Congress. He has more control over America's face to the world than almost anyone in the House. And what he wants credit for is the subtraction.

Sources

Another Promise Made and Kept — Díaz-Balart Leads President Trump's Historic Funding Cuts — Office of Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, July 18, 2025
Rep. Díaz-Balart Delivers Opening Remarks on the FY2027 National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs Appropriations Bill — Office of Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart
Research finds more than 14 million preventable deaths by 2030 if USAID defunding continues — UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, on the study published in The Lancet, July 1, 2025

Speaker Johnson Pulled Nick LaLota Aside on the House Floor. He Changed His Vote, and $1.1 Billion for Public Broadcasting Died by Two.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:21:05 +0000

On June 12, 2025, Speaker Mike Johnson was about to lose.

The House was voting on H.R. 4 — the White House's request to cancel $9.4 billion Congress had already approved and appropriated. Most of it, $8.3 billion, was foreign aid: global public health, disaster relief, hunger programs. The rest, $1.1 billion, was two years of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the body that sends federal money to local public radio and TV stations.

It was the first time Congress had ever formally voted on Elon Musk's DOGE cuts. And it was failing.

Nick LaLota had voted no.

Then, as CNN reported from the floor:

"Then he pulled aside Rep. Nick LaLota, a New York centrist, who had just voted no. With the vote still open, several minutes of tense conversation followed before LaLota ultimately went to change his vote. Within seconds, the package of spending cuts narrowly passed."

The final tally was 214 to 212. LaLota is recorded as a Yea.

Two votes. His was one of them.

What he says he got

Reporters asked him what changed in those minutes. He wouldn't say.

"I had some conversations with the speaker that raised my level of confidence that will put this and future issues in the right trajectory," LaLota told CNN — while declining to offer specifics of the conversations, or any promises on SALT.

SALT is the state and local tax deduction — the cap on how much of your property and state income taxes you can write off on your federal return. It is the signature issue of Long Island's Republicans, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with foreign aid or public radio.

So the trade, as far as anyone was allowed to know, was this: LaLota supplied the deciding vote to cancel money for global AIDS programs and public broadcasting, and in exchange he received a raised level of confidence about an unrelated tax negotiation.

He was not the only New Yorker in the huddle. Rep. Mike Lawler, another suburban New York Republican working the same tax issue, was in the conversation with Johnson and also agreed to vote yes.

Texas Rep. Chip Roy posted the obvious question to X right after the vote: "Real question on the $9B rescissions package that narrowly passed – is how expensive were the 2 original no votes who flipped to yes…?"

We still don't know. LaLota has never said.

Four Republicans held. One of them was from New York.

The vote wasn't unanimous on the Republican side, and this is the part that makes the "I had no choice" defense impossible.

Four Republicans voted no and stayed no: Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, Mike Turner of Ohio, and Mark Amodei of Nevada. Malliotakis is a New York Republican in a swing seat, facing the same Speaker, on the same night, with the same leverage available to her.

She held. He didn't.

And LaLota's first instinct was hers. He had already pressed the button for no. He knew what was in the bill. What changed wasn't the bill.

Then he did it again

Six weeks later the Senate sent back its version, and the House had to act one more time.

On July 18, 2025, LaLota voted Aye on H.Res. 590, the rule that carried the Senate's amended package to final passage. That one went 216 to 213.

Trump signed it. Every dollar for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting through fiscal 2027 was gone.

What that did to Long Island

On August 1, 2025, CPB announced it was winding down. Most of its staff were terminated at the close of the fiscal year on September 30. Its president, Patricia Harrison, noted it was the first time in nearly 60 years that Congress had refused to fund it, and described what the money had bought:

"Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country."

Note emergency alerts. CPB was the conduit for the federal grants that keep local stations' warning equipment running — which matters on a barrier-island district that takes hurricanes.

Here is who that hit in NY-01.

WLIW-FM, 88.3 out of Southampton, is Long Island's only NPR station — it's the East End's, and it produces The Long Island Daily along with local coverage of towns like Riverhead. It sits inside LaLota's district.

WSHU, whose signal reaches eastern Long Island through repeaters, told its listeners it receives "over $350,000 in federal funding this year" — money it says is "roughly equivalent to 2.5 pledge drives," and which paid for NPR programs, music royalties, satellite interconnection, and emergency alert systems. The station called the rescission "the strongest threat to public media that we have ever seen. It is quite literally unprecedented."

That is what LaLota's switched vote bought, on the way to a tax conversation he wouldn't describe.

The design of the cut is upside down

The argument for defunding CPB is always about NPR's newsroom in Washington. That's not where the money mostly goes.

As NPR reported when CPB folded, the network relies on direct federal funds for "only a small portion of its budget." Its approximately 1,000 member stations "receive a heftier portion of their operating revenue through CPB" — and the ones in rural and poor areas lean on those grants hardest.

So the cut barely dents the thing the complaint is about, and it lands squarely on the local station. In Michigan, John Moolenaar called defunding public radio "a win for the American People" and took $1.6 million from WCMU, the station in his own district serving 42 rural counties. In Oklahoma, Tom Cole accepted an award for protecting public broadcasting in 2016 and then moved the bill that shut its funder down — including his own tribe's radio station. In Florida, Kat Cammack wrote the Defund NPR Act and then voted for the package that cost the station housing Florida's statewide storm-alert network about 20% of its funding.

LaLota's version is different in one way, and it isn't a flattering one. Cammack, Cole and Moolenaar believed in the cut. LaLota didn't — he voted against it. He then reversed himself in the middle of the vote for something he wouldn't name.

The pattern on Long Island

There's a version of this argument that says: fine, that's how the sausage gets made, and he was fighting for Long Island taxpayers on SALT.

Except look at what the fight has actually produced. LaLota's neighbor Andrew Garbarino spent months as one of five Republicans holding Trump's budget bill hostage over the SALT deduction — and then slept through the vote when it came at 6:54 in the morning. The tax break is the thing Long Island's Republicans talk about constantly. It's also the thing they keep trading other people's programs away for, and then not showing up for.

And LaLota's own accounting of the June 12 trade never got any more specific than "a raised level of confidence."

He voted no because he thought the cuts were wrong. Then he made them law. When his constituents asked what he got, the answer was that he'd rather not say.

Long Island still doesn't know the price. It knows the bill: the public radio station in Southampton, and the emergency alerts, and a global AIDS program, and $9.4 billion Congress had already promised.

We deserve better.

Source

House GOP narrowly approves $9.4 billion package of DOGE cuts — Sarah Ferris, CNN, June 12, 2025, with contributions from Brian Stelter and Liam Reilly. Roll calls: House Roll Call 168 (June 12, 2025) and House Roll Call 203 (July 18, 2025). Photo: CNN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the money is for

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

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

CBP's share buys agents and hardware — surveillance towers along the southern and northern borders, air and marine platforms, biometric entry-and-exit systems, and inspection equipment described in the text as using "artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, or other algorithms."

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

The only limits Congress wrote were about equipment

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

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

That's it. The guardrails Congress bothered to write into a $70 billion law are about procurement — what gear CBP is allowed to buy, and when it may stop hiring a particular job title.

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

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

Why the margin matters more than the bill

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

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

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

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

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

The 187 with report cards

Two hundred fourteen Republicans voted yes. These are the ones who have a report card on this site, by state:

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

How they voted

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

If your representative is on that list, they were one of the two votes this needed.

Nathaniel Moran Said Congress Would Have 'a Lot More to Say' About the Iran War. Then He Voted No. Twice.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:15:20 +0000

On April 7, 2026, Nathaniel Moran did something unusual for a House Republican. He criticized the president out loud, by name, on the record.

Trump had posted that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" ahead of a deadline he'd set for Iran. Days earlier, on Easter, he had posted a profanity-laced message telling Iran's leaders to open the Strait of Hormuz or "you'll be living in Hell."

Moran, speaking to the Longview News-Journal after an appearance at the Rotary Club of Longview, did not hedge:

"I thought the comments by the president on Easter were abhorrent, and I wholeheartedly disagreed with comments about wiping out an entire civilization."

He went further, and this is the part East Texans should hold onto:

"We in America always have been seen as the leader of freedom because the conflicts we've engaged with, we engaged in them for a just and moral reason, and we undertook them in a just and moral way. And that means protecting civilian lives and innocent lives, even when we are trying to defeat the enemy."

Good words. Now watch what he did with them.

The promise he made to a room in Longview

At that same Rotary Club appearance, Moran gave his audience a civics lesson about who gets to authorize a war.

He told them Article I of the Constitution gives Congress — not the president — the power to declare war. He explained that courts have allowed presidents to order short-term strikes on their own, but that once a conflict runs past the 60- or 90-day marks in the War Powers Resolution, Congress has to authorize it for the fighting to continue.

And then he made a commitment:

"But as we go longer in, now we're going to get into some timeframes that hit those War Powers Act timeframes. Going forward, if we get past that 60-day mark, there's gonna be a lot more that Congress has to say about it."

The Tyler Morning Telegraph summed up what his constituents should expect: statements from Moran reaffirming the War Powers Act.

The war began in February. The 60-day mark came and went that spring.

What Congress said, and how he voted

Congress did have more to say. Twice. Moran voted against it both times.

June 3, 2026 — the House passed H. Con. Res. 86, directing the president to remove U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities against Iran that Congress had never authorized. It passed 215–208.

Moran: Nay.

The Senate agreed to that same resolution on June 23, 50 to 48.

July 23, 2026 — the House did it again, passing H. Con. Res. 89, 214–208.

Moran: Nay.

Both roll calls are on the Clerk of the House's website with his name on them. We wrote up the July vote in full: 182 House Republicans just voted to keep us in Trump's Iran war — and lost.

So the sequence, in his own district's newspapers and the House's own records:

Date	What Moran did
April 7, 2026	Calls Trump's "whole civilization" threat "abhorrent"; says past 60 days, Congress will have "a lot more to say"
June 3, 2026	Votes no on the resolution letting Congress say it
July 23, 2026	Votes no again

Why the votes matter more than the quotes

There is a version of this story where Moran is the good guy — the Republican willing to say publicly that threatening to wipe out a civilization is wrong. He deserves credit for saying it when most of his colleagues said nothing.

But the War Powers Resolution votes are not a press release. They are the only mechanism Congress has to reclaim the authority Moran told a Rotary Club audience it holds under Article I. When the vote came, the man who gave the civics lesson voted to keep Congress out of it.

It is possible to believe the mission against Iran's nuclear program was justified — Moran does, and said so — and still vote to make the president come to Congress for authorization once the clock runs out. That is exactly what the 60-day rule he described is for.

He explained the rule in April. He voted against enforcing it in June, and again in July.

What this costs

This is not an abstraction about constitutional structure. Americans are dying in a war Congress never voted for, and the branch that is supposed to decide keeps being told by its own members to sit down.

Moran sits on the House Committee on Ethics and on Ways and Means. He is a lawyer and a former county judge. He knows precisely what Article I says — he explained it, unprompted, to a room full of constituents in Longview.

When the moment came to act on it, twice, he chose the president over the institution he serves in.

We deserve better.

Sources

Jordan Green, "Moran says Trump's comments about destroying Iran's 'whole civilization' are 'abhorrent'," Tyler Morning Telegraph, April 7, 2026. Photo: Leeza Meyer/Tyler Morning Telegraph.
House Roll Call 199 — H. Con. Res. 86, June 3, 2026 and House Roll Call 282 — H. Con. Res. 89, July 23, 2026, Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Ron Estes Flew to El Salvador During the Abrego Garcia Fight. He Has Never Said a Word About It.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:55:56 +0000

In April 2025, the biggest fight in American law was over one man.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father, had been deported to CECOT — El Salvador's mega-prison — without a hearing. The government admitted the deportation was an error. On April 10, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the administration had to facilitate his return. The administration didn't.

That was the week Ron Estes went to El Salvador.

The photo

Estes never announced the trip. What put him there was a picture posted by the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador on Wednesday, April 16, 2025, showing a congressional delegation led by Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri.

Standing in that lineup: Estes, along with Reps. Riley Moore of West Virginia, Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, Mike Kennedy of Utah, Carol Miller of West Virginia and Claudia Tenney of New York.

Independent journalist Marisa Kabas broke the story on April 17. Smith and Moore had already posted their own photographs from inside CECOT — pictures of themselves in front of caged prisoners. Kabas contacted every office on the list. Only Hern's answered, and only to say it "cannot confirm or comment on the Congressman's location for security purposes."

Estes's office said nothing at all.

Asked directly. Answered nothing.

Kansas Reflector opinion editor Clay Wirestone emailed Estes spokesman Roman Rodriguez with two straightforward questions: did the congressman go inside the prison, and was he concerned about Abrego Garcia's welfare?

"He did not respond."

That's the whole answer, printed in the column on April 21, 2025. Axios, compiling its own list of lawmakers who had visited CECOT, got no answer from Estes's office either.

The Reflector later added an update: Estes did tour the prison, based on a photo shared on Jason Smith's Facebook account.

So a sitting member of Congress went inside a foreign prison holding people his own government had shipped there without hearings, and then declined to tell his constituents whether he'd been in the building.

More than a year later, his own press release archive still contains no statement about the trip. No readout, no photo, no paragraph explaining what he saw or why he went.

What CECOT is

This matters because of where he was standing.

Amnesty International's Americas director, Ana Piquer, described El Salvador's mass detention system as "a systematic state policy of massive and arbitrary deprivation of liberty," with more than 85,000 people held "without sufficient admissible evidence."

Human Rights Watch described conditions in CECOT and other Salvadoran prisons as including "cases of torture, ill-treatment, incommunicado detention, severe violations of due process and inhumane conditions, such as lack of access to adequate healthcare and food." People held there are denied contact with relatives and lawyers, appear before courts only in mass online hearings, and — in Human Rights Watch's account — the government has said they "will never leave."

Both of those assessments are quoted in the Kansas Reflector's column. Neither is disputed by the Salvadoran government, which built CECOT precisely as a place people don't come out of.

The part that isn't about El Salvador

Estes is a member of the legislative branch. When the executive branch defies a unanimous Supreme Court order, checking it is not optional — it is the job.

He had a rare kind of leverage that week. He was on the ground, in the country, with the embassy arranging his schedule. Sen. Chris Van Hollen showed what was possible: he flew down and met with Abrego Garcia on April 17, the day after the embassy photo.

Estes could have asked to see him. He could have asked the Salvadoran government a single question about a man the United States government conceded it sent there by mistake. He could have come home and told Kansans what he found.

Instead, as Wirestone put it, "he posed for the picture and made no public comment."

It fits the record

None of this is a departure for Estes. He has been backing the enforcement apparatus for years. In 2018, sitting on the Homeland Security Committee, he voted for a resolution supporting ICE and said: "Amidst dangerous and extreme calls to abolish ICE, I voted to show our support for ICE and our men and women in law enforcement."

The trip was consistent with all of that. What's harder to defend is the silence. If Estes believed the trip was right, the ordinary move was to say so — the way Smith and Moore did, loudly, with photographs. Kevin Hern went a step further and told Newsmax the men held there "will never see the light of day" — a statement he at least had to own.

Estes did the trip and skipped the explanation.

The people of Kansas's 4th District are entitled to know what their congressman did on an official trip taken in their name. Estes has spent more than a year not telling them.

Source

Clay Wirestone's April 21, 2025 column for Kansas Reflector: Did Kansas Rep. Ron Estes visit notorious torture prison? We know he was in El Salvador last week.

Tom Cole's Social Security Bill Has Four Words That Should Worry You: 'Amendments Are Prohibited'

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:47:22 +0000

On June 8, 2026, Tom Cole introduced H.R. 9187, the Bipartisan Social Security Commission Act of 2026. He is the lead sponsor. Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York signed on as the first cosponsor, which is where the word "bipartisan" in the title comes from.

Cole has been pushing this same idea for a long time. His own office says he has led or co-led it for seven Congresses — fourteen years of trying.

Here's how he described it:

"I am going to tell you the truth that many of my fellow politicians in Washington refuse to acknowledge: the solvency of Social Security is at a critical point... doing nothing on Social Security is not an option."

That sounds reasonable. Social Security really does have a money problem. The 2026 trustees report projects the trust fund that pays retirees, their spouses, and survivors may run out in late 2032. At that point, benefits get cut across the board.

So the problem is real. The question is who gets to fix it, and whether you get any say.

Read the bill and you find out the answer is no.

What the bill actually does

Cole's bill creates a 13-person group called the Commission on Long-Term Social Security Solvency. Nobody elects them. Every single one is appointed:

1 by the President, who also chairs it
2 each by the Speaker, the House minority leader, the Senate majority leader, and the Senate minority leader
1 each by the chair and top Democrat of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee

Only two of the thirteen are required to be experts from outside government. The rest can be politicians.

Within one year, those 13 people have to hand Congress a plan to keep Social Security solvent for 75 years — plus the actual bill text to do it. Nine of the thirteen have to sign off.

The bill requires the commission to hold exactly one public hearing. Not one a month. One, total, in the whole year. Everything else can happen behind a closed door.

Then comes the part that matters.

"Amendments prohibited"

Normally, when Congress writes a law that touches your retirement, the process is slow on purpose. Committees hold hearings. Members offer amendments. Bad ideas get stripped out. Good ideas get added. You get time to call your representative.

Section 9 of Cole's bill throws all of that out. Here is the language, word for word from the bill:

"Amendments prohibited.—No amendment to, or motion to strike a provision from, an approval bill considered under this section shall be in order in either the Senate or the House of Representatives."

That is not a summary. That is the text.

The rest of Section 9 is just as tight:

Any committee the bill is sent to must report it "without amendment" within three days — and if it doesn't, the committee is automatically discharged and the bill goes to the floor anyway.
House debate is capped at four hours, split between one supporter and one opponent.
"All points of order against the approval bill and against its consideration are waived."
In the Senate, debate is capped at 30 hours. A motion to recommit is not allowed. That cap means no filibuster — the 60-vote threshold that normally protects a program like this simply doesn't apply.

So: 13 appointed people write a plan in private. Nine of them approve it. Congress gets four hours in the House to talk about it, cannot change a comma, and then votes yes or no.

If you don't like one piece of it — say, the piece that raises your retirement age — there is no mechanism to take that piece out. It's the whole package or nothing.

The model Cole picked actually proves the opposite

Cole's own press release says the bill is "Modeled after the 1983 Social Security Commission." That's the Greenspan Commission, the one everybody in Washington points to as the time this worked.

Here's the problem with that comparison: the 1983 commission didn't finish the job. Congress did — by amending it.

Rudolph Penner, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, walked through what happened in a paper for the Urban Institute. The commission, he wrote, "was rather cautious," and "its proposals did not solve Social Security's financial problems for the entire 75 year period."

What closed the gap was an amendment offered on the House floor:

"During the House debate Congressman J. J. Pickle, Chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee that dealt with Social Security, added a provision that would very gradually raise the normal retirement age (NRA) from 65 to 67... This provision did more to improve the financial health of Social Security than any single recommendation of the Commission."

Penner's conclusion: "It took courageous actions by the Congress to enhance the report and make it much more meaningful."

Two things follow from that.

First, the single biggest change to come out of 1983 was a benefit cut. Raising the retirement age from 65 to 67 means people work longer for the same check. Everyone born in 1960 or later lives under it.

Second — and this is the part Cole doesn't mention — that amendment would be illegal under his own bill. Pickle's provision was added during floor debate. Section 9 of H.R. 9187 says no amendment "shall be in order in either the Senate or the House of Representatives." The one move that made the 1983 deal work is the exact move Cole's bill bans.

So the precedent he's invoking is a case where open debate mattered. His bill would prevent it from happening again — while leaving the door open for the same kind of cut, just written by people you never voted for.

Cole also listed who is cheering the bill on. His press release names the Peterson Solutions Fund, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the American Action Forum, and the American Enterprise Institute among the groups praising it. These are the organizations that have spent decades arguing that the answer to Social Security is spending less on it.

They are not going to be the ones locked out of that room.

Who is against it

This isn't a fringe objection. The people whose entire job is watching out for retirees have been saying the same thing for years about bills like this one.

In January 2024, Reps. John Larson and Jan Schakowsky led 116 House Democrats in a letter opposing fast-track commissions. Their words:

"The goal of these commissions would be to produce legislation that cuts benefits and calls for an up or down vote without hearings, and that is unamendable. This is not a simple debate over process."

The next month, the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters, AFGE, the AFT, the NEA, the Alliance for Retired Americans and other unions stood at the Capitol to oppose a similar commission bill. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler called it "a power grab that is trying to bypass the regular democratic process by hiding behind closed doors."

AARP has taken the same position on fast-tracking. In a July 21, 2026 letter about a different Senate fast-track bill, AARP's chief advocacy officer Nancy LeaMond wrote:

"We strongly object to fast-tracking Social Security changes through Congress... If regular order is the gold standard for routine legislative matters, it certainly should be the standard for something as important as Social Security."

And on August 5, 2026, at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on exactly this idea, Sen. Ron Wyden put it bluntly:

"Republican members of this panel will claim they have the solution: an unaccountable 'commission' that will rubber stamp benefit cuts like increasing the retirement age."

He added that such commissions "are designed to smuggle in benefit cut plans with minimal public scrutiny or debate."

The part Cole leaves out

Cole says the crisis means "doing nothing is not an option." He does not mention that he helped make the crisis worse.

Cole voted for Trump's 2025 budget bill. According to the Social Security actuary's own numbers, cited by Wyden, that bill "plundered Social Security to the tune of $168 billion" — and moved the trust fund's exhaustion date up a year, from 2033 to 2032.

So the sequence is: vote for a bill that drains Social Security faster, then point at the faster deadline as the reason Congress must hand the program to a commission that answers to nobody, on terms that forbid Congress from changing a word.

There is another way to do this, and it isn't complicated. Members could introduce bills, hold hearings, take amendments, and vote in public where their constituents can see them. That is what Congress is for. It's the same argument Ohio Rep. Troy Balderson made about spending before walking it back and voting the other way — Congress decides, or it doesn't. It's what Cole gets paid to do — and he has been getting paid to do it for 23 years.

He chairs the House Appropriations Committee, the most powerful spending gavel in Congress. If anyone in the building has the standing to run a real, open debate on Social Security, it's him.

Instead, the bill he keeps reintroducing would hand the job to 13 appointees and tell the rest of Congress — and you — to take it or leave it.

Social Security pays out to more than 71 million Americans every month, and plenty of them live in Oklahoma's 4th District. They deserve to know what's in a plan before it becomes law — and they deserve a representative who will fight for the right to change it.

Source

The bill text quoted here is H.R. 9187, the Bipartisan Social Security Commission Act of 2026, as introduced in the House on June 8, 2026.

Gus Bilirakis Voted Against $20 Billion for FEMA. Helene Hit His District the Next Day.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:43:02 +0000

On September 25, 2024, the House voted on H.R. 9747, the stopgap bill to keep the government funded. Tucked inside it was $20.26 billion to refill the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Disaster Relief Fund.

The fund needed it. FEMA had been operating under "Immediate Needs Funding" — a restricted mode where the agency pays only for immediate life-saving work and freezes reimbursements for long-term rebuilding. As the National Association of Counties explained, the bill "frees up about $20 billion for the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Disaster Relief Fund (DRF), which will take the DRF out of Immediate Needs Funding" — unlocking reimbursement for county recovery projects.

The bill passed 341 to 82. Every one of the 82 no votes was a Republican.

Gus Bilirakis was one of them. Roll Call 450: Nay.

The next night, Helene made landfall

Hurricane Helene came ashore on Florida's Gulf coast on the night of September 26, 2024 — roughly 24 hours after that vote. Two weeks later, on October 9, Hurricane Milton hit the same stretch of coastline.

Bilirakis represents Florida's 12th District. His own district offices are in Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties, all on or near the water.

Pasco County logged 9,430 storm-related incidents in the days after Helene, with assessments still ongoing. Hernando County counted three properties destroyed and 529 with major damage. Across the Tampa Bay region, Pinellas County alone assessed 27,735 properties and found 267 destroyed and 16,516 with major damage.

Sixteen days later, he told his constituents to apply for FEMA money

On October 11, 2024, Bilirakis's office published a Hurricane Recovery Resource Guide. It opens like this:

"As our community recovers from the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, I want to ensure all my constituents have access to the resources and support you need... In this guide, you will find information about applying for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster assistance, SBA loans and other federal agency disaster support programs."

And then, two paragraphs down:

"Please know that I am working with my colleagues in Congress to ensure all Floridians have the necessary federal resources we need to rebuild and fully recover from these disasters."

Working with his colleagues in Congress to make sure Floridians have the federal resources they need. Sixteen days earlier, 341 of those colleagues had voted to provide $20 billion of exactly that, and he had voted against it.

The guide goes on for thousands of words explaining FEMA's Individuals and Households Program, the maximum grant amounts, how to appeal a denial, what documents to bring. It notes that "Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties have been designated as a Major Disaster area and approved for Individual Assistance." Every dollar of that flows out of the Disaster Relief Fund he voted not to replenish.

What the vote was actually about

To be fair about it: the disaster money was not the reason most of the 82 voted no. That week, House Republicans had first tried to pass a six-month funding bill carrying the SAVE Act, the voter-registration measure Trump wanted. It failed on the floor when their own members balked. Speaker Mike Johnson then went back with a three-month bill without the SAVE Act attached, and the holdouts voted no on that.

So this was a protest vote about a voter-registration bill and the length of a spending patch.

That is the point. When the disaster fund was riding on the bill — with a major hurricane already forecast into the Gulf and headed for Florida — Bilirakis treated it as a bargaining chip he could afford to lose. The money passed anyway, over his objection, and his constituents spent it.

The pattern

This is not the first time Bilirakis has taken credit for something he had no hand in. In October 2018 his campaign ran a 30-second ad about fighting opioids in Pasco County that put the words "Bilirakis Interdict Act" on screen while the county sheriff praised him. The INTERDICT Act is a real law — it funds fentanyl-detection equipment for Customs and Border Protection — and it was sponsored by Rep. Niki Tsongas, a Massachusetts Democrat. Bilirakis was not a sponsor or a cosponsor. His campaign's answer was that he "voted for the act."

And it fits what he's told his constituents about federal spending generally. He is a member of the DOGE Caucus, and in February 2025 he toured Pasco, Hernando and Citrus counties hosting "DOGE Community Conversations" — workshops where he split residents into small groups and asked them what they'd cut out of the federal budget. "It's absolutely necessary that we make the cuts," he said.

FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund is federal spending. So is the Individual Assistance his own guide walks people through, line by line, with the phone numbers of his three district offices at the top.

Source

House vote: Roll Call 450, H.R. 9747, September 25, 2024. Disaster fund detail: Congress enacts a Continuing Resolution to avert government shutdown through December 20, 2024, National Association of Counties. Damage figures: Helene wrecked tens of thousands of homes in the Tampa Bay region, WUSF, September 30, 2024. Photo: sand pushed onto Gulf Boulevard by Helene (Pinellas County Communications, September 28, 2024).

The Day After 60 Minutes Reported 75% of the Men Sent to El Salvador Had No Criminal Record, Jeff Crank Wrote a Resolution Congratulating Trump for Sending Them

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:40:34 +0000

Most members of Congress, when a policy blows up, go quiet. Jeff Crank went the other way. He wrote a resolution.

On April 7, 2025, Crank introduced H. Res. 295, "Expressing Support for the President's Actions to Safeguard National Security and Eliminate Threats from Foreign Terrorist Organizations." He was the lead sponsor. Tom Tiffany, Lauren Boebert, Michael Guest, and Sheri Biggs signed on with him.

To understand what that resolution was, you have to know what had happened in the three weeks before he wrote it — and what had been reported the day before.

What Happened on March 15, 2025

On March 15, 2025, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a wartime law — and put people on planes.

238 migrants were flown to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.

They did not get hearings first.

What CBS Found on April 6

Three weeks later, CBS News obtained the internal government list of who was on those planes and cross-checked it against domestic and international court filings, news reports, and arrest records.

The 60 Minutes report aired April 6, 2025. Its central finding:

"But we could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans — 179 men — now sitting in prison."

Of the roughly 22% who did have records, CBS reported, "the vast majority are for non-violent offenses like theft, shoplifting and trespassing." About a dozen faced accusations of murder, rape, assault, or kidnapping.

About a dozen, out of 238.

By then, the administration had also already admitted, in a court filing on March 31, that it had deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador through what it called an "administrative error." An immigration judge had granted him protection from removal to El Salvador in October 2019; he kept that status through yearly ICE check-ins and had never been charged with a crime. ICE sent him anyway, and he ended up in CECOT.

That is where things stood on the evening of Sunday, April 6, 2025.

What Crank Wrote on April 7

The next day, Crank introduced his resolution. Its text recites the flights approvingly — "on March 16, 2025, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele received these two flights and immediately transferred the SDGTs into El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) for detention" — and then resolves that the House:

"(1) supports the President's Action to remove foreign terrorists under the Alien Enemies Act… (2) affirms that, as Commander in Chief, the President has executive authority to detain, deport, or restrict non-citizens from a Foreign Terrorist Organization; and (3) endorses the complete elimination of these organizations from the United States…"

There is no hedge anywhere in it. No line about making sure the right people were on the planes. No mention of Abrego Garcia. No acknowledgment that the government's own list, as reviewed by CBS the previous night, showed three out of four of these men with nothing on their record.

The resolution simply describes every person on those flights as a foreign terrorist and asks the House to say so too.

Then a Federal Court Ruled

On June 4, 2025, Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on the removals Crank's resolution had endorsed two months earlier.

He found that the more than 130 men were "unlawfully removed to CECOT before they had received constitutionally adequate notice" of the reason for their removal, and without "any meaningful opportunity to actually seek habeas relief." He ordered the administration to give them access to habeas corpus and to propose a process for it within a week.

On September 2, 2025, a Fifth Circuit panel went further. In a 2–1 ruling, it blocked the use of the Alien Enemies Act for these deportations, concluding that "the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred." A country encouraging people to migrate, the majority wrote, "is not the modern-day equivalent of sending an armed, organised force."

Crank's resolution asserted the President had the authority. Two federal courts looked at it and said the opposite.

The Part Congress Was Supposed to Play

Here's what makes this more than a bad take on immigration.

The Alien Enemies Act is a wartime statute. It was written in 1798 for use against nationals of a country the United States is at war with, or that has launched an invasion or predatory incursion. Congress declares war. Congress wrote that law and set its limits.

When a president stretches a wartime power to cover peacetime immigration enforcement, the constitutional check is supposed to come from Congress — the branch that owns the war power in the first place.

Crank's response, as a member of that branch, was to write a resolution affirming that the President had the authority anyway.

That's not oversight. It's a permission slip. And he wrote it as a freshman, in his first four months in office, about a program whose own paperwork had been publicly discredited the day before.

Due Process Isn't a Technicality

The thing Boasberg found missing — notice, and a chance to be heard — is the entire machinery that separates "we deported a gang member" from "we deported a man with a tattoo."

That machinery is what caught Abrego Garcia's protected status in 2019. Skipping it is what sent him to CECOT in 2025.

Nobody has to sympathize with Tren de Aragua to see the problem. A hearing is how you find out who somebody actually is. When 179 of 238 men have no findable criminal record, the hearing wasn't a formality that got skipped — it was the only step that would have caught the error, and it got skipped on purpose.

Crank represents Colorado Springs, a military town. Every service member in his district took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Due process is in that document. Twice.

He Doesn't Take These Questions in Person

If you live in Colorado's 5th District and want to ask Crank about H. Res. 295, good luck.

In March 2025 — the same month as the flights — Crank moved his first town hall online rather than face constituents in a room, and said of the people asking for an in-person event: "Why do they want to have an in-person town hall meeting? So they can stand there and wave a cane in my face like Al Green did last night and steal the show?"

Later that month, Colorado Springs residents held a town hall without him and put a cardboard cutout of Crank on the stage in his place.

The cutout can't answer for the resolution either. But at least it never signed one.

Sources

CBS News / 60 Minutes, "U.S. sent 238 migrants to Salvadoran mega-prison; documents indicate most have no apparent criminal records" (April 6, 2025), and the text of H. Res. 295 (April 7, 2025). Photo: Getty Images via CBS News.

John Joyce Wrote the Privacy Bill That Would Wipe Out 20 States' Privacy Laws. He Says Industry Asked Him To.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:38:11 +0000

In April 2026, John Joyce introduced a bill called the SECURE Data Act. The name sounds like consumer protection. Read what it does to the laws you already have.

H.R. 8413 sets a single national standard for how companies can collect and sell your personal data — and then it preempts every state law that "relates to" anything it covers. At least 20 states have passed comprehensive privacy laws. Under Joyce's bill, those state laws stop applying, along with state data broker registries and, potentially, sector-specific state laws too.

Joyce is a doctor from Altoona who serves as vice chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — the committee that writes the rules for telecoms, tech platforms and data brokers.

Which laws would go away

The state laws in the crosshairs are not obscure. At the June 3 subcommittee hearing on the bill, critics named them:

California's Delete Act, which lets you tell every registered data broker in one request to delete everything they hold on you
Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act, the law that lets Illinois residents sue when a company scans their face or fingerprints without permission
Washington's My Health, My Data Act, which covers health data that HIPAA doesn't — period-tracking apps, location data showing a clinic visit

In total, more than 20 state laws would be knocked out, according to the objections raised at the hearing.

Preemption cuts both ways in time, too. It doesn't just erase what states have already passed — it takes the subject away from them going forward. Whatever Harrisburg might want to do about data brokers in five years, it wouldn't be able to.

You would not be able to sue

The most important thing in a privacy law is not what it promises. It's who can enforce it.

Joyce's bill has no private right of action. Enforcement runs through the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general only. If a company sells your data in violation of the law, you cannot take them to court yourself. You can file a complaint and hope a federal agency gets to it.

Compare that to Illinois' biometric law, which the bill would preempt — a law whose entire force comes from the fact that ordinary people can sue. Remove the right to sue and you have converted a law with teeth into a law with a suggestion box.

The bill also loosens the clock. Under California's law a company has 15 days to respond to a request about your data. Under Joyce's bill it gets 90.

He told a reporter who asked for it

The most revealing thing about this bill is how Joyce himself described its origin. Talking to Roll Call in May about why he thinks Democrats will come around, he said:

"I think we're going to find Democrats who recognize how important this is, and that's because of the response of industry."

And on where the demand came from:

"They said industry came to us and said, 'Please, not one more. This should be done at a federal level.'"

Not one more. That is the complaint the bill answers — not "my data got sold," but "we have to comply with too many state laws." Companies wanted one rulebook, and the cheapest rulebook is the one that cancels twenty others.

His committee chairman put the framing even more plainly at the June hearing: "We're not looking to compete with Europe to regulate; we're looking to compete against China to innovate."

Democrats on the committee were blunt. Rep. Frank Pallone said the bill "locks in the failed notice and consent status quo." Rep. Kathy Castor called it "an appalling betrayal of hardworking Americans."

And Caitriona Fitzgerald of the Electronic Privacy Information Center testified that the state-law model the industry now says is too burdensome was written by the industry in the first place: "They took it to Virginia first … and then brought it to these now 22 states."

Who pays for John Joyce

Joyce's committee regulates the companies that would benefit most from this bill, and those companies fund him.

According to Who Bought My Rep, which compiles totals from federal campaign filings, the Comcast Corporation & NBCUniversal PAC has given Joyce $35,000 — his eighth-largest PAC donor. He has raised $7.0 million since 2020, of which 57% came from PACs and just 18% from large individual donations.

The number that should stop you is this one: Joyce ranks #433 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding — and #270 out of 275 Republicans. Almost nobody in Congress raises less of their money from ordinary people than John Joyce does.

That's the context for a bill written to answer industry's request. He is not funded by the people whose privacy laws he would repeal.

This is a strategy, not a bill

Preempting states is the whole game right now. An AI super PAC with $140 million exists specifically to stop states and cities from writing their own AI rules, and is spending $850,000 on one Oklahoma Republican. A California Republican used his first weeks in Congress to ask the Pentagon to study how federal authority could "preempt or otherwise mitigate" California's fuel rules. And when Big Tech money shows up, the promises to "hold Big Tech accountable" tend to arrive right alongside the checks.

State legislatures are where privacy law actually got written in this country, because Congress spent 20 years not doing it. Joyce's answer is to write one weak federal law and use it to switch the state ones off.

We deserve better.

Sources

SECURE Data Act: Analysis of the new federal privacy bill — International Association of Privacy Professionals. Hearing coverage: StateScoop (Keely Quinlan, June 2026) and Roll Call (Allison Mollenkamp, May 14, 2026). Photo: official U.S. House portrait.

David Rouzer Voted Against the Bridge Money. Then He Called It a Game-Changer.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:37:11 +0000

The Cape Fear Memorial Bridge was built in 1969. More than 60,000 vehicles cross it every day, linking New Hanover and Brunswick counties. Transportation officials call it functionally obsolete — its design doesn't meet current standards. Replacing it is the single biggest infrastructure need in North Carolina's 7th Congressional District.

David Rouzer has represented that district since 2015. He now chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, which means he is in charge of the panel that writes federal highway and bridge policy.

Here is the sequence.

November 2021: he votes no

On November 5, 2021, the House passed H.R. 3684, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — the bipartisan infrastructure law. It created the Bridge Investment Program, a new pot of money for replacing large bridges exactly like the one in Wilmington.

Rouzer voted Nay.

July 2024: the law he voted against pays for half the bridge

On July 12, 2024, the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded North Carolina $242 million for the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge replacement, through the Bridge Investment Program's Large Bridge Project grants. At the time, that covered roughly half of the project's estimated $485 million cost.

The money came from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican who helped negotiate that law and voted for it, announced the grant. So did Rouzer, who had voted against it:

"This grant is a game-changer and the result of a strong, strategic, coordinated effort by local, state and federal officials to make it happen."

That's his statement from July 2024. A strong, strategic, coordinated effort by federal officials — the same effort he had voted to stop three years earlier.

This is a well-worn move. Derrick Van Orden voted for the law that cut Medicaid by $900 billion, then claimed credit for shielding Wisconsin hospitals from one of its provisions. Susan Collins voted against an amendment requiring ICE body cameras, then announced she had personally secured them. What makes Rouzer's version notable is the scale — $242 million into one district — and the fact that he now chairs the subcommittee that oversees the program he voted against creating.

February 2025: Trump freezes it, and Rouzer defends the freeze

On February 26, 2025, a Trump executive order triggered a pause on discretionary U.S. Department of Transportation grants. The Cape Fear bridge grant was caught in it. NCDOT told the Greater Wilmington Business Journal it was the only project in New Hanover, Brunswick or Pender counties expected to get discretionary grant money, and a month after the order the state still had no idea when it would move.

"At this time, we do not know when the grant for [the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge] will be able to move forward, and we do not know what impact the review process may have on projects," an NCDOT spokesperson wrote.

The congressman who chairs the Highways and Transit Subcommittee could have picked up the phone. Here is the statement he sent instead:

"The administration is reviewing all previously approved grants, including those going back several administrations, to root out waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars. I have every confidence the grant funding previously approved for the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge will be released once their review is complete."

Read that again. The waste, fraud and abuse being rooted out is the money for the bridge his own constituents drive across 60,000 times a day. His position was that the freeze was fine and the money would probably come back.

Tillis, for his part, said the review "should not impact the bridge's progress in any meaningful way."

2026: the bill lands on the people who drive it

The money did eventually clear review. The problem is what happened in the meantime.

The estimated cost of the replacement has gone from $485 million in 2024 to $1.1 billion, driven by inflation and refined designs. NCDOT has put in $85 million. The federal grant is $242 million. That leaves roughly $773 million with no funding source.

As Port City Daily reported in July 2026, NCDOT has exhausted the grant options available for the project. Unless another source appears, the only way to close the gap is to toll the new bridge — and the region's planning organization has until February to vote either to accept tolling or to withdraw the project entirely, which would kill the state funding too. The project has to be shovel-ready by September 2027 or the $242 million goes away.

A tri-county sales tax was floated as an alternative. The subcommittee studying it last met in September 2025. It would need the General Assembly's permission and a voter referendum, and the only ballot before the February deadline is this November's.

So the choice in front of southeastern North Carolina is a toll, a new sales tax, or no bridge.

What the job is

Rouzer's own press releases show he knows how this works. He touts provisions he secured in the farm bill, the Water Resources Development Act, the surface transportation bill. He understands appropriations. He is not a bystander to federal infrastructure funding; he runs a piece of it.

Which is why the 2021 vote matters. The Bridge Investment Program that is paying for half of his district's most important project exists because a bipartisan majority created it over his objection. When it delivered, he called it a game-changer. When the president froze it, he called the freeze a fraud investigation. And now the shortfall it was meant to help cover is going to be paid by drivers in Brunswick and New Hanover counties, at a toll booth, one crossing at a time.

Sources

Bridge money on pause? — Emma Dill, WilmingtonBiz / Greater Wilmington Business Journal, April 9, 2025. CF Memorial Bridge toll decision due by February to keep grant, other funding options stall — Brenna Flanagan, Port City Daily, July 3, 2026. House vote: Roll Call 369, November 5, 2021. Photo: Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, Wilmington (Wikimedia Commons).

Jay Obernolte Traded His Tariff Vote for a Promise. When Leadership Broke It, He Voted Yes Again.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:35:11 +0000

For about ten minutes on the House floor in September 2025, Jay Obernolte had real power.

He used it to get a promise. Five months later, House leadership broke that promise in front of him — and he voted for the thing that broke it.

The Switch

Here's the setup. Under federal law, when a president declares a national emergency, any member of Congress can force a privileged floor vote on ending it. That's the check. Trump's sweeping tariffs run on an emergency declaration, so that check applies to them.

House Republican leaders didn't want those votes to happen. So they started burying language in ordinary procedural "rules" — the resolutions that set the terms of debate for unrelated bills — that switches the clock off, making it procedurally impossible to force a tariff vote for a set period.

On September 16, 2025, one of those rules came to the floor. It covered seven unrelated bills, and it extended the block on tariff votes.

Five Republicans initially voted against it: Obernolte, Kevin Kiley of California, Tom McClintock of California, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Victoria Spartz of Indiana. With the GOP's paper-thin majority, that was enough to sink the rule and blow up the leadership's whole week.

Then two of them changed their minds. As Roll Call reported, McClintock and Obernolte switched their votes "after a pledge from Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to make Jan. 31, 2026, the end date for the prohibition."

The rule passed, 213 to 211. Massie, Spartz, and Kiley held their no votes. Obernolte's switch was part of what made the difference.

That was the deal. He gave up his leverage and got a date.

The Date Came and Went

January 31, 2026 arrived. Ten days later, the House Rules Committee took up a new rule with new tariff language in it.

The new end date was July 31, 2026 — six more months.

Rules Chairwoman Virginia Foxx said the extension would give the Supreme Court time to weigh in on the president's tariffs. Kiley, who never switched in the first place, said of the extension: "I don't think that's a good thing to do."

The rule came to the floor on February 10, 2026. Obernolte voted for it.

Not "expressed concerns." Not "voted no and lost." He voted yes on extending the exact prohibition he had been promised would expire.

The rule failed anyway — 214 to 217. Only three Republicans voted no: Don Bacon of Nebraska, Kiley, and Massie. Obernolte was on the other side, with leadership.

What He Did the Very Next Day

Because that rule failed, the block came off. And on February 11, 2026, the House finally got to vote on the underlying question: whether to end the national emergency behind Trump's tariffs on Canada.

It passed, 219 to 211. Six Republicans voted yes: Bacon, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Jeff Hurd of Colorado, Kiley, Massie, and Dan Newhouse of Washington.

Obernolte voted no.

That's the whole arc in five months. He voted to keep the House from voting on tariffs. He got a promise the block would end. The promise was broken. He voted to extend the block anyway. And when the vote he had twice voted to prevent finally happened, he voted against ending the tariffs.

The September switch is often described as a moment of independence. Looked at across the full sequence, it was the opposite: the one time he had leverage, he spent it, and got nothing.

This Lands Hard in the 23rd District

Obernolte's district covers the High Desert and part of the Inland Empire, and the Inland Empire is a logistics economy. Warehousing and trucking accounted for more than 16% of all jobs in San Bernardino County, according to UC Riverside research cited by CalMatters.

Tariffs are a tax on imported goods, and imported goods are what moves through those warehouses. When the cost of moving containers goes up, it reaches his constituents twice: once at the register, and once in the job market.

His constituents also never got to weigh in. Tariff policy is set by executive proclamation. The one place their representative could have registered an objection on their behalf was the House floor — and he voted, repeatedly, to keep that door shut.

The Bigger Problem

Set aside tariffs for a second and look at the machinery.

Congress wrote itself a safety valve: if a president declares an emergency, any member can force a vote on it. That's not a partisan tool. It exists so that emergency powers stay temporary and answerable.

What House leadership has done — and what Obernolte voted for — is disable that valve on a rolling basis, six months at a time, tucked inside rules about unrelated bills. Nobody has to cast a vote called "protecting the tariffs." They cast a vote on the procedure for debating the Law-Enforcement Innovate to De-Escalate Act, and the tariff shield rides along inside it.

That is a design meant to keep constituents from noticing. Which is why it's worth writing the roll-call numbers down: 2025-268, 2026-060, 2026-065.

Obernolte's votes: yes, yes, no.

Source

Roll Call, "House Rules Committee moves to protect Trump's tariffs from congressional disapproval" (February 10, 2026), and the roll-call records of the House Clerk. Photo: Roll Call.

James Comer Spent Two Years Subpoenaing the Bidens. On Epstein, He Let the Attorney General Skip the Oath and the Camera.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:21:25 +0000

James Comer runs the congressional investigation into how the federal government handled the Jeffrey Epstein files. As chairman of the House Oversight Committee, he decides who gets called, in what format, under what rules, and whether the public ever sees it.

We know what Comer looks like when he wants answers. We watched him do it for two years to the Biden family — subpoenas, depositions, an impeachment inquiry, a nearly 300-page report.

The Epstein investigation does not look like that.

The Attorney General Didn't Have to Be Sworn In

In March 2026, the Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi over the Justice Department's handling of the Epstein files. She was scheduled to sit for a deposition on April 14. That deposition never happened; she was removed as attorney general around that time.

She finally appeared on May 29 — and by then the terms had changed.

Instead of a deposition, Comer agreed to a voluntary, closed-door transcribed interview. She was not sworn in. It was not videotaped. She brought Justice Department lawyers with her, including Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, attending as agency counsel rather than as her personal attorney. Comer said the committee would release a transcript, but no video.

Every one of those is a choice, and every one of them made the session weaker. Not under oath means no perjury exposure. No video means no clip of a witness pausing, deflecting, or looking at her lawyer. Agency counsel in the room means someone is there to object.

Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, said afterward:

"We continue to be incredibly disappointed of the decision to not have this interview videotaped and then released to the American public."

And on the central question, it didn't matter what anyone asked. According to the transcript, Bondi declined to answer questions about President Trump's involvement in the handling of the files — including when she and Trump first discussed the Epstein investigation.

The chairman had subpoena power. He used it to get a conversation.

He Won't Call the People the Reporting Points At

In June 2026, The New York Times reported that Vice President JD Vance and other top advisers had repeatedly met in the White House Situation Room in 2025 to discuss public demands for the Epstein records.

Garcia wrote to Comer asking him to bring White House officials in. As he put it to reporters:

"We have reporting now, I think pretty substantial reporting, that the vice president is leading meetings in the Situation Room about the Epstein files, so they have a responsibility to come forward and explain to us why the hell that's happening."

Asked directly about Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Comer told Spectrum News he would not call them in. His answer was about Democrats, not about the meetings:

"All they go and imply is the Epstein files is just three million pages about Donald Trump and his cabinet, and that's not true. We're bringing anybody."

"We're bringing anybody" and "I will not call the Vice President" were said in the same interview.

He is willing to lean on witnesses outside the White House. When Alan Dershowitz skipped a scheduled transcribed interview in July, Comer wrote to him that "your counsel failed to provide a reason for your refusal to testify. This is unacceptable," and warned that the committee would "explore all available tools at its disposal, including the use of the compulsory process" if Dershowitz didn't appear on September 2.

So the chairman does know how to threaten a subpoena. He just doesn't aim it at the White House.

He Stopped Holding Hearings

In May 2026, Democrats on the committee flew to Palm Beach and held their own field hearing with Epstein survivors — because, as members of the minority, they can't schedule an official one.

Rep. Maxwell Frost explained why they had to:

"We want to host this here in D.C., but James Comer doesn't want to call any more hearings, because he knows that we would be able to successfully issue more subpoenas to move this investigation forward."

Frost said the committee had shifted to round tables, "which are unofficial hearings that are actually off the record, not under oath", and accused Comer of "obstructing this investigation and completely doing everything he can to help the White House cover this up."

That word — "unofficial" — is the whole design. A formal hearing creates a record, a transcript, and a procedural path to more subpoenas. A round table creates a conversation nobody has to answer for.

The Pattern Started With the First Subpoena

This isn't new as of 2026. It showed up in the very first round of Epstein subpoenas.

In July 2025, two of Comer's subcommittees told him to issue two subpoenas. He moved on them at very different speeds.

On July 22, a subcommittee adopted Tim Burchett's motion to subpoena Ghislaine Maxwell. Comer issued that subpoena the next day.

The subpoena for the Justice Department's actual Epstein files didn't go out until August 5 — "nearly two weeks after Republicans on one of the panel's subcommittees joined with Democrats and voted to direct committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., to subpoena the DOJ," as NPR reported.

One day for the convicted associate already sitting in federal prison. Nearly two weeks for the Trump administration.

There's one more. In March 2026, Comer went on Fox News and said the federal government "asked New Mexico to stop their investigation" of Epstein's ranch — a state criminal probe shut down in 2019, during Trump's first term, when the Justice Department was run by Attorney General William Barr. Comer said it out loud, on television, as chairman of the committee with subpoena power.

He has not hauled in the officials who made that call. New Mexico eventually had to sue the Justice Department itself to get at its own investigation.

Compare It to the Investigation He Wanted

The contrast isn't hypothetical. Comer ran a very different investigation, in the same chair, with the same tools.

For nearly two years he led an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden and his family. Depositions. Subpoenas. Public hearings. It ended in August 2024 with a nearly 300-page report that rehashed familiar allegations and recommended no articles of impeachment at all. Biden was never impeached.

And when the shoe was on the other foot, Comer said the quiet part plainly. In January 2023 he announced an investigation into classified documents found at Biden's home — then said the same week that his committee would not investigate Trump's handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago:

"There have been so many investigations of President Trump. I don't feel like we need to spend a whole lot of time investigating President Trump."

That was 2023. Nothing in 2026 suggests he changed his mind.

Why This Matters to People in Kentucky

It's easy to read all this as a Washington fight between two parties over a chairman's calendar. It isn't.

The Oversight Committee is one of the only tools the public has to force the federal government to explain itself. It's not a partisan asset — it's a public one. When the person holding it decides in advance which side of the building he won't point it at, the tool stops working for everybody, including the people in Kentucky's 1st District who sent him there.

The survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have spent years being told the government will get to the bottom of it. Comer says so himself — "the government has failed the survivors of Epstein," he told Spectrum News, "and that dates back several administrations."

He is right about that. He is also the person currently in charge of doing something about it, and he's the one who decided the attorney general didn't need to raise her right hand.

Comer isn't hard to find on this. He's just hard to ask — he skipped a town hall his own constituents organized in July 2025 after they reached out to his office eight times trying to find a date.

We've seen this shape before, one floor up in the same party. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer has spent months amplifying one Oversight Committee investigation while saying nothing about the Epstein one. The difference is that Emmer only has to stay quiet. Comer is the one holding the gavel.

Source

Spectrum News, "Rep. James Comer rejects calls for White House officials' Epstein testimony" (June 2026). Photo: Spectrum News.

A Tennessee Congressman Wrote a Bill to Take Away D.C.'s Speed Cameras and Its Second Chances

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:20:03 +0000

On September 10, 2025, David Kustoff introduced a bill to wipe two laws off the books in a city hundreds of miles from his district, where nobody can vote for him or against him.

The House Oversight Committee marked it up the same day. It was reported out 24 to 20, and it now sits on the Union Calendar waiting for a floor vote.

Kustoff's H.R. 5242 repeals two laws the elected D.C. Council passed: the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act of 2016 and the Second Chance Amendment Act of 2022. The bill is opposed by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, the entire D.C. Council, and D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb — that is, by every elected official the 700,000 people who live there actually chose.

It was one of 13 bills targeting D.C.'s local laws that the committee marked up in a single sitting.

What the two laws actually do

The Republican case for the bill, written into the committee's own report, is that D.C. lets "convicted criminals" off the hook. Here is what the laws say.

The Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act is a sentence review law. It lets someone convicted of a crime they committed before age 25, who has already served at least 15 years, ask a judge to look at the sentence again. The judge doesn't have to do anything. Before a sentence can be reduced, the court has to find that the person is not a danger and that the interests of justice warrant it.

Twenty-five states and the federal government have laws like it.

The Second Chance Amendment Act is a record-sealing law. It lets more people petition to have old convictions and arrests sealed from public view — not from police, not from the courts, not from employers legally entitled to see them. First-degree murder isn't eligible at all. An eligible felony can't be sealed until eight years after the sentence is finished. The judge weighs the person's interest against the community's interest in keeping the record open, plus seven other factors.

All 50 states and the federal government have criminal record sealing laws. As Oversight Democrats pointed out in their minority views, four Republicans on the committee are from states whose own sealing laws meet the bipartisan Clean Slate Initiative's minimum criteria.

The reason those laws exist is not softness. A criminal record — even for an arrest that went nowhere — follows a person into every job application and every apartment application for the rest of their life.

The evidence in the committee report includes a TV station's web poll

The report Republicans filed to justify the bill runs several pages on D.C. crime. Its cited support includes this:

A poll given by Fox 5 DC asked, "Should juveniles who commit violent crimes face tougher punishments?" 98% of respondents said yes.

That is an unscientific viewer poll on a local TV website, cited in a committee report as evidence that Congress should override a city's elected government.

The report also praises President Trump's takeover of the D.C. police force and the deployment of the National Guard into the city, and concludes: "Clearly the Executive actions taken by the Trump Administration are working."

Then they bolted on the speed cameras

Here is the part that gives the game away. During the markup, Rep. Scott Perry offered two amendments to Kustoff's bill that have nothing to do with juvenile sentencing or criminal records. The committee report records both as passing by recorded vote, and both are in the bill as reported:

Section 2 repeals D.C.'s authority to run automated traffic enforcement — the cameras the District uses to catch speeding, red-light running, stop-sign running and failure to yield. It also strikes the requirement that a car's owner pay the ticket.
Section 3 repeals D.C.'s restrictions on right turns at red lights. The D.C. Council passed that ban 12–1 in October 2022 as a pedestrian and cyclist safety measure, after a city transportation study of 100 converted intersections found fewer conflicts between cars and people and more drivers yielding to pedestrians.

The committee explained its reasoning in the report. The cameras, it wrote, "do less to advance traffic safety than harass unsuspecting citizens and visitors to bridge budget gaps," and D.C. should instead "implement sound budget policies that match modest spending levels with proper revenue sources."

So a bill titled "to repeal the Second Chance Amendment Act of 2022 and the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act of 2016" now also tells the District of Columbia it may not use speed cameras and must allow right turns on red — because members of Congress from other states find the tickets annoying and think the city spends too much.

Nobody in D.C. gets a say

Congress does have constitutional authority over the District. The Republicans' report leans on it hard, quoting the Enclave Clause and the Home Rule Act.

But the Home Rule Act was passed in 1973 for a stated purpose — as the minority views put it, to "grant to the inhabitants of the District of Columbia powers of local self-government" and to "relieve Congress of the burden of legislating upon essentially local District matters."

Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents D.C. in the House and cannot vote on the floor, put it plainly after the markup:

"Republican members of Congress, who are not accountable to D.C., have no business dictating the local laws of a city where 700,000 people live, work, and have chosen their own leaders through the democratic process."

Kustoff is not accountable to a single person affected by his bill. Not one D.C. resident can vote for him, vote against him, show up at his office, or throw him out.

This is becoming the House Republicans' favorite hobby. Oversight Chairman James Comer wrote a separate bill that would strip D.C. of the power to set its own taxes and fees after a delivery company complained about a 20-cent charge.

He believes in local control right up until he doesn't

The tell is what Kustoff wants for his own city.

In October 2025 he spent a day with Trump's Memphis Safe Task Force and came away arguing that the federal presence in Memphis should never end — "on a permanent basis, we have extra federal law enforcement," as he put it — and that Memphis should be "a blueprint" for other cities. Tennessee's governor sent the National Guard into Memphis at the president's request, not at the request of anyone in Memphis. Local elected officials sued to stop it.

So the pattern is consistent, just not in the way Kustoff would say it is. When Washington wants to override a city's elected government, he is for it — in D.C., where he writes the bill, and in Memphis, where he lives.

One more thing worth noticing about H.R. 5242: Section 4 says it applies only to criminal conduct that happens after it becomes law. The committee wrote that this is "so as to not impact those who have already utilized" the two laws. Meaning the bill does nothing at all about the people Republicans spent five pages of the report warning about. It only closes the door on the kids who come next.

Sources

Norton Statement on Markup of Her Bill to Allow Electronic Transmission of D.C. Legislation to Congress and 13 Anti-D.C. Home Rule Bills, Office of Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, September 11, 2025. Bill text, committee vote and both sets of committee views: H.R. 5242 and House Report 119-341. Photo: official congressional portrait.

David Kustoff Wants Memphis Occupied Forever

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:15:48 +0000

On October 16, 2025, David Kustoff spent a day riding along with President Trump's Memphis Safe Task Force. Then he called Fox News and said he wanted it to never end.

"Because of the local law enforcement numbers being down, it makes sense to have a stronger federal law enforcement presence," Kustoff told Fox News Digital. He said he would work with state officials and the Trump administration "to make sure that, on a permanent basis, we have extra federal law enforcement once this task force sees its completion."

He went further. He said Memphis should be the model for everybody else.

"This is a blueprint, what is being done in Memphis, for other big cities across the country. And I would think that any mayor and any governor who has a problem with crime in their communities would welcome such an effort."

Ten months later, NPR went and looked at what the blueprint actually built. It is not what Kustoff sold.

The task force was announced as an anti-crime operation. It became an immigration dragnet.

Trump authorized the Memphis Safe Task Force on September 15, 2025. He called it a "replica" of the operation in Washington, D.C., and said it would focus on "dangerous career criminals." Immigration enforcement was never mentioned as a goal — not by federal officials, not by local ones.

That is not how it went. NPR reviewed arrest data and talked to lawyers, immigrants and community members across ten months of the operation, and found something different: the flood of federal agents into Memphis produced widespread immigration arrests, a majority of them of people with no criminal convictions, according to a data analysis by the Institute for Public Service Reporting.

The first months of the task force brought hundreds of immigration arrests — a sixfold jump over the months before it. And most of the arrests the task force made overall, immigration or otherwise, were for nonviolent offenses, according to the city's own data.

The way they were made matters. Most of the operation ran on traffic stops.

"That's been the main way that families have been separated," Maria Oceja, co-founder of the local rapid-response network Vecindarios 901, told NPR. In the first months, she said, law enforcement was "pulling people over left and right." Her group's hotline got so many calls that four people had to answer it at once, all night, for months.

Hunter Demster, a Memphis resident who films task force activity, told NPR the stops were concentrated in the city's two main Hispanic neighborhoods. "It was very evident that this was an immigration operation at its core," he said. "This isn't necessarily about finding the worst of the worst or fixing crime. It's about targeting Black and brown folk."

What it did to Kustoff's own city

Kustoff told Fox News that people in Memphis "do appreciate the presence of the law enforcement and the National Guard," and that agents told him strangers were walking up to thank them and hug them. "That's the Memphis way, that's the Southern way, that's the Tennessee way," he said.

Here is the other Memphis way, as described by people who live there:

"There was a spike of fear and panic," said Mauricio Calvo, who runs Latino Memphis. "Kids were not going to school, people were not showing up to work. We were getting calls from medical providers saying people were not coming in."
Volunteers set up food pantries in their garages to deliver groceries to families too afraid to go out.
One woman's group started a Facebook channel just to tell people which routes were safest to drive.

And there is Yasser Lopez. He was 18, a junior at Memphis Business Academy, brought to the United States from Nicaragua as a child, with no criminal convictions. In February he was riding as a passenger in a car on the way to a soccer game. Memphis police stopped the car. Immigration agents followed. He was held without bond for 63 days.

His classmates walked out of school over it. A federal judge eventually ordered him released, finding his arrest and detention had violated his due process rights.

"I do not want children pulled from cars and out of schools," Ronnie Davis, a barber in the Frayser neighborhood, told NPR. Davis says he feels safer with the extra law enforcement around. He also said this: "But had I been Hispanic, I'd be terrified. If I was Haitian, I'd be terrified."

The crime emergency was already ending on its own

Kustoff's whole case for a permanent federal presence rests on an emergency. He told Fox News the crime rate in Memphis "really exacerbated" under Biden.

Crime in Memphis has been falling since 2023, when it hit a near-record high. By the time Trump launched the task force in the fall of 2025, crime in the city was at a 25-year low. Even the Fox News story carrying Kustoff's quotes noted that the Memphis Police Department had reported a significant drop over the first eight months of 2025 — before any of this started.

Crime has kept going down since. Trump flew to Memphis in March 2026 and declared it "fixed." What nobody has shown is that the troops are the reason for a decline that started two years before they arrived. When NPR asked the White House about the immigration side of the task forces, a spokesperson replied that they had "yielded tremendous results" — and, NPR noted, listed those results without providing evidence.

The task force does not have an end date.

Nobody in Memphis got a vote on this

The one thing that made Memphis different from Chicago or Minneapolis is that the state government was on board. Gov. Bill Lee sent in hundreds of Tennessee National Guard troops in October 2025 at Trump's request — not at the request of anyone in Memphis.

Seven state and local Democratic officials, led by Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, sued to stop it. In November a Davidson County judge temporarily blocked the deployment, ruling the plaintiffs were likely to prove Lee had violated the Tennessee Military Code.

Chancellor Patricia Head Moskal wrote that "the power committed to the Governor as commander-in-chief of the Army and the Militia is not unfettered." She noted that Lee never issued an official order — he put out a press release after Trump signed a memo — and that the Tennessee legislature never voted to send the Guard to Memphis, which state law requires. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had already sent Lee a letter saying the Guard would be funded to stay through September 2026.

The troops stayed anyway. In April 2026 the Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled for the governor — but not because the deployment was lawful. The panel never reached that question. It held that the elected officials who sued couldn't prove they'd been harmed, so they had no standing to ask.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, said he was not "supportive" of the immigration arrests but couldn't do anything about them. "There's no mayor in America that can control the immigration aspects of this," he said.

That is the actual blueprint Kustoff is recommending to every other city in America: the president decides, the governor signs off, the city it happens to gets no say, and the courts find nobody has standing to object.

He wants it permanent. He won't hold a town hall.

Kustoff was born in Memphis and told Fox News he has lived in the area his entire life. He is asking for a permanent armed federal presence there. He is not asking the people who live there what they think.

In late March 2025, Tennessee Lookout columnist Mark Harmon noted that Kustoff's scheduled event at Our Lady of Perpetual Help was cancelled over what were described as security concerns — after the Germantown Democratic Club planned a sign-waving protest outside. Steve Cohen, the Democrat next door in the 9th District, held a town hall that drew 750 people.

This is a pattern with this crowd, not a one-off. When federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Arizona's Eli Crane's response was to demand the military be sent in. And the surveillance machinery pointed at people who criticize ICE online is something Congress paid for — Kustoff included.

Kustoff got his day riding along. He got the photo op, the Fox News hit, and the numbers the task force handed him — 45 missing children recovered, more than 900 arrests. What he did not get, and did not go looking for, was the part NPR found: the neighborhoods that emptied out, the kids who stopped going to school, the 18-year-old held for 63 days over a ride to a soccer game.

He wants that permanent.

Source

In Memphis, an 'anti-crime' task force quietly turned into an ICE crackdown — Kat Lonsdorf, NPR, July 27, 2026. Photo: National Guard members on Beale Street, July 17, 2026 (George Walker IV/AP).

Darin LaHood Told Peoria Radio We Need an 'Off Ramp' From the Iran War. Four Weeks Later He Voted Against One.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:27:01 +0000

On May 6, 2026, Darin LaHood sat down with WCBU's Joe Deacon in Peoria and said the war with Iran needed to end.

Not hedged. Not on background. On the record, to a public radio station in his own district:

"We need to wind down the conflict, I've publicly said that. I think we need to have an off ramp on that, that's number one."

He explained why, in terms central Illinois understands:

"Number two, we have to open the Strait of Hormuz and get that done. I think you do that through diplomatic approach. We've got to continue to work with Iran as best we can on a solution that opens the Strait of Hormuz because we've seen way too high of energy prices, fertilizer prices, petrochemical prices."

Energy. Fertilizer. Petrochemicals. That is the input cost sheet for a corn and soybean district.

Asked about the price tag of the war — around $50 billion at the time — he said: "It's a lot of taxpayer money, particularly when we're $39 trillion in debt."

Four weeks later, the House voted on the off ramp.

June 3, 2026

H. Con. Res. 86 directed the President, under section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities with Iran. That is the whole substance of it: Congress has not authorized this war, so bring the troops out.

It passed, 215 to 208.

Republicans voted 4 yes, 207 no.

LaHood voted no.

Then on July 23 the House did it again — H. Con. Res. 89, passed 214 to 208 — and LaHood voted no a second time.

His explanation

Five days after the June vote, WGLT's Charlie Schlenker asked him about it. Two answers.

The first was that it would be over soon anyway:

"We will have a resolution here shortly. We'll have the [Strait] of Hormuz open and we'll have an agreement."

The second was that the war wasn't really a war:

"This is not on the same level of Iraq or Afghanistan in terms of a war with troops on the ground with missiles being fired. Essentially there's been nothing that's happened militarily within the last 30 days."

Both claims have since been tested.

The resolution did not come "shortly." Seven weeks after he said it, the House was voting on the same question again, and by the time of that July 23 vote the Pentagon's count was 18 U.S. troops killed since fighting broke out in February — four of them after July 17 — with nearly 500 injuries, 100 of those in the two weeks before the vote.

The Strait of Hormuz was not open. His Democratic opponent, Paul Nolley, put it bluntly in the same WGLT story: "Iran is now firmly in control of the Strait of Hormuz, our arsenal has been severely depleted, international alliances further strained and confidence in our nation has been damaged, both at home and abroad."

The part that doesn't reconcile

Take LaHood's stated position at face value: the war should wind down, diplomacy should reopen the Strait, and the cost is real money the country doesn't have.

Every one of those is an argument for the resolution he voted against. The resolution was not a criticism of the troops or a surrender document. It was Congress saying it hadn't authorized this and wanted the forces out — the exact "off ramp" LaHood said we needed, formalized into the one instrument the House actually controls.

He voted no, twice, and offered as his reason that nothing much was happening militarily. Eighteen Americans are dead.

Where the leverage is

LaHood sits on Ways and Means and on the Intelligence Committee, where he chairs the NSA and Cyber subcommittee and vice-chairs the CIA subcommittee. He is not a backbencher on national security. He is one of a few dozen members who see the classified picture and whose vote carries weight with the rest of the conference. When the June resolution passed with four Republican yes votes, a handful more from members with his standing would not have been a symbolic act.

He is also funded, in part, by the money that flows around this issue. TrackAIPAC's tally of FEC filings, current to July 5, 2026, puts pro-Israel PAC contributions to LaHood at $146,867.

Eleven years, and still no town hall

LaHood has represented central Illinois since 2015. During the March 2025 push for him to hold one, he told WGLT "I meet with any constituent that wants to meet with me" — but would not commit either way to actually holding a town hall. In April 2025 a group called Citizens for IL-16 filled the UAW Hall in East Peoria to standing room only for a town hall of their own. He wasn't there.

He is on the ballot in November. Somebody should read him back the May 6 interview and ask which sentence he'd like to keep.

We deserve better.

Source

Joe Deacon, "Rep. LaHood again calls for 'off ramp' on U.S. war in Iran to bring fuel costs down," WCBU, May 6, 2026; Charlie Schlenker, "U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood and Democratic opponent Paul Nolley differ on war powers vote," WGLT, June 8, 2026; Ryan Denham, "LaHood no, Sorensen yes as House votes to end the war with Iran," WGLT, June 3, 2026. Roll call 199 from the Office of the Clerk. Photo: WCBU.

Darin LaHood Voted to Let the FBI Read Americans' Messages Without a Warrant

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:27:00 +0000

On April 12, 2024, the House voted on a simple question: should the FBI have to get a warrant before it goes into a government database and reads an American's emails, texts and calls?

The measure was Amendment No. 1 to the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, offered by Rep. Andy Biggs. It failed on a 212–212 tie — in the House, a tie loses. A single member switching would have changed the outcome.

Darin LaHood voted No.

He then voted Aye on final passage of that bill — RISAA — which extended the surveillance authority with no warrant requirement attached.

What that database is, in one paragraph

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets the government collect the communications of foreign targets located overseas without a warrant. Almost nobody disputes that it's valuable. The fight has always been over the other end of those conversations: when an American emails, texts or calls a foreign target, the American's words land in the same database. And the FBI can go into that database, type in an American's name, and read what's there — no warrant, no probable cause, no judge.

That is called a U.S.-person query, or the backdoor search. The Biggs amendment would have ended it. LaHood's vote kept it.

He knew exactly what it feels like

Thirteen months before that vote, on March 9, 2023, at the House Intelligence Committee's annual worldwide threats hearing, LaHood told the room something no member of Congress had said before.

A declassified footnote in an intelligence oversight report had described improper FBI database queries of "a US Congressman." LaHood had read the classified version. From his own statement that day:

"I have had the opportunity to review the classified summary of this violation, and it is my opinion that the member of Congress that was wrongfully queried multiple times solely by his name was in fact me."

He called it "an egregious violation that not only degrades trust in FISA and the Intelligence Community but is a threat to the foundational values of our democracy."

And he drew a line:

"Reauthorization of Section 702 without reform is a non-starter."

Then the reform reached the floor, and it was a warrant requirement, and he voted it down on a vote decided by a tie.

Three years later, "clean"

Section 702 came up for renewal again in 2026, with a hard sunset. LaHood is now chairman of the Intelligence Committee's Subcommittee on the National Security Agency and Cyber, and vice chairman of its CIA subcommittee. He is, in other words, one of the people who decides.

He gave an interview to Martin Matishak of Recorded Future News on March 20, 2026. His position: back President Trump's proposal for an 18-month "clean" reauthorization — no warrant requirement attached.

"This is the singular most important collection item we have in our intelligence portfolio."

In the same interview he acknowledged that FBI queries of the database had risen roughly 35% year over year, which he attributed to the 2024 reforms taking effect, drug cartel investigations, and administrative errors like misspellings.

Renewal without reform, he had said, was a non-starter. In 2026 he was the one carrying it, and it would take, in his words, "a little political muscle."

To be fair to him

Two things belong in the record.

First, LaHood is not a bystander who never lifted a finger. He chaired the Intelligence Committee's FISA Working Group, pressed FBI Director Christopher Wray publicly and repeatedly, and RISAA did contain real changes — restrictions on who at the FBI can run U.S.-person queries, new penalties, expanded oversight. LaHood's honest position is that reform already happened in 2024, and that the warrant requirement was the wrong reform.

Second, that is an argument people make in good faith. Intelligence officials say a warrant requirement would slow down urgent counterterrorism work, and that a "query" of already-lawfully-collected data isn't the same as a new search.

But the argument sits badly next to the specific facts of his own case. What happened to LaHood was not a slow-moving counterterrorism emergency. It was an FBI employee typing a congressman's name into a search box, more than once, in violation of the rules that already existed. Rules that already existed are exactly what failed. A warrant requirement is the reform designed for that failure, and it is the one he voted down.

How it ended

It ended badly for everyone. After a three-year extension passed the House 235–191 on April 29, 2026, and a 45-day stopgap after that, negotiations collapsed. Section 702 lapsed in June 2026 — the first time the authority had gone dark since Congress created it in 2008.

The people who wanted a warrant requirement did not get one. The people who wanted a clean renewal did not get that either. What the country got was the thing both sides said they were trying to prevent.

And in Illinois

LaHood has represented central Illinois since 2015 — eleven years — and he is on the ballot again in November. He did not hold an in-person town hall during the 2025 push for one; asked about it, he told WGLT "I meet with any constituent that wants to meet with me," but would not commit either way to holding one. In April 2025, constituents filled the UAW Hall in East Peoria for a town hall they held without him.

If anyone gets the chance, the question is short. In 2023 he said renewal without reform was a non-starter. Which reform did he mean?

We deserve better.

Source

"LaHood Addresses Violations and Need for FISA Reform," lahood.house.gov, March 9, 2023; Martin Matishak, "Rep. LaHood on why Section 702 reauthorization will take a 'little political muscle,'" The Record from Recorded Future News, March 20, 2026. Roll call 114 of the 2nd session of the 118th Congress from the Office of the Clerk. Photo: The Record / Recorded Future News.

Craig Goldman Told a Chamber Breakfast to 'Challenge Us.' His Constituents Were Outside, Because They Couldn't Get a Call Back.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:26:02 +0000

On the morning of September 23, 2025, Craig Goldman spoke at a Leaders in Government breakfast hosted by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce at the City Club downtown. He had been in Congress about nine months.

His message to the room, as reported by the Fort Worth Report, was that he wanted to hear more from them. Asked about workforce training, he said:

"You have to tell us how we can help you benefit the local economy, to help supply that workforce."

Then he told the business leaders to lean on his staff harder:

"You're keeping them employed because they need stuff to do every single day. So challenge us."

Outside the building, about two dozen people from the Fort Worth chapter of Indivisible were standing on the street with signs reading "Shame." A handful wore the red cloaks from The Handmaid's Tale.

They were there because they had already tried to challenge him, the ordinary way, and could not get through.

"No response from Craig"

The organizer, Sabrina Ball, told the Fort Worth Report that she and others had repeatedly tried to reach Goldman's office to set up a discussion or a town hall about federal funding cuts, tariffs and immigration. It's impossible to reach the congressman, she said.

"No response from Craig," Ball said. "When I heard that he was speaking at this breakfast, it's like, 'Hey, well, here's the perfect opportunity (because) if he doesn't see us, at least the people that are coming to the breakfast will see us.'"

At the event, Goldman said it was not clear to him what the demonstration was aimed at. As of the paper's deadline, his office had not commented on the protest.

Two dozen people in his own district, in red cloaks, holding "Shame" signs, on the sidewalk outside the room he was speaking in. It was not clear to him what it was aimed at.

What was clear to him

Inside the same room, Goldman was specific and fluent about the constituencies he does hear from.

He talked about the first bill signed into law in Trump's current term by any freshman — his — which repealed federal energy conservation standards for commercial refrigerators and freezers. "My first time in the Oval Office was with a bill signed by the president," he said.

He described the reach of his committee assignment: "Eighty percent of the bills that make it to the House floor go through our committee."

He talked about the trip he had taken to Israel the previous month with other members of Congress, where he asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the Fort Worth-built F-35. Netanyahu, per Goldman, called it "a floating command center in the sky." The other members of the delegation made fun of him, he said, because he asked every military leader they met about the F-35.

His reason was straightforward and, on its own terms, entirely legitimate: "It's the number one employer in my district, in Congressional District 12. People, not only from Tarrant County but Parker County, go to Lockheed Martin every single day to help build the F-35."

That is what a member of Congress paying attention sounds like. He knows who employs his constituents, he flew across the world and asked a head of state about their product, and he took the ribbing for it.

He has simply never brought that attention to a room where anyone can ask him a question back.

A year with no town hall

Goldman did not hold a public town hall in his first year in Congress. Constituents on r/FortWorth were asking each other in early 2025 whether their representative had held one at all.

The chamber breakfast was not a town hall. It was a ticketed event for the business community, and the questions came from that room. There is nothing wrong with a member speaking to the chamber. The problem is when that is the only forum, because the sorting is automatic: the people who can afford a seat at the City Club get "so challenge us," and the people on the sidewalk get "it was not clear to him."

The gap shows up in his record. He sits on Energy and Commerce, and his signature legislative work has been repealing energy efficiency rules — including a bill now in the Senate that would cancel up to $14,000 in home appliance rebates for low- and moderate-income households. Business groups asked for those repeals. The households on the other side of them did not get a hearing, and there was no room where they could have asked for one.

The money runs the same direction. Three outside groups spent more than $1.4 million to elect him in 2024 — led by Defend American Jobs, the cryptocurrency industry's super PAC, at $725,091, and Conservatives for American Excellence, funded by billionaires Ken Griffin and Paul Singer, at $601,856. TrackAIPAC's tally of FEC filings, as of July 5, 2026, puts pro-Israel PAC money to Goldman at $171,025. Only about 1% of his fundraising came from small grassroots donors, ranking him 284th of 440 House members on that measure.

The ask is not complicated

Goldman is running for a second term in November. He is a fourth-generation Fort Worth native who served twelve years in the Texas House before this. Nobody is asking him to stop meeting with the chamber, or to stop advocating for Lockheed Martin, or to answer a question he doesn't have the intelligence briefing for.

The ask is one advertised public meeting, in the district, where anyone from Tarrant or Parker County can walk in and say what's on their mind — the same invitation he extended to the City Club, extended to everybody.

He told the business community to challenge him. Some of his constituents took him up on it before he ever said it, and are still waiting for a call back.

We deserve better.

Source

Bob Francis and Cecilia Lenzen, "Goldman asks for input while protesters call for town hall," Fort Worth Report, September 23, 2025. Independent expenditure figures from the Federal Election Commission; pro-Israel PAC total from TrackAIPAC (via fec.gov, July 5, 2026). Photo: Maria Crane / Fort Worth Report / CatchLight Local / Report for America.

Tom McClintock Won't Meet His Own Constituents. He's Demanding Six Years of Records From Philadelphia's Sheriff.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:16:00 +0000

Tom McClintock chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement. It is one of the most powerful immigration posts in Congress, and he has spent 2026 using it the same way over and over: sending letters to city and county officials across the country demanding their records.

Philadelphia. Boston. New York City. Arlington County, Virginia. California.

None of them are in his district. His district is in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Central Valley.

What the Philadelphia letters asked for

On May 6, 2026, McClintock and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sent letters to three Philadelphia officials: District Attorney Larry Krasner, Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel and Sheriff Rochelle Bilal.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported what they wanted: up to six years of immigration communications between those agencies and federal immigration officials, due back by May 18 — twelve days later.

That part is at least about government. This part isn't.

From the sheriff specifically, the committee also demanded her correspondence with a list of named private organizations:

No ICE Philly
Juntos
CAIR Philadelphia
Asian Americans United
the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition
New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia

Read that list again. These are immigrant-rights groups, a civil-rights organization, an Asian American community group and a faith-based coalition. A congressional committee asked an elected sheriff to hand over everything she has ever written to them.

The committee's stated justification, in its own words: "The shielding of criminal aliens from immigration enforcement in Philadelphia undermines public safety and thwarts the efficient enforcement of federal law."

Bilal's office declined to comment. Krasner, Bethel and the mayor's office could not immediately be reached.

The same letter, city after city

Two days earlier, on May 4, McClintock and Jordan sent the same kind of demand to Arlington County, Virginia — to Commonwealth's Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, Police Chief Charles Penn and Sheriff Jose Quiroz.

On May 27, they gave Boston officials two weeks. The Washington Times reported that Jordan and McClintock demanded Police Commissioner Michael Cox turn over, by June 10, all Boston Police Department communications touching on immigration from January 2022 forward — plus detainer counts, criminal histories, and his communications with the district attorney, the sheriff and the mayor's office. They called the city's approach "pro-crime sanctuary policies."

To be fair to the letters, they aren't argument-free. The Boston letter cites three cases from the previous two years in which people released by the Suffolk County sheriff were later arrested by ICE and charged with serious crimes against children. That is a real thing to raise. It does not require four years of every email a police department wrote about immigration.

They have also gone after New York City officials and, with Rep. Darrell Issa, California officials.

The pattern is the point. This is not oversight of a federal agency, which is what a congressional committee is built for. It is a standing federal investigation into the internal communications of local prosecutors, police chiefs and sheriffs — the same local law enforcement officials the party running the committee spends most of its time promising to back.

It's a fight he's been building toward

McClintock isn't just sending letters. He wrote the Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act (H.R. 7640), which cleared his committee in March 2026. By his own description, it pre-empts sanctuary jurisdictions from interfering with immigration enforcement and redirects federal law enforcement funding away from them and toward jurisdictions that cooperate with ICE.

So: a bill to defund them, and a document campaign to investigate them.

There is a broader version of this move going on right now. Claudia Tenney's bill to let one federal official strip any nonprofit's tax-exempt status — without showing it the evidence — was quietly reintroduced in December 2025. Greg Abbott declared Texas's largest Muslim civil-rights group a terrorist organization on reasoning that Texas Monthly traced to an anti-Muslim think tank's report. The common thread is government power pointed at the organizations that represent immigrants and Muslims, and at the local officials who work with them.

McClintock's letters put a congressional subpoena power's worth of pressure behind the same idea, without a subpoena.

Meanwhile, in his district

Here is the contrast that ought to bother the people who elected him.

McClintock has time to write to a sheriff in Philadelphia about her emails. He did not have time for his own constituents.

When people in his district organized their own town hall in Modesto in March 2025, nearly 200 of them showed up and he declined the invitations. They put their questions to a cardboard cutout of him instead. His office dismissed the whole event as "a nationally coordinated campaign by a group called Indivisible."

He has been in Congress since 2009. In that time the things his constituents have actually asked him about — 56% of adult Medi-Cal enrollees in his district at risk of losing coverage under the work requirements in the budget bill he voted for, the Caldor Fire that burned 221,835 acres across three counties — have not produced this kind of energy.

Six years of records from a sheriff 2,700 miles away did.

Source

House Judiciary committee criticizes Philly law enforcement over sanctuary policies, demands immigration records and correspondence — Jeff Gammage and Sam Janesch, The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 6, 2026. Committee letters and dates from judiciary.house.gov and the Washington Times.

"It's Done": Mike Rogers Promised Rigorous Oversight of a Strike That Killed Shipwreck Survivors. It Lasted 11 Days.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:34:54 +0000

On September 2, 2025, the U.S. military blew up a boat in the Caribbean it said was carrying drugs.

Two people survived that first strike. They were in the water, clinging to the smoldering wreck of their boat.

A second strike killed them.

Almost three months later, the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had verbally ordered the crew to "kill everybody." The story landed on November 28, 2025.

The next day, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee put out a statement promising to find out what happened.

Eleven days after that, he said he was done.

The promise

Mike Rogers has represented Alabama's 3rd District since 2003, and he chairs the House Armed Services Committee — the panel with jurisdiction over the entire Department of Defense. If Congress is going to ask the Pentagon a hard question, his committee is where that happens.

On November 29, 2025, Rogers and the committee's ranking Democrat, Adam Smith, issued a joint statement:

"This committee is committed to providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense's military operations in the Caribbean. We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question."

A full accounting. Bipartisan action. Rigorous oversight.

The ending

In early December, Rogers and other committee leaders sat through a classified briefing from Adm. Frank Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command — the officer who oversaw the strike. They watched the video.

On December 10, as ABC News reported, Rogers ended his side of the investigation. He told reporters:

"It's done."

"I've got all the answers I needed."

His spokesperson put it this way: "The video and classified briefings from the Pentagon were sufficient to convince Chairman Rogers that this was a legal action."

Bradley told lawmakers there had been no "kill them all" order from Hegseth — contradicting the Post's reporting. Rogers took that answer, from the officer who ran the operation, and closed the file.

Nobody outside that briefing room has seen the video.

What the law actually says about this

The thing Rogers declared legal in eleven days is not a close call in the legal literature. It is one of the oldest bright lines there is.

TIME reported on December 1, 2025 that legal scholars were unequivocal about orders to leave no survivors:

"It is absolutely unlawful to order that there will be no survivors." — Rebecca Ingber, Cardozo School of Law

"Intentional killing of a protected person... is a war crime." — Laura Dickinson, George Washington University Law School

The Defense Department's own Law of War Manual, TIME noted, treats an order to kill shipwrecked people as so clearly illegal that service members have a duty to disobey it.

Legal experts differed on whether the U.S. is in an armed conflict at all in the Caribbean, which changes which body of law applies. That's a genuinely hard question. It is also exactly the kind of hard question a congressional investigation exists to work through in public — not the kind you settle by watching a video once and announcing the answer.

The senator who saw it differently

Rogers wasn't the only member of Congress with access. Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been pushing for the footage to be declassified and released. His assessment, per ABC:

"I think anybody who saw that video would be quite disturbed about it."

Same country, same footage, opposite conclusions. One of them wants you to see it. The other says it's done.

Congress ultimately had so little confidence in voluntary disclosure that the defense policy bill tied Hegseth's travel budget to releasing the video. That's what oversight looks like when the committee chairman won't do it: other members reaching for the only lever left.

This is the second chairman to do this

Rogers is not an outlier. He's a pattern.

The Senate has its own version: Jim Risch chairs the Foreign Relations Committee and refused to hold a single public hearing on Trump's war with Iran. Same structure — the one person with the gavel decides the public doesn't need to hear the answers, and there is no appeal.

That's the whole design failure. Committee oversight isn't a right the public holds. It's a favor the chairman grants.

Who pays for the gavel

There's one more thing worth knowing about the man who decided the Pentagon had answered enough questions.

The weapons industry funds him. FEC records compiled by Who Bought My Rep show $40,000 each from the PACs of RTX, BAE Systems, L3Harris and General Atomics — four contractors whose business runs through his committee — and they're not alone on the list.

Of the $8.2 million Rogers has raised, about $41,700 came from small grassroots donors. That's half of one percent.

None of that proves anything about the boat. It does describe a chairman whose career depends on a good working relationship with the institution he is supposed to be checking.

He also won't take the question at home

If you live in Alabama's 3rd District and want to ask him about any of this in person, you can't. Rogers has not held a public, in-person town hall since 2017. When constituents in Opelika organized their own in April 2025 and invited him, he didn't come.

Two men were killed in the water after their boat was already destroyed. The committee chairman who promised America a full accounting gave it eleven days and a closed door.

Sources

House Republican drops his inquiry into Sept. 2 boat strikes — ABC News, December 10, 2025. Photo: Getty Images via ABC News.
Rogers and Smith Issue Joint Statement on Recent Reports of Follow-Up Strike Ordered in SOUTHCOM AOR — House Armed Services Committee, November 29, 2025.
Could Hegseth Face Prosecution For the Alleged Boat Strike Order? — TIME, December 1, 2025.

Mike Flood Voted to Strip Federal Courts of Their Power to Enforce Orders. Then He Told a Town Hall He Hadn't Read It.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:22:57 +0000

On May 22, 2025, the House passed Trump's budget bill by a single vote, 215 to 214. Mike Flood voted yes.

Five days later he stood in front of a room of constituents in Seward, Nebraska, and the very first question was about a provision buried on page 500-something of the 1,100-page bill he had just voted for.

His answer, as KMTV reported:

"I'm not going to hide the truth, this provision was unknown to me when I voted for that bill."

What was in the part he didn't read

Section 70302 of H.R. 1 was four lines long. Here they are, in full:

"No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section."

Strip out the legal language and here is what it does.

When a federal judge orders the government to stop doing something, the only thing that makes that order real is contempt — the judge's power to punish officials who ignore it. Section 70302 would have taken away the money courts use to enforce contempt in a huge category of cases, and it would have done it retroactively: every injunction and restraining order already sitting on the Trump administration would have become a piece of paper with no teeth.

A court order nobody has to obey is not a court order. It's a suggestion.

This is not an abstract worry. It's already happening in the cases where courts do still have teeth — a federal judge had to order the EPA a second time after the agency read a ruling voiding its grant terminations and concluded it had to do nothing. Section 70302 was designed to make that the permanent default.

"Unknown to me"

This was not a secret. Two days before the vote — on May 20, 2025 — Rep. Laura Friedman and 20 members of Congress sent a letter warning that the provision "would block courts from enforcing contempt rulings" and demanding it be struck.

Flood's own Nebraska colleague, Rep. Don Bacon, told KMTV flatly:

"I knew about this provision and I'm totally fine if the Senate strips it out."

So the information was available. Bacon read it. Nebraska's Adrian Smith not only read it, he defended it, telling the station the provision "reinforces those existing requirements" and that he supported its inclusion.

Flood — a lawyer, and a former speaker of the Nebraska Legislature — did not read it, and voted for it anyway.

The crowd in Seward reacted about how you'd expect. One constituent:

"You say, oh I care about the rule of law but you voted for a bill that contains a provision that guts the checks the judicial branch has and you didn't even read it? It's ridiculous."

Colleen Nygern, the constituent who asked the question, walked out of the town hall rather than listen to the rest of his answers.

What he promised, and who actually did it

Flood told the room he'd fix it:

"When I return to Washington I am going to very clearly tell the people in my conference that we cannot support undermining our court system and we must allow our courts to operate and issue injunctions."

Section 70302 did come out of the bill. Flood didn't do it.

It was killed on June 23, 2025, by Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who ruled the language violated the Byrd rule — the Senate procedure that keeps non-budget policy out of a fast-track budget bill. An unelected Senate referee saved the enforceability of federal court orders. Not the lawyer from Nebraska who voted for the thing.

Then, on July 3, 2025, the final bill came back to the House and Flood voted for it again.

The other 1,095 pages

Here's the part that should actually worry Nebraskans. Section 70302 got caught because one constituent in Seward read the bill herself and stood in line to ask about it.

Nobody caught the rest on Flood's behalf. And the rest is what's hitting his district right now:

Nebraska stands to lose up to $4 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade, with roughly 55,000 Nebraskans projected to lose health coverage.
About 18,000 Nebraskans have already lost food assistance under the law — an 11% drop in SNAP recipients, per the state's own DHHS data.

Flood has been asked about that too. Confronted at a town hall over the SNAP cuts, his answer was "we do not have unlimited money in the United States." The room booed him.

He didn't say that provision was unknown to him.

Why "I didn't read it" is not an excuse

Reading the bill is the job. It is close to the whole job. A member of Congress has one vote and a staff whose entire purpose is to tell them what's in the thing they're voting on.

The May 22 vote passed 215–214. Flood's yes was not a formality; a single member changing their mind would have stopped that version of the bill in its tracks. One Republican, Brian Fitzpatrick, later voted against the final version while staying quiet about the May 22 vote that kept it alive. Flood voted yes both times.

To his credit, Flood keeps holding real, in-person town halls — which is more than most of his colleagues will do, and it's how Nebraskans found this out at all. But the point of a town hall is that constituents get to hold him to something. He told them he'd go fight the provision. What actually killed it was a Senate parliamentarian, ten days before he voted for the bill one more time.

Source

Congressman Mike Flood tells crowd he didn't read portions of the Big Beautiful bill before voting to pass it — Max Williams, KMTV 3 News Now, May 28, 2025.

Trump Said Members of Congress Should Be Executed. Guy Reschenthaler, a Former Navy Lawyer, Called It a Distraction.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:10:59 +0000

On the morning of Thursday, November 20, 2025, the President of the United States said that six members of Congress had committed a crime "punishable by DEATH."

He said they had engaged in "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL." He said each of them "should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. … An example MUST BE SET." He reposted messages from other accounts, including one calling for the six to be hanged.

One of the six was a congressman from western Pennsylvania. So is Guy Reschenthaler. What he said about the death threat is the subject of this post, and it can be summarized quickly: nothing. He never addressed it. When he finally spoke, he used his credentials as a former Navy lawyer to vouch for the president and accused the other side of "sowing division."

What the six actually said

The trigger was a video, released that week, in which six congressional Democrats — all military veterans — spoke directly to service members and intelligence personnel.

"We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now," said Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan.

Rep. Chris Deluzio, a Navy veteran who represents western Pennsylvania — the same corner of the state as Reschenthaler — said that Americans' trust in the military "is at risk," and that "right now, the threats to our constitution aren't just coming from abroad. … You must refuse illegal orders."

They closed together with a line from naval history: "Don't give up the ship."

That's the whole offense. Six veterans reminded troops that they must refuse illegal orders.

This is not a controversial legal proposition. It is black-letter military law. The Uniform Code of Military Justice requires troops to obey only lawful orders, and a service member can be prosecuted for carrying out an unlawful one. It is taught in basic training. It is the entire premise of the Nuremberg principle.

And of all the members of Congress in America, the one best positioned to say so out loud was Guy Reschenthaler.

He was a Navy JAG. That's the point.

Reschenthaler is not a random backbencher with an opinion about military law. He was a Judge Advocate General's Corps officer — a Navy lawyer — and deployed to Baghdad in 2009. He says so himself, constantly. He said it in his statement about this very episode: "As a former Navy JAG (Judge Advocate General) who prosecuted terrorists in Iraq…"

A JAG officer's job includes advising commanders on the legality of orders. The "refuse illegal orders" rule is not an abstraction to a former JAG. It is the thing he was trained to apply.

So when the president called it seditious to restate that rule, and floated execution for the people who did, the natural person to explain the law was the JAG in the room.

What he did instead

Deluzio said out loud what the test was. "I think this is a moment where everyone — Democrat, Republican, you name it — should be condemning the president's calls for political violence against me and others," he told WESA, "and I think every elected Republican in Pennsylvania should be asked whether they're going to condemn that call for violence."

So reporters asked them.

Reschenthaler's office did not immediately respond to WESA's request for comment that Thursday afternoon.

Two days later, City & State Pennsylvania published the emailed statement he eventually sent. Here it is in full:

"As a former Navy JAG (Judge Advocate General) who prosecuted terrorists in Iraq, I know President Trump's actions are both lawful and necessary. My Democrat (sic) colleagues are dangerously sowing division to distract from the President's successes."

He went on to list those successes: securing the southern border, dismantling terrorist networks, "decimated Iran's nuclear capabilities," a Middle East peace deal, and "taking the fight to foreign drug cartels that funnel illicit drugs into our towns and kill our friends, families, and neighbors."

Read it again for what isn't there.

There is no mention of the death threat. No mention of hanging. No mention of the word "violence" at all. The question on the table was whether the president should be calling for the execution of members of Congress, and the answer he gave was a press release about border security.

And note the sleight of hand in the first sentence. Reschenthaler invoked his military-law credentials to certify that Trump's actions are lawful — a different question than the one being asked, and one nobody had put to him. Meanwhile the six veterans who said troops must refuse unlawful orders got called dangerous dividers. The former Navy JAG's contribution to a fight about military law was to certify the boss and insult the lawyers on the other side.

The word "dangerously," in his statement, is applied to the people who were threatened.

Three other Pennsylvania Republicans found a way

Here is why "he was just being a loyal Republican" doesn't cover it. Other Pennsylvania Republicans were asked the same question, and they managed.

Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican congressman from Bucks County and a former FBI agent, condemned it directly. "When our military is dragged into partisan conflicts, it is not only irresponsible – it is deeply disrespectful to those who serve," he told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "Having served in the FBI, I've seen how inflamed rhetoric can stoke tensions and lead to unintended violence." He added that "incendiary rhetoric" of this kind "heightens volatility, erodes public trust, and has no place in a constitutional republic."

U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick, who defended Trump on the substance and called the video "inappropriate and unwarranted," still said this: "President Trump can speak for himself, but as I've said repeatedly, there is no place in either party for violent rhetoric and everyone needs to dial it down a notch."

State Sen. Tracy Pennycuick, a former Army helicopter pilot who disagreed with the video, closed her statement this way: "Despite our disagreements, we should never condone political violence of any kind."

You did not have to agree with Deluzio to clear this bar. McCormick and Pennycuick both thought the video was wrong and still said the sentence. It costs nothing. It is one line.

Reschenthaler didn't say it.

Neither did Rep. Scott Perry or state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who never responded to City & State at all. Rep. Mike Kelly's office said he wasn't available, pointing instead to his Fox appearance the day before, where he wondered aloud, "Why would you bring out something like that?"

This is who he is when it counts

Reschenthaler is the House Chief Deputy Whip — the member whose job is counting votes and holding the Republican conference together. He is, by design, one of the people other Republicans look to before they decide what's safe to say.

When the moment came to say that calling for a colleague's death is out of bounds, the man in that job said the president was right and the veterans were divisive.

It fits the rest of his record on democracy. Reschenthaler signed the amicus brief in Texas v. Pennsylvania, the lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to throw out votes from four states including his own. He voted to reject Arizona's electoral votes on the night of January 6, 2021 — and then, hours after the Capitol was stormed, voted at 3:08 a.m. to reject Pennsylvania's, the same ballots that had just reelected him. He later called that a "symbolic vote." He voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the attack, and against creating an independent commission to investigate it.

He also refused about 40 interview requests from Pittsburgh's WTAE in the two months after January 6, when the station wanted to ask him about exactly those votes — a pattern of ducking questions we documented here.

There's a version of this that's a partisan disagreement about a video. That's not what happened. A president said members of Congress should be executed and boosted a call to hang them. His own colleagues asked Pennsylvania's Republicans a yes-or-no question about political violence. Three said no to it in some form. The one with the military-law credentials used them to say the president was right, and never mentioned the threat at all.

If you want to know what Guy Reschenthaler will do when the pressure is real, that week is the answer.

Source

Hilary Danailova, "PA GOP lawmakers weigh in on Trump accusing veteran pols of 'seditious behavior,'" City & State Pennsylvania, November 22, 2025, and Chris Potter, "Trump accuses Pa.'s Deluzio and Houlahan of 'seditious behavior,'" WESA via Pennsylvania Capital-Star, November 20, 2025.

Rick Crawford Spent 2026 Fighting to Let the FBI Read Americans' Emails Without a Warrant

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:43:00 +0000

There is a law that lets the government collect the emails, texts, and phone calls of foreign targets overseas. It's called Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and almost nobody disputes that it's useful.

The fight is over what happens when an American is on the other end of one of those conversations. Those messages land in a government database. And right now the FBI can go into that database, search for an American by name, and read what's there — without a warrant, without probable cause, without a judge.

Critics call it the backdoor search. In 2026 Congress had a chance to close it.

Rick Crawford, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, spent the year making sure it stayed open.

What he pushed for

In March 2026, with the authority set to expire, Crawford's plan was what Washington calls a "clean" reauthorization — 18 more months of Section 702 with no changes at all. Roll Call reported that his bill contained no warrant requirement for searching Americans' communications.

"I'm doing everything I can to try to advance the 18-month clean" reauthorization. — Rep. Rick Crawford

The resistance wasn't partisan. Republican Andrew Clyde of Georgia said he would "probably not support a clean extension." Republican Andy Harris of Maryland said the 18-month timeline was "probably off the table." Democrats objected too — Jamie Raskin said of the administration, "It's an administration which has set itself against the privacy rights of the people and against civil liberties."

The 9/11 argument

When Crawford went home to Arkansas television to sell it, he reached for the biggest thing he had. On April 24, 2026, he told KATV:

"If we had had 702 prior to 9/11 very good likelihood and all probability would not—9/11 would not have happened."

And:

"What we don't want to do is let that go dark and run the risk of another type of 9/11."

Notice the sleight of hand. Nobody in this debate was proposing to "let it go dark." The reformers wanted to keep the foreign collection and require a warrant before the FBI reads an American's side of it. Crawford answered a question about Americans' Fourth Amendment rights by invoking the worst terrorist attack in American history.

He also claimed his revised bill had solved the privacy problem — "We've been able to clean that up to satisfy, you know, both sides. Being able to walk and chew gum at the same time."

The ACLU's Kia Hamadanchy, quoted in the same KATV story, disagreed:

"Quite insidious because it doesn't have to provide any new protections. All it essentially does is restate existing law."

That's the whole argument in one line. Crawford's "reform" added review paperwork and restated rules already on the books. What it did not add was the one thing that actually protects you: a judge.

What the reformers were asking for

The Electronic Frontier Foundation laid out the ask in June 2026: Section 702 "should require a warrant before the Federal Bureau of Investigation can look at digital communications collected from Americans." If Congress wouldn't do that, EFF said, let the authority lapse.

Today, as EFF describes it, the FBI can "query and even read the U.S. side of that communication without a warrant." A warrant requirement would mean an agent has to convince a judge there's probable cause first. That's it. That's the reform Crawford spent months resisting.

Why it matters right now, specifically

EFF pointed at something more immediate than principle: who would be holding this power.

The incoming Director of National Intelligence, Bill Pulte, had already "accused several of the President's political foes and targets… of mortgage fraud based on private data held by his agency." That is not a hypothetical about abuse. That is a federal official using private government records against the president's political enemies, before ever getting the keys to the intelligence community.

Crawford's answer was to hand that administration eighteen more months of warrantless access to Americans' communications.

We've documented what this looks like in practice: ICE is paying contractors to scan social media around the clock and then subpoenaing platforms to unmask Americans who criticize the agency. And in the Senate, Tom Cotton has been asking the Justice Department to open investigations into American protest groups. Arkansas's two most powerful members of Congress on intelligence are both pushing in the same direction — more surveillance power, aimed inward, with fewer people allowed to say no.

How it ended

Crawford didn't get his clean bill. On April 29, 2026, the House passed a reauthorization — Crawford put out a statement celebrating it — and then both chambers fell back to a short stopgap while negotiators kept fighting over the warrant question.

They never resolved it. Section 702 lapsed in June 2026, and negotiations continued from there.

So the chairman who insisted the sky would fall without an immediate clean renewal ended up presiding over the lapse he warned about — because he would not accept the one reform that could have gotten the votes. He had a Republican-controlled House and members of his own party telling him what they needed. He chose the version the FBI wanted instead.

The bottom line

Rick Crawford has represented eastern Arkansas since 2011. He has not held an in-person town hall since 2017.

So no constituent got to stand up and ask the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee the simple version of this question:

If the government wants to read my email, why shouldn't it have to ask a judge first?

For everyone else in America, that answer is in the Fourth Amendment. Crawford spent a year arguing it shouldn't apply here.

Source

Roll Call, "Uncertainty shrouds key surveillance authority renewal in House", March 18, 2026, and KATV, "Rep. Crawford warns FISA 702 surveillance law must be renewed to prevent 'another 9/11'", April 24, 2026. Photo: KATV.

Steve Womack Just Introduced a Bill to Fix the National Debt. A Year Ago He Voted for $3.4 Trillion of It.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:39:00 +0000

On June 24, 2026, Steve Womack introduced the Budgeting for a Better America Act, a bipartisan bill to fix how Congress handles money. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the bill would move Congress to two-year budget resolutions, add debt and deficit information into the budget process, create a "Fiscal State of the Nation" hearing, and set up a commission to recommend how to get the deficit down to 3 percent of the economy within ten years.

The budget watchdog group praised it. Its president, Maya MacGuineas, said the members behind it "deserve real credit for putting forward a serious bipartisan bill to help Congress budget more responsibly."

This is Womack's brand. He chaired the House Budget Committee in the 115th Congress. He led the 2018 Joint Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform, whose recommendations make up much of this bill. He is Arkansas's designated grown-up on the national debt.

So let's talk about what he did on July 3, 2025.

The $3.4 trillion vote

That day, Womack voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — Trump's budget bill. The Congressional Budget Office's final score found the law will add $3.4 trillion to the debt over ten years, and that's before counting the extra interest owed on all that new borrowing.

Womack put out a press release the same day. It is about a thousand words long. It lists the tax provisions. It lists $9 billion for servicemember quality of life, $21 billion for munitions, $12 billion for readiness, $7 billion for air superiority. It lists $46.5 billion for border barriers, $4.1 billion for Border Patrol hiring, $6.1 billion for border technology, $12.5 billion for air traffic control.

Count the mentions of the deficit, the debt, or how any of it gets paid for.

Zero.

The closest it comes is a section header claiming the bill "prevents waste, fraud, and abuse." What's under that header isn't waste or fraud. It's Medicaid work requirements, Medicaid cost-sharing for people just above the poverty line, and new SNAP restrictions. That's not eliminating waste. That's taking health coverage and food away from poor people and calling the savings a cleanup.

Here's Womack's own quote from that release:

"I'm proud to vote for this bill that delivers on the clear direction Americans gave us in November."

The man who chaired the Budget Committee, on the largest single addition to the national debt in years, had nothing to say about the debt.

The part where the trap closes

Read the first bullet of his own press release. The bill works by:

"Making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent—protecting the average taxpayer from a 22 percent tax hike."

Womack voted yea on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on December 20, 2017, when it passed the House 224–201. Then in 2025 he voted to make those cuts permanent — which is the single biggest reason the bill scores at $3.4 trillion.

And now, eleven months later, he wants a commission to figure out how to close a hole that size.

Think about the order of operations. First you lock in the tax cuts forever. Then you set up a bipartisan commission with a mandate to get deficits down to 3 percent of GDP. The revenue side is off the table by law. So there is exactly one place the commission can look.

It can look at the spending. Which means Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food assistance, and housing — the same programs Womack has already been cutting with his own gavel.

He's already showing us what he'd cut

You don't have to guess. Womack chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that writes HUD's budget, and this June he brought forward a bill that cuts homeless assistance grants by $256 million and public housing by $1.3 billion — while finding $875 million to prepare for the 2028 Olympics.

He also voted for the health care provisions that will leave 28,000 more people in his own district uninsured, and in January 2026 he joined every Arkansas Republican in voting against extending the subsidies that hold premiums down.

That's the actual fiscal philosophy. Borrowing for tax cuts and border walls is prudence. A rent voucher is a spending problem.

Why this matters more from him than from anyone else

Plenty of members of Congress vote for debt and then complain about debt. What makes Womack different is that he has spent his career claiming the referee's jersey.

He chaired the Budget Committee. He co-led the budget-process reform committee. He belongs to the Bipartisan Fiscal Forum. When the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wants a Republican to stand next to, they call him.

That reputation is worth something, and he spends it. It's how a $3.4 trillion vote gets waved through as a serious person's decision. If the House's designated deficit hawk says the bill is fine, who's left to say it isn't?

Process reform is not nothing. Biennial budgeting and better debt data are genuinely reasonable ideas. But a commission is also the oldest move in Washington: it converts a choice you already made into a problem someone else has to solve later — usually by cutting something from people who don't have lobbyists.

The bottom line

Steve Womack has represented northwest Arkansas since 2011. He hasn't held an in-person town hall in seven years; he takes pre-screened questions on the phone instead.

If he did hold one, somebody would surely ask the question his press releases keep dodging:

If the debt is the emergency you say it is, why did you vote to add $3.4 trillion to it — and why is the plan to pay for it always our health care, our food, and our housing, and never the tax cuts you made permanent?

Source

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, "Bipartisan Fiscal Forum Leaders Introduce Budgeting for a Better America Act", June 24, 2026. Photo: U.S. House of Representatives.

Steve Womack Toured a Shelter for Homeless Teens and Called It a 'Growing Issue.' Eight Weeks Earlier He Wrote the Bill Cutting Homeless Aid by $256 Million.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:33:00 +0000

On Monday, July 27, 2026, Steve Womack toured a new emergency shelter for homeless and runaway youth in Mulberry, Arkansas. He called teen homelessness a "growing issue" in the state.

He would know. He's the one writing the budget.

Womack's actual job

This isn't a congressman who happens to have an opinion about homelessness. Steve Womack is the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development — the subcommittee that writes the annual funding bill for the entire Department of Housing and Urban Development. Homeless assistance grants, public housing, Section 8, homeownership counseling, lead paint removal: those line items are his line items. He picks the numbers.

On June 3, 2026, he presented his Fiscal Year 2027 bill to the full Appropriations Committee. Here is how he described it in his own remarks:

"The housing title of this bill addresses affordability concerns and ensures a responsible safety net for our most vulnerable citizens—the elderly, disabled, our veterans, and the working poor."

Now here is what's in it.

What the bill does

The committee advanced the bill on a party-line vote on June 4, 2026. According to the committee's ranking Democrats, Womack's bill:

Cuts Homeless Assistance Grants by $256 million — the exact program that funds the kind of shelter he toured. Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro said the cut rolls "back aid for the more than 745,000 people experiencing homelessness, and preventing tens of thousands of people from moving off the street into stable homes."
Cuts public housing by $1.3 billion, which DeLauro said "will cause cuts to rent and utility payments for some 2,700 housing agencies across the country and put hundreds of thousands of low-income households at risk of eviction."
Cuts fair housing enforcement by 64%. Ranking Member James Clyburn said the bill "walks away from enforcement of longstanding civil rights laws that protect housing choice."
Cuts housing counseling assistance in half — the program that helps families buy a first home.
Eliminates funding for lead-based paint hazards in nearly 700,000 low-income housing units already deemed at risk, and eliminates eviction prevention grants.

Overall the bill comes in at $92.2 billion — $10.7 billion below the previous year, a number Womack states plainly in his own remarks. Counting housing revenues, transportation and housing programs together take a cut of nearly $8.8 billion, or 8 percent.

The $875 million he did find

Womack's bill isn't short of money for everything. It's short of money for housing.

In the same speech, the chairman announced $875 million to prepare for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, on top of $94 million the year before. He announced $732 million for shipbuilding and maritime programs, including $165 million for the Merchant Marine Academy. He announced $4 billion for FAA facilities and equipment.

The Olympics line alone is more than three times the size of the homeless assistance cut.

None of those are crazy things to fund. That's not the point. The point is that a chairman with $92.2 billion to allocate decided that a $256 million cut to homelessness aid was necessary, and $875 million for the Olympics was not optional. Those were choices, and he made both of them.

How he describes the cut

Here's the part worth reading twice. This is Womack in his June 3 remarks, on the homelessness money:

"The package provides $4.2 billion for homeless assistance grants, including $3.8 billion for the Continuum of Care program—reaffirming this subcommittee's bipartisan agreement to ensure certainty for local providers while returning competition to the program."

Notice what's missing. He gives you the total. He does not tell you it's $256 million less than last year. "Reaffirming this subcommittee's bipartisan agreement" and "ensuring certainty for local providers" is how you describe a cut when you don't want to say the word.

He does the same thing with rental assistance, calling $58 billion for Section 8 and related programs "a fiscally responsible level." And he closes by saying the whole bill "implements the fiscal discipline and regulatory relief that the American people demand."

Nobody in Mulberry demanded this.

Then he showed up for the photo

Eight weeks after presenting that bill, Womack was in the River Valley touring an emergency shelter for kids with nowhere to sleep and telling a reporter that teen homelessness is a growing problem in Arkansas.

He's right that it's growing. He is also the single member of Congress most directly responsible for how much federal money goes to fixing it — and he just moved that number down.

This is a specific kind of dishonesty, and it isn't unique to him. We've written about Steve Hilton's plan to address homelessness by making it illegal to be outside, and about Bill Hagerty's bill to evict 37,000 American kids from public housing by calling their families a loophole. The through-line is the same: express concern in public, cut the program in committee.

What else Womack has been busy cutting

The housing bill isn't an outlier. It's the pattern.

Womack voted for Trump's budget bill, which will leave 28,000 more people in his district without health insurance. In January 2026 he was one of all four Arkansas Republicans who voted against extending the health care subsidies that keep premiums down. He stood by while DOGE cut more than $1.7 million in grants out of his own district, money that had been going to the University of Arkansas and to local nonprofits. And he was one of the Republicans who took food assistance away from 4.5 million people.

A teenager sleeping in a car in Crawford County is downstream of every one of those votes.

The bottom line

Steve Womack has been in Congress since 2011. He hasn't held an in-person town hall in seven years — now he does telephone town halls with pre-screened questions instead.

So when he shows up in Mulberry to tour a shelter and tell a reporter that teen homelessness is a "growing issue," there's nobody in the room to ask him the obvious question:

You wrote the budget. Why did you cut it?

Source

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, "Womack tours emergency youth shelter in Mulberry, calls teen homelessness a 'growing issue' in Arkansas", July 29, 2026. Photo: U.S. House of Representatives.

Tom Cotton Wrote a Bill Ordering the President to Share More U.S. Intelligence With Israel — and Making It Harder to Ever Stop

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:25:00 +0000

Every year Congress passes a bill setting the rules and the budget for America's spy agencies. This year, Tom Cotton wrote it. He is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027 — Senate bill 4615 — is his bill. His committee sent it to the Senate floor on August 5, 2026.

It runs 192 pages. Most Arkansans will never read a word of it. But there is one section in it worth knowing about, because it changes who decides what America does with its own secrets.

What Section 622 does

The section is called "United States-Israel Intelligence Sharing Enhancement." Here is what it requires, according to the Washington Times' read of the bill:

The president must expand and enhance intelligence sharing with Israel — across terrorism, cyber threats, sanctions evasion, missile defense, early warning, and other regional security topics.
The president may suspend, reduce, or limit that sharing only on the basis of "a specific and identifiable national security concern."
If he does, he must document the decision and notify the congressional intelligence committees — a report that is unclassified, though it may carry a classified annex.
The requirement extends to countries that normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.
The president must also keep the committees updated on progress toward "seamlessly integrating Israel into regional air and missile defense."

The bill does deal with other partners — there are separate sections on the Indo-Pacific, on Taiwan, and on intelligence support for Ukraine. But those are cooperation provisions. Israel is the one where the bill takes away a president's ability to quietly turn the tap down.

That is not a small thing. Sharing intelligence is one of the few levers an American president has that costs nothing and gets attention. It is how you tell an ally, without a press conference and without cutting off weapons, that you want them to stop doing something. Section 622 makes using that lever a paperwork event with a report to Congress attached.

The former CIA officer who says this is backwards

Paul R. Pillar spent 28 years in the U.S. intelligence community. Writing in Responsible Statecraft on June 10, 2026, he laid out why he thinks Cotton has this exactly wrong.

His argument has three parts. First, on intelligence specifically, Israel has a documented history of passing American secrets on to third parties — including countries the United States treats as adversaries. Second, shared intelligence can be used in ways that cut against American interests, particularly during an active regional war. Third, locking the arrangement into statute strips the executive branch of the flexibility it needs to manage a sensitive relationship.

You don't have to agree with all of that to see the problem with writing it into law. The whole point of a lever is that you can pull it.

Cotton's position on tying a president's hands depends on who's being tied

Here is the part that should bother Arkansans regardless of what they think about Israel.

For most of this year, senators have tried again and again to make the president come to Congress over the Iran war — the war Trump started in February 2026 without a vote. The Senate has now voted thirteen times on some version of ending it. Cotton voted no every single time it mattered. The position he took, over and over, was that Congress should not be second-guessing a commander in chief on national security.

Then he wrote Section 622, which is Congress second-guessing a commander in chief on national security — in advance, in writing, with a mandatory report.

The difference isn't a principle about executive power. The difference is which way the constraint points.

This is the same senator who spent a decade attacking Obama's Iran deal and then went nearly silent when Trump signed a similar one. The pattern is consistent: the rule bends to fit the outcome.

Follow the money

Cotton is not a random senator with opinions about the Middle East. He is the biggest recipient of pro-Israel political money in Arkansas's congressional delegation.

TrackAIPAC's tally of Federal Election Commission records, dated July 5, 2026, puts the total at $1,127,943 from pro-Israel PACs. The next-highest Arkansan on that list is John Boozman at $191,516 — Cotton has taken almost six times as much as his own state's senior senator. Steve Womack is at $134,837, Bruce Westerman at $79,146, French Hill at $71,443, Rick Crawford at $25,398.

That is money to the man who, as chairman, decides what goes into the intelligence bill. He is the one who picks the sections. He is the one who writes them. Nobody had to lobby a committee to get Section 622 in — the chairman put it there.

We've written before about how a handful of donors came to own the Republican Party's foreign policy, including the $37 million primary that took out a sitting Republican congressman who wouldn't vote the way the lobby wanted. Section 622 is what the money buys once it stops needing to threaten anybody. It buys the pen.

What this has to do with Arkansas

Nothing. That's the point.

There is no version of this that lowers a grocery bill in Jonesboro or keeps a hospital open in Helena. Cotton has not held a real, open town hall in Arkansas in nine years. In 2025 he skipped an angry town hall to attend a $7,000-a-plate fundraiser instead. In January 2026 the state's largest paper ran a piece headlined "Hill, Cotton back on radar, but not for Arkansas constituents."

He found the time to write Section 622.

The bottom line

Tom Cotton used the most powerful position he has ever held — chairman of the committee that oversees every American spy agency — to write a foreign government's intelligence access into United States law, and to make it harder for any future president to change his mind about it.

He did it after taking more than a million dollars from PACs that wanted exactly that.

And he did it while telling us, thirteen times over, that Congress has no business telling a president what to do about war.

We deserve better.

Source

Paul R. Pillar, "Senate wants to force US to share sensitive intel with Israel", Responsible Statecraft, June 10, 2026. Photo: Responsible Statecraft.

Tom Cotton Says Your Worries About Data Centers Are Valid. Then He Asked the Justice Department to Investigate the People Raising Them.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:22:00 +0000

On June 10, 2026, Tom Cotton sent a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche asking the Justice Department to open an investigation into the people organizing against data centers in America.

Not the companies building them. The people objecting to them.

The letter is one page. And buried in the middle of it is a sentence that gives the whole game away:

"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. He says so in writing. And then he asks the federal government's top law enforcement agency to investigate them anyway.

What he actually asked for

Cotton's letter to Blanche opens by asking DOJ to "investigate foreign influence efforts targeting the buildout of American AI infrastructure." His claim is that the opposition isn't real — that it's foreign:

"Alarming reports indicate that a network of foreign actors, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is attempting to manipulate U.S. policy and public opinion on data centers."

The specific ask, as Fox News reported, is an investigation under the Foreign Agents Registration Act — the law that requires people working on behalf of foreign governments to register with the Justice Department. Cotton points out in the letter that nobody in the network he describes has ever been charged under it.

His evidence is thin. The letter names one person — Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman living in Shanghai — and then reaches for guilt by association: a professor from Tsinghua University appeared on a panel about AI hosted by Senator Bernie Sanders. That's the case.

Here's what the letter does not mention: the actual people in actual American towns fighting actual data centers over their actual water and their actual electric bills. There are a lot of them, and they aren't taking orders from Beijing. In Missouri, hundreds of Eric Burlison's constituents opposed a data center in their county and their congressman wrote a letter supporting it anyway. Cotton's letter would sweep all of that into a federal foreign-agent probe.

This is a habit, not a one-off

The Blanche letter isn't the first time Tom Cotton has asked a federal agency to go after a group he doesn't like.

November 2025 — the Justice Department. Cotton asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate CodePink, the anti-war group, for possible violations of the same foreign-agent law and for "material support" to foreign terrorist organizations. Material support of a terrorist organization is a serious federal felony. He wanted it looked at because of the group's funding and its positions on China and Palestine.

March 2025 — from the chairman's seat. Cotton chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. During a hearing on March 25, 2025, an activist named Tighe Barry was removed from the room, and Cotton called him a "CODEPINK lunatic funded by Communist China." The group filed a Senate ethics complaint three days later, asking Cotton to publicly recant and apologize. It says its money comes from small donors in the United States.

April 2019 — the IRS. Cotton wrote to the IRS commissioner asking the agency to investigate whether the Southern Poverty Law Center should keep its nonprofit status. He called the organization "a racist and sexist slush fund devoted to defamation" and urged the IRS to "take immediate action."

Different agencies, different targets, one move: when a group organizes against something Cotton supports, Cotton asks the federal government to open a file on them.

That's worth sitting with for a second. The senator who chairs the committee that oversees America's spy agencies keeps asking the executive branch to investigate Americans for the content of their politics. The job of that committee is supposed to be the opposite — keeping the surveillance state pointed outward and inside the law.

Meanwhile, back in Little Rock

While Cotton was writing to Washington about foreign influence, some of his own constituents were standing outside his Little Rock office.

On April 13, 2026, members of Arkansas Community Organizations hand-delivered a letter to Cotton's office asking him to cut ties with Palantir Technologies. Organizer Nathan Huffmister said the group delivered a letter "asking him to sever his support for the company, which is being used by ICE and the Trump administration to violate Americans' right to privacy."

Norma Huffman, president of the group's Southwest Little Rock chapter, put it plainly:

"People that are being taken away from their families … Palantir is no good, and I cannot support a senator that gets funding from this type of organization."

These are Arkansans. They came to his office. They wrote it down and handed it to his staff. There is no record of Cotton responding.

The funding she was talking about

Huffman's line about "funding from this type of organization" is not a guess. It's in the Federal Election Commission's own records.

There is a super PAC called America One, registered in Alexandria, Virginia. Federal filings show it has spent $665,400 supporting Tom Cotton this election cycle. And on March 26, 2025, America One received $125,000 from Alexander C. Karp — listed with the employer "Palantir Technologies Inc." Karp is Palantir's chief executive.

What does Palantir do with the government? According to the ACLU, the company builds the software backbone of the deportation machine. Its case-management contract with ICE has grown past $145 million since 2014. In April 2025 it took a $30 million contract to build "ImmigrationOS," a system for identifying people to remove and tracking them through the process, running through September 2027. The systems pull records from Health and Human Services, the FBI, student visa databases, and commercial data brokers. ICE has said in writing that "Palantir remains the sole provider capable of meeting the specific needs and requirements of ICE."

So the picture is this. A company profiting from mass deportation puts money behind Cotton through its CEO. Arkansans show up at his office to object. He ignores them — and writes to the Justice Department asking it to investigate people who protest.

This is the same pattern we documented when ICE started paying contractors to scan social media and then subpoenaing the platforms to unmask Americans who criticize the agency. Nobody gets charged. That isn't a bug. Being investigated is the punishment.

It's also the same money pattern that Marsha Blackburn's data-center donations followed in Tennessee: praise the industry in public, collect from it in private, and treat the neighbors as the problem.

What this costs Arkansans

Cotton's own letter concedes the point his constituents are making. Data centers use enormous amounts of electricity and water. When they arrive, ordinary ratepayers can end up covering the cost of the new power lines and generation built to serve them. He wrote that Americans have "valid concerns" about "rising energy costs and strains on natural resources," and that Congress "should implement common sense regulations and legislation to protect communities from adverse effects."

He wrote that in June. He has not passed that legislation. What he did instead, in the very next paragraph, was ask the Justice Department to investigate the organizing.

You can believe both of the things Cotton wrote in that letter, or you can believe one. If the concerns are valid, the people raising them are neighbors, not foreign agents. If they're foreign agents, the concerns aren't valid. Cotton wants it both ways, because the one thing he clearly won't do is take the side of the people who have to pay the electric bill.

The bottom line

Tom Cotton has spent seven years asking federal agencies to investigate organizations that oppose him — the SPLC at the IRS, CodePink at the DOJ, and now the whole American movement against data centers, also at the DOJ.

In the same period, his own constituents came to his Little Rock office to ask him one thing about one company, and got nothing.

He is up for reelection this November. We deserve a senator who answers letters from Arkansans instead of writing letters about them.

Source

Sen. Tom Cotton, "Cotton to DOJ: Investigate Communist China Influence on Data Center Development", June 10, 2026. Photo: KATV.

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

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

On April 10, 2026, Carol Miller was home in West Virginia during a congressional recess, touring a manufacturing plant in Eleanor. A WOWK reporter asked her about three things Washington had done to her state.

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

On the cuts she wrote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the war

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the tariffs

The third question was tariffs. Chris Hamilton, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, had just described the president's tariffs as having severely damaged the coal industry's international operations and supply chain.

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

Her answer:

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

West Virginia is the state paying most dearly for the choices its congressional delegation has made. Its people are being asked to absorb an $83 million Medicaid hole, higher costs from tariffs, and a bill for a war — and the member who sits on the committee that wrote the first one says Washington will "consider what they need to do."

We deserve better.

Source

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

Clay Higgins Voted for a Bill Banning Officials From Pressuring Tech Companies to Censor. Then He Promised to Do Exactly That.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:38:00 +0000

On March 9, 2023, the House passed the Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act. The bill did one thing: it would have made it illegal for federal officials to lean on private companies to take down speech.

In the words of the official summary, it barred federal employees from "using their official authority to censor a private entity," and defined censorship as "influencing or coercing, or directing another to influence or coerce, for the removal of lawful speech."

It passed 219 to 206. Clay Higgins voted yes, and his office put out a press release under the headline "Higgins Helps Pass Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act."

Two and a half years later

On September 11, 2025 — the day after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University — Higgins posted this:

"I'm going to use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate an immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk."

Read that against the bill he voted for. Using official authority to influence or coerce a private entity for the removal of lawful speech. That is the thing H.R. 140 makes a fireable offense with civil penalties attached. It's not a close analogy. It's the definition.

And he didn't stop at social media. In the same statement:

"I'm also going after their business licenses and permitting; their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their driver's licenses should be revoked."

Roll Call reported the full version, which ends: "I'm basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk's assassination."

Take that list apart

A U.S. congressman said he would use his office to take away, from private citizens, for things they wrote online:

Their business license. Issued by states and parishes. Not a federal power.
Their permits. Same.
Their place at school. Public universities are bound by the First Amendment; expelling a student for protected speech is the textbook violation.
Their driver's license. A state document, issued for whether you can operate a car safely. There is no lawful path from an offensive post to a revoked license.

Higgins does not have the authority to do most of this. That's not a defense. A member of Congress announcing he'll aim the machinery of government at people for their opinions does damage whether or not he can pull it off — because the people hearing it can't be sure he can't, and the safest thing to do is shut up. That's the point of a threat.

Roll Call quoted George Washington University law professor Mary Anne Franks on the constitutional problem with the social-media half: pressuring private companies to punish users for their political views is "jawboning," which can violate the First Amendment even when the government never touches the speaker directly. As she put it, among the things the First Amendment protects, "you are allowed to say that some terrible thing that happened is a good thing."

That is uncomfortable and it is also the law. The Constitution does not have an exception for tasteless.

The man he was avenging

WBRZ, reporting Higgins's statement, described Kirk as a commentator "known for his advocacy for free speech, gun rights and opposition to progressive and liberal ideology." He made his name going onto campuses to say things the room didn't want to hear.

Higgins's response to his murder was to propose a federal blacklist.

He's said the quiet part before

This is not the first time Higgins has proposed using force or state power against Americans for expression.

In September 2020, he posted a photo of armed Black demonstrators with the caption: "One way ticket fellas. Have your affairs in order. Me?...I wouldn't even spill my beer. I'd drop any 10 of you where you stand." Facebook removed it for violating its violence and incitement rules. He posted again — "I'll advise when it's time gear up, mount up, and roll out" — and that came down too. The ACLU of Louisiana called for his censure.

In June 2017, hours after the London Bridge attack, he wrote of terrorism suspects: "Hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all."

The through-line isn't a party position. It's a habit of reaching for punishment — state punishment, or worse — as the first response to speech he doesn't like.

Why this one matters more than a bad tweet

Plenty of politicians say ugly things online. What separates this is the word "Congressional."

Higgins wasn't venting as a citizen. He said explicitly that he would use the authority of his office — the same office that put him in charge of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement — to get Americans banned, blacklisted and stripped of licenses over posts.

Two and a half years earlier he voted to make that behavior illegal for everyone else in the federal government.

We deserve better.

Source

Domenic Purdy, "Rep. Higgins says making light of Charlie Kirk's death should result in social media bans, revoked licenses," WBRZ, September 12, 2025.

Troy Balderson Said 'Congress Decides. Not the President, Not Elon Musk.' His Office Took It Back the Next Day.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:50:49 +0000

In February 2025, Troy Balderson stood in front of a room of business leaders from Westerville, Ohio, and said something almost no House Republican was saying out loud.

Trump's executive orders, he said, were "getting out of control." Trump and Elon Musk were exceeding their authority. And then this, as the Columbus Dispatch reported it:

"Congress has to decide whether or not the Department of Education goes away. Not the president, not Elon Musk. Congress decides."

It was the right answer. It is, in fact, the answer written into Article I of the Constitution.

It lasted about a day.

The walk-back

By February 21, The Hill was reporting that Balderson's office said his remarks had been "mischaracterized."

His spokesperson's clarification:

"Without congressional action, there is no certainty from one administration to the next. Congressman Balderson supports President Trump's efforts, but Congress must do its job to make his executive actions permanent."

Read that again, because it inverts the thing he'd said.

The Dispatch quote was about authority — that only Congress may decide whether a federal department exists. The clarification is about durability — that Congress should ratify what the president already did so it can't be undone later.

Balderson posted the same line on X himself: "It's up to us on Capitol Hill to make permanent his executive actions, ensuring continuity in public policy from one administration to the next."

So the position went from "Congress decides" to "Congress signs off." Twenty-four hours, no vote required.

Then came the actual test

Talk is easy to walk back. Roll calls aren't.

Four months later, the House took up H.R. 4, the Rescissions Act of 2025 — a bill that cancelled $9.4 billion Congress had already voted to spend on foreign aid and public broadcasting, at the president's request. It is the purest possible version of the question Balderson had raised in Westerville: when Congress appropriates money and the president decides not to spend it, who decides?

On June 12, 2025, Balderson voted Yea. It passed by two votes.

When the Senate sent back a narrower version on July 18, he voted Aye again to finish it.

The man who said "Congress decides" voted twice to let the president un-decide.

And on the Education Department specifically

The department he named in Westerville is the cleanest test of all, because Congress did eventually put its position in writing — and then didn't act on it.

We've documented that story: Congress wrote down that dismantling the Education Department without a law was illegal, passed the funding bill anyway, asked for briefings it never received, and started drafting new laws to make the dismantling legal after the fact.

Balderson has never introduced a bill to stop it. To his credit, he is not among the 37 Republicans who signed the one-sentence bill to abolish the department outright. But not signing that bill is a low bar for someone who told a room full of constituents that this was Congress's call and nobody else's.

He said Congress decides. Congress didn't decide. He voted with the people who took the decision away.

Why an Ohioan should care about a process fight

This can sound like inside baseball. It isn't.

When the president can cancel spending Congress approved, the money your representative "secured" for your district stops being a commitment and becomes a suggestion. Balderson sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and is vice chairman of its Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee — a job whose entire purpose is checking the executive branch.

He has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 and a 6% lifetime score, and he ranks #297 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding, with $40,000 from American Electric Power and $39,000 from Marathon Petroleum — companies his own committee regulates.

Ohio ranks 35th of 50 on the measures we track, and its Republicans in Congress voted to make Medicaid, food aid and jobs worse. Balderson was one of them.

He isn't taking the question

Constituents have been trying to ask him about this in person. In Knox County, organizers invited him to a town hall on August 23, 2025; he declined, and they held it without him, inviting the audience to submit the questions they would have asked. A Columbus Dispatch letter writer put it more directly: "Rep. Troy Balderson is ducking and dodging us. We'll hold a town hall anyway." In Athens County, residents who showed up got a meeting with his staff, not him.

The one time he did say the quiet part in a room in Ohio, his office spent the next day explaining he hadn't meant it.

We deserve better.

Source

Ailia Zehra, "Troy Balderson: Congress must 'do its job' to make Trump executive actions permanent," The Hill, February 21, 2025, reporting on and following up the Columbus Dispatch's account of his Westerville remarks. Roll calls from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.