MAGA Report Cards — Controversy

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

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

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

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

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

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

What he actually said

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

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

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

The seat he is running for

This is not a random open seat.

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

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

The expert CNN asked

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

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

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

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

His response was to attack his opponent's client

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republican leaders knew, and backed him anyway

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

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

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

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

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

What the job actually decides

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

Lisa McClain Says She Supports 'Anybody With an R Behind Their Name.' She Was Talking About Max Miller, Whose Ex-Wife Says He Threw Boiling Water at Her.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:20:40 +0000

On Sunday, September 6, 2026, Lisa McClain went on CBS's "Face the Nation" and was asked whether she supports the reelection of her Ohio colleague Max Miller, whom Margaret Brennan introduced as "the Ohio Republican congressman who's been accused of domestic abuse by his two former partners."

McClain is the House Republican Conference Chair — the fourth-ranking Republican in the House. Her answer was not that the allegations were false, or that she had looked into them. It was this:

"I support anybody with an R behind their name."

She added, in the same interview: "At the end of the day, he's our nominee right now. I wish the allegations weren't true."

What she is supporting

On July 30, 2026, Miller's ex-wife, Emily Moreno, asked a court for a restraining order barring Miller from contacting her lawyers. In her filings she alleged that Miller verbally and physically abused her and their two-year-old daughter. According to CBS News, she says he threw boiling water at her, pointed a gun at her, and threw her against a wall — and that their daughter suffered a fractured clavicle and bruising.

Emily Moreno's father is Senator Bernie Moreno, Republican of Ohio. He said in August that his daughter "lives in constant fear of this man," that he now picks his granddaughter up at a police station for custody exchanges because he does not know "what this guy's capable of," and that Miller "should not serve in the House of Representatives." We covered that when he said it.

Miller denies everything. On an August 2 livestream he said his former wife "is engaging in a pattern of reporting incredible, serious and destructive allegations with absolutely no evidence." To rebut her, he released a Dropbox folder of documents — which, CBS reported, appeared to include naked photographs of his own daughter.

Her own party has already broken with him

McClain's line was that she supports anybody with an R next to their name. A lot of Republicans with an R next to their names have declined to.

Brennan read her the list on air: Katie Britt of Alabama, Jim Banks of Indiana, Jon Husted of Ohio, Roger Marshall of Kansas and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia have all called on Miller to resign or quit, and Tim Sheehy of Montana said "this guy is clearly a degenerate sociopath. He should step aside and seek help." Miller's former father-in-law, a sitting Republican senator, says he needs "serious psychological help."

President Trump himself called Miller on August 3 — the day before the deadline to withdraw without triggering a special-election primary in Ohio — to raise concerns, CBS reported at the time.

Miller did not withdraw. The deadline passed on August 4.

So the position McClain is defending is not the party's consensus. It is leadership's, and only leadership's. Speaker Mike Johnson took the same line on August 31, calling Miller "a great member of Congress" and describing the allegations as "some issues in his personal life."

"Let the process play out"

McClain's other formulation was that "divorces are ugly" and "at the end of the day, we got to let the process play out."

That is a reasonable thing to say about a contested custody filing. It is a strange thing to say as a reason to actively campaign for someone in the middle of it. Nothing about letting a court process play out requires the fourth-ranking House Republican to go on national television and vouch for the man.

She then explained what the vouching is for:

"I'm focused on winning the House back, taking the House back, keeping the House because we are the only party that's actually putting more money in your pocket, making sure that crime is down, securing the border, and rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. And Max Miller has been a good advocate for his constituents doing that."

Republicans hold a narrow House majority. The party in the White House usually loses seats in a midterm. That is the whole calculation, and McClain said it out loud: the seat is worth more than the question.

This is not McClain's first careful sentence

McClain told POLITICO in February 2025 that the secret to her leadership job was honesty — "just tell the truth." We went through her record against that standard: in the same interview she repeated a false claim about Social Security, and a month later she told a Michigan mother there were no cuts to Medicaid, then voted for the bill that cut it.

"I support anybody with an R behind their name" is at least candid. It is also a description of a job she is not doing.

What the record shows

Lisa McClain, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House, said on national television on September 6, 2026 that she supports Max Miller's reelection because "I support anybody with an R behind their name." Miller's ex-wife has told an Ohio court he threw boiling water at her, pointed a gun at her, and injured their two-year-old daughter. Six Republican senators named on the program had already called on him to quit, and a seventh, the accuser's own father, says he should not serve in the House. McClain's stated reason for backing him anyway is holding the House majority.

Source

House GOP conference chair says Rep. Max Miller is "our nominee right now" despite abuse allegations by Sophia Vlahakis, CBS News, September 6, 2026, and the program's own transcript. Photo: CBS News.

Susan Collins Voted to Convict Trump Over January 6. Her Campaign Made a Man From the Oath Keepers' Membership Rolls a Town Chair.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:46:11 +0000

On February 13, 2021, Susan Collins was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump for inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol. It is the vote her allies reach for whenever anyone calls her a rubber stamp.

In June of this year, her campaign named Wayne Erkkinen its town chair in Greenville. The Anti-Defamation League had already identified Erkkinen, four years earlier, as one of the Mainers on the Oath Keepers' membership rolls.

Who Erkkinen is, and how he was identified

Erkkinen, 81, is a Piscataquis County commissioner. As town chair, he is responsible for grassroots organizing and voter outreach in Greenville — the kind of job that puts a person in front of neighbors, at doors, on phones, for a campaign that is fighting for its life.

His name surfaced in 2022. The Portland Press Herald reported that the ADL's Center on Extremism had gone through a five-gigabyte cache of Oath Keepers emails, chat logs, and membership data leaked by the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets. The rolls held 38,000 names. Nationwide, the ADL found more than 370 members of law enforcement, more than 100 military members, and more than 80 elected officials. In Maine, 215 people had at some point been paying members.

The ADL released Erkkinen's name at the Press Herald's request, along with that of a Gorham town councilor. It withheld the names of a Maine police officer and two first-responders it had also identified, saying the report was not meant to "unmask" rank-and-file personnel.

Erkkinen did not respond to a phone message left at his home in Greenville Junction in 2022.

What the group was

This matters because of what the Oath Keepers actually did.

Its founder, Stewart Rhodes, was indicted for seditious conspiracy against the United States for his role in planning the January 6 assault. Seventeen members faced federal charges over the attack. Rhodes was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison in May 2023 — the longest sentence handed down over January 6, and the first to carry a terrorism enhancement. Trump released him on his first day back in office.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks violent extremist groups, describes the Oath Keepers as an anti-government organization built on the belief that federal authorities are conspiring to impose martial law, confiscate weapons, and herd opponents into camps.

That is the group. Not a veterans' club with a bad news cycle.

What Erkkinen says now

Asked about it this week, Erkkinen told the Daily Beast he joined in 2010 thinking it was an organization for law enforcement and military veterans who had sworn to defend the Constitution. He said he quit "years ago," before January 6, because he didn't want to be part of something violent.

"It wasn't what I thought it would be," he said.

Take him at his word. It changes nothing about the decision Collins' campaign made. A national organization had published his name in 2022, a Maine newspaper had printed it, and four years later her campaign handed him a job running voter outreach.

Collins' campaign, per the Daily Beast, argued that it cannot be expected to keep tabs on every grassroots volunteer on its books.

The vetting she says she does

This is a campaign that has spent 2026 telling Mainers that Collins is different from the rest of her party — a senator, in the Daily Beast's words, "who claims to be right in the weeds of Maine's issues." She has represented Maine in the Senate since 1997.

A town chair is not a stranger who signed up on a website. It is a named appointment the campaign announces. Someone chose him and someone published it.

And the January 6 vote is the whole argument for her independence. If that vote meant what she says it meant, the people who show up in her name in Maine towns are exactly where it should be visible.

The pattern this fits

It is not the first time this year that what Collins does has diverged from what her January 6 vote is supposed to prove. On July 28 she voted to confirm a director of national intelligence who would not say Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

Her deciding-vote record tells a related story. Collins has cast 200 deciding votes in the Senate. The Maine Democratic Party counts 19 of them as confirming Trump nominees, and none as stopping one.

The short version

Susan Collins voted to convict Trump for inciting January 6. In June 2026, her Senate campaign named as its Greenville town chair a man the Anti-Defamation League had publicly identified in 2022 as one of 215 Mainers on the Oath Keepers' leaked membership rolls — the group whose founder was convicted of seditious conspiracy for planning that same attack. Her campaign's answer is that it cannot keep tabs on every volunteer.

Source

Thomas Kika, "Collins Re-Election Bid Stumbles Over 'Oath Keeper' On Campaign Staff", The National Memo, September 2, 2026, reporting on the Daily Beast's story; and Matt Byrne, "Gorham councilor, Piscataquis County commissioner appear on Oath Keepers member lists", Portland Press Herald, September 7, 2022. Photo: official Senate portrait.

Byron Donalds Says the No. 1 Way to Stop Another 9/11 in Florida Is Blocking Sharia Law. Sharia Law Had Nothing to Do With 9/11.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:51:01 +0000

Days before the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, Byron Donalds stood at a town hall in The Villages and posed a question to the room about protecting Florida from another attack like it.

Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor of Florida, answered it himself:

"Now, how do you prepare Florida for the potential of another 9/11? The No. 1 thing I would say is we cannot have Sharia law take a foothold in our state. Absolutely not. Absolutely not."

Sharia law had nothing to do with September 11.

What actually caused the attacks, according to the people who investigated them

The 9/11 Commission spent twenty months on the question Donalds asked. Its answer is on the first page of the report's executive summary: the pain "was inflicted by 19 young Arabs acting at the behest of Islamist extremists headquartered in distant Afghanistan," and "the 9/11 attack was driven by Usama Bin Ladin."

That is a terrorist organization operating out of a foreign country. It is not a body of religious law, and no religious legal code let it into the United States.

The Commission was equally specific about what went wrong on this end. "Across the government, there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management." Four categories, named in a single sentence. Not one of them is a court doctrine, a statute, or a religious tradition. They are descriptions of what the federal government failed to do: it did not take the threat seriously enough, did not build the tools to counter it, and did not share what it knew across agencies.

Donalds knows this. He said it himself, at the same town hall, right after the Sharia line.

"A lot of 9/11 was really information flow, or lack thereof. We had agencies that were siloing information at the federal level. People were not talking."

That is, broadly, the Commission's actual conclusion. He put it second. First was a religious legal tradition that appears nowhere in the finding.

Florida's real connection to the attacks is documented, and it is not this

The hijackers did spend time in Florida, which is part of what makes the substitution so stark. The Commission's account of how the plot was assembled puts three of the four pilots in one small Gulf Coast town. Mohamed Atta "started flight instruction at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida," and Marwan al Shehhi enrolled there with him. Ziad Jarrah "had already arranged to attend the Florida Flight Training Center (FFTC) in Venice, Florida." When the muscle hijackers arrived in 2001, "the majority settled in Florida."

They learned to fly at Florida flight schools, on student and tourist visas, in plain view. What a governor of Florida might have to say about that is a real subject. Nothing in it runs through Sharia law.

The one genuine 9/11 fight a Florida politician led was about a foreign government, not a foreign legal code. Former Senator Bob Graham spent years pushing to release the "28 pages" withheld from the 2002 congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks, which he co-chaired. He believed they would reveal America's "true relationship with Saudi Arabia." They came out in 2016. Donalds did not mention them.

Sharia law has never been law anywhere in the United States

The second half of the claim is as empty as the first. There is no American jurisdiction where Sharia law is or has been in force, and the last state that tried to ban it could not produce an example of the thing it was banning.

Oklahoma voters passed a constitutional amendment barring state courts from considering Sharia in 2010. A federal appeals court blocked it. As the American Civil Liberties Union recorded at the time, the court wrote that the state's lawyers "do not identify any actual problem the challenged amendment seeks to solve," and that they "admitted...that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law."

So the top item on Donalds's counterterrorism list is a threat the last state to legislate against it could not find a single instance of, aimed at an attack it played no part in.

Florida passed its own version anyway. Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1471 on April 6, 2026, which the Governor's Office says "reinforces that Florida courts may not apply or enforce foreign or religious law if doing so would violate constitutional rights." Donalds is running to succeed DeSantis and is campaigning on stopping something his own party's governor already signed a bill about five months ago. That is embarrassing. It is also beside the point. A law against a thing that does not exist does not make the thing exist.

What he said next

Donalds did not stop at Florida law. He went after Democrats, who unlike Republicans, he said, are "playing footsie with the radical Islamists." Then he explained what he meant:

"We know what happens when you let radical Islam into your country. We have proof of it, looking at Western Europe today. Western Europe allowed radical Islam to take hold, and we're seeing, unfortunately, some things that are not working out for the European nations. We don't want that in Florida. We don't want that in America."

Strip out the softeners and the claim is that letting Muslims into a country is what causes terrorism, and that one American political party is on the terrorists' side. He offered no evidence for either, at a town hall, days before an anniversary that a lot of Americans mark by remembering people they lost.

This is a scripted party message, not one candidate's slip

Donalds is not improvising. He is reading from a message the Republican Party has spent real money building.

We documented the spending: Republicans put more than $10 million into making "Sharia" a campaign word, and a pollster found anti-Muslim sentiment in this country spikes during election cycles rather than after terrorist attacks.

The same message shows up all over this site's coverage. Oklahoma's Josh Brecheen warned a town hall about the Ottoman Empire, got laughed at, and then cosponsored a bill to bar anyone who adheres to Sharia from entering the country. Mike Rogers (MI) claimed his Muslim opponent "believes America deserved 9/11," a quote from a different person entirely; PolitiFact rated it Pants on Fire and noted the attack evokes anti-Muslim tropes.

Same word, same anniversary, same election year. The anniversary is the point. Attaching Sharia to September 11 is what gives the word its charge, and it is why the claim gets made in the first week of September rather than any other week of the year.

What the record shows

Days before the 25th anniversary of September 11, Byron Donalds told a town hall in The Villages that the number one way to protect Florida from another such attack is stopping Sharia law. The commission that investigated the attacks attributed them to al Qaeda and to four failures of the American government, none of which was a religious legal code. Three of the four hijacker pilots trained at flight schools in one Florida town, which Donalds did not mention. Sharia law has never been in force in any American state, and the last state to ban it could not name one case where a court had applied it. He then told the audience that Democrats are "playing footsie with the radical Islamists."

He is asking to run the state where the hijackers learned to fly, and his top counterterrorism priority is a thing that had no role in what they did.

Source

A.G. Gancarski, "Byron Donalds says the key to preventing another 9/11 is stopping Sharia law", Florida Politics, September 1, 2026. Photo: Florida Politics.

Mike Johnson Says Max Miller Has Been a 'Great Member of Congress.' Miller Is Under an Ethics Investigation for Domestic Violence, and the Accuser's Father Is a Republican Senator.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:47:21 +0000

The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation in August into whether Rep. Max Miller of Ohio "may have engaged in domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use," in violation of the House's own conduct rules.

On Monday, August 31, 2026, CNN's Manu Raju asked the Speaker of the House whether he supports Miller's reelection campaign.

Mike Johnson said yes.

"He has been a great member of Congress," Johnson said. "He has some issues in his personal life he's working through. The House Ethics Committee is looking into that and any implications it may have." He added that he would "let due process play out."

What "some issues in his personal life" refers to

Max Miller's ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has accused him of hurling scalding hot water at her, holding a gun to her head, and breaking their 2-year-old daughter's collarbone. The two divorced last year and have been in a custody fight over the child.

Miller denies all of it. He sued his ex-wife for defamation in May, and says he filed his own paperwork to open an ethics investigation to clear his name.

Emily Moreno's father is Bernie Moreno, the Republican senator from Ohio. He is one of several Republicans who have called on Miller to resign. Last month he described what his family has been through:

"My daughter lives in constant fear of this man, not like something that's existential, but deeply in her heart, she fears what this guy is capable of. You can't fathom what that makes me feel like when the dad's number one job is to protect your kids."

Moreno said his family had gone through "the seventh level of hell," and asked Miller to "seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake."

That is the record the Speaker of the House looked at before calling Miller a great member of Congress.

"Due process" is doing work it cannot do

Johnson's answer has a defensible-sounding structure. There is an investigation. Let it finish. Do not prejudge.

Except that is not what he did. He was not asked whether Miller should be expelled or punished. He was asked whether he supports Miller's campaign — a political endorsement, entirely within his discretion, requiring no finding of fact from anyone.

He could have said the honest version of "due process": I'm not going to weigh in on his race while the Ethics Committee is working. Instead he volunteered a character reference.

And the timing is not neutral, either. The Ethics Committee observes a 60-day blackout before an election, which begins September 4. The committee is not expected to report anything before November. "Let due process play out" means, in practice, that voters go to the polls with nothing.

The rest of the party is not united behind this

The striking thing about Johnson's answer is how much company Miller has lost.

Republican senators called on him to resign. A conservative group called him unfit to serve. A poll had him down 14. Miller's response to all of it was to loan his own campaign $1 million and stay on the ballot. Cook Political Report has since moved Ohio's 7th District from "likely Republican" to "toss up."

His own former father-in-law, a sitting Republican senator, wants him gone.

Against that, Johnson is not "letting the process play out." He is picking a side in a fight where much of his own party has already picked the other one.

He is the third Republican leader to take this position, and the pattern is the point

Johnson is not alone, and that is what makes this worth writing down rather than filing as one bad answer on a rope line.

Rep. Jim Jordan, asked on CNN whether Miller should resign, called it "a family matter" and said he hopes Miller wins — weeks after going hard at a Democrat facing similar accusations.

Ohio's Republican nominee for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, was caught on leaked audio backing Miller "up and down the ticket," explaining that Republican control of the House comes first: "If we compromise that, we're done."

Three Republican leaders, three versions of the same answer. Ramaswamy's is the only one that says the quiet part: the seat matters more.

The party that spent years telling America it stands for family values has settled on a rule for its own members. When the accused is one of ours and the seat is a toss-up, the allegations become a personal matter and the process becomes a reason to wait.

What the record shows

On August 31, 2026, House Speaker Mike Johnson publicly endorsed the reelection of Max Miller, a member under House Ethics Committee investigation for possible domestic violence and abuse, calling him a "great member of Congress" with "some issues in his personal life." The accusations — scalding water, a gun to the head, a 2-year-old's fractured collarbone — come from Miller's ex-wife, whose father is a sitting Republican senator who says she lives in constant fear of him and has asked Miller to resign. The Ethics Committee's pre-election blackout begins September 4, so its findings are not expected to reach voters before they vote.

Source

Sarah Davis, "Johnson says he supports Max Miller's reelection bid: 'Great member of Congress'", The Hill, September 1, 2026. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Stephanie Bice Told a Room of Republican Students That Trump Is Costing Her Party Votes. When It Leaked, Her Campaign Said She Was Taken Out of Context.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:06:29 +0000

On Thursday, August 27, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America" in the middle of an escalating trade war with Canada.

The same day, Oklahoma congresswoman Stephanie Bice stood in front of a gathering of Republican students at Oklahoma State University and said this:

"We're not helping ourselves today when we decide to rename Lake Ontario 'Lake America.' I mean, yeah, these are not—this does not help the case, right?"

She was speaking privately. The Bulwark obtained the audio, and it went further than the lake.

What else is on the tape

Bice told the students about a conversation from a board meeting the day before:

"I was at a board meeting yesterday with a group, and one of the execs said to me, 'I'm a Republican. I've been a Republican for a long time, but I have Trump fatigue.' It's a fair statement, you know?"

And she said what she is actually worried about heading into November:

"The challenge that we have is that we have to get over the narrative that 'I don't like this guy, so I'm going to vote for the Democrat,' because I'm telling you right now, I'm hearing it already."

"And what happens is that'll impact me because … two things will either happen. They're going to vote for the Democrat and they may split [the] ticket and vote for me and a few others, or—this is my bigger fear right now—people don't go vote."

That is a sitting Republican member of Congress telling a room of her own party's college students that the President of her own party is depressing her party's turnout, that a longtime Republican executive told her so to her face, and that she thinks the complaint is fair.

Four days later, a colleague put the lake in a bill

The thing Bice said "does not help the case" did not stop. On August 31, 2026, Florida congressman Jimmy Patronis introduced H.R. 10196, whose entire official title is "To rename Lake Ontario as 'Lake America'" — a statute to do by law what Trump had done by executive order. It was referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources the same day. Its text has not been published yet.

Bice said the renaming was hurting Republicans on a Thursday. By the following Monday, a member of her conference had introduced legislation to write it into law.

Her campaign's answer was that she didn't mean it

Once the recording surfaced, Bice's campaign issued a statement:

"The characterization of Congresswoman Bice's remarks is inaccurate. She was relaying a comment made by someone else and discussing the importance of Republicans turning out and voting for the entire ticket. Any suggestion otherwise takes her comments out of context."

She was relaying someone else's line about Trump fatigue — that part is true, and the recording bears it out. But "It's a fair statement" is her own. So is "We're not helping ourselves." So is "I'm hearing it already."

The campaign's position is not that she was misquoted. It is that she was misunderstood.

Publicly, she is exactly where she has always been

None of this has produced a public word of criticism.

Trump endorsed Bice's reelection in March 2026, calling her a "Highly Respected America First Congresswoman." She voted against impeaching him after January 6. Nothing in her public record reflects the concerns she voiced to those students, and she has not repeated them on the record since.

It is worth noting where her constituents fit in this. Bice chairs the House Administration subcommittee on modernizing Congress, the panel whose stated purpose is to improve "how Congress works for the American People" — and she will not hold an in-person town hall with her own constituents in Oklahoma's 5th District.

So the voters she represents did not get this candor. A room of Republican students did, and the rest of us only because the audio leaked.

The short version

Speaking to Republican students at Oklahoma State University on the day Trump renamed Lake Ontario, Stephanie Bice said the move "does not help the case," repeated a Republican executive's admission of "Trump fatigue" and called it "a fair statement," and said her bigger fear is Republicans staying home in November. Four days later a fellow House Republican introduced a bill to write the renaming into law. When the audio leaked, her campaign said she had been taken out of context — and she has said none of it publicly in the days since.

Sources

House GOPer in Private Meeting: Trump's Exhausting Our Voters — The Bulwark, August 28, 2026, by Joe Perticone.

'Trump fatigue': U.S. Rep. Stephanie Bice addresses leaked audio — KFOR, August 31, 2026.

Leaked Audio Reveals MAGA Rep Venting About Trump's Bizarre Priorities — The Daily Beast, August 29, 2026, by Josh Fiallo.

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

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

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

Then he asked a question.

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

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

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

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

The second speaker said it more plainly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A civil rights group calls their caucus a hate group

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

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

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

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

There is no takeover to stop

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

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

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

Las Vegas in August is an election cycle.

Both men have been here before

This is not a first offense for either of them.

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

Maria Elvira Salazar Said Trump's Venezuela Oil Deal Was Just Letting an 'Acting Dictator' Buy Time. An Hour Later She Deleted the Post and Called the Deal Great.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:44:31 +0000

On Friday, August 28, 2026, President Trump announced that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had cut a deal with Venezuela's acting president, Delcy Rodríguez. American companies get access to what Trump called "65 BILLION BARRELS" of proven Venezuelan oil, "at no cost to the American Taxpayer." The Venezuelan government said the arrangement covers 17 oil fields and would bring roughly $100 billion in investment and more than $209 billion in tax revenue into the country.

The next day, Maria Elvira Salazar — who represents Miami's 27th District, home to one of the largest Venezuelan communities in the United States — went on X and said what she thought of it.

"Any oil 'deal' with Venezuela's interim regime has an expiration date: the day President Trump leaves the White House.

Venezuela's acting dictator is just buying time. The regime has stolen American investments before, and it will do it again the moment it can.

A lasting deal can only be made with a democratically elected government that respects the rule of law, protects private property, and is backed by strong democratic institutions.

No democracy. No lasting deal. Period."

She posted it in English and in Spanish. Then she deleted both.

About an hour later, according to the New York Post, she was back with a new one.

"The U.S.-Venezuela oil deal is a great deal for the United States and the Venezuelan people."

She added that "for years, China took advantage of Venezuela's weakness to buy its oil at deep discounts. Now America is stepping in, and American investment and influence offer Venezuela a path toward prosperity, stability, and security." She wrote, "We want this deal to last 100 years" — and kept the condition from the post she had just deleted: "Only an administration backed by strong democratic institutions and the rule of law can guarantee that. This will only be possible with free elections."

Nothing about the deal changed in that hour. Delcy Rodríguez was still the person on the other side of the table — Salazar said so herself in the second post, allowing that "Delcy is the wrong person to make this deal with." The regime that she said had "stolen American investments before" was the same regime. What changed was the verdict: a deal she had just given an expiration date became one she wanted to last a hundred years.

Nine months ago she said oil money was the problem

This is not a case of a member being caught out on a subject she has no record on. Salazar has built a large part of her political identity on Venezuela.

On December 10, 2025, she praised a Trump administration move against the regime in terms that could not be plainer:

"Maduro's illegitimate narco-terror regime is kept afloat by two things: DRUGS and OIL MONEY. If we want democracy restored in Venezuela, we have to choke BOTH of the Regime's life lines. Well done @POTUS!"

Oil money. Choke it. Well done.

Eight and a half months later, the same administration signed a deal that Venezuela's own government projects will send it more than $209 billion in tax revenue, and her objection lasted about sixty minutes.

Salazar also posted on January 3, 2026, after U.S. Special Forces captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife, that "the narco-terror imposed by the Maduro regime is over" and that it was "time for the rightful leaders of Venezuela to restore freedom." Rodríguez, the person now running the country and signing oil contracts with Washington, was Maduro's own vice president. She is not one of the rightful leaders Salazar had in mind. Salazar has said publicly that opposition leader María Corina Machado "does not need Delcy Rodríguez's permission" to return to her own country.

Her deleted post said there could be no deal without democracy first. Her replacement post said the deal was great, and democracy was what would make it last.

Her district is not an abstraction here

Salazar's district is Miami. Venezuelan exiles who left because of that regime live there, work there, and vote there. In February 2025 the same administration she is now praising moved to strip Temporary Protected Status from more than 300,000 Venezuelans nationwide, and Salazar was one of the three Miami Republicans who put out a statement when the Supreme Court let it happen.

She has been down this road before. Her neighbor in the Miami delegation, Mario Diaz-Balart, wrote letters defending the Venezuelans in his district and then voted to give ICE $38 billion. And Salazar's own record already includes a habit of announcing a principle in public and then not carrying it: she has toured the country for a year promoting an immigration bill that has never gotten a hearing, and she handed a children's hospital a ceremonial check for money she had voted against.

The New York Post asked her for comment. She did not respond.

The bottom line

In December 2025, Maria Elvira Salazar said the Venezuelan regime was kept alive by "DRUGS and OIL MONEY" and that America had to choke both. On August 29, 2026, the day after Trump announced an oil deal that Venezuela's own government projects will send that regime more than $209 billion in tax revenue, she posted — in two languages — that Venezuela's "acting dictator is just buying time" and that there could be "no democracy, no lasting deal." She deleted both posts within the hour and replaced them with a statement calling the deal "great," keeping her condition about free elections and dropping her objection to the deal.

Source

Florida rep deletes X post blasting Trump's oil deal with Venezuela, then posts again to praise it — Adry Torres, New York Post, August 29, 2026. Image: the deleted post, captured six minutes after it was published (New York Post).

Kevin Hern Called Tulsa City Councilors to Warn Them Off a Human Rights Ordinance. A Year Later, It Still Isn't Law.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:22:11 +0000

In June 2025, the Tulsa City Council took up a change to the city's human rights ordinances. It did three things.

The first was housekeeping — cleaning up gender-specific language, swapping "he" for "the contractor," adding a seat on the Human Rights Commission for the new Asian Affairs Commission, and updating the Tulsa Women's Commission's name.

The second added veterans to the city's list of protected classes.

The third took protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity — which Tulsa already applied to housing — and extended them to public accommodations.

Its sponsors said it overrode no state or federal law and altered no employment standards. Fifteen people signed up to speak in favor at the June meeting. Nobody signed up to speak against it. Mayor Monroe Nichols said he'd sign it as soon as it reached his desk.

The council tabled it 7–2 and set a vote for September 10. Three councilors — Anthony Archie, Carol Bush and Karen Gilbert — asked for more time with the language. Some councilors also raised a worry that the federal government might pull money from Tulsa if it passed. The sponsor, Councilor Laura Bellis, disputed that.

Then Kevin Hern started calling them.

What the councilors say he said

Hern was then, and still is, Oklahoma's First District congressman, representing Tulsa. Multiple councilors told the Tulsa World in August 2025 that he had phoned them about the ordinance.

Councilor Anthony Archie described the call this way:

"He has been receiving a lot of feedback from folks at the state level and some folks at the federal level about the ordinance, and he's concerned that it may hamper his ability to bring resources back to the state of Oklahoma."

Archie was careful about what he had and hadn't been told. He said he did not come away thinking passage would mean a "one-for-one" loss of any particular federal funding source. What he came away with was this:

"But I came away with the idea that the White House was watching, and folks in the executive and the legislative branch federally were watching, and that the decisions we make here in Tulsa affects his ability to navigate his role as a representative for Oklahoma."

Councilor Karen Gilbert said Hern called her too, and put it more bluntly: "The call was to inform of concerns from the federal executive branch how our federal funding could be cut."

Councilor Carol Bush said Hern raised the same concerns she had already raised herself: "It was (about) the unintended consequences when we do things. Does this, you know, shine a light on us that maybe we don't need? Does it jeopardize federal funding?"

Council Chairman Phil Lakin declined to say whether he got a call.

Hern's office did not respond to several requests for comment from the Tulsa World.

It worked

The day before that story ran, Bellis and Councilor Lori Decter Wright abruptly halted discussion of the ordinance. In a joint statement read to their colleagues, they said "the highest levels of the current federal administration are actively spreading misinformation about the ordinance" in order to spread fear and make it fail.

"The malicious misinformation campaign undermines the hard work of many in our community who simply want to make certain Tulsa is a city that welcomes, supports, and protects everyone who calls it home, works here, or comes to visit."

Asked directly, Wright and Bellis confirmed that Hern was one of the people they were talking about.

The context made the threat legible without anyone having to spell it out. The Trump administration had been explicit about withholding money from entities running diversity programs, and within the previous month city councils in Dallas and Fort Worth had ended their cities' DEI programs to head off the loss of millions in federal funds. Tulsa's councilors did not need a specific grant named to understand the shape of the thing.

Look at where that leaves the ordinance today. Tulsa's own city government still lists the protected classes for public accommodations as "race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, age, or disability." Sexual orientation and gender identity are not among them. Neither is veteran status. A full year later, the law reads exactly as it did before.

Not his job

Hern does not represent the City of Tulsa on the City Council. He holds a seat in the U.S. House. The Tulsa World's editorial board made that point with a list, published September 7, 2025, of seven things he could have been doing instead of calling city councilors.

Number one on the list: host a town hall where the public is invited and people can ask him questions directly.

That one lands, because our own research on Hern found that the last time he is known to have taken open questions from a room of Oklahoma constituents was February 2025 — at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Glenpool where he was pressed hard about Elon Musk and mass federal layoffs. Weeks later a public lunch with him was canceled after more than 100 activists signed up. When a Tulsa station asked all five Oklahoma House members whether they'd keep meeting constituents, two said yes and Hern didn't respond. In April 2025, constituents held a town hall for him anyway and asked their questions to an empty chair, while he was in El Salvador touring the CECOT mega-prison and promoting the trip on Newsmax.

The editorial's other suggestions included getting Ryan Walters to release federal education money still undelivered to Oklahoma schools almost two months into the fiscal year, and working to stop the clawbacks of money he and his colleagues had already voted for. It closed on the asymmetry:

"We bet Congress made a city councilor or two wince a time or three with the belief that federal decisions would hurt Tulsa. But they didn't bother representatives. They are too busy working with other leaders trying to run a city that's progressing into the future."

The same lever, used elsewhere

Threatening a smaller government's funding to make it drop a policy is not a Hern invention; it is the standard play of this era, and it usually works.

The Education Department opened a case against Ann Arbor's schools over a policy on not outing transgender students to their parents, with the district's federal funding as the enforcement mechanism. Greg Abbott threatened two Texas airports' funding over a foot-washing sink, and DFW folded the same day.

What distinguishes Hern's version is how little had to be said. He never had to name a grant. Archie's account is that no specific dollar was ever put on the table — just the information that Washington was watching, delivered by the congressman whose job is to bring Washington's money home. That was sufficient.

Hern is now running for the U.S. Senate.

What the record shows

Tulsa's City Council was set to vote on September 10, 2025, on adding veterans as a protected class and extending the city's existing LGBTQ discrimination protections from housing to public accommodations. Nobody had signed up to speak against it; fifteen people spoke for it; the mayor said he would sign it. Then Kevin Hern, the area's congressman, phoned councilors to say he was worried the ordinance could hamper his ability to bring federal resources to Oklahoma and that the White House was watching. Three councilors — Archie, Gilbert and Bush — described those calls on the record. The sponsors pulled the ordinance, naming Hern as one of the people pressuring them. Hern's office would not comment. Today, Tulsa's public accommodations ordinance still does not cover sexual orientation, gender identity or veteran status.

Sources

Hern called to raise concerns about proposed human rights ordinance, city councilors say — Kevin Canfield, Tulsa World, August 28, 2025, and Editorial: 7 things Rep. Kevin Hern could do rather than bother the Tulsa City Council — Tulsa World Editorial Board, September 7, 2025. Current protected classes verified against the City of Tulsa's own human rights page. Photo: Daniel Shular / Tulsa World.

Trump Pushed a Rival Out of the Kentucky Senate Race for Andy Barr in May. By Late July, Barr's Website Had Deleted the 'Trump-Endorsed' Badge and the Rally Photo.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:15:51 +0000

On May 1, 2026, Donald Trump did more for Andy Barr than endorse him. He endorsed Barr for Mitch McConnell's open Senate seat and pushed one of Barr's rivals, businessman Nate Morris, out of the race entirely — offering him an ambassadorship instead. Morris took the deal and endorsed Barr. Eighteen days later, Barr swept the Republican primary.

Eight weeks after that, Barr's campaign website started deleting Trump.

What came off the site

We checked this ourselves against the Internet Archive rather than take anyone's word for it. Here is the Barr for Senate homepage on July 8, 2026, compared to the same page on July 28, 2026.

Gone from the homepage in those three weeks:

The red "Trump-Endorsed" badge sitting directly under his name.
The photo of Barr and Trump onstage at a rally, arms raised together — replaced with a picture of Barr walking outdoors with two children.
The "Endorsed by President Trump" pop-up, with its embedded video.
"Close the Border" as a section heading.
"Stand Proudly for Life" — deleted as a policy plank.
"Cut Waste, Grow Freedom" — also deleted.

Added in the same edit: "Backing the Blue" and "Fighting for Farmers." The rewritten issues page also named his Democratic opponent, Charles Booker, for the first time.

The count of the word "Trump" in the homepage's visible text went from five to two. The visible slogan changed too: "Kentucky Tough. 100% America First." became "Kentucky Tough, Kentucky First, Always."

America First, out. Kentucky First, in.

The Lexington Times, which first spotted the edits, dated them to July 16 using the site's own WordPress "last modified" timestamps, and counted 16 Trump references removed across the whole site — the homepage, the biography page and the issues page. On the biography page, according to the Times, three sentences disappeared, including the boasts that Barr was the first member of Kentucky's delegation to endorse Trump in 2024 and served as chairman of Trump's Kentucky primary campaign.

What stayed

The rewrite was not a clean break. Those same two boasts survive on the homepage, in the short "Meet Andy" summary, where they still read "First Member of Kentucky Delegation to Endorse President Trump" and "The Kentucky Chairman for President Trump's 2024 Primary Campaign." They were cut from the biography page and left standing one click away. The endorsements page still lists "President Donald J. Trump" first under "Key Endorsements," and the campaign's May 1 press release announcing that endorsement is still online.

And the hidden description that search engines and social networks display when someone shares the homepage was never touched. It still reads "Andy Barr. Kentucky Tough. 100% America First." — on the July 8 capture, on the July 28 capture, and on the live site today.

The campaign's answer

Asked what happened, Barr's communications director, Alex Bellizzi, did not explain the deletions. He said this instead:

"Kentuckians know that Andy Barr is proud to have President Trump's endorsement. He's laser focused on defending Kentucky common sense versus crazy Socialism. Andy Barr can't wait to keep fighting for Kentucky alongside President Trump as our next U.S. Senator."

That is a statement about how proud Barr is, offered in place of an answer about why the proof of it was taken down.

Why this is worth noticing

Kentucky is not a swing state. Trump carried it by roughly 30 points in 2024, and nonpartisan forecasters rate this Senate seat safe or solid Republican. Barr is not scrubbing Trump because he is scared of losing Kentucky.

He is doing it because a candidate's website is the one piece of campaign material the candidate fully controls, and what a campaign puts on it is a calculation about who they need in the room. In May, when the primary was the whole ballgame, the badge and the rally photo were the first things a visitor saw. By late July, with a general election ahead, they were a liability worth deleting — quietly, without a word to anyone, and without dropping the endorsement itself.

That is the tell. Barr didn't return the endorsement. He didn't disagree with Trump about anything. He kept the benefit and hid the receipt.

It is the same maneuver he ran in reverse in the primary, when he spent $1 million on an ad telling Kentucky "it's not a sin to be white" while running against a Black opponent. Barr calibrates what he says to whoever is listening. And when Kentucky's own hospitals said the budget bill he voted for would be devastating, he demanded the governor prove they were closing rather than answer for the vote.

Kentuckians vote on November 3.

What the archive shows

Donald Trump endorsed Andy Barr on May 1, 2026, and cleared his strongest rival out of the primary with the offer of an ambassadorship. Barr won the nomination eighteen days later. Between July 8 and July 28 — the Lexington Times pins it to July 16 — Barr's campaign homepage deleted the "Trump-Endorsed" badge, the photo of the two men together, the "Endorsed by President Trump" pop-up, the "Close the Border" heading and the "Stand Proudly for Life" plank, cutting mentions of Trump in that page's visible text from five to two. Internet Archive captures confirm every one of those removals. Barr's campaign was asked why and did not say.

Source

Barr's Senate campaign website dropped its "Trump-Endorsed" banner, rally photo and 16 Trump references in a July 16 rewrite — The Lexington Times, August 29, 2026. We independently verified the homepage changes against Internet Archive captures of barrforsenate.com from July 8, 2026 and July 28, 2026, and the surviving Trump material against the live site on August 30, 2026. Before-and-after image: The Lexington Times.

Mike Collins Says He Has 'Always Condemned' Racism and Antisemitism. His PAC Paid $7,700 to a Man Who Posted a Swastika and an Image of Himself in Klan Robes.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:42:12 +0000

Mike Collins is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia. On Thursday, August 27, 2026, The Washington Post published what it found on the X account of a man who used to work for him.

A swastika. An image of himself in what look like Ku Klux Klan robes. A racial slur for Black people, posted several times. The words "White Power." All of it in June and July of this year.

The man is Preston Parra, 24. Until August 24, when he changed his biography and made his posts private, his own X account described him as a "twink fascist."

What Collins actually paid him

Collins' campaign has a habit of describing the people around him as strangers. So it is worth being exact about this one, because the paperwork is public.

Parra interned in Collins' congressional office for two months in 2024, according to LegiStorm, the tracker of federal staff employment.

Then he got paid. Overhaul PAC — Collins' own leadership PAC — sent Parra two checks in May 2025: $2,700 on May 7 and $5,000 on May 23, both filed with the Federal Election Commission as "fundraising consulting." That is $7,700, in the FEC's own records. It was about two months before Collins launched his Senate campaign in July 2025.

Parra's consulting website goes further. It quotes Collins praising the quality of his "product": "You can grade it by the amount of people that are watching it and pushing it back out." The site does not say when Collins said it or what he was talking about, and Parra told the Post it was about the video clipping and digital work he did, not the personal account. Collins' campaign was asked whether he stands by that endorsement. It did not answer.

"Satire," he says

Parra told the Post the Klan image was made with Grok's AI tool and that the account is "satirical." He said he is a provocateur. He said Collins didn't know about the personal account because it was private at the time. "What, is there supposed to be some kind of CIA background check?" he said.

He also told the Post he is not a white supremacist — because it goes against his religion, and because his father is Colombian.

And then, in the same interview, he said this:

"I do think that the white race contributes more to the world."

That is not a joke that landed badly. That is a man explaining his actual position to a national newspaper, on the record, while defending himself.

Parra also said he liked working for Collins because of the tone. "I like the edginess," he told the Post. "I didn't think it was edgy enough."

The fourth one

If Parra were the only one, Collins could plausibly say he got unlucky in a hire. He is not the only one. He is the fourth person connected to Collins caught with this material, and each one was documented by a different newsroom.

His son-in-law. In July, CNN reported that David Alan Scheer II — married to Collins' daughter — is a "pro-White nationalist" influencer with more than 1.5 million followers who shares antisemitic conspiracy theories and Nazi imagery. We wrote that story up here. Scheer asked his followers to vote on whether he should make a video titled "why Gen-Z doesn't hate Hitler." He is registered to vote at a house Collins owns.

His chief of staff. In May, Slate reported that Kip Talley — Collins' chief of staff — was in a roughly 30-person group chat that included Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, two of the best-known white nationalists in the country. In the chat, Talley described working to help Charles Johnson, who has promoted Holocaust denial, while Johnson was locked up. "I'm going to try and use the levers of the legislative branch to check into his detention," Talley wrote in December 2025. Collins replaced him in July. Talley said he acted "solely in my personal capacity."

His digital director. In May, William Paul — who worked as Collins' digital director in 2025 — walked up to Rep. Mike Lawler in a Washington bar and started in on him. A NOTUS reporter was standing right there and heard the whole thing — including Paul telling Lawler that Jews were anti-American, and that Lawler's Jewish supporters served Israel more than America. Paul later apologized on X and said he was getting help for a drinking problem.

And now Parra. Four people. Four different outlets. One congressman in the middle of all of it.

His answer was to change the subject

Here is what Collins said about his son-in-law earlier this month:

"He has had no role in my campaign whatsoever, and I don't believe or support those views and I have always condemned racism and antisemitism regardless of the source."

Here is what his campaign said about Parra this week: it did not answer the Post's detailed list of questions. A spokesperson put out a statement saying Collins condemns antisemitism and finds it "abhorrent" — and then accused Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, of not condemning antisemitism on the left hard enough.

That is the pattern, and it is the whole pattern. A general condemnation of a category. No mention of the specific person. And a pivot to his opponent.

He did the same thing when more than 50 Black Georgia lawmakers signed a statement demanding he explain his ties. "No one speaks for me, and I don't speak for anyone else," he said. Nobody had said anyone spoke for him. They asked him to account for the people he hires, pays and marries into. He has still never done it.

Georgia Republicans stopped waiting

The people saying this out loud are not Democrats.

Debbie Dooley, an original tea party organizer in Georgia who backed Collins' rival in the primary, put it to the Post this way: "In the South, we have a saying: You lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas. Well, Mike Collins has got a lot of fleas on him." She added: "We do not need a senator that thinks he's a media influencer on X and has no integrity. Ethics matter. I cannot support him."

Shelley Wynter, a conservative radio host in Georgia, endorsed Ossoff. So did former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake and the Republican mayors of Valdosta and Tifton — three crossovers in three days.

And a former Collins staffer told the Post what the office's social media strategy actually was, under longtime chief of staff Brandon Phillips: "casual trolling" and a "comms philosophy of shock factor." Another Georgia Republican operative summed up the confusion inside the party: "There was always a question of where does Mike end and Brandon begin."

Phillips is the same aide at the center of the open House Ethics investigation into Collins' office, where a nonpartisan watchdog found "substantial reason to believe" that Collins himself "retained an employee who did not perform duties commensurate with the compensation the employee received" and "discriminated unfairly by dispensing special favors or privileges by retaining an employee with whom his Chief of Staff had a personal relationship." The complaints that started it said she was paid $5,000 as a district intern for no work. Investigators recommended subpoenas. Collins called it a "nothingburger."

Collins' own feed

None of this is happening to a man with a spotless account of his own.

In March 2024, Collins replied "Never was a second thought" to a post attacking a Washington Post reporter that flagged her Jewish identity, and refused to apologize when people objected: "Y'all just see stuff that ain't there."

In May 2025, he said replacing a Steak 'n Shake in the congressional food court with a halal restaurant was "equivalent to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in the 7th century."

In 2024, he reposted a video of mostly white college students confronting a Black pro-Palestinian protester, with one of them making apelike sounds at her. He said afterward that he disavows racism and that the sounds were not the video's "focal point."

Parra said he took the job because he liked the edginess of that feed, and wished it were edgier.

What the record shows

Four people connected to Mike Collins — his son-in-law, his chief of staff, his digital director, and a paid contractor for his leadership PAC — have been caught posting or defending Nazi imagery, white nationalist company, or antisemitic abuse, in reporting by four separate news organizations. Collins' PAC paid the contractor $7,700. Collins has never explained a single one of them by name. His answer, every time, has been a general condemnation of racism and a complaint about Jon Ossoff.

Source

Liz Goodwin and Olivia George, "Mike Collins's former staffer posted KKK, Nazi imagery," The Washington Post, August 27, 2026. Photo of Mike Collins via The Advocate.

Asked If He'd Campaign With Max Miller, Vivek Ramaswamy Said Republican Control Comes First: 'If We Compromise That, We're Done.'

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:35:18 +0000

A man walked up to Ohio's Republican nominee for governor and thanked him for standing behind a congressman his own party has been asking to quit.

"Thank you for supporting Max, Max Miller," the man said.

"Absolutely," Vivek Ramaswamy answered. "Up and down the ticket."

The man pressed: would Ramaswamy actually go out and campaign with him?

"My view is this is the most important election for preserving the Republican control of the House, the Senate, and also protecting the Republican control of the state. If we compromise that, we're done. So that's the way I look at it."

The exchange was captured on audio published by Headquarters News on X on August 26, 2026, and reported by Raw Story the same day.

Read the answer again, because it is not an evasion. He was asked about a specific man and specific allegations, and he answered with a calculation. Losing the majority is the thing that cannot be compromised. Everything else is downstream of that.

A necessary note up front: none of the allegations against Max Miller has been proven in court. He has never been criminally charged over any of them, and he denies all of them. What follows is what has been filed in court, reported in public records, and said on the record.

What Ramaswamy is choosing to stand behind

Miller is fighting two court cases at once, one with his ex-wife and one with his ex-girlfriend. Both women say he abused them.

Mother Jones obtained more than 2,000 pages of court filings and police reports through public records requests. We went through what those records contain: his ex-wife Emily Moreno told detectives she couldn't rule out that Miller caused their 2-year-old daughter's broken collarbone, because he had previously thrown hot water at her, shoved her, and held a gun to her head. The child protective services investigation into the collarbone was ruled unsubstantiated. The records also include a threat to a sitting U.S. senator.

That senator is Bernie Moreno of Ohio — Emily's father, and the toddler's grandfather.

His own party already answered this question

This is not a case where Republicans have gone quiet and Ramaswamy is simply declining to be the first one out. Three weeks before that audio, they went on the record.

On August 6, 2026, two U.S. senators publicly told Miller to resign — Ohio's Jon Husted and Montana's Tim Sheehy. Four days earlier, Moreno himself had said Miller "should not serve in the House of Representatives." A major conservative group called him unfit to serve. A poll showed him losing a safe Republican district by 14 points. Miller's response was to loan his own campaign $1 million and stay on the ballot, past the deadline for the party to swap in anyone else.

So when Ramaswamy says the majority can't be compromised, he is disagreeing with Republican senators who decided it could be — and with the grandfather of the child in the file.

President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson have avoided calling for Miller to go. Ramaswamy went further than avoiding it. He said "absolutely," and "up and down the ticket."

What it says about the man asking to run Ohio

Ramaswamy is running to be governor of Ohio. The job is almost entirely about judgment calls made without a roll call to hide behind — who gets appointed, which investigations get funded, who is told their conduct is disqualifying.

He was handed the easiest version of that test anyone could construct. A man asked him a yes-or-no question about one man. Two senators from his own party had already answered it. And his reasoning was that the seat count comes first.

This is of a piece with how he has run. He spent months refusing to tell Ohio what he actually stands for, to the point that a newsroom had to badger him into stating a single position. Here he stated one plainly, and it turned out to be about the majority.

The bottom line

In audio published August 26, 2026, Vivek Ramaswamy — the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio — was asked whether he would campaign with Rep. Max Miller and said "absolutely," "up and down the ticket," explaining that this is "the most important election for preserving the Republican control of the House, the Senate, and also protecting the Republican control of the state. If we compromise that, we're done." Miller faces two civil cases from two women alleging abuse, all of which he denies; on August 6, two Republican senators — Ohio's Jon Husted and Montana's Tim Sheehy — called on him to resign, four days after his former father-in-law Sen. Bernie Moreno said he should not serve in the House; Miller stayed on the ballot after loaning his campaign $1 million.

Source

"Vivek Ramaswamy caught on audio defending GOP candidate accused of domestic abuse", Raw Story, August 26, 2026. Audio published by Headquarters News. Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Raw Story.

A Michigan Senate Nominee Criticized Tommy Tuberville's Anti-Sharia Bills. Tuberville Called Him a 'Terrorist Sympathizer.'

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:10:07 +0000

On August 24, 2026, Abdul El-Sayed — the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, and a Muslim — went on Fox News and said this:

"The idea that you have somebody like Tommy Tuberville, who barely was good at coaching football, is trying to ban Sharia law when there's less than 1% of the Muslim community in America, as if somehow Muslims are out here trying to push Sharia law, that seems to me to be deliberately targeting the Muslim community because they're different."

That is a criticism of a senator's legislation. It contains a jab about football and an argument about a bill.

Tommy Tuberville's reply, posted on X the next day:

"Sounds like something a terrorist sympathizer would say."

What that sentence actually does

A sitting United States senator called a major-party nominee for the United States Senate a terrorist sympathizer.

Not "he's wrong about the bill." Not "here's why Sharia is a threat." A man criticized his legislation, and the senator's answer was that criticizing it is what a terrorist sympathizer sounds like.

There is only one thing distinguishing El-Sayed from everyone else who has criticized this legislation — including a George Mason University law professor who told a House Judiciary subcommittee in February that the House companion of Tuberville's own deportation bill is "manifestly unconstitutional". El-Sayed is Muslim.

Tuberville did not say that. He didn't have to.

The legislation El-Sayed was criticizing

Two of the Senate's anti-Sharia bills are Tuberville's own. He introduced both on October 15, 2025: S. 3008, the "No Shari'a Act," which would bar the application of Sharia in the United States where it would violate constitutional rights, and S. 3009, the "Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act," which would amend immigration law so that advocating for Sharia is grounds to be denied a visa, declared deportable and removed from the country. It is the House companion of that second bill the George Mason professor testified against.

A third is Sen. John Cornyn's. On February 12, 2026, Cornyn introduced S. 3887, the "Defeat Sharia Law in America Act," which would amend the Civil Rights Act so that a business covered by its public-accommodations section that provides goods or services "by implementing Sharia law" counts as discriminating on the ground of religion. Tuberville is its only co-sponsor. He signed on the day it was introduced.

CAIR's Alabama chapter called that bill an "unconstitutional attack on religious freedom," noting that Sharia, "like Jewish Halacha, provides Muslims with guidance for their daily life and religious practice, requiring them to offer their five daily prayers, fast in Ramadan, give in charity, stand up for justice, obey the laws of the land in which they live, and advocate for the religious rights of their neighbors."

El-Sayed's factual point in the Fox interview is not in dispute. Muslims are a small share of the U.S. population, and Sharia — a religious framework — does not have standing over the U.S. Constitution.

This is not a one-off

Tuberville's answer to El-Sayed reads worse next to what he has already posted.

In March 2026 he put up a photo of the September 11 attacks beside a photo of New York's Muslim mayor, captioned "The enemy is inside the gates." We laid that out, along with the rest of the machinery — a 50-member congressional caucus, a state bill, a governor and an attorney general, all mobilized against a Sharia takeover that traced back to a hate group's blog post and five houses in Little Rock, two of them occupied by Christians.

The bigger picture is a spending decision. Republicans have put more than $10 million into television ads mentioning Sharia or Islam negatively this cycle — about ten times the total of each of the last four cycles. A pollster who studies this found anti-Muslim sentiment spikes during election cycles, not after terrorist attacks.

Tuberville isn't improvising. He's reading from a budget.

He's running to govern Alabama

Tuberville is not running for reelection to the Senate. He is running for governor of Alabama.

A governor signs bills, appoints judges, runs the state police, and decides which Alabamians the state protects. Alabama has Muslim citizens — doctors, students, small-business owners, engineers at the Huntsville research corridor, people whose families have been in Birmingham for generations.

The man asking to run their state has said, in public, that a Muslim who criticizes his bill sounds like a terrorist sympathizer.

Every Alabama Muslim watching that exchange now knows what happens if they say the same thing El-Sayed said.

What the record shows

On August 24, 2026, Abdul El-Sayed criticized Tommy Tuberville's anti-Sharia legislation on Fox News, arguing it targets Muslims for being different. On August 25, Tuberville publicly called that "something a terrorist sympathizer would say." Tuberville wrote two of the Senate's anti-Sharia bills himself and is the sole co-sponsor of a third, S. 3887, which CAIR's Alabama chapter calls an "unconstitutional attack on religious freedom." He is running to be governor of Alabama.

Source

Tuberville fires back at El-Sayed over Sharia law criticism: 'Sounds like something a terrorist sympathizer would say' — Yellowhammer News, August 25, 2026. Image via Yellowhammer News.

Asked Whether America Has an Interest in Taiwan, Sen. Darline Graham Said 'National Security Is Not My Thing.' She Has Been in the Senate Since July.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:03:08 +0000

South Carolina has two U.S. Senate seats. One of them is currently held by a woman nobody elected, who was handed the job in July, and who was asked on a debate stage this week whether the United States has a national security interest in Taiwan and the South China Sea.

She asked the moderator to repeat the question. Then she answered it.

"I'm just going to be honest here. I'm not that informed on national security, so — but I do support our military."

She added that national security "is not my thing, not my area of expertise."

Darline Graham has been a United States Senator since July 14. The runoff that decides whether she is on the November ballot is Tuesday, August 25.

How she got there

Graham was not elected to anything. Governor Henry McMaster appointed her to the seat left vacant by the death of her brother, Lindsey Graham, on July 11 — on President Trump's public recommendation. She had never held elected office and had never run for anything. Six days after being sworn in, she announced she was running for the full six-year term.

The debate in Newberry on August 18, co-moderated by Greta Van Susteren, was the only one scheduled before the runoff. Her opponent is U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman.

Why the Taiwan question isn't a gotcha

It's worth being precise about what she was asked, because "national security" can sound like a trick topic full of classified detail. It isn't what happened here.

Whether the United States has an interest in Taiwan and the South China Sea has been the stated position of every administration of both parties for decades. Taiwan makes most of the world's advanced computer chips. There is no version of this question that a senator gets to be surprised by.

Norman, standing next to her, answered it in a sentence: "What the president is doing right is he's enabling Taiwan to defend themselves against China, but it's peace through strength that he's showing." Agree with it or don't — he had an answer.

And this is not a hypothetical part of the job. A senator votes on arms sales, on defense authorization, on sanctions, on whether to keep funding a war. Graham has had a vote on every one of those since July 14.

What she has found time to be informed about

Graham says national security isn't her area. Here is what has been.

Her first bill was the SAVE Act — legislation that would make it harder for millions of American citizens to vote by requiring documentary proof of citizenship. She cosponsored it within days of arriving.

Her first big procedural move was to say she'd blow up the filibuster to pass it — the opposite of her late brother's long-held position, in the seat she was appointed to honor his legacy in.

Her first votes cut against the community she spent her career serving. Graham led South Carolina's Commission for the Blind and worked in state disability and workforce services. Then she got to the Senate and voted the other way on disability programs.

And within two weeks of launching her campaign, it had taken $24,000 more than federal law allows — the FEC told her so on August 17. She has also inherited her brother's leadership PAC along with his seat.

So the areas of expertise developed quickly. Voting restrictions: within days. Campaign money: within two weeks. Taiwan: not her thing.

The honest part is the problem

Give Graham this much — she did not bluff. Plenty of politicians would have produced forty seconds of "peace through strength" and moved on. She said out loud that she didn't know.

But a senator is not a candidate for a job she might grow into. She already has the job. She has had a vote on the Senate floor since July 14, and she will keep having one through January whatever happens on Tuesday. Saying "that's not my area" is a thing a nominee says at a hearing. It is not available to someone already casting the votes.

South Carolina Republicans go to the polls Tuesday, August 25. Trump held a rally for her in Myrtle Beach, Gov. McMaster endorsed her, and former Gov. Mark Sanford endorsed Norman instead.

Sources

Darline Graham says she's "not that informed on national security" at debate — CBS News. Photo: AP.
Graham, Norman clash in only scheduled debate before Senate primary runoff — WIS-TV
Sen. Darline Graham avoids giving direct answer to national security question in S.C. debate: 'Not my thing' — PBS News

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I am the anointed one."

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

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

Wisconsin already thought about this

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

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

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

"This video content generated by AI"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the label matters more than the joke

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

Two problems with that.

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

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

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

Not the first time his phone has been the problem

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

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

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

Derrick Van Orden couldn't manage six words.

Source

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

Arizona Voted 55–3 to Make Sex Offenders Who Move Here Register. Andy Biggs Was One of the Three.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:37:02 +0000

Some votes are hard. This one was not.

In 2005, the Arizona Legislature took up Senate Bill 1382. Its official short title was three words long: "sex offenders; registration." What it did was require a registered sex offender who moves to Arizona from another state to register here too.

The Arizona Senate passed it 28–0. The House Judiciary Committee approved it 8–0. The House Rules Committee approved it 9–0. On April 18, 2005, the full House passed it 55 to 3. The governor signed it four days later, and it became Chapter 176 of Arizona's laws. All of that is on the Legislature's own bill record.

Nobody in the Arizona Senate could find a reason to vote no. Seventeen committee votes were cast in the House, and not one of them was no.

Three House members did. According to reporting by Sahara Sajjadi at The Copper Courier, one of them was a state representative from Gilbert named Andy Biggs, a few years into his first stint in the Legislature.

Biggs is now the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona.

What the bill actually asked for

It is worth being precise about how small this bill was, because "voted against a sex offender bill" can mean a lot of things.

Arizona already required people convicted of sex offenses in Arizona to register with law enforcement. The gap SB 1382 closed was the one at the state line: someone convicted in another state, already on that state's registry, could move to Arizona and — under the law as it stood — slip out of the system.

The bill said: if you were on the registry where you came from, you're on the registry here.

That's it. No new crimes. No new prison sentences. No new spending. A paperwork requirement so that Arizona police would know who had moved into their towns.

Fifty-five of Biggs's colleagues voted yes. Every single senator voted yes. A Democratic governor signed it.

This is not the first time we've written this sentence

If this were the only vote of its kind in Biggs's career, it would be a curiosity — one strange no vote from twenty years ago, easily explained away as a libertarian objection to registries in general.

It isn't the only one.

In 2013, when Biggs was president of the Arizona Senate, the Legislature tried to strip police powers from the Colorado City Marshal's Office — the department the U.S. Justice Department had already sued for serving the leadership of a polygamous sect instead of the public, including in an effort to return a fleeing child bride to the group.

The bill passed the state House overwhelmingly. It reached Biggs's Senate, and it never got a vote.

The Republican who wrote that bill has said exactly what she thinks happened. We laid the whole thing out in "The Republican Who Wrote the Bill Says Andy Biggs Killed It", and the sponsor's own words are the headline: "Women and children suffered three years longer than they should have because he protected the bad guys."

Two bills, eight years apart, in two different chambers. Both times the overwhelming majority of Arizona Republicans went one way. Both times Biggs went the other.

Why it's coming up now

Biggs is running for governor against incumbent Katie Hobbs, and his record on this has become an issue in the race. His campaign's position is that these characterizations are unfair.

Voters can weigh that. But they should weigh it against the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is not really arguable:

Senate vote on SB 1382: 28–0.
House Judiciary Committee: 8–0.
House Rules Committee: 9–0.
House floor vote: 55–3.
Governor: signed.

When a bill moves through a legislature without a single senator and without a single committee member opposing it, and three people out of sixty on the House floor say no, the burden of explanation is on the three.

Twenty-one years later, Andy Biggs is asking Arizonans to make him the person who signs or vetoes bills like this one.

He owes them an explanation of that vote. So far, he hasn't given one.

Source

Over 20 years, Andy Biggs repeatedly voted to protect sex predators — The Copper Courier, August 21, 2026, by Sahara Sajjadi. Photo: Ross D. Franklin/AP.

Max Miller Says Unions Are Abandoning Him Over the Allegations Against Him. The AFL-CIO Scored His Votes for Working People at 14 Percent.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:50:42 +0000

In a sworn statement filed on July 8, Ohio Congressman Max Miller told a court that unions are walking away from his campaign.

"A lobbyist for a trade union informed me by text message that the union was withdrawing its support for my campaign because of these allegations," he wrote. "Representatives of two other organizations that had supported my campaign likewise informed me or my campaign that their support was ending because of these allegations."

One union's national organization, he said, notified him in writing that it will endorse his opponent in November.

Miller put the cost at about $30,000 in lost organizational support, plus individual donors who told him they were done. He estimated his reelection would now cost $2.5 million to $3 million — up from $1.4 million before.

The filing is part of a defamation lawsuit Miller brought against his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, after a May report on allegations about his conduct toward her. Miller denies those allegations.

His explanation for the union exodus is that the allegations drove it.

There is a simpler explanation sitting in his voting record.

14 Percent

The national AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the country, scores members of Congress on how they vote on issues affecting working people.

Through 2025, it scored Max Miller at 14 percent.

That is not a number a "friend of labor" posts. Fourteen percent means that on roughly six out of every seven votes the AFL-CIO tracked, Miller voted the other way.

Here is one of them.

The Vote on a Million Workers' Contracts

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order stripping collective bargaining rights from federal employees. A second order in August 2025 widened it. Together they ended union contracts for more than a million federal workers — one out of every 14 workers in the whole country covered by a union contract.

On December 11, 2025, a bipartisan bill to give those workers their contracts back passed the House 231–195.

Miller voted no. He was one of the 195 Republicans who voted to keep the orders in place. The Senate has not touched the bill since.

Seven months later, he was telling Ohio radio audiences what kind of Republican he is.

"I've been a Davis-Bacon Republican since Day One."

That was Miller on July 13, referring to the 1931 law that guarantees construction workers on federal projects a decent wage.

"We are not a right-to-work state, ladies and gentlemen," he added. "And, you know, this is one of these things where hopefully this shows you and the rest of the district that I am representing the district as it is — I am not going to Washington, D.C. to represent my own wants, feelings, wishes and needs."

To be fair to his record: in June, Miller did break with Speaker Mike Johnson and vote for a bill making it easier for workers to unionize — after Democrats used a procedural maneuver to force it onto the floor. He has also collected some union endorsements, including from the Ohio Conference of Teamsters in early July and a local operating engineers union later that month.

But a 14 percent lifetime score is what the whole record adds up to. One good vote, forced to the floor by the other party, doesn't move it.

His Ex-Wife's Lawyer Made the Point Bluntly

Miller's affidavit came with no proof attached — no text message, no letter, no name of a union.

Moreno's attorney, Subodh Chandra, called the claim hearsay in a July 20 filing and offered an alternative reading.

"Nor is the reason self-evident," Chandra wrote. "Even if it's true, the union could have been walking away from Miller because he's a lousy candidate to champion its issues."

A Miller spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The District Is Union Country

Miller represents Ohio's 7th District, in the Cleveland area. Ohio is more unionized than the country as a whole — 11.6 percent of wage and salary workers, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

His opponent is Brian Poindexter, a city councilman and a member of the local ironworkers union. Poindexter has built his campaign on workers' rights.

The endorsement math has moved with him. The Cleveland Building and Construction Trades Council endorsed Miller in 2024. This cycle, the Ohio State Building and Construction Trades Council — Cleveland is one of its 14 member councils — endorsed Poindexter. So did the Ohio AFL-CIO, which called him the "best and easy choice to elect someone who will spend every day fighting for us." So did the American and Ohio Federation of Teachers, the United Steelworkers, and the American Federation of Government Employees — the union whose members lost their contracts in the order Miller voted to preserve.

"Strengthening collective bargaining rights, allowing more and more people to join the union of their choice if they so choose — those are the types of things that I really want to fight for," Poindexter told Politico.

Recent polling shows Miller trailing in a district Trump carried by 11 points.

The Rest of the Ledger

The union story is one line in a long year for Miller. Two Ohio senators have told him to resign, while Kroger, Walmart and Nike are still on his donor list. He asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate him, and within hours it agreed. Two thousand pages of records have detailed further allegations, including a child abuse investigation. And when Republican senators called on him to quit, he answered by announcing a $1 million loan to his own campaign and staying on the ballot.

Through all of it, his message to Ohio's 7th District is that he's a union guy who got a raw deal.

The AFL-CIO put a number on the first half of that: 14.

Source

Riley Rogerson, "Max Miller insists he can win again — but warns in court filings he's bleeding union support and cash", Politico, August 19, 2026. Photo: AP.

Randy Fine Rang a Voter's Doorbell. When Nobody Answered, He Opened Their Mailbox and Started Flipping Through the Mail.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:59:02 +0000

There is a short list of things you should not do at a stranger's front door. Near the top of it: open their mailbox and start reading their mail.

On Sunday, a doorbell camera in Florida's 6th Congressional District recorded a man doing exactly that. He rang the bell. Nobody answered. He opened the mailbox and flipped through what was inside for a few seconds, then moved on.

The man was Randy Fine, the district's sitting member of Congress, out canvassing for votes ahead of Tuesday's primary.

The video went viral on Monday. On Tuesday, Fine's office confirmed to TMZ that the man in the footage is him.

The confirmation came with no explanation of what he was doing.

What the law says

The relevant statute is 18 U.S. Code § 1702, "Obstruction of correspondence," and it is short enough to read in full:

"Whoever takes any letter, postal card, or package out of any post office or any authorized depository for mail matter, or from any letter or mail carrier, or which has been in any post office or authorized depository, or in the custody of any letter or mail carrier, before it has been delivered to the person to whom it was directed, with design to obstruct the correspondence, or to pry into the business or secrets of another, or opens, secretes, embezzles, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both."

Note the phrase "pry into the business or secrets of another." The law doesn't require that anything be stolen or destroyed. Looking is enough, if that's why you opened it.

Whether Fine's few seconds at that mailbox meet that standard is a question for prosecutors, not for us. What we can say is that a sitting member of Congress was filmed doing the thing the statute describes, at a house he had chosen to visit, two days before an election in which he was on the ballot.

The timing is the part that should bother you

Fine was not passing by. He was canvassing — going door to door in his own district, asking people for their votes, two days before Florida's congressional primary. President Donald Trump had endorsed him over the weekend.

So the sequence is: get the president's endorsement, go out to collect votes, ring a voter's bell, and when the voter isn't home, go through their mail.

Whatever he was looking for, he was looking for it in a house whose vote he was there to ask for.

Rep. Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat, put it bluntly: "Watch my 'colleague' Randy Fine break the law by going through someone's mail. MAGA movement's newest hero is breaking federal law. Just like Daddy Trump. Time to throw these bums out in November!"

Barbie Harden Hall, a former Democratic House candidate in Florida, asked the question most people watching it asked: "Why are you looking through someone's mailbox while you're out canvassing? Not only is it wrong, it's creepy as fuck."

This is not the first time Randy Fine has been the story

Fine has built a national profile out of saying things that get him condemned, and then not backing down from them.

In July he went on television and declared that "a Muslim terrorist runs the city of New York" — blaming New York's mayor for a stabbing that police were investigating as a possible hate crime committed by a man they said may have had mental health problems. In February, a wave of House Democrats called for him to be formally reprimanded or to resign over a post saying he would choose dogs over Muslims.

Earlier, he cast the only Republican vote against a House rule — and told the White House he would vote against every rule on the floor until Trump fired a consultant who criticized him on a podcast. And after the U.S. struck Iran, he talked about opening "the gates of hell".

The pattern isn't that Fine occasionally slips. It's that the rules — of decorum, of decency, and now possibly of federal law — are treated as things that apply to other people.

Why a small thing matters

It would be easy to wave this off. Nobody's mail was stolen. No harm was proven. A few seconds of footage.

But think about what mail actually is. It's your bank statements. Your prescriptions. Your ballot, in a state where three million people voted by mail in 2024. Your medical letters. The federal government protects it with a five-year felony precisely because the contents of a mailbox are the most ordinary, unguarded record of a person's private life.

And the person who opened this one is a member of the body that writes those laws. He wasn't a stranger passing through. He was there in his official capacity as their congressman, asking to keep the job.

The homeowner watched it happen on her phone and called the police. Ormond Beach officers took a report and told TMZ that Fine did not appear to have taken anything and that she did not want to press charges, so there are no charges and no case. He is entitled to the same presumption of innocence as anyone else.

What he is not entitled to is a memory lapse. His own office told TMZ the man in the video is him. Asked about it by an MS NOW reporter as voters went to the polls, Fine said: "I don't even know that it's real. I certainly don't remember doing that." Pressed on whether he would take responsibility, he answered: "I don't remember even doing it, so I'm not gonna take accountability for something I don't know that I actually did."

Two days before an election, in a district he represents, a congressman opened a voter's mailbox on camera. His office says it was him. He says he does not remember.

Source

'Breaking Federal Law. Just Like Daddy Trump': Republican Randy Fine Caught Rifling Through Voter's Mailbox — Brad Reed, Common Dreams, August 18, 2026.

Darren Bailey Says He'll "Crack Down on Repeat Offenders." He Took $3,100 From a Registered Sex Offender and Prayed at His Church.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:16:30 +0000

Darren Bailey wants to be governor of Illinois, and his campaign website tells you exactly what he thinks the job is. He is "committed to restoring law and order and making our neighborhoods safe again." He will "hold violent criminals accountable, crack down on repeat offenders, and stop policies that put politics ahead of public safety." And the closer: "Every family in Illinois deserves to feel safe in their homes, schools, and communities—and Darren Bailey will make sure they do."

On August 17, the Chicago Sun-Times reported who has been helping pay for that message.

The Donor

Victor D. Barr is a Rockford man who was convicted of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in the early 2000s. The victim was a girl who attended the public high school where Barr taught math.

He was required to register as a sex offender — his name, photo and address posted on a publicly accessible Illinois State Police database for the rest of his life. Not for five years. Not for ten. For life. That database is free, searchable by anyone with a web browser, and it exists precisely so that people can look someone up.

Barr is now a pastor at Rockford Faith Center.

Barr and his household have given money to Bailey's campaigns three separate times:

$2,000 in 2022, about a month before that year's election
$700 in April 2026
$400 in June 2026

That is $3,100 across two campaigns and four years, all of it recorded in the Illinois State Board of Elections database that every campaign in the state is required to file with.

And Then He Showed Up in Person

This is the part that makes "we didn't know" hard to hold onto.

In June 2026 — the same month as the $400 donation — Bailey attended a service at Rockford Faith Center, the church where Barr serves as pastor. The church posted about it on Facebook afterward: "Pastor Marla had the opportunity to pray over Darren Bailey and his wife."

So the sequence is a donation in April, a visit to the church in June, and another donation in June. A candidate for governor did not merely cash a check from a stranger. He went to the man's church.

The Response Came After the Phone Call

Bailey's campaign told the Sun-Times: "We did not know his background. ... We're going to find a charity and donate it. ... We're committed to making it right."

Notice what triggered that. Not an internal review. Not a staffer running the routine check that any campaign can run for free on a state database. A reporter called.

The campaign's explanation for the church visit was that Bailey goes to a lot of churches — that "we go to African American churches, major Protestant, nondenominational churches. ... He goes everywhere."

That may well be true. It is also not an answer to the question. The question is why a campaign that promises to "crack down on repeat offenders" never once, in four years and three donations, looked up a donor whose name sits on a public sex offender registry.

This Is Not the Only Time

The week before the Sun-Times story ran, Bailey spoke at the Signs & Wonders Christian conference in Rochelle, held August 9-12. LGBTQ Nation reported that he shared the bill with Richard Jones, a registered child sex offender who was charged with two counts of sexual assault against 15-year-old male victims in 1990 and 1997, according to the Missouri State Highway Patrol. In 1997 a court sentenced Jones to six years in prison.

Jones' website now describes his walk away "from sexual addiction and homosexuality," and says he "conducts ministry and teaches principles that redeem and restore those struggling in addictive bondage."

Two different men. Two different states. Two different sets of charges involving teenagers. One candidate for governor, standing next to both of them inside the space of a few months.

At some point "we did not know his background" stops being an explanation and starts being a description of how the operation runs.

The Part That Should Sting

Here is the detail that turns this from an embarrassing story into a genuinely ugly one.

Bailey runs a Christian private school. Its curriculum, per that same LGBTQ Nation report, states that "Gay people have no more claims to special rights than child molesters and rapists."

Sit with that. The school Bailey runs teaches children that gay people are comparable to child molesters — while Bailey himself takes money from a man convicted of sexually abusing his own student, and shares a conference stage with a man convicted of sexually assaulting teenage boys.

The comparison was never a moral standard. It was a weapon, and it was only ever pointed one direction.

A Pattern of Saying It Wasn't What It Looked Like

Illinoisans have seen this move from Bailey before. It follows a shape:

He compared abortion to the Holocaust, then, when Jewish groups objected, said Jewish leaders had told him he was right — and they said that wasn't true.
He took abortion off his campaign platform, then stood at an anti-abortion rally while his running mate called it a "sin against God."
Ninety minutes after the Highland Park massacre he told Illinoisans to "move on and celebrate" — then sued six months later to undo the gun law it produced.

Every time, the pattern is the same. Do the thing. Get caught. Explain that it wasn't really the thing.

What This Actually Costs Us

Illinois families are not asking for much here. They are asking that the person who wants to run the state's police, prisons, and child protection systems be able to do the single easiest safety check there is — typing a donor's name into a public database that the state built and maintains.

Bailey's whole pitch is that he is the one who takes public safety seriously and his opponents put "politics ahead of public safety." But when checking a donor might have cost him $3,100, nobody checked. The donations stood on the public record through two election cycles. It only became a problem when it became a headline.

A candidate who promises to protect your kids should be able to notice who is writing his checks.

Source

Darren Bailey took campaign money from sex offender who's now a pastor, went to service at his church — Chicago Sun-Times, The Watchdogs, August 17, 2026. Photo: Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times; Facebook.

Republicans Spent Millions Calling Brandon Herrera Too Extreme for Congress. Now Mike Johnson Is Raising Money for Him.

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:58:13 +0000

Standing in a San Antonio barbecue joint last month, the Speaker of the House told Texas voters they had a clear choice: the "common sense" of the Republican nominee, or the "crazy" positions of his Democratic opponent.

The Republican nominee was Brandon Herrera. And until very recently, the people calling him crazy were Republicans.

The New York Times reported this week on how the party got from there to here. It is a short trip, and nothing about Herrera's record moved.

What Republicans said about him when it was convenient

Herrera, 30, is a YouTuber with more than four million subscribers who built his following on gun reviews and inflammatory jokes. He ran in 2024 against the district's Republican incumbent, Tony Gonzales, and ran again this cycle.

Both times, the party's leadership was against him. In 2024 the leadership roster formally endorsed Gonzales, with Mike Johnson raising money for him in San Antonio that April. This cycle Johnson and President Trump were behind Gonzales again — in January a lawyer for Trump sent Herrera a cease-and-desist letter over a mailer edited to make it look as though the president was posing with him.

Gonzales and his allies spent millions making the case, and the material they used was Herrera's own video archive:

A joke that a Nazi-era submachine gun was "the original ghetto blaster" and "Hitler's street sweeper."
A joke making light of veterans who die by suicide. The Republican Jewish Coalition spent millions in 2024 amplifying that one. Its ad said: "Fools like Brandon Herrera who mock veterans do not belong in Congress or Texas."

His Democratic opponent has since added to the pile, circulating a video of Herrera showing off his ownership of a 1939 English edition of Mein Kampf, along with clips of him joking about Nazi atrocities against Jews. Herrera says the book is part of a historical collection and vehemently denies being antisemitic.

Then Gonzales was forced out — first out of the race, then out of Congress — over a sexual misconduct scandal. And, as the Times puts it, top Republicans quickly closed ranks around Herrera.

That is the entire explanation. Not a retraction, not new information, not an apology. A vacancy.

We documented the same instinct in how Johnson handled the Gonzales scandal itself: a Speaker who calls himself a "zealous guardian of due process" telling reporters it wasn't "time" to discuss a resignation, while rank-and-file Republicans said out loud what he wouldn't.

The timing of Johnson's trip to San Antonio

Here is the detail that makes the reversal hard to explain away.

Johnson headlined a fundraiser for Herrera at Republican congressional campaign headquarters in Washington on July 22, with the committee's chairman, Richard Hudson, co-hosting. In the days that followed, another video surfaced: Herrera, in July 2022, using crude sexualized language to insult Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action after the Sandy Hook school shooting.

We wrote about what he actually said and about Texas Republicans walking away from reporters rather than answer for it. That post is from July 28. Two days later, Johnson stood next to Herrera in San Antonio and called the district critical to holding the Republican majority.

So this was not a case of the leadership not knowing. The video was in the news that week. Johnson went anyway.

He is not apologizing, and he says so plainly

Asked about the remarks, Herrera told the Times he wouldn't use that language as a candidate, but that he is not sorry:

"I know the difference between the way that you speak in a comedy performance, so to speak, and the way that you speak in a political environment."

And on his critics:

"What they're going to do is they're going to pretend jokes are policy, and they're going to purposely pretend that they don't know the difference."

He also told the Times that the only people who have ever cared about the videos are "either in the media or in D.C."

That last claim is worth testing against the map.

The district includes Uvalde

Texas's 23rd District stretches from San Antonio to El Paso along the border. It contains Uvalde, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered at Robb Elementary School in 2022.

Herrera's position, per the Times, is that he opposes all new restrictions on firearms — including red flag laws, the specific measure designed to take guns from people who have signaled they intend to hurt someone.

His Democratic opponent, Katy Padilla Stout, says she decided to run specifically to stop a gun influencer from representing Uvalde. Her family hunts and owns guns; she supports age and mental health checks.

At a gathering of left-leaning women in the northern hills of San Antonio, she paused before recounting Herrera's remarks about Watts to check that children were out of earshot.

"That is not the type of person you want making decisions for you and your children."

A candidate who jokes about Nazi weapons and mocks veteran suicide, who opposes every new gun restriction, running to represent the town where a gunman killed 19 children in their classroom — that is not a media obsession. That is the job description colliding with the résumé.

Nobody has represented the district since April

There is one more piece of this the Times surfaces, and it belongs to a third Republican.

The seat has been empty since April. Governor Greg Abbott has not called a special election to fill the remainder of Gonzales's term, and his spokesman declined to explain the reasoning.

Padilla Stout's read on it:

"Why wouldn't you call a special election? Because you're scared you're going to lose."

Whatever the motive, the effect is fixed: for months, everyone in this stretch of the Texas border has had no vote in the House at all — and no one to call about a VA claim, a Social Security check, or a Medicaid denial. The party that spent millions arguing Herrera was unfit has been content to leave the seat vacant rather than risk it.

What actually changed

Line the two positions up.

While Gonzales was still running: Johnson endorses Gonzales and raises money for him in San Antonio in 2024, then opposes Herrera again this year. Trump endorses Gonzales too, and his lawyer tells Herrera to stop putting the president's picture on his mail. A Republican group buys millions in ads saying Herrera does not belong in Congress because he mocks veterans.

Once the seat came open: Johnson headlines Herrera's Washington fundraiser, stands beside him in San Antonio days after another video surfaces, and describes him as the "common sense" choice.

Between those two moments, Herrera did not withdraw a single joke. He has said explicitly that he won't. The one thing that changed is that the Republican majority is narrow and this seat is red by 15 points.

That is the whole standard. Not what a candidate said about veterans, or Hitler's weapons, or the mothers of murdered children — just whether the party needs the vote. Herrera understood the arithmetic better than his critics did, and said so:

"After a brutal primary on all sides," he told reporters in San Antonio, "the focus has to be bringing the party together."

It worked. That's the part worth remembering in November.

Sources

The New York Times, "Nazi Jokes and Vulgar Insults: The Edgy Gun Influencer Embraced by the G.O.P." by Bayliss Wagner (August 16, 2026). Photo by Jordan Vonderhaar for The New York Times.
Yahoo News, "Mike Johnson to Fundraise for Candidate Who Joked About Killing Older People" by J.D. Wolf (July 16, 2026).
FOX San Antonio, "Mike Johnson Addresses Border Wall in Big Bend, VA Concerns in San Antonio" by Yami Virgin (July 30, 2026).
The Texas Tribune, "Trump lawyer sends cease-and-desist letter to Brandon Herrera over use of president’s image in campaign ad" by Gabby Birenbaum (February 12, 2026).
The Texas Tribune, "U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales prevails in primary runoff over gun influencer Brandon Herrera" (May 29, 2024).

Sarah Sanders Tried to Punish the Republicans Who Killed Her Prison. She Went 0 for 3.

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:40:23 +0000

On August 14, the Arkansas Times ran a piece asking a question that would have sounded ridiculous two years ago: could a Libertarian nobody had heard of have the best shot at beating our governor?

The Libertarian is Colt Shelby, a sixth-generation Franklin County man who works in oil and gas and says he "was not political at all" before 2024. He isn't in this race because he wanted to be a politician. He's in it because Sarah Sanders tried to build a 3,000-bed prison a mile from his property without telling anybody first.

That's the part worth sitting with. Sanders didn't get a challenger from the left. She got one from a rural county where more than three in four voters had picked her for governor two years earlier. And before Shelby ever filed to run, those same voters and their legislators had already beaten her — five times in her own Republican Senate. Then she tried to make them pay for it, and lost that fight too.

Here's how a governor with a Republican supermajority ends up losing to Republicans.

A prison nobody was told about

On Halloween 2024, Sanders announced that the state had already bought 815 acres north of Charleston in Franklin County. The land cost $2.9 million, and it was going to hold the largest prison in Arkansas history.

Nobody in Franklin County was asked. Not the county officials, not the utilities, not the people who live there. They found out when the rest of us did. And when public records requests later pried the emails loose, they showed state officials had intentionally hidden the purchase — and were passing around South Park clips to mock the residents who were upset about it.

A week after the announcement, more than 1,800 people packed the Charleston High School gym to tell the state no. That is an enormous turnout for a rural county. It did not change her mind.

Then there was the price. The first number Sanders gave the public was $470 million. Emails obtained through a records request showed that an architectural firm's initial estimate was $1.2 billion — more than two and a half times what she told us. By the time her allies went to the Legislature for money, the ask was $750 million, and adding the $75 million left over from Asa Hutchinson's administration put the estimated construction cost at $825 million, according to the California firm the state hired to run the project.

So: a secret purchase, a site the community rejected, and a cost that nearly doubled the moment anyone checked her math.

Her own Republican Senate said no. Five times.

Money bills in Arkansas need a three-fourths vote — 27 of the 35 state senators. Sanders' party holds far more seats than that. This should have been easy.

It wasn't. Senate Bill 354, the $750 million prison appropriation, was voted down over and over during the 2025 session. On the fifth and final try, it got 21 yes votes — still six short — with nine senators voting no and five more voting "present," which does the same job as a no. Seven of the nine no votes were Republicans.

Their objections weren't left-wing. Sen. Bryan King (R-Green Forest) called the project "fiscally irresponsible" and said the "only winners" would be the contractors hired to plan and build it. He pointed at Utah, which built a mega-prison, blew the budget, and then couldn't staff it. His alternative was to fund mental health treatment, help county jails, and add beds to prisons Arkansas already owns.

That is a conservative argument about wasting money, made by conservatives, and Sanders could not answer it. She didn't even try again during the 2026 fiscal session.

Then she went after the Republicans who stopped her

This is where it stops being a budget dispute and becomes a story about how our governor uses her office.

Sanders' response to losing a policy fight was to try to remove the legislators who beat her. In the March 3, 2026 primaries, she recruited challengers against two of them and backed a loyal incumbent in a third Senate race. She lost all three.

Sen. Ron Caldwell (R-Wynne) voted against the prison money all five times. Sanders hand-picked a challenger for him: Trey "BoDirt" Bohannan, a businessman with no political experience whom she described as "somebody I have known for a long time" and had handed a Small Business of the Month award in 2024.

Her candidate had a problem. His campaign told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette he'd lived in the district "for almost three years," but he had changed his voter registration into the district on October 21, 2025 — exactly one week before announcing his campaign. His own divorce filings put him in Jefferson County, outside the district, into November 2024. And for a candidate who called himself a huge Trump supporter, state records show he didn't vote at all in 2024. He got a late endorsement from Kid Rock. Caldwell beat him with about 70% of the vote.

Sen. Bryan King (R-Green Forest), the prison's loudest critic in the Legislature, drew a Sanders-backed challenger too — Bobby Ballinger Jr., son of the former senator King had already beaten in 2022. King took 60% and sent another Ballinger home.

Sen. Blake Johnson (R-Corning) had Sanders on his side and had held his seat since 2015. Rep. Jeremy Wooldridge beat him with over 62%, winning three of the district's four counties.

Three races. Three losses. In Republican primaries, in deep-red districts, against a sitting Republican governor's full public support.

She still won't say the site was wrong

Nearly two years and $2.9 million later, the land sits there. In April 2026, the Department of Corrections said flatly that "the project has been on hold for several months now with no new developments" and that "no work has been done outside of routine maintenance and upkeep." Sanders didn't ask for prison construction money in her budget for the coming year. She asked instead to spend the leftover $75 million on adding bed space to relieve county jails and on recidivism programs — much closer to what Bryan King had been proposing than to what she'd spent two years fighting for.

But she has not admitted she was wrong about the site. Asked about it, she said:

"I still firmly believe that we have to expand capacity and I've yet to see a better alternative than the Franklin County location."

Adam Watson, one of the Franklin County residents who organized against the prison, had a short answer to that: "I think if the governor is saying she hasn't heard any better ideas, then that just means she is not listening." Asked what would finally convince him the project was dead, he said it would take "When the ink is dry on a deed" handing those 815 acres to someone other than the state.

That's what our governor has earned in Franklin County. Not disagreement — distrust. They don't believe she'll stop.

Two years spent on this

Remember what all of this was supposed to be about. Sanders sold the prison as being tough on crime.

Arkansas already locks up its people at one of the highest rates in the country. We're still one of the least safe states in America — CNBC's 2026 rankings gave Arkansas a D– for quality of life and put us near the bottom for crime anyway. Building the biggest prison in state history on land that turned out to be a poor fit geologically and hydrologically was never going to fix that. Bryan King said so out loud, to his own party, and got a primary challenger for his trouble.

Meanwhile the things that actually determine whether Arkansans are safe, fed, and healthy haven't moved. We're still dead last in the country for food insecurity. We're still 49th of 50 for overall health. She has been governor since 2023.

The money doesn't scare them anymore

Which brings us back to Shelby, and to the reason a Libertarian with no money is suddenly worth writing about.

Sanders has raised $7.7 million and had more than $5 million in the bank as of the end of June. Shelby has raised just under $25,000. That is not a close race on paper, and Sanders is still the clear favorite in November.

Shelby's argument is that in Arkansas in 2026, the governor's backing has become a liability:

"Money does matter, but it doesn't always matter... All these guys were outspent and outgunned, and they all won because their opponents were endorsed by the governor."

He isn't making that up. That's exactly what happened to Bohannan, to Ballinger, and to Johnson. And Sanders keeps making it easier — she skipped the one debate her challengers showed up for in June, leaving an empty chair on the stage while they spent an hour on her record.

Shelby's own summary is the sharpest thing anybody has said about the governor's standing with her own party this year:

"The worst thing that could happen to my campaign at this point would be if the governor endorsed me."

A governor whose endorsement is a punchline in her own primaries isn't strong. She's just well-funded. Franklin County figured that out first. We deserve better.

Source

Colt Following: Could Libertarian candidate Colt Shelby have the best shot against Gov. Sarah Sanders? — Matt Campbell, Arkansas Times, August 14, 2026. Photo: Colt Shelby for Governor, via Arkansas Times.

The Republican Who Wrote the Bill Says Andy Biggs Killed It: 'Women and Children Suffered Three Years Longer Than They Should Have Because He Protected the Bad Guys'

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:07:43 +0000

Andy Biggs is the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona. Before that he was president of the Arizona Senate. And in 2013, according to the Republican who wrote the bill, he is the reason women and children in Colorado City, Arizona suffered three years longer than they had to.

What the bill would have done

Colorado City, Arizona sits on the Utah line and is the historic seat of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the sect that broke from the Mormon Church over polygamy. Its leader, Warren Jeffs, was convicted of sexually assaulting two underage girls he had forced into marriage.

Colorado City shares a police department, the Marshal's Office, with Hildale, Utah across the border. For years the accusation against that department was not that it failed to stop the FLDS. It was that it worked for them.

The U.S. Justice Department had sued both towns in 2012, alleging the shared marshal's office selectively enforced the law and served FLDS leadership rather than the public — including an effort to return a fleeing child bride to the group.

In 2013, Arizona legislators tried to do something about it. A bill to strip the marshal's office of its authority passed the state House overwhelmingly.

Then it went to the Senate, where Biggs was president. It never got a vote.

The bill's own sponsor says he buried it

Michelle Ugenti-Rita, then a Republican state lawmaker, wrote that bill. After the federal government won its case, she was blunt about what happened to it, and about the cost:

"Women and children suffered three years longer than they should have because he protected the bad guys."

Flora Jessop, who escaped the FLDS, told the Washington Post that legislators had "more than enough" to act on.

This is not a Democratic attack line. It's the bill's Republican author, and a survivor of the sect, saying the same thing.

The Post also spoke to a county Republican supervisor who said he cast an early ballot against Biggs over precisely this — he wanted a candidate "who has made a stand for women and children above religion."

Biggs's explanation

Asked in a TV interview last year about accusations that he helped kill the bill, Biggs said officials were trying to gather more information, and that he is "not sure we ever got to" the conclusion that the marshal's office was fully corrupt. He questioned whether legislators had enough evidence to justify the state stepping in.

Set that against the timeline. Warren Jeffs had already been convicted. The federal government's lawsuit against the towns was already pending, and it went on to win.

The evidence Biggs says he wasn't sure about was sufficient for the Department of Justice.

And note what gathering more information meant in practice. He wasn't required to pass the bill. He could have let it come to the floor and let 30 senators vote. Instead the thing died where nobody had to go on record — which is the specific power a Senate president has, and the specific reason it's hard to pin down afterward.

Except the sponsor pinned it down.

Twelve years later, the same instinct

In December 2024, Biggs was publicly demanding the Epstein files. He posted that "Americans deserve transparency from the corrupt FBI—starting with Epstein's client list and the Russian collusion hoax," and three weeks later asked flatly: "Where is Epstein's client list?"

On July 23, 2025, he got the chance to vote on it. A House subcommittee took up a measure demanding the Justice Department release the files. It passed 8 to 2, with three Republicans joining five Democrats.

Biggs was one of the two no votes.

His chief of staff didn't respond when the Phoenix New Times asked about it.

He is not the only Republican who found the files less urgent once a vote was attached. Clay Higgins was the only member of the entire House to vote against releasing them on the floor, 427 to 1. James Comer, who chairs the committee that could compel them, has handled the whole subject with conspicuous gentleness.

But the pattern is worth naming in Biggs's case specifically, because it's the same shape as 2013: loud in public about accountability, quiet where it counts, and unavailable for comment afterward.

What Arizonans are actually voting on

Biggs is asking Arizona to make him governor. A governor signs or vetoes bills, appoints agency heads, and decides which investigations the state pursues.

The record he brings to that job includes a stretch as the most powerful man in the Arizona Senate, during which a bill to strip a police force accused of serving child abusers of its authority passed the House and quietly expired on his watch — and the Republican who wrote it says he's the reason.

He's also asking for the job on an abortion record most Arizonans don't share.

Voters can weigh his explanation — that nobody was sure. They should weigh it against the fact that the Justice Department was sure enough to sue, and won.

Source

Hannah Knowles, "Small-town fight may haunt Andy Biggs, GOP governor candidate in Arizona," The Washington Post, July 20, 2026; and TJ L'Heureux, "Andy 'Where's the client list?' Biggs votes no on Epstein files release," Phoenix New Times, July 24, 2025. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Greg Abbott Threatened Two Airports' Funding Over a Sink. DFW Folded the Same Day.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:39:05 +0000

Before Muslims pray, they perform wudu — rinsing hands and feet. It takes a couple of minutes and it needs a place to sit and a tap at the right height. Airports around the world install them for the same reason they install chapels, water fountains and nursing rooms: people are in the building for hours.

Houston's airport has had an ablution room at its international terminal since 2024, described as for use by people of all faiths. Dallas Fort Worth has had a station inside its Terminal D interfaith chapel since 2019 — "seven years of one of these stations with no issues or concerns that we're aware of," a DFW spokesperson told KERA.

On Friday, Greg Abbott announced he is reviewing every state and federal grant dollar going to both airports because of them.

What Abbott actually did

He sent a letter to DFW's CEO Christopher McLaughlin and to the mayors of Houston, Dallas and Fort Worth, saying his office is reviewing all grant funds for facilities at their airports — and that funding would be revoked if the ablution facilities stayed in use.

He also referred both airports to U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for federal investigations.

His stated reason, from the news release:

"These ablution facilities appear designed to single out one subset of the population for special treatment based on religion. That is illegal. Both airports are government-owned facilities. The federal and state constitutions prohibit government from facilitating this sort of discrimination. Just as the government cannot favor the secular over the sacred, it also cannot favor one religious view over all others."

Hold that argument up to the light. Abbott's position is that a public airport providing a washing station violates the Constitution by favoring one religion — while Houston describes its room as available to all and DFW's sits inside the airport's interfaith chapel.

By that logic, an airport chapel is unconstitutional. A kosher or halal food vendor is unconstitutional. A quiet room is unconstitutional. Abbott is not, of course, reviewing grant funding over any of those.

The rule he's applying only has one religion in it.

It worked immediately

Shortly after Abbott's announcement, a DFW spokesperson said plans for the facility had been cancelled, because it "would not deliver the originally anticipated operational benefits."

That is what an airport says when a governor threatens its grant funding on a Friday afternoon. Nobody at DFW ran a fresh cost-benefit analysis in the hour after the press release. They read the threat and complied.

Note also what state Sen. Tan Parker, R-Flower Mound, who chairs the state Senate's transportation committee, sent DFW the day before Abbott's letters: six questions for the airport's board, among them "Who approved this? Who wrote the check?"

There was no check. The "private donation" everyone was chasing came from a state permit filing that the design firm, Ghafari Associates, had filled out wrong. DFW says the two proposed stations would have been paid for out of the airport's own money — concessions, parking and airline landing fees. "While we are a public facility, it would not be taxpayer dollars," a spokesperson said. The airport also put the cost nearer $120,000 than the $300,000 on the filing.

So a state senator demanded to know who was secretly funding a washing station, and the answer was: the airport, out of parking revenue, for a project the airport had not yet approved.

This is a habit, not a principle

Abbott has a documented method: find a city doing something the Republican base dislikes, then threaten its money until it stops.

He threatened $530,000 in grants for Grand Prairie unless the city cancelled an event at a water park that had initially been advertised as a "Muslims only" gathering.
He threatened cities' transportation funding last year unless they removed rainbow crosswalks supporting LGBTQ+ communities.
And now: all grant funds at the two biggest airports in Texas, over foot-washing stations.

None of these are votes. None went through the Legislature. This is one man using the state's checkbook to make local governments do what he wants, on subjects he chooses.

The broader campaign

This didn't come out of nowhere. Anti-Islamic rhetoric has been at the forefront of Texas Republican messaging through the year, with GOP leaders railing for months about ending the so-called "Islamification" of Texas.

We've traced where that panic actually comes from. In Little Rock, the supposed "Sharia takeover" that mobilized a governor, an attorney general, a state bill and a 50-member congressional caucus turned out to be five houses in a subdivision that had been there nearly two decades — two of them occupied by Christians. The story originated in a hate group's blog post.

Abbott himself is a direct participant. Texas Monthly reviewed 1,300 pages of emails and found that twelve of the thirteen reasons in Abbott's proclamation declaring CAIR a terrorist organization matched a report written by a fellow at a think tank the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an anti-Muslim hate group — including a claim about the FBI that appears to be false.

So the pattern is: an outside group writes the material, Abbott issues the order, and Texas institutions fall in line.

Who this actually costs

Muslim Texans — most of them American citizens, many of them flying through DFW and Bush Intercontinental every week — just watched their governor put the state's grant funding on the line to stop an airport from installing a place to wash before prayer. A facility the airport was going to pay for out of its own parking and concession revenue.

And the practical outcome is a chill that runs well past one room. Every city manager and airport board in Texas now knows the price of accommodating Muslim travelers is a funding review and a federal referral. That is the point of doing it in public.

Abbott says the Constitution forbids government from favoring one religious view over all others. He should read it again.

Source

Ayden Runnels, "Abbott threatens Texas airports' funding over Islamic facilities," The Texas Tribune, Aug. 14, 2026. Photo: Image of Sport/Sipa USA via Reuters, courtesy The Texas Tribune.

The Third-Ranking Republican in Congress Went on TV and Called Minnesota's Lieutenant Governor "a More Masculine Version of Tim Walz"

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:03:48 +0000

Peggy Flanagan is the lieutenant governor of Minnesota. She just won her party's nomination for the United States Senate, beating Rep. Angie Craig in the primary. She is a citizen of the White Earth Nation, the first woman of color elected to statewide office in Minnesota, and when she was elected in 2018 she was the highest-ranking Native American woman in elected executive office in the country.

On Wednesday, August 12, 2026, Fox Business anchor Cheryl Casone asked Tom Emmer — the House Majority Whip, the third-ranking Republican in Congress — for his read on her.

Here is what he led with, after a warm-up about downtown Minneapolis:

"Cheryl, look. First looking at Peggy Flanagan, she's just a more masculine version of Tim Walz, but it's the same person."

"First looking at." Not her record as lieutenant governor. Not a vote. How she looks.

This is a habit, not a slip

Emmer is not a backbencher who wandered onto television. He is the man who counts votes for the Republican conference, and he has now made a specific kind of remark twice in seven weeks.

On June 24, at a Faith and Freedom Coalition town hall on Capitol Hill, he said Somali Minnesotans who don't assimilate should "go the hell back to where they came from" — and added that he was "done being careful, even the least bit careful." Minnesota is home to roughly 107,000 Somali residents, the largest such community in the country.

He was telling the truth about that last part. Seven weeks later he is on Fox Business describing a Native American woman's appearance as her defining political trait.

The number he stated as fact

The rest of the answer is worth reading closely, because Emmer moved from the insult straight into a figure he presented as established:

"She is literally in the fraud issue up to her eyes. $9 billion in fraud under her watch, Tim Walz' watch, Keith Ellison, Ilhan Omar... Not one government official has been charged or held accountable for almost $9 billion dollars in taxpayer money that was built out of our state government in the hands of Somali fraudsters."

Minnesota does have a serious fraud problem, and nobody sensible disputes that. But the $9 billion number is not a finding. It is a projection an assistant U.S. attorney offered in December for what prosecutors expect they may eventually find across 14 "high-risk" state programs.

The largest charged case in the state — Feeding Our Future, which the Justice Department calls the largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the nation — involves roughly $250 million. That is a real scandal and a real number. It is also a different program: the $9 billion is a Medicaid estimate, and Minnesota's own Medicaid director said in December that "we don't have evidence in hand to suggest that we have $9 billion in fraud in these benefits over the last seven years."

Gov. Tim Walz has called the $9 billion figure sensationalized. Whether you believe him or the prosecutor's projection, the honest way to say it is "prosecutors believe it could reach." Emmer said it had happened, and attached the words "Somali fraudsters" to it.

That is the same move he made in December 2025, when he told the same network that 80% of crimes committed in the Twin Cities are committed by Somalis — a figure Minnesota's own crime data contradicts, and one he then inflated to 90% two weeks later.

What he's actually running on

Strip out the appearance comment and the inflated figure, and Emmer's pitch is straightforward. He said it himself at the end:

"Vote for Democrats you will get more of the same, vote for Republicans you're going to get a change."

Nothing in the answer was about what Republicans would do next. Not the price of groceries, not health premiums, not the hospitals in his own 6th District. What was in it: Flanagan's looks, the fraud number, thanks to Trump for "chasing down the fraud, waste and abuse," and a count of Amy Klobuchar's press releases. The part about Flanagan was about who she is — a woman he described first by her looks and then by association with a community he has already told to leave.

Emmer is the third-ranking member of the House majority. When he is asked what Republicans offer Minnesota, this is the answer he gives.

The thing about "she's just a more masculine version"

There is no policy content in that sentence and no way to fact-check it, which is the point of saying it.

It's the oldest available attack on a woman running for office: not that she's wrong, but that she is somehow not properly a woman. Emmer aimed it at the first woman of color Minnesota ever elected statewide, on national television, and prefaced it himself with the words "First looking at."

Flanagan will face Republican nominee Michelle Tafoya, a former sportscaster, in November. Minnesotans will spend the next three months hearing about this race. Emmer just showed them what shape the Republican half of it is going to take.

Source

Tom Emmer Says Peggy Flanagan Is 'a More Masculine Tim Walz' — Kathianne Boniello, Mediaite, August 13, 2026. Photo: Fox Business via Mediaite.

Trump Re-Endorsed 16 Florida Republicans This Week. Cory Mills Was the One He Skipped.

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:00:16 +0000

The single most valuable thing a Republican can have on a primary ballot in Florida is a Donald Trump endorsement. Cory Mills has been telling voters he has three of them.

"I'm the only person who sits on this stage today who has been endorsed three times by President Donald J. Trump," Mills said at a primary debate in New Smyrna Beach last week.

On Wednesday night, August 12, Trump went through the Florida ballot and posted fresh endorsements for essentially the whole delegation ahead of the August 18 primary. Jimmy Patronis. Kat Cammack. Aaron Bean. John Rutherford. Randy Fine. Mike Haridopolos. Gus Bilirakis. Anna Paulina Luna. Laurel Lee. Greg Steube. Scott Franklin. Brian Mast. Mario Diaz-Balart. María Elvira Salazar. Carlos Gimenez. Plus Sydney Gruters in the open 16th.

Sixteen names. Mills's district — Florida's 7th — was not one of them.

Trump did not withdraw the old endorsement. He just didn't repeat it, on the one night when he repeated everyone else's.

What's on Mills's record

There is not much mystery about why.

Mills has been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee since November 2025 into allegations including campaign finance violations, sexual misconduct and dating violence. Politico reports the committee is also looking at whether he benefited from federal government contracts.

He is also the subject of an active Department of Justice criminal investigation, first reported in July. No charges have been filed. Mills has called the reports "fake news" and noted, correctly, that he has never been charged.

In October 2025, a Florida circuit judge granted a protective order against Mills at the request of a former girlfriend, Lindsey Langston — a former Miss United States and Republican State Committeewoman for Columbia County — who alleged he had threatened to release intimate videos. The order expired in January. In February 2025, Washington police investigated whether he assaulted a former girlfriend.

Langston spoke publicly for the first time on August 7, in an interview with Florida's Voice Radio, describing what she called a months-long pattern of unwanted contact and threats after their relationship ended.

"I tried to handle it on my own, but it got to a point where I was genuinely scared," Langston said. "I felt that it was the best, in my best interest to go to law enforcement."

Mills denies all of it and calls the allegations politically motivated.

His own colleagues are working against him

The endorsement Trump withheld is not the only one Mills is missing.

Two sitting Republican members of Congress — Anna Paulina Luna and Mike Haridopolos — are backing Ryan Elijah, the former local television anchor running against Mills. Luna has previously said publicly that she thought Mills should have resigned. Both of them got their own Trump endorsements Wednesday night.

Central Florida sheriffs have lined up behind Elijah too. And this week Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd — who endorsed Mills in 2022 — went on camera and called him "not a good guy", after Mills listed the sheriff as a supporter on his website.

Elijah's pitch to Republican voters is not ideological. It's arithmetic:

"We have a member of Congress who is on the verge of getting kicked out, and that's what you need to understand," Elijah said at the debate. "We're all conservatives here. But if you look the other way, we are going to get a huge surprise in November."

Another challenger, Army veteran Michael Don Johnson, has hammered Mills over the reporting on his military record — the award two of the soldiers named in his Bronze Star paperwork say he did not earn.

The campaign account

Endorsements aside, the numbers are the part Mills can't argue with.

His latest federal campaign reports show less than $70,000 in his account. He has cut a new television ad leaning on the Trump endorsement — but according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, he has no pending ad buys, so it isn't clear when the ad will air.

An incumbent congressman, four days out from a primary, with $70,000 and nothing booked.

What it costs the district

Here is the part that matters to people in central Florida rather than to Cory Mills.

Florida Republicans went through a mid-decade redistricting push under Gov. Ron DeSantis designed to pick up as many as four Democratic-held seats. Mills's district wasn't redrawn. Trump carried it by more than 12 points in 2024 — but by only about 5.5 points in 2020.

If Mills survives Tuesday, Politico reports his seat becomes the top target for Florida Democrats, and the DCCC has already lined up behind Bale Dalton, a military veteran and former chief of staff to Bill Nelson at NASA.

So a district Republicans should never have to think about is about to consume money and attention that would otherwise go somewhere else — not because of a policy fight, but because of one member's conduct. That is the same story playing out in three other safe Republican seats this cycle.

Mills's answer to all of it has been to compare his legal troubles to Trump's and refuse to go. His party's answer, this week, was to hand out sixteen endorsements and walk past his.

Source

Cory Mills hopes Trump boost will overcome Ethics headlines in Florida primary — Gary Fineout, POLITICO, August 13, 2026, and Trump reiterates endorsements for 16 Florida Republicans, omits Cory Mills amid investigations — Florida's Voice, August 13, 2026. Photo: Francis Chung / POLITICO.

Max Miller Dumped His Custody File on X to Save His Campaign. A Federal Lawsuit Says a Nude Photo of His 2-Year-Old Was In It.

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:51:34 +0000

On August 2, 2026, Ohio Congressman Max Miller was under heavy pressure to drop out of his re-election race. His answer was to prove he had nothing to hide. He posted a Dropbox folder to his X account containing the records from his divorce and custody case, and said he was staying on the ballot.

Ten days later, his ex-wife sued him in federal court over what was in that folder.

Emily Moreno filed the lawsuit on August 12 in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, on behalf of the couple's 2-year-old daughter. It names both Miller and his attorney, Aaron Minc, and it says the folder Miller posted publicly contained a nude photograph of the child.

According to the suit, the image was available for download for 23 hours.

What the lawsuit says

Moreno's attorney, Subodh Chandra, said Miller and Minc "engaged in incomprehensible recklessness."

"This child is an entirely innocent victim who has become collateral damage to her father's political ambition."

The complaint puts it more bluntly still. Any parent, it argues, knows better — in a world "filled with pedophiles, creeps, and AI-generated image alteration and video generation" — than to put a nude picture of a child on the public internet.

The suit accuses Miller and Minc of negligence, civil conspiracy, and civil liability for criminal acts, citing one of Ohio's child pornography statutes. It seeks $150,000 for each disclosure and transfer of the photo.

It also asks a judge to order that the download records be preserved, because — the filing says — Minc has still not said how many people downloaded the image.

The lawyer says he built the folder

Minc has not denied assembling the file. He told Politico he was the one who collected the documents and built the Dropbox folder so Miller could post it, that he alone was responsible for its contents, and that releasing the photo was completely unintentional and a mistake.

He also said there were no photos showing the girl's genitals — only one of her without a shirt on.

The lawsuit disputes that directly. Chandra wrote that a different photo than the one Minc described was in the released cache, and that a veteran pediatrician who reviewed it says it shows the child's genitalia. The photo also showed a large yellow bruise on the girl's shoulder.

Chandra says he emailed Minc the day after the release demanding answers.

He may have broken his own custody agreement to do it

There is a second problem with posting your child's photograph to win a news cycle: Miller had already agreed in writing not to.

Days after the documents went up, Moreno's attorneys in the custody case asked Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Judge Debra Boros to hold Miller in contempt. Their shared-parenting agreement says neither parent may use their daughter's image for any political campaign without the other parent's consent.

Judge Boros has not ruled.

The pressure he was trying to escape

The document dump did not happen in a vacuum. It was the move Miller made when the exits were closing.

By early August, two Republican senators had publicly told him to quit, a conservative group had called him unfit for office, and a poll had him down 14 points. Miller's response was to loan his own campaign $1 million and stay in the race. His former father-in-law — Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, the plaintiff's father — had already said publicly that Miller is a danger to his daughter and should not serve in the House.

Ohio Republicans were prepared to move him off the ballot. Trump's political team asked them to back off, and the meeting that could have replaced him never happened.

On August 4, the House Ethics Committee announced it was investigating whether Miller "may have engaged in domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use." Miller says he requested that investigation himself, to "clear my name from these horrific attacks on myself and family."

That is the context for the Dropbox link. Releasing everything was supposed to be the proof of innocence. Instead it produced a federal lawsuit alleging he published a nude image of his own toddler.

What is and isn't established

Miller has repeatedly denied abusing his ex-wife or their child, and he has not been criminally charged. A Cuyahoga County Children and Family Services investigation opened after the girl was diagnosed with a broken collarbone found neither parent responsible for that injury. We reported on the 2,000 pages of records behind those allegations when Mother Jones obtained them in July.

The lawsuit filed this week is a civil complaint. Its allegations have not been tested in court, and Minc's account — that it was his error, not Miller's — may hold up.

But two things are already on the record and not in dispute. Miller chose to post his family's private legal file on X, where the suit says the two posts carrying the link drew more than 400,000 views. And he did it because he was trying to hold onto a seat in Congress.

The seat he's holding onto

Miller is seeking a third term in Ohio's 7th District, which covers western Cuyahoga County, northern Wayne County, and Medina and Ashland counties. Both of Ohio's U.S. senators have asked him to get out. He has declined.

His constituents are entitled to ask what they are getting for that stubbornness. Not one of the last six weeks of headlines out of this office has been about Medicaid, or grocery prices, or the hospitals in Wayne County. Every one of them has been about Max Miller's ability to stay on a ballot.

That is what a safe seat buys a member of Congress: the freedom to spend a full campaign season on his own problems.

Source

Lawsuit accuses U.S. Rep. Max Miller, attorney of releasing nude photo of 2-year-old daughter — Adam Ferrise and Sabrina Eaton, cleveland.com, August 12, 2026. Additional reporting from Forbes and The Guardian. Photo: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/AP, via The Guardian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One said yes.

The tally

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

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

Husted is the one to look at

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

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

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

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

What Van Orden said

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

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

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

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

The pattern, not the exception

None of this is new behavior around Max Miller.

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

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

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

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

Why it matters where you live

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

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

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

Source

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

Florida's Most Famous Republican Sheriff Just Said Cory Mills Is "Not a Good Guy" and Shouldn't Represent Anyone

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:04:22 +0000

Grady Judd is not a Democrat. The Polk County sheriff is one of the most recognizable Republicans in Florida, a fixture on cable news, and an endorsement that GOP candidates across the state chase every cycle.

In 2022, he gave that endorsement to Cory Mills.

On August 11, a week before Mills's August 18 Republican primary, Judd went on camera for one of Mills's challengers and took it back — with a list of reasons.

"I did not endorse Cory Mills for this election," Judd said, emphasizing the word. "He's misleading you. In Polk County, we call that lying to you. That's right. He's under criminal investigation. He's had House ethics complaints. He's not a good guy. We don't want him representing us."

Judd is now backing Ryan Elijah, one of three Republicans challenging Mills. "I'm endorsing Ryan Elijah. He's honest. He'll go to Washington and do what's right," Judd said. "Cory, shame on you for suggesting I endorsed you when I didn't."

The part that's actually in dispute — and the part that isn't

Mills pushed back, and on the narrow question he has a case worth stating.

He says he never claimed a current endorsement. He did win Judd's support in 2022, when he was running for an open seat, and he provided Florida Politics with the text message to prove it — Judd wrote at the time, "Cory count me in you are clearly the best. Let me know how I can help." Judd does not dispute that.

The endorsement graphic is still on Mills's campaign website today. Mills says his campaign was locked out of that site years ago and can't update it, that the page is obviously dated because it still names his 2022 primary opponent Anthony Sabatini, and that the web address on current flyers is there only because a print shop reused a template from the last election. "Yes we need new website and trying to get access to old one to update," he said.

That's a real explanation for a stale webpage. Take it at face value.

It changes nothing about the sentence that matters. Judd didn't say Mills faked a text message. He said Mills is under criminal investigation, has racked up House ethics complaints, is not a good guy, and shouldn't represent anyone. And on that, Judd is describing the public record.

The record Judd is describing

Every item on the sheriff's list is documented.

The criminal investigation. The Justice Department is criminally investigating Cory Mills, as NBC News reported in July 2026. The focus hasn't been made public; a source said at least one person was contacted about Mills's finances and allegations of misconduct. Mills called it "a desperate lie from my political opponents." He has not been charged.
The ethics complaints. The Office of Congressional Ethics found that companies Mills owns had been "securing close to $1,000,000 in federal contracts for munitions and weapons" since January 2023 — the month he was sworn in — and reported that he refused to cooperate with its review. A House Ethics investigative subcommittee has been running its own inquiry into him since November 2025; it calls the allegations "serious and complex" and has authorized more than 20 subpoenas.
The restraining order. In October 2025 a judge issued a restraining order against Mills at the request of Lindsey Langston, Miss United States 2024, who alleged he threatened to release sexually explicit videos of her. Mills denied it.
The Bronze Star. In May 2025, NOTUS found five people who served with Mills in Iraq — including the two soldiers his award paperwork says he saved — who have no recollection of him being at the incidents listed on the form. One called the description of his involvement a "fabrication."

Judd didn't have to dig for any of this. It's been in the papers for two years.

Why a sheriff from the wrong county matters

Polk County isn't even in Florida's 7th District. Judd has no vote in this primary and no constituent stake in it.

That's what makes the move notable. This isn't a local official protecting his turf. It's a sitting Republican sheriff going out of his way, in the final week of a Republican primary, to tell Republican voters in another part of the state that the Republican incumbent is unfit.

Mills is a congressman whose own party has been quietly trying to get out from under him for months. Republicans are now spending time and money defending seats like his — districts Trump carried comfortably in 2024 — not over any policy dispute, but because of the conduct of the men holding them. Their complaint has generally been about the polling, not the behavior.

Judd skipped that part. He said the behavior.

What his own voters already said

None of this is news to the people Mills represents. When he held a town hall in Oviedo in January 2026, hundreds of constituents greeted him with booing, and one man asked whether he was profiting from his companies' federal contracts. Critics at the event told FOX 35 he was unfit for office. "We believe that his lack of character, lack of ethics, and the numerous scandals that have been levied against him disqualify him for this position," one of them said.

Seven months later, a Republican sheriff who once vouched for him is saying the same thing in shorter words.

"He's not a good guy. We don't want him representing us."

Florida's 7th District votes August 18.

Source

Jacob Ogles, "'We call that lying': Grady Judd backs Ryan Elijah, slams Cory Mills for touting past endorsement", Florida Politics, August 11, 2026.

More Than 50 Black Georgia Lawmakers Asked Mike Collins to Explain Himself. All He Has Said Is 'No One Speaks for Me.'

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:27:38 +0000

For weeks, the question about Mike Collins was whether he would say anything at all.

Now he has. And what he said is worth reading closely, because it is a careful non-answer to a question nobody actually asked him.

On August 11, 2026, the Georgia Recorder reported that more than 50 Black Georgia state lawmakers had signed a statement condemning Collins — the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate — over what the statement calls his "extensive ties to white nationalists." The signers are not activists or opposing campaign staff. They are sitting members of the Georgia General Assembly.

Their central complaint was not the ties themselves. It was that Collins had never explained them.

"We condemn the Georgia congressman and urge our Republican state legislators to join us in demanding answers for his extensive ties to white nationalists."

State Sen. Nikki Merritt, a Grayson Democrat who leads the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus, put it plainly: "I signed this letter because these are some really concerning allegations. We're talking about ties to people who promote white nationalism, just hate and racist propaganda, and these are targeted specifically at Black people and minorities."

Collins' campaign did not respond to the Recorder's requests for comment.

What he actually said

Collins was asked about his son-in-law at an event in Athens the week before. Here is his answer:

"No one speaks for me, and I don't speak for anyone else. I condemn all forms of antisemitism. I don't care what the source is. Any type of hate, I condemn, period. That's not who I am."

He then pointed to his voting record supporting Israel's military, and said his son-in-law has never been part of his campaign.

Count what is missing. He does not name David Alan Scheer II. He does not say whether he has spoken to him. He does not address the chief of staff he replaced. He does not address the video he himself reposted. He condemns "all forms of antisemitism" in the abstract — a statement no one would dispute — and moves on.

"No one speaks for me" answers a charge nobody made. Nobody claimed Scheer speaks for Collins. The charge is that Collins has spent years surrounded by this and has never once drawn a line.

The three things he did not address

His son-in-law. In July, CNN's KFile documented that Scheer, married to Collins' daughter, promotes white nationalist ideology to an audience of more than 1.5 million followers across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Telegram. We went through that reporting in detail — the Patriot Front posts, the Nazi propaganda imagery, the "Jewish Bolsheviks" video. The Recorder reviewed his accounts too, and found posts claiming Jews control the media and are responsible for the death of Jesus. In one video posted in November 2025, Scheer said: "All we're told is Germany bad, Hitler evil. Don't ask questions. Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust."

His chief of staff. A May 28 Slate report found that Kip Talley, then Collins' chief of staff, took part in a group chat with white supremacists, where he documented efforts to help an associate who had been jailed for contempt. The man Talley was trying to help had minimized the Holocaust and argued that non-white people were genetically predisposed to violence. Talley said he acted on his own: "I was simply trying to help a suffering inmate connect with counsel. I did not act at the direction of Rep. Collins, use official resources, or coordinate with anyone else in the group chat."

Collins replaced Talley last month. That was the second chief of staff he lost — the previous one was under congressional investigation over campaign funds and had used a Collins campaign account to mock a woman who said she was raped.

The video he posted himself. This is the one that cannot be blamed on anybody else. In 2024, Collins reposted footage of a pro-Palestinian demonstration at Ole Miss in which white counterprotesters mocked a Black demonstrator — one of them imitating a monkey. Collins captioned it: "Ole Miss taking care of business."

After the blowback, he wrote that he had meant to elevate the reaction to the protests, not the behavior in the video, and that he now recognized "there certainly seems to be some potentially inappropriate behavior that none of us should seek to glorify."

That is not a staffer's post. That is not an in-law's post. That is Mike Collins' own account, his own caption, and a walk-back that still would not use the word racist.

Why Georgia Republicans are being asked to sign too

The most pointed line in the legislators' statement is the one aimed at their own colleagues: they urged "our Republican state legislators to join us."

That is a test, and so far it is going unanswered. Collins is not a fringe candidate — he is the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat, with Donald Trump's endorsement, running against Sen. Jon Ossoff in November.

It is also not only Democrats who have noticed. Former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona and the Republican mayors of Valdosta and Tifton have all crossed party lines to endorse Ossoff. Gov. Brian Kemp backed Collins' primary opponent, arguing that Collins' record and history of controversial statements on social media could harm him in a general election.

The Center for Politics' Sabato's Crystal Ball recently moved Georgia's Senate rating from "leans Democratic" to "likely Democratic."

The pattern is the point

Any one of these could be a coincidence. A relative with ugly views. A staffer in a bad group chat. A repost that landed wrong.

The reason 50 lawmakers signed a statement is that it keeps happening, and the response is always the same shape: a general condemnation of hate, a pivot to his record on Israel, and no engagement with the specific thing he is being asked about.

Georgians asking Mike Collins what he believes have gotten one sentence: "That's not who I am." They are still waiting to hear who he is.

Source

Four dozen Black Georgia lawmakers press Collins on alleged 'white nationalist' ties by Ross Williams, Georgia Recorder, August 11, 2026. Photo: Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder.

Mike Johnson Calls Himself a 'Zealous Guardian of Due Process.' Watch Who Gets It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:27:17 +0000

On March 4, 2026, Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales went on a conservative radio show and admitted he'd had an affair with a woman who worked in his congressional office. He called it a "mistake" and a "lapse in judgment." Four months earlier, asked about the rumors in public, he had called them "completely untruthful."

The staffer, Regina Santos-Aviles, died in 2025 after setting herself on fire. Her widower released texts in which Gonzales asked her for a "sexy pic" and kept going after she told him he was "going too far." The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into whether Gonzales "engaged in sexual misconduct towards an individual employed in his congressional office."

Gonzales said he would not resign. And the most powerful Republican in the House agreed with him.

"I don't think it's time"

Nine days before that admission, Mike Johnson was asked whether Gonzales should step down. Here is what the Speaker said:

"I think we have to wait for more of the facts to come out, and I don't think it's time to call for resignation."

He went further:

"If the accusation of something is going to be the litmus test for someone being able to continue to serve in the House, you'll have a lot of people would have to resign or be removed or expelled from Congress."

Some rank-and-file Republicans did speak up. Lauren Boebert called on Gonzales to step down. Anna Paulina Luna said "this is really disgusting to see." Brandon Gill said Gonzales should quit the race because "America deserves better."

Johnson said none of that. Johnson had endorsed Gonzales.

Here's what finally moved leadership, and it wasn't the conduct. Gonzales made his admission the day after the March 3 primary — a primary he came in second in. In Texas you need more than half the vote to win a primary outright, and neither man got there, so Gonzales was headed to a May runoff against a challenger who had just beaten him.

Two days after that result, leadership moved. Barely. They asked him to withdraw from his re-election race, and, as the Texas Tribune noted, pointedly did not ask him to give up his seat. NRCC chair Richard Hudson spelled out the arrangement: Gonzales should quit the runoff "while focusing on his family and serving his constituents for the remainder of his term."

Serving his constituents. That was the deal. Give up the campaign, keep the vote.

The math, not the misconduct

Gonzales kept that vote for another five weeks. He gave it up on April 13 — and not because Republican leaders finally found their conscience.

He quit the same evening Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell did, both of them staring down expulsion resolutions their colleagues had drafted. A Democrat, Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, wrote the one aimed at Gonzales. Luna wrote the one aimed at Swalwell. Each man was given until 2 p.m. to quit or face a vote.

CNN reported the reason it worked out that way: the numbers had to come out even. One Republican and one Democrat meant no net change to Johnson's razor-thin majority. Before the Swalwell allegations surfaced, GOP leaders had asked Gonzales not to run again but hadn't pushed him out of Congress — they couldn't spare the vote.

Fox News laid out the same arithmetic for the four members then facing expulsion: two Democrats, two Republicans. The parity is what made anyone willing to move. As Fox put it, with a majority that tight, Republicans "may not want to cede power to Democrats if the House expels a GOP Member."

That's the standard. Not what a member did. Whether removing him costs a seat.

Same podium, two answers

The morning after those resignations, Johnson stood in front of reporters and was asked about the two members still on the list — Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and Republican Cory Mills.

On the Democrat, he had a clear answer:

"I have been a zealous guardian of due process around here. I do think certainly on Cherfilus-McCormick, the Ethics Committee has gone through all of its processes, and they found some alarming facts. I think the facts are indisputable at this point, and so I believe it'll be the consensus of this body that she should be expelled."

On the Republican, in the same remarks, he said he'd be looking into the status of the Ethics Committee's investigation.

To be fair to Johnson: an ethics subcommittee had already proven 25 of 27 counts against Cherfilus-McCormick, and she was under federal indictment. She denies wrongdoing. That's a further-along process than Mills's.

But notice what the Speaker's rule actually produces. When a process finishes on a Democrat, he announces the verdict for the whole chamber. When a process is open on a Republican, the openness of the process becomes the reason to say nothing — and there is always a process, and it is always open. Mills is still in Congress. He's one of four scandal-plagued House Republicans who have turned safe seats into real races.

"The key word there is allegation"

Which brings us to right now.

Max Miller, the Ohio Republican, is accused by his ex-wife of throwing hot water on her and of shoving her against a wall, according to court filings reviewed by CBS News — and, in an account she gave police, of holding a gun to her head. Their 2-year-old daughter turned up with a fractured collarbone. Miller denies all of it. Last week he asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate him, and within hours it agreed — opening a probe into domestic violence and illegal drug use.

Johnson had already answered, on July 21, two weeks before any of that. Here is what he said:

"The key word there is allegation. We have a process here. The House Ethics Committee works on those things."

Two weeks later, with the investigation open, he said more, and it was worse:

"There's all sorts of domestic events going on with 435 members of Congress all the time, it's not my business to get engaged in it."

All sorts of domestic events. A gun to a head is a domestic event. It is not the Speaker's business.

He isn't alone in the dodge. Jim Jordan called the same allegations "a family matter" and said he hopes Miller wins. Trump's own political team told Ohio Republicans to stop pressuring Miller to leave the ballot. The people who did break with Miller — Sens. Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted — are both from Ohio, and Moreno is the accuser's father.

What the same party sounds like when it's a Democrat

Hold Johnson's "zealous guardian of due process" next to how his party talks about people on the other side.

Maine Democrat Graham Platner had a chest tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol. He told the Associated Press he got it during a night of drinking in 2007 while on leave from the Marine Corps in Croatia, that he didn't know what it was, and that he'd had it covered up. The National Republican Senatorial Committee turned it into a months-long campaign — press release after press release, from October 2025 through the following summer.

Then a former girlfriend accused him of forcing her to have sex in 2021 — a claim he called "categorically false" — and his own party did what Johnson's has never done. Platner suspended his campaign in July and formally withdrew days later. The executive director of the Maine Democratic Party said on television that quitting "was the right thing to do" and that the allegations "were very real and they were very credible."

He is not in office. He never was. He had no vote to protect and no majority to preserve.

The day after Platner announced he was quitting, the NRSC's official statement on the race was this, in full:

"Maine Democrats elected a rapist Nazi to be their nominee for Senate, and regardless of who they anoint next, Susan Collins will be re-elected in November."

No process. No waiting for facts. No 435-members-have-domestic-events. For a private citizen with no vote to protect, the Republican Party's campaign arm went straight to "rapist Nazi."

And then look who they nominated

Here's the part that should end the argument.

The challenger who beat Gonzales on March 3 was Brandon Herrera, a gun YouTuber. He finished first, but under 50%, so the two were set to meet again in a May runoff. The split tells the story: the lead Gonzales built during early voting, before the affair had fully come out, evaporated as election day returns came in. Herrera finished ahead 43.3% to 41.8%. When Gonzales quit the runoff, Herrera became the Republican nominee in Texas's 23rd District without another vote being cast.

During their 2024 primary fight, Gonzales called Herrera a "known neo-Nazi." Herrera says that's false: "I am not, nor have I never been a neo-Nazi."

What's documented is on his own channel. Jewish Insider catalogued it in April 2024: a 2022 video showing off a Nazi submachine gun set to "Erika," a Nazi marching song, in which he calls the weapon "the original ghetto blaster" and goose-steps, and which ends with an associate beginning a Hitler salute; a 2020 video on Nazi guns scored with more Nazi marching music; years of Sons of Confederate Veterans videos; and a 2019 photo of him with the group in full Confederate uniform.

The party's response to all of that was to endorse him. Within days of Gonzales quitting, Trump endorsed Herrera, calling him a fighter for the MAGA agenda. So did Boebert — the same member who'd wanted Gonzales gone over the affair — and Mary Miller of Illinois.

The Democrats' campaign arm has since put the seat on its target list, citing Herrera's "disturbing history of extremism, violence, and antisemitic rhetoric." This is a district Trump won by 15 points. It's competitive now because of who Republicans picked — the same candidate who called a child a slur to insult mothers who organize against gun violence.

The standard

Put it in order.

A Democratic Senate candidate with a covered-up tattoo and a denied accusation: rapist Nazi, said in writing, by the party's official Senate committee.

A Republican congressman who admitted an affair with his own employee, a woman who later killed herself: not time to call for resignation — and please stay for the votes.

A Republican congressman accused in court of holding a gun to his wife's head: the key word there is allegation, and anyway, not my business.

A Republican nominee with Nazi songs in his back catalog: endorsed by the President of the United States.

Mike Johnson is not confused about right and wrong. He can state a verdict for the entire House when it suits him. He simply applies one rule to people who cost him nothing and another to people whose votes he needs. That is not due process. That is a headcount.

Source

Gabby Birenbaum, The Texas Tribune, "Rep. Tony Gonzales, forced into runoff, admits to affair with aide who died by suicide" (March 4, 2026). Photo via The New Republic.