MAGA Report Cards — Cost of Living

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

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

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

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

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

What she asked for

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

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

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

What happened to it

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

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

Two weeks later, at the full committee, Moore offered a scaled-down amendment — $50 million, one-fifth of the original ask, with a 25% state match attached. Appropriations Chairman Mike Simpson of Idaho said it hadn't been "properly vetted." It failed on a voice vote.

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

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

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

The part Miller doesn't mention

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

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

And she voted against filling it in the first place.

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

On August 12, 2022, the House passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which put further money into water and environmental infrastructure. Miller voted no on that too.

Mountain State Spotlight's Henry Culvyhouse put the pattern plainly: Miller voted against two Biden-era spending bills that helped expedite water projects in her own state, then turned around and asked the federal government for water money.

Her office's answer, in full:

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

That is a description of a bill she voted against.

What she did get

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

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

The record underneath

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

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

The bottom line

There is a version of this story where a member of Congress fights the cuts, loses, and can at least say she tried. Miller didn't lose that fight — she was on the other side of it, twice, in 2021 and 2022, before the water crisis was a line item anybody was fighting over.

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

We deserve better.

Sources

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

Pennsylvania Gets the Data Centers and the Electric Bills. All Ten of Its Republicans in Congress Voted for a Ten-Year Ban on States Writing AI Rules.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:33:34 +0000

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

In Pennsylvania, that somebody is you.

A California Democrat, Rep. Ro Khanna, just toured 15 Pennsylvania counties. He was there to talk about lost manufacturing jobs. That is not what people wanted to talk about.

"I was surprised by the anger about it in Pennsylvania. In other states, people are sometimes opposed in local communities, local pockets. But not this widespread anger."

Data centers came up more than any other issue. Five have been proposed close together in King of Prussia. A two-million-square-foot project is proposed in Conshohocken. So on August 3 he introduced a "Data Center Bill of Rights" — a declaration that communities have the right to reject a data center through a transparent local process, or to allow one only with real protections: no higher electricity rates, disclosed water use, renewable power, and taxes actually paid.

Here is the honest part. Khanna's answer is House Resolution 1471, a "sense of the House" resolution. It is non-binding. It changes no law. And as of this writing it has zero cosponsors — not one member of Pennsylvania's congressional delegation has signed it.

So set the resolution aside and ask the harder question. When Pennsylvania's Republicans actually had votes to cast on who gets to make these decisions and who pays the bill, how did they vote?

First, what this is costing you right now

Pennsylvania's grid is run by PJM Interconnection, based in Valley Forge. Every year PJM holds an auction to pay power plants to be available on the hottest and coldest days. That auction price flows into your bill.

In July 2026 it hit the ceiling again. The price for 2028 and 2029 landed at $325 per megawatt-day — the maximum allowed under a cap negotiated by the Shapiro administration after the 2024 auction closed at a then-record $269.92. Without that cap, it would have gone higher.

The auction also came up 6,831 megawatts short of what PJM wanted. And PJM's peak demand forecast has risen by 66,000 megawatts through 2036 — a mix of retiring fossil fuel plants, electrification, and proposed data centers. That increase alone is nearly 80 times the output of Three Mile Island, which is reopening next year for the sole purpose of powering data centers.

Robert Routh of the Natural Resources Defense Council put it plainly:

"Data center load growth is degrading grid reliability, and it's raising prices to the Governor Shapiro-negotiated cap."

Patrick Cicero, Pennsylvania's former consumer advocate, said the last two auctions have added roughly $16 billion to the cost of keeping the lights on. Some Pennsylvania utilities have raised the rate they charge customers who don't shop around by as much as 20%. His estimate of what that means for a household:

"This has cost the average residential consumer in Pennsylvania somewhere in the neighborhood of $220 to $320 per year in additional costs on their bill."

That is the bill. Now here is who signed for it.

The senator who threw the party

On July 15, 2025, Sen. Dave McCormick brought President Trump to Carnegie Mellon University for his Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit and announced more than $90 billion in private investment in data centers and power plants.

Seven months later, Technical.ly went looking for the money. What it found was that "some of the headline-grabbing announcements at the summit didn't match what companies actually pledged." McCormick's office named figures the companies themselves would not confirm — a $2.4 billion commitment from Constellation Energy among them. Some of the investments announced that day had been made years earlier, "as far back as the Biden administration." McCormick's office did not respond to a request for comment on the discrepancies.

Now that the townships are angry, McCormick's language has softened. On a telephone town hall in late July 2026 he allowed that "data centers in Pennsylvania have raised legitimate concerns," and said developers should show up with commitments to protect energy costs and water, use local labor, invest in the community, and pay taxes.

"That should be part of the deal up front. With all those facts, then the local community can decide whether they want the data center or not. And if they choose not to, that's their choice."

Read that again. A sitting United States senator is describing what developers should voluntarily offer. He is one of a hundred people in the country who can write a law requiring it. He has not.

The vote that answered the question

Pennsylvania sends ten Republicans to the U.S. House. On May 22, 2025, they got a real vote on exactly the question Khanna's resolution asks — who decides — and every one of them answered the same way.

The version of Trump's budget bill that passed the House that day by a single vote, 215-214, contained a ten-year ban on states enforcing their own artificial intelligence laws. Brian Fitzpatrick, Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Guy Reschenthaler, John Joyce, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly, Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie, and Scott Perry all voted yes.

Be precise about what that provision did and didn't do: it targeted state AI rules, not township zoning. It would not by itself have stopped a supervisor in Conshohocken from voting a project down. But it is the clearest statement any of them has made about where they think this power belongs — a decade-long freeze on Harrisburg's ability to regulate the industry at all, inside a bill the House passed at 6:54 in the morning.

The Senate killed it six weeks later. On July 1, 2025, senators voted 99-1 to strike the moratorium, Republicans and Democrats alike voting to protect their own states' authority. Only one senator in the entire chamber voted to keep it, and it wasn't McCormick — he voted with the 99.

House Republican leadership tried again anyway. In November 2025, Majority Leader Steve Scalise went looking for a way to attach a state AI preemption ban to the defense bill. That effort collapsed too, and the language was dropped in December after bipartisan blowback. Twice in one year, House Republican leadership went after the right of states to write their own rules for this industry. Twice they lost.

Then they made the power supply worse

Six weeks after the moratorium was stripped out, the same bill came back and passed for real. On July 3, 2025, nine of Pennsylvania's ten Republicans voted for final passage. Fitzpatrick was the only one who voted no — which he talks about a great deal more than the yes vote he cast in May that kept the bill alive by a single vote.

That law moved up the expiration of the two largest federal clean-energy tax credits — the credits driving most of the new electricity generation being built in Pennsylvania — to the end of 2027, from nearly a decade later. Spotlight PA reported one projection of an added $130 a year per Pennsylvania household by 2030.

Put the two halves together and you have the whole story of your electric bill. Demand is exploding because of an industry Pennsylvania Republicans courted and celebrated. Supply is tighter because of a law they voted for. PJM's auction is pinned at its cap. And the difference shows up on your statement every month.

Meanwhile, in Harrisburg: $2 billion still on the table

Pennsylvania hands data centers a sales tax exemption on their computer equipment. It is projected to cost the state nearly $2 billion in lost revenue over the next five years.

Almost nobody in Harrisburg publicly defends it. In the state House, 197 of 202 members voted for a bill repealing it. In the state Senate, 44 of 50 voted for a bill that included eliminating it. And then lawmakers went home for the summer without sending anything to the governor's desk.

Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, a Republican, said Democrats had "shredded" the Republican bill into "something that nobody could recognize." House Majority Leader Matt Bradford said he was "obviously unbelievably disappointed by the Republican leader in the Senate stating that he has no interest in doing anything on data centers." The only data center measure that survived into the budget was a disclosure rule: facilities using more than 10 megawatts have to report their energy and water use.

Two chambers, near-unanimous agreement, and the tax break is still there.

And the candidate for governor who found a poll

Stacy Garrity, the state treasurer running for governor, is quoted in the same reporting saying she'd back a pause but not an extended moratorium. That is the softest possible version of the position, and it arrived late. For two years Garrity's public line on data centers was that Pennsylvania needed to deregulate to attract more of them — "Ohio is kicking our butt" — until polling showed 64% of Pennsylvania adults calling data centers a crisis or a problem. We laid out the whole timeline in her own words.

There is one more Pennsylvania detail worth remembering. In northeastern Pennsylvania — where his Democratic opponent, Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti, calls data centers one of the most contentious issues in the region right now — Rob Bresnahan bought stock in a data center supplier while advocating for data centers on Capitol Hill.

This is not a Pennsylvania problem

The pattern repeats everywhere the boom has landed. In Ohio, Republican Sen. Jon Husted introduced something called the Ratepayer Protection Act — a bill with no cosponsors, from a senator whose campaign took about $69,750 from the tech and utility companies on the other side of that fight.

The shape is always the same. Court the developers during the boom. Discover the language of protection when the polling turns. Offer something voluntary, non-binding, or unenforceable. Never cast a vote that costs the industry anything.

What we deserve

The people showing up to township meetings in King of Prussia and Conshohocken and Homer City are asking for three simple things: to know how much water and power a project will take, to have rules that are actually binding, and to not eat the cost on their utility bill.

Their senator says developers should offer that. Their governor's challenger wants a pause of unspecified length. All ten of their Republican House members voted for a ten-year freeze on states enforcing their own AI rules, and nine of them voted for the law that helped push their constituents' power bills up.

Khanna is right about one thing, whatever you think of a non-binding resolution:

"At least they were offering royalty checks in the cases of fracking. [Data center developers are] not even giving the communities checks. It's just kind of like, 'OK, we're going to build.' What does the community get out of it? I literally don't understand it."

Neither do we. Pennsylvanians are paying for this industry twice — on their electric bills and in lost tax revenue — while the Republicans who represent them offer voluntary suggestions and votes that go the other way. We deserve better.

Source

Ro Khanna's tour through Pennsylvania influenced new federal data center legislation — Sam Janesch, The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 9, 2026. Photo: a yard sign protesting a proposed data center near the closed Cleveland-Cliffs steel mill in Conshohocken, by Monica Herndon / Philadelphia Inquirer staff photographer.

Warren Davidson Wrote a Bill to Take Away Your State's Power to Stop 200% Interest Loans

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:14:00 +0000

Every state in the country gets to decide how much a lender is allowed to charge you. Ohio decided a long time ago. Under Ohio law, a two-year $2,000 loan is capped at 37% a year. That is the ceiling. It exists because Ohioans, over decades, got tired of watching neighbors sign loans they could never climb out of.

Warren Davidson has written a bill that would take a large piece of that power away — not just from Ohio, but from every state.

It's called the American Lending Fairness Act. Davidson introduced the House version, H.R. 7866, on March 9, 2026. His fellow Ohio Republican, Sen. Bernie Moreno, introduced the Senate companion on February 12.

Here is what 103 consumer, civil rights, and community organizations told Congress the bill would do, in a letter sent on May 7, 2026:

"S. 3889 would eliminate states' ability to stop exploitative, unaffordable predatory lending through rent-a-bank schemes."

What a "rent-a-bank" loan actually is

This part is simple once you see it, and the whole bill turns on it.

Banks are exempt from state interest-rate caps. Ordinary lenders — the storefront on the corner, the online installment lender — are not. So high-cost lenders found a workaround: they partner with a small bank chartered in a state with no cap at all, put the bank's name on the paperwork, and then claim that state's law applies to a loan made to somebody in Ohio.

The lender does the advertising, the underwriting, and the collecting. The bank rents out its charter. That's the whole trick, and it has a name: rent-a-bank.

The National Consumer Law Center documented six of these operations running in Ohio in a factsheet on the state:

EasyPay Finance, through TAB Bank — loans at 130% to 189%, sold through pet stores, auto mechanics and furniture stores
OppLoans, through FinWise Bank, First Electronic Bank or CC Bank — $500 to $4,000 at 160%
Personify Financial, through First Electronic Bank — up to 189%
Axcess Financial, which runs the Check 'n Go stores, through Capital Community Bank — its Xact loan runs 145% to 225%

Ohio's own ceiling, again, is 37%. As NCLC put it: "a few rogue banks are helping predatory lenders disguise their loans as bank loans so they can charge triple-digit interest rates."

Congress has been on the other side of this before. In 2021, on a bipartisan vote, it overturned a Trump-era regulation that would have protected these arrangements.

The one lever states still have

A 1980 law called DIDMCA is what lets a state-chartered bank export its home state's interest rate to borrowers everywhere else. But Congress wrote an escape hatch into it — Section 525 — that lets a state opt out and say: loans made to our residents follow our rules.

Iowa, Colorado, and recently Oregon have used it, and other states are considering it. Colorado opted out in 2023, the lending industry sued, and in 2025 the Tenth Circuit sided with Colorado — ruling that out-of-state banks lending to Coloradans have to obey Colorado's limits.

Davidson's bill is the answer to that ruling. It would limit a state's rate caps to banks chartered inside that state, so an out-of-state bank could keep exporting whatever rate its home state allows. One legal summary of the bill notes it repeals Section 525 outright — the opt-out provision itself.

The coalition letter spells out the stakes plainly: lenders using these arrangements charge 100% to 200% a year, rates that are illegal for many installment loans in 45 states.

Here is how Davidson described his own bill:

"Federal law should not pick winners and losers based on a bank's charter. The American Lending Fairness Act restores decades-long precedent, protects consumers' right to shop for interest rates across state lines, and ensures they benefit from real competition."

"Consumers' right to shop for interest rates across state lines." Nobody in Ohio is shopping across state lines for a 225% loan at the furniture store. The shopping is being done by the lender, and what it is shopping for is a state with no cap.

Look at who lined up behind it

Moreno's announcement listed the groups supporting the bill. It is a wall of finance: the American Bankers Association, America's Credit Unions, the Consumer Bankers Association, the American Financial Services Association, the Online Lenders Alliance, the American Fintech Council, the Financial Technology Association, the Delaware, Nevada and Utah bankers associations — and two banks by name, WebBank and Cross River.

Two of the endorsers are from Ohio: the Ohio Bankers League and the Ohio Credit Union League.

On July 17, 2026, eleven of those trade groups wrote jointly to the leaders of both banking committees urging Congress to pass it.

Now look at who pays for Davidson's campaigns. According to federal campaign filings:

American Bankers Association PAC — $35,000. An endorser of his bill.
America's Credit Unions PAC — $34,000. An endorser of his bill.
UBS — $35,000. Wells Fargo — $35,000.
Mortgage Bankers Association — $32,500. Huntington Bancshares — $25,500.

Davidson sits on the House Financial Services Committee, which is the committee that writes the rules for all of them — and the committee his bill was referred to.

The magazine Jacobin, which first flagged the bill in February, reported that Davidson and Moreno together have taken nearly $5 million in financial-sector donations, and noted state caps exist because out-of-state banks have charged rates "as high as 199 percent on credit cards and loans."

Of the $3.66 million Davidson has raised, about $161,000 — roughly 4% — came from small grassroots donors.

This is a pattern, not a one-off

Davidson's committee has spent this Congress dismantling the rules that sit between ordinary people and the financial industry. The same committee voted to gut the law requiring companies to say who really owns them — a bill Davidson himself wrote. Its chairman personally authored the resolution that killed a $5 cap on overdraft fees, keeping about $5 billion a year in bank revenue that would have stayed in customers' accounts.

And the federal agency that would otherwise police high-cost lending is being taken apart. At a hearing last July, House Republicans asked how to make the gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau permanent.

Strip the disclosure rules, kill the fee caps, defang the cop — and then take away the states' authority to fill the gap. That last piece is Davidson's contribution.

What it costs an Ohio family

A $2,000 loan at Ohio's 37% ceiling is expensive. A $2,000 loan at 189% is a different kind of thing entirely: the interest alone can exceed the amount borrowed inside a year. That is the gap between what Ohio law allows and what a rent-a-bank loan charges, and Davidson's bill is aimed squarely at making sure states can't close it.

The coalition letter names three states that have pulled the opt-out lever — Iowa, Colorado and Oregon — and says others are considering it. This bill isn't only about those three. It takes the option off the table for every state, permanently, right as more of them start reaching for it.

Exactly one Ohio organization signed the letter opposing it: Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, the legal-aid group that represents low-income Ohioans in court. On the other side: the Ohio Bankers League and the Ohio Credit Union League.

Davidson picked a side. It wasn't the borrowers'.

We deserve better.

Source

Freddy Brewster, "Wall Street–Backed Lawmakers Want to Help Banks Gouge You," Jacobin, February 20, 2026.

Mary Miller's Child Care Bill Was One Sentence Long. By the Time It Passed, It Could Cut Off a Whole State.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:49:50 +0000

On February 26, 2026, Mary Miller introduced a bill about child care fraud. You can read the whole thing in about thirty seconds.

It was called the No Funds for Repeat Child Care Violations Act. Its entire operative content was one amendment to the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act: strike the words "Secretary may" and insert "Secretary shall."

That's it. It turned a discretionary power to withhold funds from a state that keeps violating program rules into a mandatory one.

On June 3, the House passed it 217 to 207. By then the bill had grown from one section to six, picked up a new short title — the Stop Child Care Scams Act of 2026 — and started carrying something the February version didn't have anywhere in it.

What got added

Compare the bill as introduced with the version the House sent to the Senate. Section 5 of the passed version is new, and it does two things:

First, it cuts the improper payment threshold in half. Under current rules, a state has to file a corrective action plan when its improper payment rate goes over 10%. The bill drops that trigger to 5 percent and writes it into permanent law.

Second — and this is the part worth reading twice — it adds this:

"If for each of 2 consecutive fiscal years the improper payment rate of a State determined under this section is more 5 percent, then such State shall be ineligible to receive funds under this subchapter" — unless the state satisfies the Secretary of Health and Human Services that it will fix things.

A state goes over 5% two years in a row, and every low-income family in that state can lose its child care assistance, unless one Cabinet secretary decides otherwise.

If that mechanism sounds familiar, it's because we've written about it before. It is, essentially, the CRACKDOWN Act that Glenn Grothman introduced the very same day — same 5% threshold, same two-consecutive-years trigger, same "shall be ineligible" language, same escape hatch through the HHS Secretary.

Grothman's standalone bill is still sitting in committee. Miller's bill is the one that carried the idea onto the House floor and over to the Senate.

"Improper payment" is not the same thing as fraud

This is the load-bearing point, and it isn't a matter of opinion. The Government Accountability Office has said it flatly, and the House Education and Workforce Committee quoted it in its own report on the companion bill: while all fraudulent payments are improper, not all improper payments are due to fraud.

An improper payment is any payment made in the wrong amount, to the wrong recipient, or for a service that didn't qualify. In practice a huge share of them are documentation problems — a missing form, a late eligibility recertification, a payment that was actually too small.

Miller's public case for the bill is about scams. Her office cited an estimated $600 million a year in improper payments across federal child care programs, and the bill's fraud sections are genuinely aimed at fraud: they require the HHS Secretary to investigate it, and to permanently bar any provider found to have committed it after all appeals are exhausted.

You can argue about whether permanent debarment with no discretion is the right call. But at least those sections punish the people who did something wrong.

Section 5 doesn't. Section 5 punishes a state's error rate — and the people it takes the money from are the families, not the bureaucrats who filed the paperwork wrong.

What that would mean in Illinois

In Miller's own state, more than 36,000 children age five and under get their child care paid for through this program, according to the First Five Years Fund. That's 16% of the kids who qualify — the other 84% are already going without.

Child care in Illinois runs about $19,807 a year. Families who get the subsidy pay an average of $335 a month instead.

Now imagine Illinois posts a 5.2% improper payment rate two years running. Under Section 5, unless one federal official is satisfied with the state's promises, the funding stops — for all 36,000 of those kids at once. Their parents' options are to quit a job or find $1,651 a month.

That's the mechanism. Not a fine on the state agency. Not a clawback of the misspent money — which, incidentally, federal law already allows, along with three-year on-site reviews of every state and mandatory independent audits.

The vote

The final tally on June 3 was 217 to 207. Republicans voted 212 to 0 in favor. Democrats voted 207 to 4 against. Miller voted yes on her own bill.

An almost perfectly party-line vote is worth noticing on a bill whose supporters describe it as common-sense anti-fraud housekeeping. When 207 members of one party vote against stopping fraud, it's usually because the bill in front of them does something else too.

It's now with the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

The pattern

Miller sits on the House Education and Workforce Committee, which moved eight of these bills at once in early March. She's a member of the House Freedom Caucus. And she has built a record of writing bills that take something away and naming them after the thing they threaten.

She demanded Congress lock in every DOGE cut permanently — "Every DOGE cut targets waste, fraud, and abuse. Congress MUST codify them quickly. What's the holdup?!" — and was one of only eight cosponsors of the bill to write DOGE into federal law.

Child care assistance for 36,000 Illinois kids is not waste, fraud, or abuse. It's the thing that lets their parents go to work.

We deserve better.

Source

House passes Mary Miller bill targeting child care fraud — WSIU, June 5, 2026. Bill text and roll call: H.R. 7726 and Roll Call 198. Photo: WSIU.

Virginia Foxx Voted Against Katrina Aid. And Sandy Aid, Twice. Then Helene Hit Her District.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:35:08 +0000

On September 8, 2005 — ten days after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans and flattened the Mississippi coast — the House of Representatives voted on $51.8 billion in emergency relief for the survivors.

It passed 410 to 11.

Virginia Foxx was one of the 11.

You can read the roll call yourself. Roll Call 460 lists every name. All eleven "no" votes were Republicans. Foxx, then eight months into her first term, is on that list.

Twenty-one years later, a storm hit her own district. Her position changed.

The record, in order

This is not a single bad vote. It is a pattern with one exception, and the exception is the interesting part.

Hurricane Katrina, September 8, 2005. The House passes $51.8 billion in emergency aid, 410-11. Foxx votes no.

Hurricane Sandy, January 4, 2013. The House votes on H.R. 41, which raised the borrowing authority of the federal flood insurance program so it could actually pay Sandy claims. Foxx votes no.

Hurricane Sandy, January 15, 2013. The House votes on H.R. 152, the main Sandy supplemental appropriations bill. Foxx votes no.

Hurricane Helene, December 19 and 20, 2024. Helene has torn through western North Carolina — her district. Congress takes up the American Relief Act, carrying roughly $100 billion in disaster money for North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and other states hit since 2022. Foxx votes yes. When a second version comes to the floor the next day and passes 366-34, she votes yes again.

Louisiana's survivors got a no. Mississippi's got a no. New Jersey's got a no, twice. Watauga County got a yes.

What she said when it was her turn

Foxx wasn't quiet about needing help. She was, by her own account, working the phones.

Danielle Battaglia of McClatchy reached her on September 30, 2024, days after the storm. Two feet of rain had fallen over Foxx's home in Banner Elk. Her own driveway had washed out.

"My own husband is trapped because our driveway washed away."

"We don't have enough National Guard. Last night, they had sent out 400 National Guard for 25 counties."

She spent three days contacting the White House, the National Guard and the governor's office. She pushed for more troops, for Starlink satellite internet to reach cut-off counties, and for leftover federal COVID relief money to be redirected to storm recovery.

Every one of those requests is reasonable. People in her district were cut off and desperate, and calling Washington on their behalf is exactly the job.

It was also exactly the job in 2005, when the people cut off and desperate lived in Louisiana.

Fourteen months later, she was still asking

The advocacy didn't stop. On January 14, 2026, after the Department of Homeland Security announced nearly $40 million in FEMA Public Assistance grants for counties in her district, Foxx put out a statement:

"For over a year, I've advocated relentlessly for western North Carolina with DHS as well as FEMA to allocate additional funding to help our area rebuild and recover — today's announcement by DHS is welcome news indeed."

"I am grateful to Secretary Noem and her team at DHS for working with me to get these funds out to Western North Carolina."

Relentlessly. For over a year. To get federal disaster dollars into her district.

That is the same federal machinery she voted to deny to Gulf Coast families ten days after Katrina, and to New Jersey and New York families after Sandy.

Why this matters beyond the hypocrisy

There's a version of this story that's just a gotcha. This is worse than a gotcha, because the money isn't abstract.

FEMA is a shared pool. It works because states that aren't having a catastrophe this year pay in for states that are — with the understanding that next year it might be reversed. That's the whole design. A member who votes no when it's someone else's district and yes when it's hers isn't applying a principle about federal spending. She's applying a principle about geography.

And the machine she now depends on is being taken apart around her. Michael Whatley, whom Trump made the White House recovery czar for western North Carolina, was recorded telling a Brunswick County audience that he had suggested the president get rid of FEMA — while he held that job. Foxx has thanked DHS leadership for the Helene money. She has not, that we can find, said anything about whether the agency writing those checks should continue to exist.

Foxx also chairs the House Rules Committee, the panel that decides which bills reach the floor and on what terms. If she wanted a debate about how this country funds disaster recovery — the debate her 2005 and 2013 votes implied she wanted — she is now, uniquely, in a position to schedule one.

You can't ask her about it

Foxx has not held an in-person town hall since 2010. She has not held even a telephone town hall since June 2015. Asked about it on Fox News in March 2025 — while her district was still digging out from Helene — she said town halls are "just an opportunity for people to yell at their member of Congress."

Her constituents in Boone have organized their own and left a chair for her. She hasn't come.

So nobody in North Carolina's 5th District has had the chance to ask her the obvious question in a room: When the water was in someone else's living room, why was the answer no?

We deserve better.

Source

Roll call votes from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House — RC 460 (2005), RC 7 and RC 23 (2013), RC 516 and RC 517 (2024). Helene quotes from Danielle Battaglia, "Cut off by Helene in Western NC, Rep. Foxx calls for more aid for her district," McClatchy/Durham Herald-Sun, September 30, 2024. Photo: McClatchy, via AOL.

Joe Wilson Wants Trump's Face on a $250 Bill. Ground Beef in His District Is Up 19%.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:42:20 +0000

In February 2025, a month into Trump's second term, a 24-year veteran of Congress from South Carolina announced what he was going to spend his lawmaking power on.

Not groceries. Not health coverage. Not the tariffs.

A new $250 bill with Donald Trump's face on it.

Joe Wilson posted a mock-up on X and explained why the country needed one. (The image on his own press release carries the caption "AI concept artwork of what the bill may look like designed by Grok AI on X" — the currency of the United States, drafted by Elon Musk's chatbot.) His explanation:

"Bidenflation has destroyed the economy forcing American families to carry more cash. President Trump is working tirelessly to fight inflation and help American families. This achievement is deserving of currency recognition... The most valuable bill for the most valuable President!"

Read that again. His argument was that prices were so high that families needed a bigger denomination to carry them around in. And his solution to that problem was to put a picture on it.

He had to rewrite the law to do it

No living American has ever appeared on U.S. paper money, because federal law forbids it. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent summarized the rule, "no living person can be on U.S. currency." The statute says only the portrait of a dead person may appear on our money and securities.

Wilson's bill, H.R. 1761, doesn't work around that rule. It carves a hole in it. Section 4 tacks one clause onto the end of the law: "except if the individual is or has been the President of the United States." Section 3 then orders the Treasury Secretary to print the $250 notes with Trump's portrait within one year of the bill becoming law. Section 2 is a "sense of Congress" declaring that the notes should be printed "to commemorate the semiquincentennial of the United States."

Three Republicans put their names on it the day he filed it: Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee, Darrell Issa of California, and Wilson's own South Carolina colleague Ralph Norman. Thirteen more joined over the following fifteen months, bringing the total to sixteen.

Fifteen months later, this stopped being a joke

Bills like this usually die quietly in a committee drawer. This one didn't.

On May 28, 2026, Bessent used a White House press briefing to announce that his department is ready to go. He said he has "two mandates" for currency: "At present, no living person can be on U.S. currency, and the currency must say 'In God We Trust.'" There was legislation on Capitol Hill, he said, to "change the first requirement so that a living person, Donald J. Trump, could be on a $250 bill."

"At Treasury we prepare things in advance, so we have prepared in advance that if the legislation is passed, but we will stick to the law."

A Treasury spokeswoman confirmed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing "is conducting appropriate planning and due diligence" and "is moving proactively" to produce the note. A Republican committee aide said the bill had been greenlit for a hearing. Wilson's own spokesman said the congressman had spoken with Financial Services Chair French Hill about moving it, and had talked to Bessent and Trump about their support "on multiple occasions."

NBC reported that Bessent treated the currency question as "bifurcated" from the growing affordability crisis — from Americans struggling to buy gas and groceries. His defense of the whole exercise:

"I don't think that there's anything untoward about having the president of the United States, the person who was president of the United States on the 250th anniversary bill."

The excuse doesn't survive contact with a receipt

Wilson blamed "Bidenflation." Trump has now been back in office for more than a year and a half. So what happened to prices?

NBC News has tracked real checkout prices since 2021. As of its August 2026 update, ground beef is up 19% since January 2025 and orange juice is up 22%. Sandwich bread is up too. Eggs — the item Trump campaigned on hardest — are down 30% from their spring 2025 peak, so that one went his way. The rest of the cart did not.

Democrats on Congress's Joint Economic Committee calculated in January 2026 that a typical American family paid $310 more for groceries during Trump's first year than in 2024. Coffee alone cost $76 more, after a 50% tariff on Brazil that Trump later reversed.

Which brings us to the part Wilson would rather you not connect.

On February 11, 2026, the House voted on H.J.Res. 72, a resolution to end the national emergency behind Trump's 25% tariffs on Canada. It passed 219 to 211. Six Republicans crossed over.

Wilson was not one of them. He voted no.

Tariffs are a tax collected at the register — the coffee number above is exactly how that works. Wilson is happy to call high prices a crisis when they're a reason to print Trump's face. He was not willing to cast one vote against a policy that raises them.

What his district actually needed from him

Wilson represents South Carolina's 2nd District. Here is what is happening there while he works the phones on currency design.

26,239 households in SC-02 rely on SNAP to buy food, according to USDA data — including 15,069 households with children and 9,686 with someone over 60.
An estimated 28,199 people in SC-02 are projected to lose health coverage under the cuts in Trump's budget bill, per the Joint Economic Committee — 25,300 losing ACA marketplace coverage and 2,899 losing Medicaid.

Wilson voted for that bill and celebrated it with the words "Promises Made, Promises Kept."

Twenty-eight thousand of his neighbors losing their doctor. Twenty-six thousand households needing help to eat. And the legislation he has personally lobbied the Treasury Secretary and the President to advance is a picture on a banknote.

Nobody who studies money thinks this is a good idea

Set the politics aside. The bill doesn't even work as economics.

Oscar Brookins, an emeritus economics faculty member at Northeastern University, put it plainly: "I don't see any practical function that the $250 denomination would fulfill." He asked the obvious question — "How many times do you go into the store and you spend something close to $250?" — and pointed out that a brand-new note is not free to make: "It seems a long, costly process is usual, even when existing currency is simply tweaked, let alone an entirely new one."

So there goes Wilson's premise. He says high prices are forcing families to haul around thicker stacks of cash. Almost nobody hands over $250 in paper at a checkout counter, and printing a new denomination to fix a problem that doesn't exist would be slow and expensive.

It's a whole genre now

Wilson isn't alone in this.

In March 2026, the Treasury said Trump's signature would go on paper currency — a first for a sitting president. A federal commission of Trump appointees approved a design putting his image on 24-karat commemorative gold coins. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna filed a bill eight days into the term to carve Trump's face into Mount Rushmore — the mountain's own sculptor wrote in 1936 that the rock couldn't take a fifth head, and the engineers and superintendents who have worked there since say the same. Seventeen Republicans, including South Carolina's own Rep. William Timmons, have signed onto bills to rename Dulles Airport after Trump.

None of it lowers a grocery bill. All of it takes up floor time, staff time, and committee attention that belongs to the people paying those bills.

He still won't face them in person

There's one more thing worth knowing about how Wilson spends his time.

He has been extraordinarily available to Scott Bessent and Donald Trump on this bill — "multiple occasions," his own office says. He has been considerably less available to the people who elected him. Asked in March 2025 whether he would hold an in-person town hall, Wilson wouldn't commit to a date, telling the Post and Courier that "tele-town halls are more convenient and reach thousands more immediately."

The last time he stood in a room with his constituents over health care, in April 2017, they held up red "you lie" signs and shouted his own most famous words back at him.

Twenty-five years in Congress. A district losing coverage and food assistance. A grocery cart that costs $310 more. And the thing he picked up the phone to the Treasury Secretary about was whose face goes on the money.

We deserve better.

Source

"South Carolina Republican wants to put Trump on new $250 bill" — Ashleigh Fields, The Hill, February 26, 2025. Photo: Greg Nash / The Hill.

Glenn Grothman Wrote a Bill That Can Cut Off an Entire State's Child Care Aid Over a Paperwork Error Rate

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:20:02 +0000

The federal government helps low-income parents pay for child care through a program called the Child Care and Development Block Grant. In Wisconsin, it covers more than 18,500 children age five and under — about 18% of the kids who qualify, according to the First Five Years Fund. The average cost of care in the state is $17,963 a year.

Glenn Grothman wrote a bill that can shut a state out of that program entirely.

Not for stealing. For having an error rate.

What the CRACKDOWN Act does

The bill is H.R. 7721, and Grothman gave it a name he clearly enjoyed: Combating Regulatory Abuse, Closing Known Deficiencies, and Overseeing Waste Nationwide. CRACKDOWN.

He introduced it on February 26, 2026. A week later the Education and Workforce Committee approved it. Everything below comes from the committee's own report, House Report 119-587, which is the official record of what the bill does and how it moved.

Two changes:

It cuts the improper-payment threshold from 10% to 5%. Under current rules, a state that goes over 10% has to file a corrective action plan. Grothman's bill drops that trigger to 5% and writes it into permanent law.
It adds a death penalty. If a state's improper payment rate tops 5% in two consecutive fiscal years, the bill says that state "shall be ineligible to receive funds under this subchapter" — unless it satisfies the Secretary of Health and Human Services that it will fix things.

Read that again. A state goes over 5% twice, and every low-income family in that state can lose its child care assistance — unless one Cabinet secretary decides otherwise.

Grothman then made it broader. In the March 5 markup he offered an amendment "to clarify that the bill applies to all improper payments, not just overpayments." That passed by voice vote. So a state that underpays providers is now racking up the same score that can get it thrown out of the program.

"Improper payment" does not mean fraud

This is the whole thing, and it is not a matter of opinion. The Government Accountability Office has said it plainly, and the committee report quotes it: "While all fraudulent payments are considered improper, not all improper payments are due to fraud."

An improper payment is any payment made in the wrong amount, to an ineligible recipient, or for an ineligible service. That includes:

A payment that was too small.
A payment that was probably fine but the file was missing a document.
A payment to a family whose eligibility paperwork was late.

None of that is theft. It is administration. And Grothman's bill treats a state that runs a 5.1% error rate for two years the same way you would treat a criminal enterprise.

The tools he says don't exist already exist

The pitch for this bill is that nobody is watching. The committee report's minority views walk through what is actually already on the books:

States above 10% already must file corrective action plans, and HHS's Office of Child Care already oversees that process.
HHS conducts on-site monitoring reviews of every state on a three-year cycle, and has started publishing the resulting oversight reports.
Federal law already requires states to arrange independent audits, and requires them to repay the federal government for misspent funds — or HHS can simply deduct the money from future payments.
HHS can already "disallow improperly spent funds, deduct improperly spent funds from subsequent allotments, take some combination of the actions, or impose other sanctions."
The GAO issued nine recommendations in 2020 for tightening oversight of the fund. HHS has addressed all nine.

Grothman's committee held a markup on eight fraud bills at once. Per the minority views, the majority "did not produce any evidence of widespread fraud in the program, presenting only vague and unfounded allegations."

What "unlimited power for the Secretary" looks like in practice

The bill hands the HHS Secretary sole discretion over whether a cut-off state can get back in. The minority views call that "unlimited power," and warn it "could open states up to invasive, excessive, and inequitable oversight."

That is not hypothetical. The same report documents what this administration did in early 2026, before the bill even moved:

After an independent journalist posted a video claiming Minnesota child care centers were drawing federal money without serving children — a claim the state agency reviewed and found the centers "were operating as expected at the time of the video" — the administration froze all child care funds to Minnesota and rolled out a nationwide documentation regime. HHS then suspended five states' access to nearly $10 million across child care, TANF and social services block grants.

The five states: California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York. The minority views note that HHS "provided no evidence of fraud in these five states beyond the fact they are led by Democratic Governors." A court blocked the freeze.

Grothman's bill would give that same Secretary a statutory switch to do it again, permanently, and call it the law.

The vote

The committee approved H.R. 7721 on March 5, 2026, by a recorded vote of 19–15 — a straight party split. Democrats' one amendment, which would have required HHS to turn over its communications to states about the funding freeze, failed 15–19.

The CRACKDOWN Act then got folded into a bigger package. Announcing its passage, Education and Workforce Chairman Tim Walberg's office listed the eight reforms inside H.R. 7726, the Stop Child Care Scams Act — Grothman's CRACKDOWN Act among them, described this way: "States that allow improper payments to spiral out of control will be held accountable."

That bill passed the House on June 3, 2026, 217 to 207. Grothman voted yes. Two hundred and seven Democrats voted no.

Who actually pays

Here is the part nobody on that committee had to answer for.

CCDBG reaches roughly 15% of federally eligible children nationwide. It is already far too small. In Wisconsin, families who can't get help pay that $17,963 a year themselves, or one parent leaves the workforce. The First Five Years Fund estimates the state's child care shortage costs Wisconsin's economy $2.6 billion a year in lost earnings and productivity.

Grothman's answer to a program that serves too few children is a rule that can make it serve none — in an entire state — because a state agency's paperwork error rate sat a point too high for two years running.

He knows how to legislate the other direction when he wants to. This is the same member who wrote a bill to make it easier to pay disabled workers below the minimum wage by stripping out counseling requirements he called burdensome. Paperwork protecting a disabled worker: an unnecessary obstacle. Paperwork used to disqualify a state from helping poor families afford day care: essential accountability.

It is the same instinct running in both directions. The people at the bottom are the problem, and the rules should be arranged accordingly.

Source

House Report 119-587, Combating Regulatory Abuse, Closing Known Deficiencies, and Overseeing Waste Nationwide Act of 2026 — U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce, April 6, 2026

Greg Abbott Wants to Break Up the Utility With the Cheapest Rates in Texas. The Companies That Would Replace It Have Been Funding His Campaign.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:10:00 +0000

On Tuesday, August 4, 2026, Greg Abbott announced a plan to open parts of the Texas electricity market to retail competition in cities served by municipally owned utilities — most prominently San Antonio, where CPS Energy provides electric and gas service.

Abbott called those municipal utilities "energy monopolies." He said their structure keeps customers from shopping for lower rates. He also attacked what he called a "tax through electricity prices" — the practice of a city-owned utility sending some of its revenue back to the city to pay for public services.

It's a tidy affordability message. There's one problem with it.

CPS Energy already has the cheapest rates in Texas

That's not a talking point from the utility's defenders. It's the utility's response to Abbott, and it's a checkable claim:

"CPS Energy consistently maintains the lowest combined electric and gas residential rates in Texas and high reliability, including compared to investor-owned utilities."

San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones made the same point on KSAT's Q&A:

"San Antonio and Castroville that are both municipally owned utilities actually have the cheapest utility cost when it comes to electricity and gas. So this idea that we're sort of being frivolous and not managing this well is not correct."

So the governor's plan to lower electricity costs starts by dismantling the model that produces the lowest electricity costs in the state.

CPS Energy put the reason plainly: "Our returns benefit the community, with the investment going to our customers rather than private investors." A municipal utility has no shareholders to pay. That's the whole difference — and it's exactly what Abbott's proposal would open up.

Who's been paying for the governor's campaign

Now the part that makes the timing worth examining.

Campaign finance disclosures compiled by Transparency USA, a nonpartisan organization that tracks state-level campaign finance, show entities tied to electricity companies have given to Abbott's campaign in recent reporting periods:

Donor	Amount
Oncor TX State PAC	$100,000 / $200,000
NRG Energy Inc. PAC	$35,000
Vistra Employee State PAC	$25,000
Vistra Energy Corp.	$25,000
CenterPoint Energy Inc. PAC	$20,000
NextEra Energy Inc. PAC	$15,000
El Paso Electric Company Employee PAC	$10,000

That's $130,000 from the six unambiguous entries, plus Oncor's state PAC — listed in the database at $100,000/$200,000 — bringing the sampled total to at least $230,000.

And KSAT was explicit that this is not the complete picture: the list "is not comprehensive and reflects a sample of donations from electricity-related interests."

The Public Utility Commission of Texas lists roughly 140 certified retail electric providers already operating in the deregulated parts of the state. Those are the companies that would be free to move into San Antonio if Abbott's plan became law. It's unclear how many would, but the opportunity is the point.

Abbott's Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa, does not accept donations from corporate PACs at all — including electricity and utility companies. Her campaign confirmed it when KSAT asked.

The timing question nobody will answer

Any restructuring of the municipal utility model would need the Texas Legislature, which doesn't convene again for months. Abbott is running for re-election this year. Energy affordability has become one of the biggest political issues in the state.

KSAT noted that Abbott's office has not publicly explained why the rollout came this week.

That's a small sentence doing a lot of work. A governor announced a major restructuring of how a million people buy electricity, months before the body that would have to pass it even meets, in the middle of his own re-election campaign, and declined to say why now.

We have seen this movie

Abbott's energy positioning has a pattern. Just weeks ago we wrote about how he spent years selling Texas to data centers as the "epicenter of AI development" — handing them the biggest tax break in the country — and then, in an election year, started asking for credit for slowing them down.

The donor pattern repeats too. In July, Texas made delta-8 THC a felony seven years after Abbott signed the law legalizing it — four weeks after the state's biggest beer distributor gave him $500,000.

And it isn't only Texas. In Michigan, John James took nearly $50,000 from DTE and Consumers Energy while both companies were asking regulators to raise rates.

What San Antonio stands to lose

Strip out the language about monopolies and choice, and Abbott's proposal does two concrete things to San Antonio.

It exposes ratepayers who currently have the lowest combined rates in Texas to retail providers who answer to investors. And it goes after the revenue transfer that KSAT reports has long been a significant source of funding for the San Antonio city budget — meaning if that money stops, the city either cuts services or finds the money somewhere else. Abbott calls the transfer a hidden tax. He has not said what replaces it.

There's a version of this debate worth having. Municipal utilities aren't automatically well run, and local control has real costs. But the case for breaking one up gets harder when the utility in question is the cheapest in the state — and considerably harder when the governor making the case has taken at least $230,000 from the industry that would take its place.

Source

"Gov. Abbott's campaign reports donations from utility companies amid push to open San Antonio CPS Energy market", KSAT, August 7, 2026. Donation figures compiled by Transparency USA.

Byron Donalds Promised Data Centers Won't Raise Your Electric Bill. The Law Doesn't Say That — and the Developers Have Given Him $894,000.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:08:00 +0000

On July 22, 2026, Byron Donalds made a promise to Floridians on X. Talking about the state's new data center law, the Republican front-runner for governor wrote:

"Senate Bill 484 ensures that utility rates will not go up due to data centers."

That's an absolute. Not "helps protect against." Not "should prevent." Will not.

PolitiFact checked it and rated it Half True. Their finding, in one line from Florida State University professor Mark McNees, who researches how AI data centers affect consumers:

"Saying rates 'will not' go up because of (the law) claims an outcome the statute does not deliver."

What the law actually does

SB 484 is not nothing. It applies to "large load customers" — data centers drawing 50 megawatts or more, which is roughly the electricity of 30,000 to 50,000 homes. It tells the Florida Public Service Commission to approve pricing rules that "reasonably ensure" each data center "bears its own full cost of service" instead of shifting that cost onto regular customers. It even blocks developers from splitting one big site into several small hookups to dodge the bill.

Those are real consumer protections. But look at what they are: instructions to a commission.

McNees again: the law "directs a process, not a result." The phrase "reasonably ensure" is "an instruction to the commission" — not a cap on rates, and not a ban on increases.

Three specific holes:

1. It doesn't cover most of the map. Only four investor-owned utilities are governed by the commission and bound by the law: Florida Power & Light, Duke Energy Florida, Tampa Electric, and Florida Public Utilities Company. They serve about 75% of Floridians.

The other 25% — customers of rural cooperatives and municipal utilities like the Jacksonville Electric Authority, Orlando Utilities Commission, and Gainesville Regional Utilities — are not protected by this law at all. Their rates are set by local boards. If a data center goes up near them, they're on their own.

2. The enforcement tools are optional. The law lists things utilities could use against data centers — upfront financial guarantees, minimum demand charges so a developer can't walk away mid-project and stick locals with the cost. It doesn't require any of them.

3. It doesn't touch the biggest driver of your bill. When fuel costs rise, utilities pass that straight through to customers. Nothing in SB 484 caps those charges or shields residential customers — even if a data center's enormous consumption is what drove regional demand up in the first place.

So a Floridian on a rural co-op, watching a hyperscale facility break ground nearby, has exactly zero protection from the law Donalds says guarantees their rates won't rise.

The $894,000 question

Here's the context PolitiFact noted in passing: Donalds "has received dozens of campaign contributions from AI companies."

That undersells it. Reporting on the backers of Florida data center projects found that developers behind four proposed facilities have given enormous sums to Donalds' campaign:

Project / backer	Given to Donalds
Ferreira Construction and executive Nelson Ferreira (Martin County)	$500,000
Phillips Infrastructure Corp. and Palm Beach Aggregates (Project Tango)	$350,000
Timberline Real Estate Partners (Sentinel Grove, St. Lucie County)	$34,000
Fort Meade LLC / Stonebridge Development (Polk County)	$10,000
Total	$894,000

Nearly nine hundred thousand dollars from the people who want to build the things he's assuring you are harmless.

This is the same arrangement we keep finding in state after state. In Ohio, Jon Husted took $69,750 from the tech and utility companies at the center of that state's data center fight while promising to protect ratepayers. In Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn's campaign reported more than $100,000 from AI and data-center employees weeks after she called data centers "good and important" for the state. Florida's version is just bigger.

Why the overstatement matters

Florida already has more than 100 operational data centers. The hyperscale AI facilities — the enormous ones — are proposed but not yet open. Which means the rate impact Donalds is describing hasn't happened yet, and the law's protections haven't been tested even once. The four covered utilities were required to file compliant pricing plans with the commission by October 1.

In other words, Donalds guaranteed the outcome of a process that hadn't run.

His Democratic opponent David Jolly wants a moratorium on data centers, and several Florida counties have already enacted their own. Donalds has attacked that position while insisting the protections are already locked in. They aren't. They're pending, partial, and optional in places.

This isn't Donalds' first time promising Floridians a break that others say won't arrive. He is also the loudest voice for Amendment 3, a property tax cut that would pull as much as $12 billion a year out of Florida's cities and counties and gives renters nothing. And billionaire Ken Griffin wrote a $10 million check to a PAC backing him — the single biggest contribution of the race.

The pattern holds. A big promise, an absolute word — "ensures," "will not" — and underneath it a law that does less than advertised, backed by donors who benefit either way.

Floridians will find out who was right when the first hyperscale facility switches on and the bills arrive.

Source

"Donalds says FL law will prevent electric bill hikes from data centers. That's not guaranteed." by Samantha Putterman, PolitiFact, August 7, 2026. Photo: AP. Donation figures from reporting on the backers of Florida data center projects.

Ashley Hinson Told a Private Room the Iran War Was a 'Political Liability.' In Public She Voted Six Times to Keep It Going — and Took $21,000 From Big Oil.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:55:45 +0000

There's what Ashley Hinson says when she thinks Iowans are listening, and there's what she says when she thinks they aren't.

On May 28, 2026, at a campaign stop in Fort Dodge, Hinson was caught on audio talking about Trump's war with Iran. The recording was first reported by Politico and obtained by CBS News. Here is what the Republican candidate for Iowa's open U.S. Senate seat said in that room:

"I do hope we can get this done by the next couple of weeks. If it drags on beyond that, it's a political liability for us too."

And then:

"Because we've lost Iowa soldiers. I've been to four funerals since December. It's awful."

Read that first quote one more time. Iowa soldiers are coming home in caskets, and the framing she reached for — in the same breath — was that this is a liability for us too.

Then she went back to Washington and kept voting to keep the war going.

Six votes

Between March and July 2026, Hinson voted six times against measures to limit or end U.S. military involvement in Iran and Lebanon, including several war powers resolutions.

She was one of 182 House Republicans who voted in July to keep us in the war — a vote that side lost.

Nothing about her private worry changed her public vote. Not one time.

She also didn't tell Iowans what she told that room. She told them the opposite version: that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, and that the families of the fallen Iowa soldiers "all said we need to finish the job. Even in their grief."

That's the trick. The grief of the families she visited gets used as an argument for continuing the thing that produced it — while privately she's counting the political cost.

Who paid for the votes

Here's the part that makes the pattern legible.

Federal Election Commission records show Hinson's campaign and political action committees have taken $64,500 from oil and gas companies since 2021 — Chevron, ExxonMobil, Valero, Phillips 66, and the American Petroleum Institute.

And after the war began in March 2026, those companies gave her another $21,000 for her 2026 Senate campaign.

You should know what that money was buying, and what it bought them:

Crude oil averaged $96 a barrel in the second quarter of 2026.
ExxonMobil reported $14.53 billion in profit between April and June — more than double the same period in 2025.
Chevron reported $12.1 billion in second-quarter profits, up from $2.49 billion a year earlier.

Chevron's profit went up nearly fivefold. Then it wrote checks to the member of Congress voting to keep the conditions in place.

This is not a one-off. We documented the identical arrangement in Ohio, where Chevron made $12.1 billion off the Iran war and put $200,000 into a super PAC for Jon Husted, who has voted 13 times to keep it going. Same war, same quarter, same company, same play — just a different senator.

What it costs at the pump in Iowa

While Exxon and Chevron were posting those numbers, Iowans were paying for them.

The average price of a gallon of gas in Iowa went from roughly $3.00 a year ago to $3.78 last month. Diesel climbed past $5.00 a gallon.

Diesel is the number that matters most in Iowa, and it's the one that gets the least attention. Diesel runs the combines, the grain trucks, the co-op deliveries, and the semis that move Iowa's corn and soybeans to market. When diesel goes over $5, every acre in the state costs more to farm and every bushel costs more to move — and none of that comes back.

So the ledger for Iowa looks like this:

Who	What happened
ExxonMobil	Profit more than doubled
Chevron	Profit up from $2.49B to $12.1B
Ashley Hinson	$21,000 in new oil money since March
Iowa drivers	Gas up ~78 cents a gallon
Iowa farmers	Diesel over $5.00 a gallon
Iowa families	Four funerals since December, by Hinson's own count

She knew

The thing that separates this from an ordinary bad-votes story is the audio.

A member of Congress can vote wrong out of conviction. That's a disagreement. What the Fort Dodge recording establishes is that Hinson understood the war was going badly enough to be a political problem, understood Iowa families were burying their children over it, and voted six times to keep it going anyway — while the companies profiting from it topped up her Senate campaign.

She has served in the U.S. House since 2021. She is running for the seat Joni Ernst is leaving, against Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek, in what polling suggests is a close race.

Iowans get to decide whether "political liability" was a warning about the war — or just about the election.

Source

"Rep. Hinson backed Iran War and took big oil cash as Iowa gas prices surged" by Richard Eberwein, Heartland Signal, August 7, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall. The Fort Dodge audio was first reported by Politico on June 2, 2026.

Steve Hilton's Homelessness Plan Starts With Making It Illegal to Be Outside

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:55:00 +0000

California has close to a quarter of everyone in America who is homeless, in a state with 11% of the country's population. It is the state's most visible failure, and whoever wins in November inherits it.

So it's worth reading exactly what Steve Hilton proposes to do about it, because his plan begins somewhere specific.

"This is against the law"

Hilton's starting position, told to CalMatters, is that living outside is illegal and the state should treat it that way:

"This is against the law, and the law needs to be enforced."

That's the foundation. Everything else in his plan sits on top of it.

The rest: he calls California's Housing First strategy a "complete disaster" and wants to free up state funding for sober housing instead. He says the state is "way under capacity for mental health beds." And he says of people with severe mental illness ending up incarcerated that it's "completely barbaric," setting this benchmark: "That's going to be the measure of success for me that we are no longer a society where people who need serious and intensive medical support and help are left on the streets or put in our jails."

Some of that is real. California genuinely doesn't have enough treatment capacity, and jails genuinely have become de facto psychiatric wards. Nobody who works on this disagrees.

But look at the order of operations. Enforcement first, capacity later.

What "enforce the law" means without the beds

Here's the problem with leading with illegality.

If it is against the law to sleep outside, and there is nowhere legal to sleep, then the law is not a tool for getting someone indoors. It's a tool for moving them to a different block, or into a jail cell — the exact outcome Hilton himself calls "completely barbaric."

Hilton acknowledges the shortage. He says California is "way under capacity for mental health beds." He is describing, accurately, a state that cannot house the people his first policy would criminalize.

Building treatment capacity takes years — siting, licensing, staffing, funding. Citations can start the day a governor says so. Whichever one comes first is the one that defines the policy, and Hilton has been clear which comes first.

Housing First is not a slogan

Hilton's other move is to tear out Housing First — the approach that puts people into stable housing before requiring sobriety or treatment compliance — and redirect funding to sober housing.

He calls it a "complete disaster." His argument is partly about scale of failure: "The fact that we've had this catastrophic failure that's cost tens of billions of dollars means that we need a complete review," and "I think we've got to be honest that you've got a lot of corruption in the system."

California's spending on homelessness absolutely deserves an audit. That's a fair thing for a candidate to demand.

But "the money was spent badly" and "the underlying approach is wrong" are two different claims, and Hilton is using the first to prove the second. The reason Housing First exists is that requiring sobriety before housing screens out the people in the worst shape — exactly the group CalMatters notes make up a large share of the problem, with more than one-third of homeless Californians regularly using drugs and more than one-quarter having been hospitalized for mental illness.

Move to sober-housing-only and those people don't get sober. They stay outside. And under the first plank of Hilton's plan, being outside is now something the law needs to enforce against.

The part that's missing

Read Hilton's plan and notice what isn't in it: housing supply.

There's enforcement, treatment beds, sober housing, and an audit. There is no plan to build more homes at prices Californians can pay — which is the thing that determines how many people become homeless in the first place, as opposed to what happens to them afterward.

That's a striking gap for a candidate whose whole pitch is affordability, and it's an especially strange one right now. Congress passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act in June 2026 — 85–5 in the Senate, 358–32 in the House — and President Trump canceled the signing ceremony and held it hostage until Congress passes an unrelated voter-ID bill. The most significant federal housing law in decades, backed by homebuilders and the real estate industry, sitting unsigned.

Hilton has spent the summer advertising his "good personal relationships" with Trump's cabinet and arguing that a governor with a constructive relationship to this administration would be good for California. Here is a concrete, enormous thing that relationship could be spent on.

What we're actually being asked to buy

Every part of Hilton's homelessness plan except the enforcement requires money, time, and construction. The enforcement part requires only a decision.

That asymmetry is the whole story of criminalizing homelessness wherever it's been tried. The citations are cheap and immediate and visible. The treatment beds are expensive and slow and invisible. A politician who leads with the first and promises the second is offering something that will look like action long before it produces a single additional place for anyone to live.

"The law needs to be enforced" is not a housing policy. In a state that is short on beds by Hilton's own account, it's a policy of moving people along. We deserve better.

Source

How will California's next governor handle homelessness? — Marisa Kendall, CalMatters, May 6, 2026. Photo: CalMatters.

Bruce Westerman's 'Bipartisan' Health Care Plan Has Zero Cosponsors. This Is the Fifth Time He's Filed It.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:43:08 +0000

On May 14, 2026, Bruce Westerman put out a press release with this headline, in all capital letters:

WESTERMAN REINTRODUCES COMPREHENSIVE HEALTH CARE REFORM PLAN TO LOWER COST AND EXPAND COVERAGE FOR ALL AMERICANS

The bill is called the Fair Care Act of 2026. According to his own announcement, it combines "over 75 bipartisan proposals to lower costs, decrease the number of uninsured individuals, protect those with preexisting conditions, and expand coverage options."

Westerman's statement went further:

"We cannot afford to let partisan politics stand in the way of common sense and quality care. That's why I introduced the Fair Care Act, an overarching solution that increases the number of people with health insurance coverage, decreases patient costs, and lowers long-term government spending."

Now go look the bill up. It's H.R. 8840, and the record on Congress.gov says this:

Cosponsors (0)

No cosponsors.

Not one Democrat. Not one Republican. Not a single other member of the House of Representatives has put their name on the "bipartisan" plan. It was referred to nine committees on the day it was introduced, and nothing has happened to it since.

This is the fifth version of the Fair Care Act. Westerman has been filing it since 2019.

What he does when a health care bill actually gets a vote

A bill nobody signs can say anything. Westerman's roll-call record is where you find out what he'll actually vote for, and it runs directly against the press release.

The first item on his own list of Fair Care Act provisions is "codifying the Affordable Care Act preexisting condition protections in HIPAA."

On May 4, 2017, Westerman voted for the American Health Care Act — the bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. It passed the House 217 to 213. He was one of the 217.

His press release says the plan will "decrease the number of uninsured individuals."

In 2025 he voted for Trump's budget bill. The Center for American Progress projects that law will leave 40,000 more people in Westerman's district without health coverage. Not in the country — in Arkansas's 4th District, the people he represents.

His press release says the plan will "lower costs."

On December 17, 2025, Westerman voted for H.R. 6703, which House Republicans named the "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act." That bill did not extend the expiring tax credits that were actually holding premiums down, and the Congressional Budget Office found it would leave about 100,000 more people uninsured. It passed 216 to 211.

In Arkansas, the result showed up fast: 14,441 Arkansans lost their Obamacare coverage this year after the subsidies lapsed.

The pattern is the name

Look at the two bills next to each other.

One is called the Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act. It doesn't lower premiums. Westerman voted for it, and it became the thing Republicans could point to instead of the fix.

The other is called the Fair Care Act. It has no cosponsors and no path. It is the thing Westerman can point to when a constituent asks what he's doing about health care costs.

Both bills serve the same purpose, and it isn't covering anybody. A member of Congress in his sixth term, on a committee-heavy schedule, does not accidentally file the same 75-provision bill five times without ever recruiting a single cosponsor. Getting cosponsors is the easiest thing in Congress. It costs nothing. It's a signature.

Zero, five times running, is a result.

What "expand coverage options" means in the fine print

To be fair to the bill, some of its provisions are real ideas with real support — price transparency, pharmacy benefit manager reform, cracking down on hospital consolidation, expanding telehealth. Those show up in bipartisan bills all the time.

But look at what else is on Westerman's own published list. It would eliminate the employer health insurance mandate. It would establish "a flexible Medicaid funding option for states," alongside "promoting fiscal accountability and solvency for Medicare and Medicaid." It would expand the use of pretax dollars for medical expenses — which helps most if you have money to set aside in the first place.

The two outside experts he quoted praising the bill in his press release both come from the same place — the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a free-market think tank whose chairman calls it "the most rigorous, credible, carefully constructed, free-market health reform plan that Republicans have ever advanced."

That may well be true. It's also the answer to why nobody signed it.

What Arkansans are left with

Arkansas already ranks 49th out of 50 states on the measures we track — health, income, hunger and the rest. It is not a state with coverage to spare.

Its 4th District congressman voted to repeal the law that covers them, voted for the budget bill that will strip coverage from 40,000 of them, and voted for a "lower premiums" bill that the CBO says covers fewer people.

Then he filed a bill with a nice name and told them he was fighting for fair care.

We could not find any record of Westerman ever holding an in-person town hall where somebody could hold up the press release and the roll call side by side and ask him to explain.

We deserve better.

Sources

Westerman Reintroduces Comprehensive Health Care Reform Plan — Office of Rep. Bruce Westerman, May 14, 2026.

H.R.8840 — Fair Care Act of 2026, All Information — Congress.gov. Photo: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

A Banker in Congress Wrote the Bill That Let Banks Keep Charging You $35 to Be Broke

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:43:03 +0000

If you have ever had $12 in your checking account, bought groceries for $40, and gotten hit with a $35 fee for the privilege, you already understand this story.

That fee is called an overdraft charge. Roughly 23 million American households pay them. For the households that get hit, the National Consumer Law Center estimates the average cost runs about $225 a year — money taken from people precisely at the moment they have the least of it. Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase each pull in roughly a billion dollars a year from overdraft and related fees.

In December 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finished a rule that would have capped that fee at $5 at the country's biggest banks — those holding more than $10 billion in assets. A bank could charge more if it could show the higher fee actually covered its costs, or if it treated the overdraft like the short-term loan it functionally is and disclosed the interest rate. The rule would have kept about $5 billion a year in ordinary people's bank accounts.

It never took effect. French Hill killed it.

He didn't just vote for it. He wrote it.

On February 13, 2025, Hill — the Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Financial Services Committee — introduced the resolution to wipe the rule off the books, alongside Senate Banking Chairman Tim Scott.

This is a distinction worth sitting with. Hundreds of Republicans cast a vote on this. One of them put his name at the top of it.

Here is how Hill explained himself in his own press release:

"The CFPB's actions on overdraft is another form of government price controls that hurt consumers who deserve financial protections and greater choice."

A $5 cap on a $35 fee "hurts consumers." That is the argument.

On March 5, 2025, his committee advanced it 30-19. The Senate passed its version later that month. And on April 9, 2025, the House passed it 217 to 211 — a six-vote margin, with Hill voting yes. Trump signed it that May.

The rule had been set to take effect on October 1, 2025. It never got there. Not one American ever paid a $5 overdraft fee under it.

Six votes. If four members had gone the other way, 23 million households would have kept that money.

The people who thanked him by name are the people who pay him

Hill's own press release announcing the resolution came stacked with praise from the banking industry. The Consumer Bankers Association thanked him for "standing up for consumers." The American Bankers Association "welcome[d] Chairman Hill and Chairman Scott's leadership." The Independent Community Bankers of America said it "strongly supports" the effort.

Now look at who funds him. According to OpenSecrets, the American Bankers Association has given Hill $40,000, and the Independent Community Bankers of America $39,500. Two of the three trade groups quoted praising his resolution in his own press release are among his largest donors.

That's not an inference about influence. It's the same names, in the same document, on both sides of the transaction.

And it isn't a one-off. Hill takes eleven times what the average House member takes from the finance, insurance and real estate sector — $1,620,940 against an average of $146,176 — and that sector accounts for 77% of all the PAC money he raises. Only 2% of his money comes from small grassroots donors.

He also spent thirty years in the industry he now regulates. Before Congress, Hill was founder, chairman, and chief executive of Delta Trust & Banking Corporation in Little Rock, from 1999 until he sold it to Simmons Bank in 2014. He went from running a bank to writing the rules for banks.

What "greater choice" actually means

Hill's defense — and the bank lobby's — is that overdraft is a service people want. Cap the fee and banks will stop offering it, and consumers will be pushed toward payday lenders and worse.

Notice what the rule actually did, though. It didn't ban overdraft. It gave banks three options: charge $5, charge whatever your costs justify and show your math, or call it a loan and tell the customer the interest rate. Every one of those options leaves overdraft available. What none of them leaves available is charging $35 for a service that costs the bank almost nothing, and not explaining why.

The National Consumer Law Center's Carla Sanchez-Adams put the effect plainly: overturning the rule "takes money out of the pockets of hard-working families to boost the balance sheets at the largest banks." Her colleague Lauren Saunders was blunter — that Republican leadership was "siding with Wells Fargo and other big banks over working families hurt by abusive overdraft fee practices."

Nobody has $35 overdraft fees because they're wealthy. The fee is, by design, a charge for being short on money. Hill's committee decided that charge should stay right where it was.

This is the pattern, not the exception

Killing the overdraft cap wasn't a stray vote — it's the job as Hill has defined it.

When Trump's budget director came before Hill's panel in July 2026 to answer for the dismantling of the CFPB, the Republicans on the committee didn't push back — they asked how to make it permanent.

The CFPB exists because in 2008 the financial industry blew up the economy and ordinary people paid for it. It has returned billions of dollars to Americans who got cheated. The overdraft rule is exactly the kind of thing it was built to do: find a fee that takes $5 billion a year from people who can least afford it, and make it stop.

A former bank CEO, funded overwhelmingly by banks, chairing the committee that oversees banks, wrote the resolution that stopped it.

What it means in Arkansas

Arkansas already ranks 49th of 50 states across the measures we track — health, income, hunger, and the rest. Hill's own district runs through Little Rock and North Little Rock.

The people in it who get hit with overdraft fees are not the ones with $1,620,940 to hand a congressman. They're the ones whose paycheck lands on Friday and whose rent clears on Thursday.

Hill has represented them since 2015. Given the chance to save them $225 a year, he introduced the resolution to take it back.

We deserve better.

Sources

Hill, Scott Lead Effort to Roll Back Biden-Era CFPB Overdraft Rule — U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, February 13, 2025.

Bill to Overturn CFPB Overdraft Fee Rule Would Hurt Families, Allow Big Banks to Keep $5 Billion in Excessive Fees — National Consumer Law Center.

Cindy Hyde-Smith Told Federal Regulators Mississippi Is 'at the Forefront of Safeguarding Ratepayers.' Mississippi Hid the Contract.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:25:02 +0000

On July 23, 2026, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held an oversight hearing on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — the agency that referees the nation's power grid. Cindy Hyde-Smith sits on that committee, and when her turn came she told the commissioners this:

"Mississippi, my home state, continues to be at the forefront of safeguarding ratepayers by ensuring companies, like data centers, pay their fair share for large loads."

That sentence deserves a hard look, because two months earlier a group of energy economists published a report on exactly that question in Mississippi. Their answer was close to the opposite.

What Mississippi actually did

Amazon is building four data centers in Mississippi — in Ridgeland, Canton, Clinton and Vicksburg — as part of a $25 billion investment the company says will create 2,000 jobs. Enormous facilities like these need enormous amounts of electricity, and somebody has to build the poles, wires and generation to deliver it.

The question in every state with a data center boom is simple: does the tech company pay for that, or do the people already on the grid?

Mississippi answered it in 2024 with Senate Bill 2001. According to the May 2026 report by Synapse Energy Economics, prepared for Earthjustice and Environmental Advocates Mississippi, that law:

"curtailed the standard oversight role of the Public Service Commission (PSC) over energy infrastructure, making it easier and faster to expand the electrical grid for data centers."

The report is blunt about who absorbed the risk: "By limiting the role of the PSC, Mississippi legislators transferred significant risk to residential consumers, who as a class of ratepayers, have now lost a key transparency and fairness check on Entergy Mississippi."

The law also hid Entergy's agreement with Amazon from the public, and let the utility start recovering data-center costs through everyone's rates before the facilities are even running. Ben Havumaki, one of the report's authors, put it plainly: the law "creates an unusually frictionless path for the utility to make investments on behalf of data centers."

Normally, he explained, a utility spends its own money first and then has to convince regulators the spending was prudent — "in public with transparency and reasonable vetting from other parties. In this case, a lot of that is just shrouded in regulatory cover and secrecy."

That is the state Hyde-Smith described to federal regulators as "at the forefront of safeguarding ratepayers."

What it has cost Mississippi households so far

The Synapse report put numbers to it. Entergy Mississippi's residential customers:

have already paid approximately $38 million as of March 2026 for investments related to serving these data centers, and
will contribute $74 million by the end of 2026.

Mississippi Today, reporting on the same analysis, put the household effect at about $10.60 more per month on residential bills. Against the average monthly bill the report used — $157 — that's roughly a 7% increase.

In Mississippi, $10.60 a month is not a rounding error. It's about $127 a year, taken from households that did not get a vote on it, to help build data centers for Amazon.

The report is careful, and so are we: these are estimates, and the authors say so, because the contract is secret. That secrecy is the point. Nobody outside Entergy and Amazon can check the math — which is what SB 2001 arranged.

Whose words she was using

Entergy disputes all of it. The company says its customers "are not subsidizing data centers — they're benefitting from them," and that data centers "are paying their fair share, plus additional benefits for customers." In March 2026 it launched a public pledge branding this promise: "Fair Share Plus." It projects that by 2030 customers' bills will be 16% — about $30 a month — lower than they'd be without Amazon.

Entergy has released limited data supporting those projections, citing trade secrets in its agreement with Amazon.

Now read the senator's sentence again: Mississippi is safeguarding ratepayers by "ensuring companies, like data centers, pay their fair share for large loads."

She didn't test the utility's claim in front of federal regulators. She repeated its slogan.

There's a reason to notice whose language she reached for. Entergy is one of her donors — her campaign has taken $37,250 from the utility, and she sits on both the Energy and Natural Resources Committee that oversees FERC and the Appropriations Committee.

To be fair to her, she did ask the commissioners a real question that day — what mechanisms FERC is putting in place to make large-load customers pay upfront so rates don't rise. That's the right question. But she asked it while telling the room that her own state had already solved the problem, when her state had in fact removed the referee and sealed the contract.

We have seen this exact script

This is becoming the standard move for Republicans in data-center states: warm words about protecting the electric bill, delivered by someone the power industry is paying.

In Ohio, Jon Husted says he'll protect your electric bill while the companies raising it fund his campaign — $69,750 from the tech and utility companies at the center of Ohio's data center fight. The pattern travels.

What makes Mississippi's version sting is the underlying condition of the state. Mississippi already ranks 48th out of 50 on the measures we track. Its households have the least slack in the country to absorb an extra $10.60 a month, and the least ability to hire lawyers to pry open a sealed utility contract.

Their senator went to Washington and told the referees everything was fine.

If Mississippi really is "at the forefront of safeguarding ratepayers," there's an easy way to prove it: unseal the contract and let the Public Service Commission do the job the Legislature took away from it. Until then, the only people who know whether Amazon is paying its fair share are Amazon and Entergy — and one of them writes checks to Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Source

Data centers likely increasing Mississippi power rates — Alex Rozier, Mississippi Today, May 28, 2026. Photo: site of Amazon's data center under construction in Canton, October 2025, Mississippi Today.

Joe Mitchell's Entire Housing Plan Is Deregulation. Ask Iowa Towns How That Went.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:15:00 +0000

Joe Mitchell is a housing candidate. He's a developer of workforce housing, he was a Regional Director at HUD and Chief of Staff at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and he says young Iowans can't afford to stay in the towns they grew up in. He's right about the problem.

Here is his solution, in full, from his campaign's issues page:

"The skyrocketing price of homes has made the American Dream unattainable for most Americans. Due to over-regulation and a shortage of affordable homes for sale, the median first time home buyer is now over 40 years of age. De-regulating the homebuilding industry will allow more builders to build more homes at a much lower cost."

That's it. One diagnosis — over-regulation — and one prescription: deregulate.

It's worth knowing that Iowa already ran a version of this experiment, and that Mitchell's own trade association helped pay for it.

The Iowa test case

In 2024 the Iowa Legislature passed Senate File 455, which bans cities and counties from adopting stormwater and topsoil rules stricter than state and federal guidelines. Local runoff regulations were capped at standards based on a five-year return frequency.

The pitch on the Senate floor was exactly Mitchell's pitch. Sen. Mike Bousselot, R-Ankeny:

"We have an opportunity today to address an area that is a cost driver — a regulation, that drives up the cost on a per-house basis for working Iowans, Iowans who want to stay in small communities, who want to stay in Clear Lake, want to stay in Algona."

The bill failed in the Iowa House on its first attempt, then passed on a second try after being amended, cleared the Senate 29–18, and was signed into law.

The Iowa Real Estate Developers Association — which Mitchell founded and presides over — spent nearly $75,000 lobbying for it, Salon reported, and attended the signing ceremony. Mitchell publicly supported the change on a real estate development podcast.

What "over-regulation" meant in that bill

Here's what the regulation being capped actually does.

Stormwater rules govern how much water a new development dumps onto everyone downhill from it. When you cover fields with roofs, driveways, and streets, rain that used to soak into the ground runs off instead. Retention ponds, topsoil depth requirements, and runoff limits are how a city keeps that water out of its neighbors' basements and off its roads.

During the floor debate, Democrats argued that some Iowa communities need higher standards than the bill allows — standards "aimed at mitigating harm to residents and property damage with more frequent floods and other extreme weather events."

Sen. Claire Celsi of West Des Moines put the practical objection this way:

"It has to be thought out ahead of time, it has to be planned, but there is no reason why builders and developers cannot incorporate smart storm water practices into their building practices. Otherwise, they'll end up with basements full of dirt."

And Sen. Janice Weiner of Iowa City named who ends up holding the bag:

"I see this bill as not being about affordable housing, which some may talk about. I don't think that the cost per lot … to require more restrictions is that great. And if we want to figure out another way to pass along that cost, let's leave that up to the communities to let them decide. What I care about is the fact that we, the Legislature, are going to be passing these costs on to ordinary citizens, homeowners, your friends and neighbors, because they're the ones who will ultimately pay now."

That's the whole argument in one paragraph. Deregulation doesn't make the cost disappear. It moves it — off the developer's balance sheet and onto the city's, and then onto the homeowner's, in the form of taxes, flood damage, or both.

And note who loses the ability to decide: the city council closest to the actual creek.

Meanwhile, the actual housing bill sits unsigned

There's a strange silence in Mitchell's housing plank.

In June 2026, Congress passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act — the most serious housing bill in decades. The Senate passed it 85–5. The House passed it 358–32. It cuts red tape and speeds up construction, makes it easier to build starter homes and manufactured homes, limits corporate landlords from buying up single-family houses, and expands rental help. Homebuilders and the real estate industry backed it.

Then President Trump canceled the signing ceremony and held the bill hostage until Congress passes a separate voter-ID bill that has nothing to do with housing.

A veto-proof, bipartisan housing bill — including the deregulation and permitting reform Mitchell says he wants — is sitting there unsigned, and the person blocking it is the President of his own party.

Mitchell's issues page doesn't mention it. His campaign has made no public statement about it that we could find.

That's the test of whether someone is actually a housing candidate or just uses housing as the frame for a deregulation agenda. The single biggest thing standing between Iowans and a housing bill right now is a hostage demand, and the candidate who talks about housing more than anything else has nothing to say about it.

The pattern

Put the two things next to each other.

When deregulation helped developers — capping what Iowa cities can require to manage runoff — Mitchell's association spent $75,000 to get it done and showed up for the signing.

When a housing bill actually passed with 85 Senate votes and got blocked by his own party's president, nothing.

"De-regulating the homebuilding industry" is a policy that has a clear winner, and it isn't the first-time buyer. Iowa already paid for that lesson. We deserve better.

Sources

Senate sends bill restricting local topsoil, stormwater rules to governor's desk — Robin Opsahl, Iowa Capital Dispatch, March 25, 2024
Anti-lobbyist Republican benefited from lobbyists for years — Russell Payne, Salon, July 9, 2026
Joe Mitchell for Congress — The Issues — his own campaign's housing plank

Bobby Charles Made an Ad Promising to Cut Your Property Taxes. He Never Signed Up for the Tax Break Maine Already Offers.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:12:00 +0000

Bobby Charles sits behind the wheel of his SUV in a new campaign ad. He points out that the vehicle is a 2015 with 260,000 miles on it. It still runs better than the Democratic state government, he says.

Then he makes a promise.

"I'm going to cut your property taxes by raising the homestead exemption."

Earlier in the same ad, he tells Mainers: "I pay property taxes that keep going up, just like you."

There is a problem with the ad. The tax break Charles is promising to expand is one Maine has offered for nearly thirty years — and according to his own town office, he has never claimed it.

What the homestead exemption actually is

Maine's homestead exemption knocks up to $25,000 off the value of your home for property tax purposes. For most homeowners that works out to savings of a few hundred dollars a year. It isn't a loophole or a program you have to fight for. You fill out a form.

To qualify you have to be a permanent Maine resident who has owned the home for at least 12 months, and it has to be your primary residence. Second homes and camps don't count.

The program has existed since 1998. The amount was last raised in 2020, when the maximum went from $20,000 to $25,000.

In the 2025 tax year, more than 327,000 Maine taxpayers claimed it. The state pays municipalities back for 76% of the revenue they lose to the program — a reimbursement that came to $82 million in 2025.

So this is not an obscure break. It is one of the most widely used tax programs in the state. Roughly a third of a million of Charles's neighbors are already in it.

He isn't

Charles grew up in Maine. But he spent most of his career working for the federal government and running a consulting business in the Washington, D.C., area. Property records show he has owned his home in Leeds since 2006 — and that he didn't move back full time until 2022, the same year he sold a home in Maryland.

Staff at the Leeds town office say Charles has not claimed a homestead exemption since he moved back.

His campaign doesn't dispute that he's eligible. It says he doesn't rent or own homes anywhere else, and that he qualifies for the program. The explanation offered was that his accountant made an oversight, and that he plans to use it going forward.

Here is how his senior strategist, Vincent Harris, put it:

"He's going to get it and will save whatever money he's able to save going forward, which is not enough because he's suffering under these crazy, insane property taxes put on Mainers by the incumbent insider politicians."

Read that again. The defense of a candidate who never filed for an available tax break is that the tax break is too small to matter.

Both of his opponents in the November race already receive the exemption, according to property tax records in their hometowns — Democrat Hannah Pingree in North Haven and independent Rick Bennett in Oxford.

The part where the math doesn't show up

All three candidates for governor have pledged to expand the homestead exemption. What separates them is whether they've said how.

Pingree has proposed doubling it to $50,000, paired with a change to state law letting towns tax second homes owned by non-Maine residents at higher rates. Bennett has proposed raising it for Mainers 65 and older and increasing the state's reimbursement rate to towns by three percentage points a year until the program is fully state-funded.

Charles wants to raise it to $100,000 — four times the current level. Asked how he would pay for that, his campaign said details would be released soon.

That is a real question, not a gotcha. The state currently reimburses towns for 76% of what the exemption costs them, at $82 million a year. Quadrupling the exemption without a funding plan doesn't make the cost disappear. It moves it — either onto the state budget or onto the towns, which raise property taxes to cover their gaps.

And it lands on top of everything else Charles has promised to cut. His campaign platform pledges to abolish the state income tax outright and to slash regulation. That platform contains no dollar figures, no percentage targets, and no accounting for what replaces the revenue.

A spokesperson for Pingree, Mary-Erin Casale, put the objection this way:

"You can't promise a $4 billion budget cut and a tax break at the same time. The math doesn't work, and Maine families deserve a plan that does."

This is the pattern, not the exception

The homestead ad is a small thing on its own. What makes it worth writing down is that it is the same move Charles has made all year: a confident number, delivered with certainty, with nothing underneath it.

He has promised to end the income tax that funds schools and roads. He has promised to slash regulation and wasteful spending. He has now promised to quadruple a property tax break. Not one of those promises has arrived with an explanation of what gets cut to pay for it.

Maine's affordability problem is real. Property taxes here genuinely do keep climbing, and people genuinely are being squeezed. That's exactly why a plan needs to survive contact with a calculator.

There is also something worth noticing about who Charles is describing when he says "just like you." He is a lawyer and former Assistant Secretary of State who spent most of the last three decades working in and around Washington. He didn't live in Maine full time until four years ago. The 2015 SUV in the ad is doing a lot of work.

We've seen this shape before. Pennsylvania's Rob Bresnahan sells himself as a blue-collar everyman who "learned the value of hard work early" — and chartered a $23,000 private jet while quietly flying his own helicopter. The persona is the product. The record is the thing to check.

The bottom line

Bobby Charles is running an ad promising to cut your property taxes by expanding a program that 327,000 Mainers use and he doesn't. When a reporter asked why, his campaign blamed an accountant and said he'll sign up now.

He wants to raise that exemption to $100,000 and hasn't said how he'd pay for it. He wants to eliminate the state income tax and hasn't said what replaces it.

Mainers deserve a governor who does the arithmetic before he films the ad. We deserve better.

Source

Rachel Ohm, "Bobby Charles wants to expand Maine's homestead exemption. He doesn't use it." — Portland Press Herald, August 5, 2026. Image: screenshot via the Charles campaign.

Michelle Fischbach Sits on the Trade Subcommittee. At Farmfest, She Defended Tariffs the Supreme Court Already Threw Out.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000

On Tuesday, August 4, 2026, Michelle Fischbach stood on a stage at Minnesota Farmfest in Morgan and defended President Trump's tariffs to a room full of farmers.

A member of the front-row audience started booing.

She kept going. There have been "20 agreements" on trade under this administration, she told them, and "usually ag is a winner" in them.

Why that landed badly in a room full of farmers

Six months ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump's tariffs were illegal — that the 1977 emergency law he used to tax nearly everything coming into the country never gave a president that power.

The government now owes $166 billion in refunds. As we wrote last week, that money is going to Apple, Ford, Nike, Amazon and General Motors — the importers who legally paid the tariffs. Not to the farmers who lost export markets. Not to anyone who paid more at the register.

Fischbach's opponent, DFL-endorsed candidate Erik Osberg, put the question to her directly:

"If these tariffs have been so helpful, why did the Supreme Court have to create a $160 billion refund that is going to the importers? We need Congress to act as the Constitution said in Article 1, Section 8."

That's the part that should stick.

Article I, Section 8 is her job description

The Constitution gives Congress — not the president — the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and to lay duties. Tariffs are a congressional power. The Supreme Court just said so in the most expensive way possible.

Fischbach sits on the House Ways and Means trade subcommittee. That is the specific committee, in the specific chamber, that holds that specific power.

She has spent that seat defending an executive tariff program the courts struck down, rather than exercising the authority the Constitution assigns to her. When farmers asked what Congress would do, her answer was to describe what the administration had already done.

The farm payments question

The forum opened with the moderator asking about the recurring need for ad hoc farm payments — the emergency checks Washington keeps writing to keep farms afloat.

Fischbach said Congress needs to "provide more stability and more clarity," and that farmers want strong markets, not payments.

Osberg agreed on the diagnosis and disagreed on the cause: bridge payments are "throwing billions of dollars at a problem" that needs a long-term fix, he said, adding, "It'd be nice and stable if Congress would stand up against the unconstitutional tariffs and take that back."

That's the loop farmers are stuck in. Tariffs close export markets. Closed markets crater prices. Washington writes emergency checks to cover the hole it made. Fischbach wants credit for wanting stability while defending the thing destabilizing it.

USMCA and the "very well" answer

On the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement — which the Trump administration has decided not to extend — Fischbach pointed to her access to the chief U.S. agricultural negotiator and said talks with Mexico were going "very well."

"We have the base of it, and we are taking a look at what's going on in the USMCA, what we can improve on, and there's obviously things we can improve on."

Osberg's answer was the one the room could measure against their own experience:

"One of the improvements we could make is looking at ourselves in the mirror and saying, 'Are we a reliable trade partner right now?'"

He then quoted a young farmer on a committee he convenes: "I wouldn't run my farm the way we're running this country right now."

"She is out here"

The forum also covered USDA's plan to move Washington-based staff into regional hubs. Osberg described the effect on the ground — local food producers who have waited three years just for permission to accept food stamps — and called it "chaos and uncertainty and dysfunction."

Fischbach's rebuttal was that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had been at Farmfest a few hours earlier.

"(Rollins) is out here. She is listening to people. She is talking to the people that are actually farming, the people with boots on the ground."

A cabinet secretary attending a farm show is not a response to a producer who's been waiting three years for a permit. It's evidence that someone showed up.

What Minnesota farmers are actually carrying

Tariffs hiked Midwest household costs and slashed jobs, according to a report published in July. The Minnesota Senate has compiled its own record of how the tariffs hit Minnesota businesses.

Fischbach closed the forum on her record: estate tax relief, crop insurance improvements, year-round E15.

Osberg closed with a question.

"Are farmers better off today than they were two years ago?"

The booing from the front row was one person's answer. The $166 billion in refunds going to Apple and Amazon instead of Minnesota grain farmers is a bigger one.

Source

West Central Tribune, "Fischbach, Osberg clash over tariffs, USDA shakeup in Farmfest candidate forum," by Noah Fish, August 5, 2026. The booing was also covered by Courier Minnesota.

Bill Hagerty Calls It a Loophole. It's the Rule That Keeps 37,000 American Kids in Their Homes.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:30:00 +0000

On Wednesday, August 5, 2026, Bill Hagerty introduced a bill he calls the End Housing Welfare for Illegal Aliens Act.

The premise, in his own words, is that "illegal aliens have long exploited federal housing programs by taking advantage of gaps in existing law."

There is no gap. Undocumented immigrants have never been eligible for federal rental assistance. That's not a matter of interpretation — it's settled and long-standing. No undocumented person receives a HUD subsidy today.

What Hagerty is actually going after is something else entirely, and it's worth understanding exactly what it is before you decide how you feel about it.

What the "mixed-status loophole" really is

Picture a family of four in Memphis. Two parents, two kids. The kids are U.S. citizens, born here. One parent is a citizen. The other parent is undocumented.

Under current HUD rules, that family can get help with rent — but only a prorated share. HUD divides the full subsidy by four and pays three-quarters of it, because three of the four people qualify. The undocumented parent's share of the rent comes out of the family's own pocket. They get nothing from the government.

That's the "loophole." It's an accounting rule that lets an American child keep a roof over their head without the government first throwing their parent out of the house.

Hagerty's press release describes these households as "illegals who are roommates with eligible individuals."

They are not roommates. They are families.

Who actually loses the housing

Here are the numbers, from the Terner Center at UC Berkeley: roughly 80,000 people in about 20,000 mixed-status families currently receive HUD assistance. The typical household is two adults and two young children, with three of the four eligible. And 46% of the people in those households are children — about 37,000 kids.

Hagerty's own release puts the number of ineligible people in those 20,000 households at roughly 24,000.

So the arithmetic of his bill is this: to remove 24,000 ineligible adults from housing they are not currently subsidized to live in, you destabilize the housing of 80,000 people — including some 37,000 children who are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, United States citizens.

Those kids don't get relocated to better housing. There is no better housing waiting. They get evicted, doubled up with relatives, or put into a shelter.

What else is in the bill

The mixed-status provision is one of four. The bill would also:

Deny Community Development Block Grants to sanctuary cities. CDBG money funds housing rehabilitation, homeless services, water and sewer work, and disaster recovery. Withholding it is a punishment aimed at city governments that lands on the residents.
End non-citizen eligibility for HUD programs designated for seniors and people with disabilities.
Require public housing authorities to affirmatively verify citizenship before providing services — a paperwork requirement that falls on every applicant, citizen or not, and slows down every application in the system.

The political theory Hagerty put in writing

Most press releases stick to the policy. This one didn't.

"Democrats have facilitated such abuse for political gain, because overrunning sanctuary cities with illegal aliens artificially boosts their party's power and representation when congressional districts are reapportioned."

That's from the release itself. It's the great-replacement framing — the claim that immigration is a deliberate scheme to change who holds power — stated as fact, on Senate letterhead, as the justification for a housing bill.

He then lists among the harms that these families "endanger the integrity of the electoral process." Non-citizens cannot vote in federal elections. It is already a felony. The bill Hagerty introduced is about rent.

"American families are left waiting in line"

Hagerty's central claim is that immigrants are crowding out Americans:

"For too long, Democrats have encouraged illegal aliens to raid taxpayer-funded housing programs while American families, seniors, and people with disabilities are left waiting in line."

The waiting lines are real. They are long, in Tennessee and everywhere else. But 20,000 households — three-quarters of whose members are eligible Americans — are not why. The shortage is a shortage of units and a shortage of vouchers. Congress decides how many of each exist.

Hagerty sits on the Senate Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over federal housing programs. If the problem is that Americans are waiting in line, he is on the committee that could shorten the line. He introduced a bill to remove 37,000 children from it instead.

This is a well-worn move. Alabama's Tommy Tuberville told Fox News that a bipartisan bill to lower housing costs would build homes for people "here illegally" — PolitiFact rated that False — and used it to justify voting no. The pattern is the same: point at immigrants, vote against or legislate against the housing, and call it standing up for Americans.

What this costs Tennessee

Nothing in Hagerty's bill builds a single unit of housing. Nothing in it lowers a single Tennessean's rent. Nothing in it moves anyone up a waiting list, because the vouchers freed up by evicting a mixed-status family are prorated shares — the smallest subsidies in the program.

What it does is make it federal policy that an American child can be put out of their home because of who their parent is.

Source

Sen. Bill Hagerty's press release, August 6, 2026. Figures on mixed-status households come from the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley.

Byron Donalds Is the Loudest Voice for a Tax Cut Even Ron DeSantis Won't Campaign For

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:15:00 +0000

Amendment 3 has become something close to a political orphan in Florida. The governor who spent a year pushing for it says he'll vote yes but won't campaign for it. Law enforcement groups are against it. A judge just ruled its ballot language is misleading and ordered it rewritten.

Byron Donalds has made it the centerpiece of his campaign for governor.

POLITICO reported on August 6 that Donalds "appears to be sliding into the role of chief cheerleader by default" — encouraging voters to back it, running television ads promising to cut property taxes, and pledging to keep cutting after that.

"I'm voting yes because the people of Florida are not a never-ending piggybank."

That's Donalds at a rally in The Villages last week. His campaign has spent at least $10 million on ads, according to the tracking service AdImpact.

What the amendment does

If Amendment 3 passes in November, it raises the homestead exemption to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028.

State economists project it would cut funding to local governments by as much as $12 billion a year starting in 2031.

Twelve billion dollars a year is not a rounding error. It's police, fire, ambulances, parks, libraries, road maintenance, water systems — the things cities and counties actually do with property tax money.

The sheriff who endorsed him calls it a train wreck

Here's the detail that should carry the most weight, because it isn't coming from a Democrat.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd endorsed Donalds earlier this year. This week, Judd stood at a news conference and tore the amendment apart:

"We all want reasonable tax relief, and that's possible. This is the most ludicrous piece of unresearched stuff I've seen."

Judd warned it would hit everything from law enforcement response times to funding for parks and libraries. The Florida Sheriffs Association has raised objections. Local officials from both parties have. Ron DeSantis — whose idea this originally was — said "what the Legislature did wasn't my proposal" and made clear he wouldn't lead the campaign for it, adding he wasn't sure it would even hit the 60% threshold.

DeSantis walked away from it. Donalds picked it up and started running.

Renters get nothing

Florida is the worst state in the nation for renters, according to a Consumer Affairs analysis published in April. Rent eats 37.4% of the typical income here — the most cost-burdened renters in the country.

The homestead exemption is for people who own the home they live in. If you rent, you don't get it. Not a dollar.

What renters do get is the other end of the equation. When cities lose $12 billion, they look for it somewhere else.

"Renters are not going to receive the homestead exemption. A landlord might get a tax benefit, but there is absolutely no guarantee that a renter sees a lower rent payment," said state Rep. Rob Long. "At the same time, cities are going to have to increase fire assessments, utility charges, or other fees to keep services running. And those costs will likely still be passed along to tenants."

Kelly Lynch works in Gainesville and can't afford to live there. She drives more than 20 miles each way from Bronson, in Levy County. She and her husband want to buy a house someday.

"I know plenty of people that work full time. Single moms living in Gainesville that would honestly face eviction or homelessness if their rent increases or their cost of living increases any more. None of us can comfortably afford an increase."

Donalds is selling Amendment 3 as an affordability plan. For the most cost-burdened renters in America, it is the opposite of one.

Even the ballot language didn't survive

A circuit court judge in Tallahassee ruled this week that Amendment 3's ballot summary is misleading, and gave Attorney General James Uthmeier until August 14 to rewrite significant portions of the title and summary.

That matters for the polling Donalds is riding. A James Madison Institute survey of 1,400 Floridians found 74% support — comfortably above the 60% needed. But when voters were told passage could mean less funding for local government services, support dropped to 55%. Below the threshold. It fails.

"Education equals opposition when it comes to this amendment," said Jackson Peel of the Save Our Services — No on 3 coalition. "When people hear what this bad policy will do to their communities, they reject it."

So the measure passes if Floridians don't learn what's in it, and fails if they do. And the man spending $10 million on ads about it is the one whose ads say "cut property taxes" while he plays basketball with his sons.

Who Donalds actually answers to

This is a familiar shape for Donalds.

He co-sponsored a bill to strip heat protections from Florida's outdoor workers — blocking the first-ever federal rule protecting people from dying of heat on the job, in the state where that happens.

And his campaign runs on money most Floridians will never see the likes of: Citadel's Ken Griffin wrote a $10 million check to a PAC backing him, the single biggest contribution of the race.

A billionaire's $10 million, a $10 million ad buy, and a constitutional amendment that hands money to homeowners and bills to renters.

Donalds has also promised that if Amendment 3 fails, he'll ask the constitutional revision commission that convenes in 2027 to do a "top-to-bottom property tax overhaul" anyway. And if it passes, he says he'll build a funding formula so small and rural counties don't get wrecked — a formula that does not exist, for a shortfall he is campaigning to create.

Florida's primary is August 18.

Source

POLITICO, "Donalds takes role as biggest backer of Florida's property tax measure," by Gary Fineout, and Florida Phoenix, "No on 3 campaign focuses on the pain for renters if property tax cut passes," by Mitch Perry, both August 6, 2026.

Vivek Ramaswamy Promises Free Electricity. The Power Companies Just Gave Him $97,000.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:30:00 +0000

Vivek Ramaswamy made Ohioans a big promise last week. Let a data center get built in your town, he said, and your household electricity becomes free, your property taxes go down, and the facility meets every air and water standard without exception. If those conditions aren't met, he wrote, the data center "won't be built. Period."

There's no law that does that. No rule. No statute. The whole promise rests on a governor being willing to squeeze the power industry on your behalf — using regulators the governor personally appoints.

So it matters a great deal who has been paying that governor's campaign.

$97,468 from the industry he'd regulate

Campaign finance reports filed with the Ohio Secretary of State show that PACs tied to electric utilities, gas distributors, oil and gas producers, pipeline companies and solar developers gave Ramaswamy's campaign $94,096.34 in cash during 2026, plus $3,372.57 in-kind from the Ohio Oil and Gas Producers Fund. Combined: $97,468.91, according to TiffinOhio.net's review of the filings.

His Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, received nothing from those PACs.

Here's the part that should stop you. Most of that money arrived after the giving became a public story.

On May 18, the Energy and Policy Institute reported that six of Ohio's biggest investor-owned utilities had sent more than $2 million to the two governors associations, and that corporate PACs for five of the six had given more than $68,000 directly to Ramaswamy, his running mate Rob McColley, or both.

In the ten weeks after that report published, another $65,603.24 came in from energy interests — nearly as much again, from a wider set of companies.

And the biggest checks came on the last possible day. On Friday, July 31, three landed at once:

$16,615.67 from the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition of Ohio PAC — the only energy contribution in the file that hits Ohio's per-election ceiling to the exact penny.
$16,615 from the employee PAC of Vistra Corp.
$10,000 from Diversified Gas & Oil Corporation's PAC.

AEP's Committee for Responsible Government gave $17,000 across two checks. Energy Transfer gave $5,000. NiSource — the parent of Columbia Gas of Ohio — gave $9,615.67 across two payments. Apex Clean Energy, Chesapeake Utilities and AES Ohio's Dayton Power & Light fund added more.

Why this money is different from ordinary campaign money

Ramaswamy has loaned his own campaign $25 million. Against that, $97,000 is nothing — and his campaign is entitled to say so.

But the size of the check isn't the point. The point is what a governor of Ohio actually controls.

Under Ohio law, the governor appoints all five members of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, and designates the chair, who serves at the governor's pleasure. PUCO decides rate cases. PUCO decides how the cost of new power lines and new generation gets split between data centers and everybody else. PUCO approved the data center tariff AEP Ohio operates under right now.

Free electricity for households near a data center is not something a governor can sign into existence. It is something a governor can push a commission and a utility toward — or quietly not.

The companies that would be on the receiving end of that push have introduced themselves.

What Ohioans are paying while this happens

This isn't abstract. Ohio's electric bills have climbed 53% since 2021.

In the year ending May 31, Ohio utilities disconnected service to roughly 345,000 customers — the highest rate in four reporting periods. AEP's Ohio Power was the worst in the state, cutting off 15% of its customers, more than four times FirstEnergy's rate.

Over the same period, the chief executives of Ohio's four investor-owned electric utilities took home a combined $81 million in 2025. AEP's CEO alone accounted for $36.6 million of it.

Three hundred forty-five thousand shutoffs. Eighty-one million in CEO pay. That's the industry now funding the man who'd appoint its regulators.

What's fair to say — and what isn't

Ramaswamy's data center plan is not an industry wish list, and it would be dishonest to pretend it is. It would end future property tax abatements for data centers, a break developers have fought hard to keep. It requires closed-loop water recycling, full environmental compliance, and building on brownfields instead of farmland. Some of that cuts directly against the companies writing him checks.

The solar coalition's money complicates it further — those developers are often on the opposite side of AEP and the gas producers in siting fights.

There is also no evidence that any contribution was solicited in exchange for anything. Ramaswamy holds no office. He has cast no vote. Legal contributions from registered PACs are how American campaigns work.

The problem is the timing. If the money were incidental, it would have tapered off once a watchdog put a spotlight on it. Instead it roughly doubled, spread to new companies, and the largest checks were written on the final day of the reporting period — seven weeks after utility spending in this race became a documented story.

The pattern in Ohio

This is not happening in isolation. Ohio's other statewide Republican on the ballot, Sen. Jon Husted, has taken $69,750 from the tech and utility companies at the center of the same data center fight, while telling Ohioans he'll protect their electric bill.

And Ohio has been here before. House Bill 6 — the 2019 nuclear bailout that charged ratepayers roughly $150 million a year and produced the largest corruption prosecution in state history — is what happens when the companies that generate power and the officials who regulate them get too comfortable with each other. Six years later, Ohioans are still paying for it.

Ramaswamy's other big promise has the same problem underneath it: an analysis found his property tax rollback would blow a $4 billion hole in Ohio's schools, police and fire departments in his first budget alone, and his plan to pay for it is growing Ohio's population by 36%.

He is asking Ohioans to take on faith that when he sits across the table from these companies, he'll squeeze them until the power near their data centers is free.

They just handed him $97,000 and asked him to keep it.

Source

TiffinOhio.net, "Ramaswamy takes nearly $100K from energy interests as Ohioans' electric bills soar," by Bonnie Lucas, August 6, 2026.

Trump Says the Canada Tariffs Protect American Dairy. Ask the 119-Year-Old New Hampshire Dairy Farm They're Crushing.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:10:00 +0000

Bohanan Farm in Hopkinton has been in operation since 1907. Five generations. Today it runs more than 120 dairy cows and 180 acres of corn, and bottles about 128,000 fluid ounces of milk a day as Contoocook Creamery.

Jamie Robertson can trace most of what it costs to run that farm back to Canada — the grain, the fertilizer for the cornfields, the diesel in the tractors and delivery trucks.

On August 19, a 50% tariff on a range of Canadian goods takes effect.

"If we can't cover our costs, it's not going to be a good picture," Robertson told the Concord Monitor.

Kelly Ayotte's response, as governor of the state this farm sits in:

"As I have said before, I disagree with tariffs on Canada because they simply are not good for New Hampshire."

She added that she will "continue to urge the administration to resolve this dispute with one of our state's largest trading partners as quickly as possible."

Urging. That is the whole plan.

The part that should make a dairy farmer furious

Here is what the White House says these tariffs are for.

Trump signed three proclamations on July 20 under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 — an authority no president had used in at least 70 years. The White House fact sheet says Canada discriminates against U.S. exports in three sectors: motor vehicles, alcoholic beverages, and dairy.

From the fact sheet itself:

"As part of its complicated and protectionist dairy system, Canada established tariff-rate quotas on U.S. cheese that are much more restrictive than the tariff-rate quotas imposed on similar imports of cheese into Canada from the EU."

So: a policy sold as standing up for American dairy farmers is about to raise the price of grain and fertilizer for an American dairy farm in Hopkinton, New Hampshire.

The tariffs cover roughly $20 billion in imports and hit goods that were previously protected under the USMCA — the trade agreement Trump himself signed in his first term. Energy, potash, fish, and critical minerals are exempt. Grain and fertilizer are not.

Robertson has already been squeezing what he can. The creamery switched from glass bottles to plastic to hold costs down. There is not much left to trim before the milk price moves or the farm doesn't work.

"I disagree" is not a policy

Give Ayotte this much: unlike many Republicans, she has not pretended the tariffs are good. She said in April 2025 that Canada is New Hampshire's number two trading partner and the tariffs were "not helping." She took a trade mission to Canada in the summer of 2025.

But every time saying so would have cost her something with Trump, she has passed.

When New England's other governors sent a joint letter to Canada's eastern premiers, Ayotte refused to sign it — and skipped the meeting with their Canadian counterparts, sending a representative instead. The Globe's characterization of her posture was that she was "holding her breath and hoping for the best."
Asked about a state gas tax suspension to give people immediate relief at the pump, she said in May she'd continue to monitor gas prices and did not embrace the idea.
When she criticized the earlier 25% tariffs, she paired it with saying she "appreciated the concerns" Trump had about the border.

A governor has real tools. She can join other states in a formal position. She can suspend a state tax. She can put money into the state Department of Agriculture. She can say plainly that a specific policy by a specific president is hurting a specific farm and demand it stop.

What she has chosen instead is a sentence that expresses disagreement and commits to nothing — delivered about a policy that takes effect in under two weeks.

What the farmer actually asked for

Robertson wasn't asking anyone to save him with a bailout. He asked the state to stop hollowing out the things that keep farms viable:

"We just can't keep cutting and cutting those things out. We've got to keep some infrastructure to be able to keep farms rolling."

He named the state Department of Agriculture and the university system — extension services, research, the unglamorous public backbone under a working farm.

That is a request aimed squarely at a governor's budget. It is answerable. Ayotte has not answered it.

This is the pattern

New Hampshire has already paid for the tariffs in ways that have nothing to do with a dairy barn. Canadian travel to the state is down about 30% according to state officials, gutting tourism towns like North Conway. A toy company in Keene faced a 145% tax on every toy it imports from China, with its CEO saying they had to "cut your overhead… do something to survive."

Ayotte's approach to Trump has been consistent across issues, not just this one. When the administration announced federal monitors at the polls in Manchester and Nashua, she said she'd "welcome anyone" — in the same press conference where she vowed to fight the DNC over New Hampshire's primary. She is willing to pick fights. She picks them with people who aren't Trump.

And she is not alone in treating the cost of living as a communications problem. This week the House Majority Whip went on television and claimed eggs cost 78 cents and milk was under $2, when the government's own data put them at $2.14 and $4.32.

At least Ayotte concedes the tariffs are bad. She has simply decided that saying so is the entire job.

The math on August 19

In under two weeks, the cost of grain and fertilizer at a farm that has operated since 1907 goes up, because the President decided Canada is unfair to American cheese.

The governor of New Hampshire disagrees with this. She has said so. She will continue to urge.

Jamie Robertson will pay it.

Source

Contoocook Creamery faces fuel cost hikes, concerned about tariffs — Concord Monitor, August 3, 2026. Additional reporting from the Union Leader and Granite Post. Photo: Concord Monitor.

Joe Lombardo Says He Doesn't 'Get Paid Very Much.' He Draws a Governor's Salary and a $199,000 Police Pension.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:22:00 +0000

A television reporter asked the governor of Nevada about his pay. Joe Lombardo said he doesn't "get paid very much."

Here is what the public record says.

Lombardo earned $182,000 in wages and benefits as governor in 2023. On top of that, he collects a pension from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. That pension paid him $199,175 last year, according to Transparent Nevada, the public database of Nevada government pay.

Two checks. Both from taxpayers. Put those two numbers together and you're over $380,000 a year.

The average Nevadan earns just under $60,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nevadans work more and earn less than people in any state that borders them.

So the governor makes about six times what the people he governs make. And he told a reporter he doesn't get paid very much.

His spokesman's explanation: "While he could have phrased his remarks more clearly, his point was simple: he didn't choose this work for the salary."

How he ended up with two checks

The pension is not a mistake or a loophole he tripped into. It is the result of a choice he made the moment voters gave him more power.

Lombardo spent decades at Metro and rose to assistant sheriff. In 2014, Clark County voters elected him sheriff — the top job at the department. So he retired from his old job, started drawing his police pension, and then took office as sheriff, collecting a second public salary.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal caught this in a 2017 investigation into what it called double dipping. Reporters found the practice was costing Nevada taxpayers at least $23 million a year, and that two dozen elected officials were collecting a salary and a pension at the same time. Lombardo was one of the three the paper singled out by name. He was collecting nearly $325,000 a year in salary and pension combined.

Most public retirees in Nevada can't do this. If they go back to work more than part-time, their pension stops. But state law carves out an exception for elected officials — and for jobs a government agency decides to label "critical."

Edward Zelinsky, a law professor who studies pensions, put it plainly to the Review-Journal:

"We don't give them pensions so they can double dip. We give them pensions so they can retire."

Lombardo defended it. "I had a very good career serving the residents of Clark County for 27.5 years, and I am being appropriately compensated after retiring from that job," he told the paper.

That is a real argument, and it deserves a fair hearing. He did work those years. He did earn a pension. Nothing here is illegal.

But keep it next to the other thing he said. He is being "appropriately compensated" — and he doesn't "get paid very much." Both of those came out of the same mouth.

His pay went up. His police force went down.

While Lombardo was sheriff, his own salary climbed steadily.

2015: $159,201
2017: $168,857
2022: $192,000, according to the financial disclosure form he filed himself

That's a raise of about $33,000 over his time in the job — roughly 21 percent — on top of the pension.

Now look at what Metro looked like on his way out the door.

In April 2022, with one foot already in the governor's race, Lombardo personally walked Metro's budget request in front of the department's Fiscal Affairs Committee. He asked for more than $715 million — an 8.17 percent increase, the biggest jump in years. In his own letter, Lombardo admitted the request was "considerably larger than recent years."

The request included no money for a single additional police officer.

And Metro was short. Back in 2016, Lombardo himself had championed the Clark County sales tax increase known as the More Cops Fund. It came with a promise: two officers for every 1,000 residents. By the time he was asking for that $715 million, Metro had been below that ratio for the entire fiscal year and didn't expect to hit it again until June 2023.

Clark County Commissioner Michael Naft said it out loud at the meeting:

"We're not meeting that obligation."

Lombardo's answer on when Metro would catch up was that it was "incumbent upon the community." He said fewer people were applying, and blamed a shift in how people feel about police.

He pushed the sales tax to put more cops on the street. Metro never got to the number he promised. His own pay went up anyway.

The fiscal hawk act

None of this stopped him from campaigning as the guy who makes the hard money calls.

In September 2021, Lombardo posted this:

"As Sheriff of NV's largest county I'm no stranger to tough decisions that affect a budget's bottom line. I know NV can do better &, as Gov. why I've vowed to veto any new tax increase."

A year earlier, in a guest column for the Las Vegas Sun, he had warned that COVID budget cuts could "hamper our ability to police." He argued that cutting police funding would hurt the very communities asking for change.

So: budgets are tight, cuts are dangerous, and he's the man who knows how to make tough calls. Also, he needs 8 percent more money, zero new officers will be hired, and his salary and pension both go up.

He didn't tell us everything about his money, either

There is one more piece of this.

Nevada requires officials and candidates to file a financial disclosure every year. The point is simple: let voters see where an official's money comes from, so they can spot conflicts of interest.

Lombardo married Donna Alderson in 2015. She worked as a commercial real estate broker at CBRE. He left her employment off his 2016, 2017 and 2018 disclosure statements. In 2019, he didn't file at all by the January 15 deadline. Under state law that carried a minimum $2,000 penalty.

He wasn't fined. In 2019 a deputy secretary of state said the office couldn't remember fining any public official over a disclosure form. And the Secretary of State's office told the Nevada Current it doesn't actually review these forms for accuracy — there's no one on staff to do it.

"We rely on the public checking on everybody," a spokeswoman said.

So we're checking.

"I can't control that"

Two days ago, the Nevada Current reported what Lombardo is telling Nevadans now about the cost of living.

Asked at a July meet and greet how he'd deal with grocery and housing prices, the governor said: "There's a big difference between the federal space and the local space, right? And when we talk about affordability and inflation rates and everything, I can't control that."

He went further. "Any politician who stands before you and says, 'Well, I'm going to fix inflation.' That's bullshit."

This is the same man who won his first term by blaming Governor Steve Sisolak for the national economy. "Let me be clear: this recession is a direct result of Sisolak and Biden's disastrous economic leadership," he tweeted in 2022. Asked why the national economy was Sisolak's fault but not his, his campaign spokeswoman would not answer.

He also isn't powerless. Governors have levers — tax policy, housing supply, utility rates. Lombardo vetoed a record 87 bills last session, including one that would have expanded paid family and medical leave, one that would have provided free school meals after pandemic funding ran out, one that would have temporarily capped rent for seniors and Social Security recipients, and one that would have blocked drug companies from charging more than the Medicare price.

Meanwhile, his political operation has never been healthier. The Lombardo-affiliated Better Nevada PAC raised $12 million in a single quarter this year.

The pattern

Three days ago we wrote about the 15 seconds it took Lombardo to talk his way out of a traffic ticket — he interrupted the sergeant to say "I'm Joe Lombardo," said "come on, man," and drove off.

It's the same shape as this story. There's a rule, and there's a version of the rule for him.

Nevadans pay a sales tax he pushed for a staffing level Metro never hit. Nevadans file the disclosure forms nobody checks. Nevadans get told inflation is somebody else's job. And the man saying it collects a salary and a pension from the same taxpayers — and says he doesn't get paid very much.

Source

Lombardo defers to feds on affordability, inflation issues: 'I can't control that' — Dana Gentry, Nevada Current, August 4, 2026, and $715 million: LVMPD to request 8% increase in budget, but no new officers — April Corbin Girnus, Nevada Current, April 26, 2022. Photo: Lombardo campaign, via the Nevada Current.

Tom Emmer Says Eggs Cost 78 Cents and Milk Is Under $2. The Government's Own Numbers Say Otherwise.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:20:00 +0000

On August 4, Maria Bartiromo asked the third-ranking Republican in the House a simple question. A new CNN poll had Democrats up eight points on the generic ballot. Why is America frustrated with the Republican Party?

Tom Emmer told her the frustration isn't real.

"I think it's perception, Maria. The perception and the reality of our economy. The two need to meet. Right now there are great things happening in our economy. Nobody wants to talk about 78 cent eggs, nobody wants to talk about milk that's under $2. No, no. They want to focus on gas prices. Americans are smarter than the elites in Washington."

He's right that Americans are smarter than that. They buy groceries.

What eggs and milk actually cost

The federal government tracks the average retail price of both of these items every single month. It is not a secret. It is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Eggs, Grade A large, per dozen: $2.14 in June 2026
Milk, fresh whole, per gallon: $4.32 in June 2026

Emmer said 78 cents. Eggs cost nearly three times that.

Emmer said milk was "under $2." It costs $4.32 — more than double what he told a national television audience.

And milk isn't even falling. It has gone up over the course of this year, from $4.10 a gallon in January to $4.32 in June.

Where the 78 cents came from

The number wasn't invented out of thin air. It appears to come from a wholesale price movement — what distributors pay, not what you pay at the register, as Crooks and Liars noted in flagging the claim.

That distinction matters enormously, and Emmer erased it. Nobody in Minnesota buys eggs at wholesale. The Majority Whip took a number from a market most Americans will never touch and presented it as the price on the shelf.

Then he used it to tell people their own grocery bill is a "perception" problem.

He's not a bystander to grocery prices

The most frustrating part of Emmer's answer is the pose — as if he's an analyst commenting on an economy that happens to him.

Tom Emmer is the House Majority Whip. Rounding up Republican votes for Trump's agenda is literally his job. When prices go up because of policies Congress passed, he is one of the people who passed them.

On tariffs — the policy that raises the price of imported goods for the people buying them — Emmer has been a cheerleader, not a critic. He told a telephone town hall that "these tariffs are going to protect American manufacturing," and he publicly applauded Trump's Section 232 tariffs, calling him "a master negotiator, especially when it comes to tariffs."

He also whipped through the budget bill he called "historic America First policy wins for the American people." Here's what those wins look like back home in Minnesota's 6th District:

An estimated 19,294 people in his district are projected to lose health coverage — 12,994 losing Medicaid and 6,300 losing marketplace coverage.
19,033 households in the district rely on SNAP to buy food — including 11,613 households with children and 5,117 with a senior over 60.

Those 19,033 households are the ones who feel the difference between $2.14 eggs and 78-cent eggs most sharply. They are also the ones whose food assistance he voted to cut.

"They want to focus on gas prices"

Notice the rest of the answer. Emmer complained that people "want to focus on gas prices" — as though picking which grocery bill to worry about is a media trick rather than a household budget.

This is a familiar move. When David Valadao was asked about food assistance cuts in a district where more than a quarter of households are on SNAP, he said the drop in enrollment didn't worry him. The pattern is the same: cast the vote, then tell the people it lands on that their concern is overblown.

It is also familiar from Emmer himself. He is happy to talk loudly about his committee's investigations when the subject suits him, and goes quiet when it doesn't.

The bottom line

A member of Congress can be wrong about a number. It happens.

But Emmer wasn't off by a rounding error. Eggs cost nearly three times what he said, and milk more than twice — and he said it on national television while arguing that voters' own experience of their grocery bill is a misperception that needs to be corrected.

The prices are published every month, for free, by the government he works for. He could have looked.

Minnesotans in the 6th District don't have to. They already know what a gallon of milk costs.

Source

Emmer Claims Eggs Cost 78 Cents, Milk Is Under $2 — Joe.My.God., August 4, 2026, with the full Fox Business transcript. Image via Crooks and Liars.

4 Million Americans Have Lost Food Stamps. Republicans Say That's the Economy Getting Better.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:52:00 +0000

Last year, an average of 42 million Americans got help buying groceries every month — roughly 1 in 8 of us. As of April, that number was down to 37 million.

More than 4 million people lost food assistance in nine months. A huge share of them are kids.

Nothing about the economy explains it. Unemployment has been flat at about 4 percent that entire time. Grocery prices kept going up. Nobody woke up one morning and stopped needing food.

What changed is the law. Republicans passed the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" in July 2025, and in state after state the decline accelerated right after it was signed.

And here's the part worth sitting with: the biggest cut hasn't even happened yet. It starts in October.

What the Agriculture Secretary said about it

In May, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins posted a number to social media like a scoreboard: "4.3 million off SNAP and counting!"

She added that "Americans are getting back to work," that "healthy employment numbers mean less reliance on government programs," and that America "is back in business!"

In late April, on Fox Business, she had given the same explanation for the drop: "A lot of it is people taking the program that shouldn't have been, and then a lot of it is just a better economy."

The Associated Press ran that claim through the data and the researchers who study it. It didn't hold up.

Caitlin Caspi, who studies food insecurity at the University of Connecticut, told the AP the shape of the decline doesn't match a jobs story at all: "We're not seeing a linear kind of drop-off. We do not see, for example, a pattern of decline in unemployment that would match the pattern of decline in SNAP participation." She also said flatly that she sees no evidence of a drop in fraud driving it.

Roger Figueroa, who studies nutrition at Cornell, pointed to a different cause: "What we've seen in terms of the data is that the trend in participation declines seems to be related to the program being harder to access."

That's the whole story. They made it harder. Then they took credit for the result.

The USDA's own line to NPR was that participation "tends to fluctuate" and the drop isn't representative of any one policy. That's a strange thing to say about the sharpest decline in three decades — the last time this many people fell off this fast was after Congress gutted the old Food Stamp Program in 1996.

Arizona is what this looks like when it's finished

If you want to see where the rest of the country is headed, look at Arizona.

Arizona had 882,419 people on SNAP in July 2025. By April, it was 400,641. That's a 54.6% drop. More than half the program, gone in nine months. No other state is close — the next steepest declines are Louisiana at 21%, Florida at 19% and Oklahoma at about 18%.

Then there's this, from the Arizona Food Bank Network, which has tracked the numbers the same way since 2016: for the first time, more Arizonans are visiting food banks each month than are enrolled in food stamps.

Their conclusion is one sentence long. "People need food banks now more than at any point in the last 10 years."

Natalie Jayroe, who runs the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, told NPR what that means for everyone else. "We think of ourselves as the canary in the coal mine," she said. "We are showing the rest of the country a really scary scenario."

This has names attached to it in Arizona

It's easy to say "Republicans did this" and let everyone off the hook. So here's the roll call.

The House passed the final version of the bill on July 3, 2025, by 218 to 214. It came down to four votes. Every single Republican in Arizona's delegation voted yes:

Andy Biggs — AZ-05, now running for governor
David Schweikert — AZ-01, also now running for governor
Paul Gosar — AZ-09
Eli Crane — AZ-02
Juan Ciscomani — AZ-06
Abraham Hamadeh — AZ-08

All six of them represent a state where 1 in 5 kids already faces hunger. Any one of them could have flipped it.

Nine months later, more than half the people on food stamps in their state are off the program, and Arizonans are lining up at food banks in numbers the state hasn't seen in a decade. Biggs and Schweikert are now asking those same Arizonans to make one of them governor — the office that will have to decide, starting in October, whether Arizona can still afford to run SNAP at all.

Who they specifically decided to stop protecting

The eligibility changes weren't a broad trim. Congress went in and named groups.

Under the old rules, certain people were shielded from SNAP's harsh time limits because lawmakers had recognized they were in genuine crisis. Republicans deleted those protections:

Veterans
People experiencing homelessness
Young people aging out of foster care

They also pushed work rules onto parents with a child as young as 14, and raised the top age from 54 all the way to 64. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the work-rule changes alone will cut about 2.4 million people from SNAP in an average month through 2034.

And they ended food aid for a small group of legal immigrants — refugees, people seeking asylum, and victims of domestic abuse and human trafficking.

Those are the people the "waste, fraud and abuse" language was covering for.

The human version of this is not abstract. We wrote yesterday about a woman in Oklahoma City who sells her blood plasma twice a week to stay alive and had $3.78 in her checking account. Her food stamps come to $298 a month, and there's a real chance she loses those too.

The bill that hits in October

Here's what almost nobody is talking about.

For decades, Washington and the states split the cost of running SNAP 50-50. Starting October 1, 2026 — this fall — the federal government drops to 25%, and states have to cover 75%.

Then, on October 1, 2027, states start paying for the food benefits themselves for the first time in the program's history — between 5% and 15%, depending on their "error rate." Almost half of states could owe $100 million or more.

An error rate sounds like fraud. It isn't. It's a count of overpayments and underpayments, mostly honest mistakes — a typo, a caseworker misapplying a rule, a family not knowing what to report. We've walked through how that formula works and why it quietly rewards states for kicking eligible people off: wrongly denying someone benefits doesn't count as an error at all.

The Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality ran the state budgets. On average, states will have to spend two to three times more of their own money on SNAP — a median increase of about 202%. In 15 states it's more than 300%. In Florida, nearly 770%.

States have to balance their budgets. So that money comes out of schools, roads, or the food program itself.

Some states are already talking about quitting

A survey of state SNAP agencies this spring found 29% saying they may have to narrow eligibility further, and 11% saying they might withdraw or pause the program entirely.

Of the 39 states that responded, 15 said they are now prioritizing payment accuracy over getting benefits to people on time. That is the trade-off in plain language: paperwork first, hungry families second.

"There's really an existential crisis in the future of SNAP," said Lexie Kuznick of the American Public Human Services Association.

And there's no backstop. Starsky Wilson of the Children's Defense Fund said it as bluntly as it can be said: "There's no replacement for SNAP if a state gets rid of it."

It doesn't stop at the poor

If you don't use SNAP, you still pay for this.

Every food stamp dollar gets spent at a grocery store, usually within days, usually close to home. The National Grocers Association estimates the eligibility cuts total $88 billion over ten years, and that SNAP sales will fall about 8.7% on average over the next nine years.

In a small town, that's the difference between the grocery store staying open and not. When it closes, everybody drives farther for milk.

The bottom line

Republicans campaigned on bringing down the cost of groceries. What they passed instead is the largest cut to food assistance in American history — nearly $187 billion — and they timed the expensive parts to land after the votes were counted.

Four million people are already gone. The state cost shift starts in October. The benefit cost shift lands in 2027.

And the official in charge of feeding this country is posting the casualty count like a win.

We deserve better.

Source

Juliana Kim, Over 4 million people are no longer receiving food aid amid sweeping changes to SNAP, NPR, August 3, 2026. Lead photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

Greg Abbott Spent Years Selling Texas to Data Centers. Now He Wants Credit for Slowing Them Down.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:43:11 +0000

On Monday, August 3, 2026, Greg Abbott sent a letter to the two agencies that run the Texas power grid. No new data center gets to plug in, he said, until the state finishes a full audit of how much power and water these things use.

It sounded tough. Regulators took it seriously — ERCOT put its planning study on hold the same week.

But there's a problem with the Governor riding in to save us from data centers. He's the one who invited them here.

He Called Texas "The Epicenter of AI Development"

Nine months ago, Abbott stood next to Google's CEO in Midlothian and celebrated.

Google was putting $40 billion into Texas — three new data center campuses. Abbott's own press release quotes him calling it "a Texas-sized investment in the future of our great state" and declaring that "Texas is the epicenter of AI development."

That was November 14, 2025. He wasn't warning us. He was selling us.

And it worked. ERCOT now says companies are asking to pull 474 gigawatts off the Texas grid — more than five times the most electricity Texas has ever used at once. About 90% of those requests are from data centers.

That's the fire. Abbott lit it.

The Tax Break Nobody Watched

Here's how Texas got so attractive to data centers: we pay them to come.

Texas created a sales tax exemption for big data centers back in 2013, and lawmakers expanded it in 2015 — Abbott's first year in office. At the time, the state figured it would cost about $14.6 million over two years.

At a Texas Senate Finance Committee hearing on July 27, 2026, the Comptroller's office told lawmakers the real number is now roughly $3.3 billion for the 2028–29 budget cycle. That is not a rounding error. That's more than 200 times what was promised.

The same hearing turned up more:

Texas has certified 138 data centers for the tax break. Only about 20 have ever been audited.
Several of the ones that got audited were out of compliance. One company had to pay back nearly $5.6 million.
To qualify, a data center only has to employ 20 people. Some couldn't even manage that. "To be unable to justify employment of even 20 people… tells you how little employment is really stemming from this," the state's chief revenue estimator told the committee.
And the state doesn't actually know how many more are coming. "We don't really know what's going on," he said. "There's a lot of deliberate secrecy involved in these developmental plans."

Billions of our tax dollars went out the door with almost nobody checking the receipts. That happened on Abbott's watch, for eleven years.

What This Costs Us

This is not an argument about spreadsheets. It's about your electric bill, your water, and whether you can sleep at night.

Your bill. The U.S. Energy Information Administration ran the numbers and found that under a high-demand scenario, wholesale power prices at ERCOT's North hub could run 78.9% higher in 2027 than the baseline forecast. Data centers don't pay that bill alone. We all pay it.

Your water. In Texarkana, families are fighting a huge data center project because of what it would do to their wells. One resident, Dale Huls, put it plainly: "My well is over 700 feet deep. If they're sucking water [out of the area], I'll have to have somebody come out there and go deeper." Not everybody has the money to drill deeper.

Your health. Granbury already knows what living next to one of these operations is like. In October 2024, residents sued the bitcoin mine next door over round-the-clock noise. Lawyers found more than two dozen neighbors with real medical harm — permanent hearing loss, tinnitus, severe migraines, debilitating vertigo. "In such a short time, Bitcoin mining has completely altered our community, for the worse," resident Cheryl Shadden said. "We are subjected to relentless noise that is physically harming us." Residents visiting that site have recorded noise between 90 and 130 decibels.

And your town can't stop it. Texas counties have no zoning authority. Outside city limits, local officials mostly can't say no. As one real estate lawyer explained, a city or county "can't say no, just for the sake of saying no or because it's controversial."

So people got hurt, and the only person with the power to change the rules was the Governor. He spent that time cutting ribbons.

"The Arsonist Is Not Going to Put Out the Fire"

Abbott's first big reversal came on June 10, 2026 — a letter to the PUC and ERCOT saying data centers must pay for their own power lines and stop draining community water. Suddenly the man who threw the party wanted to talk about the mess.

His opponent, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, answered the same day:

"Nice try. Data centers are moving to Texas because Abbott helped create the most generous tax dollar giveaway to data centers in the country so Texans would foot the bill. This is a CYA move by Abbott."

"Greg Abbott has zero credibility here — no one believes that the arsonist is going to put out the fire."

When the August audit order came out, she called it more of the same: "the Greg Abbott Corruption Tax in action: rig the deal for global corporations and his donors, send the bill to Texans, and put his own appointees in charge of the cover story when the public catches on."

Follow the Money

Here's the part that should bother every Texan, no matter how you vote.

While Abbott was writing tough letters about data centers, he was cashing checks from people who profit from them. The San Antonio Current reported that just four donors heavily invested in the AI boom gave Abbott $2.5 million this year alone: real estate titan Ed Roski Jr. gave $1 million in April, energy executive Kelcy Warren gave $500,000 in June, Elon Musk gave $500,000, and Rhett Bennett of Black Mountain — an energy company building data centers across Texas — gave $500,000. Both Warren and Roski recently announced data-center-related projects of their own.

The loudest objection didn't come from a Democrat. It came from Republican Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller:

"Governor Abbott has taken millions from the very interests pushing massive data center expansion throughout Texas. Those contributions are documented in public campaign-finance records. If the governor has truly changed his position, there is only one clear way to prove it. Give the damn money back."

Miller also stood outside the Capitol in July demanding a special session on data centers, saying "Texans deserve more than just empty rhetoric." Abbott hasn't called one. He ordered a study instead — run by people he appointed.

We've Seen This Movie Before

The reason piling this much demand onto our grid is scary is that we already know what a failing Texas grid does to people. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri knocked out the power Abbott was responsible for, and at least 210 Texans died. He had been Governor for six years at that point. After lawmakers passed their grid bills that spring, the Texas Tribune found that Abbott collected about $4.6 million from oil, gas and energy interests — "his largest haul ever from those groups." One million of it came from Kelcy Warren, cofounder of a pipeline company that made $2.4 billion off the storm.

That's the same Kelcy Warren who just handed Abbott another $500,000 in June.

He didn't fix the grid. He sold more of it.

Now, in an election year, with voters in both parties furious about data centers, he's discovered the problem — and wants to be the one who solves it. This isn't a fringe complaint: Gallup found 70% of Americans across the political spectrum don't want a data center built in their neighborhood, and Abbott is polling neck-and-neck with Hinojosa in a race he was supposed to coast through.

Greg Abbott had eleven years and every ounce of power in the state of Texas. He used it to hand out billions in tax breaks nobody audited, invite an industry nobody could regulate onto a grid that already killed people, and take millions from the men who built it. A letter in August of an election year doesn't undo that.

We deserve better.

Source

Gov. Greg Abbott pauses new data centers until ERCOT, PUCT audit energy, water usage — Natalie Weber, Houston Public Media, August 3, 2026. Photo: Michael Minasi / KUT News.

She Sells Her Blood Twice a Week and Has $3.78 in the Bank. Republicans Just Took Food Away From 4.5 Million People.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:26:25 +0000

Trinity Goodman is 44 years old and lives in Oklahoma City. She had $3.78 in her checking account, one cent in savings to keep the account open, and six pennies in a piggy bank. She had a bandage on her arm, because the way she stays alive is by selling her blood plasma twice a week.

"That's my full assets," she said.

Her food stamps come to $298 a month. You can't buy toilet paper with food stamps. You can't buy tampons with them either. So she goes to church pantries and hopes. She has never in her life been to a barber.

"I've never been to a barber or any of those places," she told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who met her on a 1,000-mile road trip through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky. "Never. I don't have that luxury."

And now there is a real chance her $298 goes away too.

This is not the economy. This is a law.

Here is the part that should end the argument.

Unemployment has been flat at about 4 percent since July 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nothing about the job market suddenly got better. Nobody stopped needing groceries.

And yet, in that same stretch, SNAP enrollment fell by more than 4.5 million people — about 11 percent — according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Participation dropped in every single state except Alaska. It fell by 10 percent or more in 23 states.

The Center is blunt about what that means: "It's very unlikely that reduced need is driving the decline."

The last time this many people fell off food assistance this fast — outside of a temporary spike after a natural disaster — was nearly thirty years ago, after Congress gutted the old Food Stamp Program in 1996.

So what changed in July 2025? Republicans passed the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." The Congressional Budget Office scores it as cutting SNAP by nearly $187 billion — the largest cut to food assistance in American history.

They didn't cut it because the economy improved. They cut it because they wanted to.

They took food from 1.5 million kids

Of the people pushed off SNAP, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that more than 1.5 million are children. In the 19 states where the data is public, kids made up nearly half of everyone who lost benefits.

Children are already the age group most likely to live in poverty in America — especially children under 2 years old.

You cannot accuse a two-year-old of being lazy. You cannot accuse a two-year-old of gaming the system. There is no version of "personal responsibility" that explains taking food off a toddler's table.

Read who they specifically decided to stop protecting

This is the detail that tells you everything.

Under the old rules, a handful of groups were shielded from SNAP's harsh time limits, because Congress had recognized these were people in genuine crisis. Republicans went in and deleted those protections one by one:

Veterans.
People experiencing homelessness.
Young people who just aged out of foster care.

They also raised the age you're subject to work rules from 54 to 64, and extended the rules to parents caring for kids as young as 14.

Now hold that next to another person Kristof met in Oklahoma City. Courtney Williams, 31, was put into foster care at age 6, after she saw her younger sister killed. She was moved through foster homes in seven different states, carrying everything she owned in a trash bag. In one home, at age 11, the family padlocked the refrigerator, the freezer and the food cabinets. She was hungry.

When she turned 17, the checks stopped coming and her foster mother put her out. She spent roughly the next decade homeless.

Today she is caring for a new baby and hoping her $298 a month in food stamps survives.

Congress had specifically written a protection into the law for kids coming out of exactly that system. Republicans took it out. They also took out the one for homeless adults — which is the other category Williams spent ten years in.

Taxpayers paid to incarcerate her three times. We would not pay to feed her.

And it's not just food

The same crew came for health care in the same bill.

Marketplace enrollment is projected to fall to about 17.5 million people in 2026, down from 22.3 million in 2025 — a drop of roughly 4.8 million — after Republicans let the enhanced premium tax credits expire. For the people who managed to hang on, KFF found the average out-of-pocket premium jumped 58% and the average deductible climbed 37%, to $3,786 a year.

That's the trick. You don't have to repeal someone's insurance. You just make it cost more than they have.

In the states Kristof drove through, the damage is already mapped out:

In Oklahoma, an estimated 174,000 people are at risk of losing SoonerCare, with another 95,000 projected to go uninsured. About 694,200 Oklahomans rely on SNAP every month — one of the highest rates in the country — and 1 in 4 Oklahoma kids already faces hunger.
In Arkansas — which has the highest food insecurity rate in the nation, where 1 in 4 kids goes hungry — SNAP enrollment is already down about 9 percent, nearly 21,000 people, including almost 7,900 children. The state stands to lose an estimated $8–11 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade, with rural hospitals expected to close.

These are not blue states being punished. Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky send Republicans to Washington. Those Republicans voted for this.

This has names attached to it

It is easy to say "Republicans did this" and let everyone off the hook. So here is the roll call.

The House passed the final version on July 3, 2025, by 218 to 214. Every single Republican from these four states voted yes:

Oklahoma: Stephanie Bice, Josh Brecheen, Tom Cole, Kevin Hern and Frank Lucas — the entire delegation, in a state where 1 in 4 kids already faces hunger.
Arkansas: Rick Crawford, French Hill, Steve Womack and Bruce Westerman — the whole delegation of the hungriest state in America. Pine Bluff, where Latoya Foster is behind on rent and where Kristof found seniors saying life was more livable under Jim Crow, sits in Westerman's district. He keeps a district office there.
Tennessee: Diana Harshbarger, Tim Burchett, Chuck Fleischmann, Scott DesJarlais, Andy Ogles, John Rose and David Kustoff.
Kentucky: James Comer, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers and Andy Barr.

Only two Republicans in the entire House voted no. One of them was Kentucky's Thomas Massie — so Kentucky's delegation had a live example, from their own state, of what voting no looked like. Comer, Guthrie, Rogers and Barr voted yes anyway.

In the Senate, the bill passed 50 to 50 on July 1, 2025, with Vice President Vance breaking the tie. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, all voted yes.

It was a tie. Any one of them could have stopped it. Cotton represents the state with the worst food insecurity in the country.

Two who weren't there — and one who did something else

Two names on this list didn't cast that vote, and it's worth being precise about it.

Matt Van Epps wasn't in Congress yet. He won Tennessee's 7th district in a special election on December 2, 2025 and was sworn in two days later — five months after the bill passed. He inherits the consequences rather than owning the vote.

Sarah Sanders is Arkansas's governor, so she never had a vote on a federal bill either. But she has had plenty to say about food assistance — and what she chose to do with it is its own answer.

Arkansas is dead last, #50 out of 50, for food insecurity. No state in America struggles harder to put food on the table. Faced with that, Sanders's signature SNAP initiative was to ask Washington for permission to narrow what hungry Arkansans are allowed to buy — banning soda, certain juices and candy from food stamps, while adding rotisserie chicken. USDA approved the waiver in June 2025, and it took effect July 1, 2026 — one month before Kristof's road trip.

Sanders said the approval "sends a clear message" and that Arkansas "leads the nation in getting unhealthy, ultra-processed foods off food stamps."

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families had a different read. Their policy director, Christin Harper, told legislators that the better way to fix bad health outcomes is to address the root causes — poverty and access to medical care.

Remember what Trinity Goodman actually can't buy with her $298: toilet paper and feminine hygiene products. The problem in these states was never that poor people had too many options at the register.

"The more I work, the harder stuff gets"

In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Kristof met Latoya Foster, 31, a single mother of six who works as a shift manager at Taco Bell for $13.40 an hour. Her food stamps — $1,172 a month — were cut off in May over a suspicion she says is simply a mistake in the system. She's now behind on her $650 rent and racking up a $25-a-day late fee.

"I hit rock bottom daily," she said. "The more I work, the harder stuff gets."

Then she broke down and cried.

That is not an accident of the new law. It is the mechanism. Starting in 2027, states have to pay 5 to 15 percent of SNAP benefit costs themselves, and how much they pay depends on their error rates. So states are racing to drive their error rates down — more paperwork, more re-verification, more denials. And here's the catch the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out: wrongly denying benefits to an eligible family doesn't count as an error.

Republicans built a system that financially rewards states for kicking eligible people off.

Who actually gets investigated in this country

The whole thing rests on a story about the "undeserving poor" gaming the system. So look at who the government actually goes after.

ProPublica mapped IRS audit rates by county, and the most heavily audited place in America was not a billionaire enclave. It was Humphreys County, Mississippi — a rural, majority-Black county in the Delta with a median household income of about $26,000. Its audit rate ran 51 percent higher than Loudoun County, Virginia, the richest county in the nation, where the median income was $130,000. The five most-audited counties in America were all rural, predominantly African American counties in the Deep South.

The reason is simple: so many residents there claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the IRS audits EITC filers at rates rivaled only by the very richest Americans.

Meanwhile, this same Congress found room in the budget for tax breaks for private jets and a war with Iran.

And when they can't get the cuts through the front door, they take the money anyway. The Government Accountability Office — Congress's own nonpartisan watchdog — found that the administration broke the law by withholding Head Start money. Between January 20 and April 15, 2025, HHS pushed out over $825 million less than the year before, about 65% of the prior year's rate. GAO ruled it violated the Impoundment Control Act. During last fall's shutdown, the administration illegally refused to deliver SNAP benefits at all.

Two-thirds of us can't afford groceries

This is not a story about a distant underclass.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll taken July 8–13, 2026 found that about two-thirds of Americans now call the cost of groceries unaffordable. Among households earning under $50,000, it's 82 percent. Among households earning over $100,000, it's 56 percent.

Fifty-nine percent of Americans say they don't have a good chance at improving their standard of living in this country. Fifty-four percent say the economy and high prices are the single most important thing driving their vote this year.

So the people who ran on lowering your grocery bill have instead delivered the largest food assistance cut in American history, higher insurance premiums, and record deductibles — while two-thirds of the country says it can't afford to eat.

Trinity Goodman had a message for the president.

"You do not know what you're doing to people who are struggling to live. You got money in the bank. You don't know how it feels to struggle. Live in my shoes for one day. You wouldn't be able to handle it."

She is selling her blood plasma twice a week to stay alive. And there is a real chance they take her $298 anyway.

We deserve better.

Source

Nicholas Kristof, "Meet the Americans Who Can't Afford Haircuts or Toilet Paper," The New York Times, August 1, 2026. Photo: Tamara Reynolds for The New York Times.

14 Republican Senators Just Voted to Let Your Child Care Bill Go Up

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:06:01 +0000

Child care is one of the biggest bills a working family pays. It now runs more than $13,000 a year per child, and it went up another 5% between August 2024 and August 2025.

On Thursday, July 30, 2026, the Senate had a simple, direct chance to stop that bill from going up even more for about a million low-income families. It voted 47 to 52 not to.

What the rule did — and what Trump's HHS did to it

There's a federal program called the Child Care and Development Fund. It helps roughly 994,000 low-income families pay for child care so parents can work, go to school, or train for a job.

In 2024, the government set some basic ground rules for it. The most important one: a family's copayment couldn't exceed 7% of their household income. That's the federally recognized benchmark for what "affordable" child care actually means. Two other rules made providers more stable — states had to pay them up front and based on enrollment rather than daily attendance, and had to use grants and contracts to build up child care supply in places the market wasn't serving.

In May 2026, Trump's Department of Health and Human Services published a rule called "Restoring Flexibility in the Child Care and Development Fund" that wiped out all three. It took effect July 13.

Note what HHS did not do: it didn't replace the 7% cap with a different affordability standard. It didn't propose a cheaper path. It just removed the ceiling and left nothing in its place. As the Southern Education Foundation noted in its analysis, before the 2024 rule several Southern states were charging families well above the benchmark — Alabama 10%, Florida 9%, North Carolina 10%, Missouri 14%. With the cap gone, those rates can come right back.

Ohio families lose the most

The Center for American Progress ran the numbers in April. Ten states still hadn't reached the 7% benchmark, with maximum copayments running from 7.8% of income in Wisconsin all the way up to 27% of income in Ohio. Families in those states stood to save between $440 and more than $15,000 a year once the cap kicked in.

Ohio was the worst case in the country. An Ohio family at the top of the eligibility range could have saved as much as $15,482 a year — a figure reported by Common Dreams from that CAP analysis. That's not a rounding error. For a family scraping by on the kind of income that qualifies for child care assistance, $15,000 is the difference between making rent and not.

Ohio Senator Jon Husted voted to keep that money out of his own constituents' pockets.

Maine is on that list too — it was operating under a waiver from the cap as of December 2024, meaning Maine families hadn't seen the savings yet either. Susan Collins voted no as well.

The 2024 rule required states to work toward the 7% threshold, with waivers for states that needed more time. Scrapping it means states are no longer obligated to get there at all. Families in those states now have no path to relief — not a slower path, no path.

It was a one-page vote

This wasn't a complicated bill with tradeoffs buried in the fine print. Senator Patty Murray brought it under the Congressional Review Act, which exists precisely so Congress can cancel an executive branch rule it disagrees with. A simple majority would have done it.

Murray was blunt about the stakes on the floor: "If Trump had simply done nothing, and left the seven percent cap in place, some of these families would have ended up saving as much as $15,000 a year for their family. This is really a slap in the face to moms and dads all over the country."

She also named the tradeoff these same senators keep making. "How about instead of a $1.5 trillion war budget, we make sure every working family in America can afford child care?" she asked — pointing out that Trump's tariffs already tax diapers, formula, and car seats before you even get to the child care bill.

Every Republican in the chamber voted against it except Mitch McConnell, who was absent.

The senators who voted no

Fourteen of them have report cards on this site. Each one cast a Nay:

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

Two of them — Tuberville in Alabama and Moody in Florida — represent states that were already charging families above the 7% benchmark before the cap existed.

The part that should stick

These are the same senators who talk constantly about the cost of living and about supporting families. Here was a vote where those two things were the entire question. No amendments, no procedural fog, no partisan poison pill. Just: should a working parent have to hand over more than 7% of their paycheck for child care?

They said yes, she should. And the program only reaches 13% of eligible families in the first place — so this was a vote to make an already-thin lifeline thinner.

How they voted

The record is public and permanent: the official Senate roll call for vote 215 on S.J.Res. 199, July 30, 2026.

Chevron Made $12.1 Billion Off the Iran War and Gave $200,000 to a Super PAC for Jon Husted. He's Voted 13 Times to Keep the War Going.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 09:22:00 +0000

Ohioans are paying about 79 cents more for a gallon of gas than they were a year ago. Chevron just booked its best quarter in years. And the senator who could vote to end the war driving both of those numbers has now voted not to, thirteen separate times.

Jon Husted has been in the U.S. Senate for a year and a half — appointed, not elected. In November he has to ask Ohio for the job. Before we decide, it's worth looking at exactly what he's done on the war that's emptying our wallets, and exactly who has been funding him while he did it.

Thirteen chances. Thirteen no votes.

Since the fighting with Iran began, the Senate has taken 13 roll call votes on resolutions directing the president to pull U.S. forces out of a war Congress never voted to authorize.

Husted voted no on every single one.

Here's the record, straight from the Senate's own vote tallies:

March 4 — Motion to discharge S.J.Res. 104, rejected 47–53
March 18 — S.J.Res. 118, rejected 47–53
March 24 — S.J.Res. 116, rejected 47–53
April 15 — S.J.Res. 123, rejected 47–52
April 22 — S.J.Res. 114, rejected 46–51
April 30 — S.J.Res. 184, rejected 47–50
May 13 — S.J.Res. 163, rejected 49–50
May 19 — S.J.Res. 185, agreed to 50–47 — it passed without him
June 16 — S.J.Res. 172, rejected 47–48
June 23 — H.Con.Res. 86, agreed to 50–48 — again without him
June 24 — S.J.Res. 185, rejected 47–50
July 23 — S.J.Res. 180, rejected 47–49
July 30 — S.J.Res. 181, rejected 49–50

That last one failed by a single vote.

And these weren't party-line votes he had no choice about. On July 30, Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul of Kentucky all voted yes to end the war. Three Republicans looked at the same resolution Husted did and reached a different answer. He had a choice. He made it thirteen times.

Who's been paying for his reelection

While Husted was casting those votes, Federal Election Commission records show oil money flowing to his campaign from three directions.

The biggest is a single $200,000 contribution from Chevron Corporation, recorded on June 1, to a super PAC called Ohio Flyer PAC — a committee that exists for one purpose, supporting Husted's election. Super PACs can take unlimited corporate money. It was the fourth-largest gift the committee reported all cycle.

On top of that, two corporate PACs gave Husted's campaign the legal maximum:

Chevron Employees PAC — $5,000 in March 2025 and $5,000 more in February 2026
ExxonMobil's PAC — $10,000 across four contributions between May and October 2025

Add it up: $210,000 in Chevron-connected money, $220,000 counting Exxon.

What those companies made off the war

Both companies reported second-quarter results on July 31, and both said plainly that the disruption is what made the quarter.

Chevron told the SEC it earned $12.1 billion — nearly five times the $2.5 billion it made in the same quarter a year earlier — on record U.S. production and refineries running above 97% capacity. ExxonMobil reported $14.5 billion, roughly double its year-earlier result and its strongest quarter since 2022. Exxon CEO Darren Woods said the quarter "was shaped by disruption, but defined by execution."

"Disruption" is a tidy word for a war that has pushed crude into the $90-a-barrel range.

What it costs the rest of us

Ohio's average price for regular gas was $3.86 on July 28 — up from $3.07 a year earlier, according to AAA. At the peak in May it hit $4.78. In Tiffin, it reached $4.99.

AAA hasn't been coy about why. "Volatility along the Strait of Hormuz and instability in the region have pushed crude oil prices into the $90 per barrel range," the association said, and warned it could keep pushing costs up through the summer.

For Ohio, this isn't an abstraction. Farm operations run on diesel. Fertilizer prices track energy prices. Freight costs land on grocery shelves. Every family that commutes pays the difference twice — once at the pump, once at the checkout.

"What do you want me to do?"

The single most revealing moment came in May, when gas in Ohio was at $4.78.

Asked on the Northeast Ohio podcast Strictly Speaking Unfiltered on May 19 what he was doing about gas prices, Husted replied:

"What do you want me to do?"

Hours later, he voted against the war powers resolution — the one that passed anyway, 50 to 47.

So here's the answer to his question. We wanted him to do the thing he was literally being asked to vote on that same afternoon. He had the ballot in his hand. He voted no.

Husted has said he wants the war finished. Speaking to reporters in Dayton on March 6, eight days into the fighting, he said his goal was that it "should be brief and successful," adding: "We don't want to have hostilities linger on any longer than they need to, but if we're going to undertake this, let's finish it." He later acknowledged the war's end isn't in sight.

He said he wanted it over on July 22, in an interview with CNN. The next day, July 23, he voted against the resolution to end it — which failed 47 to 49.

Saying you want a war to end and voting thirteen times to keep it going are not the same thing. Only one of them shows up in the record.

This is the pattern, not the exception

None of this is illegal, and nobody has produced evidence that a check changed a vote. Corporate money flows to senators in tight races all the time. That's the point — it's routine, it's disclosed, and we're allowed to look at it.

And when we look at Husted, this keeps happening. His campaigns have taken more than $679,000 from insurers and their executives over his career — and in June he voted against two amendments directing federal investigations into insurance denials. We've already covered how the tech and utility companies driving up Ohio electric bills have been funding his campaign too.

Oil, insurance, utilities. Different industries, same shape: the people with business before his committee write the checks, and the votes come out their way.

The choice in November

Husted was appointed to this seat by Gov. Mike DeWine in January 2025, to fill the vacancy left when JD Vance became vice president. He has never faced Ohio voters for it. On November 3, he finally will, against former Sen. Sherrod Brown.

Outside groups have already committed more than $174 million to this race. A lot of that money is betting that we won't check the record.

The record is thirteen votes. Every one of them a no. Every one of them at a moment when a different answer would have started bringing Americans home and taking pressure off the price of a tank of gas.

Chevron got its $12.1 billion quarter. We got $4.78 gas. Husted got $220,000.

Source

Reporting by Dave Miller at TiffinOhio.net. Photo: Sen. Jon Husted/YouTube. Vote records verified against the Senate's official roll call tallies.

Vote No, Then Take the Credit: The Pandemic Relief Playbook

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:35:56 +0000

There is a move some politicians pull that is so simple it almost works. Vote against a bill. Let it pass anyway. Then, when the money shows up back home, put out a press release taking credit for it.

The Associated Press caught a whole group of Republicans doing it in May 2021, a few weeks after the American Rescue Plan became law. Three of the members named in that reporting are still in Congress today: Nicole Malliotakis of New York, Beth Van Duyne of Texas, and Troy Balderson of Ohio.

It is worth going back and looking at what they did, because they never stopped doing it.

First, the vote

On March 10, 2021, the House passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. The official roll call is not complicated to read. Republicans: 0 yes, 210 no.

Malliotakis voted no. Van Duyne voted no. Balderson voted no. So did every other Republican in the House, and every Republican in the Senate.

The bill they voted against sent $1,400 checks to millions of people, extended unemployment benefits, raised the child tax credit, paid for rent help, and put money into health centers and vaccines.

Then, the press release

Thirty-four days later, Malliotakis published a document on her official House website called her "First 100 Days Report Card." It is a list of things she wants credit for.

Near the bottom, under "Total amount of Federal grants administered," she lists $3,785,875. The two biggest items are $2,622,250 to the Community Health Center of Richmond and $1,118,625 to the Beacon Christian Community Health Center.

That is more than $3.7 million for community health centers on Staten Island. It came from the bill she had voted against five weeks earlier.

In the same report card, she wrote that her office "prides itself" on "bringing federal funding to the district and back into the pockets of taxpayers."

When the AP asked her about it, she had an answer ready:

"These grants were among the 9% of funds dedicated to COVID-19 relief that I was always in support of."

About that 9%

The "only 9% of the bill is actually COVID relief" line was a Republican talking point that spring. Snopes rated it Mostly False.

Here is why. About 9% of the bill paid for vaccines, testing, and protective gear — fighting the virus directly. But that number leaves out the $1,400 checks, which were more than 20% of the bill all by themselves. It leaves out unemployment benefits. It leaves out money to reopen schools, and rent help. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that only about 15% of the bill went to things not tied to the crisis.

But set the number aside, because it does not actually rescue the argument.

There was no vote on "the 9%." There was one bill and one vote. Malliotakis says she supported the health center money. She had exactly one chance to support it, and she voted no. If her vote had won, the Community Health Center of Richmond would have received nothing.

The restaurant fund is the worst part

The American Rescue Plan created the Restaurant Revitalization Fund — $28.6 billion for restaurants that had been crushed by the shutdowns. Applications opened in early May 2021.

Van Duyne and Balderson were both on the AP's list of at least eight Republicans who went out and encouraged their constituents to apply. Neither had voted for the fund. Both told people to go get the money.

Fine — tell your constituents what is available. But watch what happened next.

The money ran out almost immediately. The Small Business Administration's inspector general later reported that 278,300 restaurants applied, asking for $72.2 billion. The SBA approved about 101,000 of them and spent all $28.6 billion.

Do the subtraction. Roughly 177,000 applications went unfunded. The GAO found that just over 100,000 businesses received funding — about 40% of eligible applicants. Some of the restaurants left out were ones Van Duyne and Balderson had told to apply.

So in April 2022, the House voted on the Restaurant Revitalization Fund Replenishment Act — a bill to refill the fund and pay the restaurants still waiting in line.

It passed 223 to 203. Six Republicans voted yes. One hundred ninety-nine voted no.

Malliotakis voted no. Van Duyne voted no. Balderson voted no.

Then the Senate finished it off. On May 19, 2022, a $48 billion version of the aid package was blocked by a filibuster — 52 senators voted to move it forward, 43 voted no, and it needed 60. Only five Republicans voted to let it proceed.

The fund was never refilled. Those restaurants never got their money.

That is the whole cycle in one program. Vote against creating it. Tell your constituents to apply for it. Vote against refilling it when it runs dry. Then say nothing when they lose.

They are still running the play

None of this is ancient history. The same three members are in Congress right now, and the pattern has only gotten more expensive for the people back home.

On July 3, 2025, all three voted for Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill." The nonpartisan Joint Economic Committee estimated what the health care cuts in that bill would do district by district. Their numbers:

NY-11 (Malliotakis): about 36,900 people lose coverage
TX-24 (Van Duyne): about 28,900 people lose coverage
OH-12 (Balderson): about 28,100 people lose coverage

Read those two paragraphs together. In 2021, Malliotakis put out a press release taking credit for $3.7 million she voted against sending to health centers in Staten Island. In 2025, she voted for a bill projected to take health coverage from nearly 37,000 people in that same district.

She has not sent out a press release about that one.

What to take from this

A press release is not a vote. A tweet telling you to apply for a program is not a vote. A ribbon cutting is not a vote.

The roll call is the vote, and the roll call is public. Anyone can look it up in about a minute — that is the whole reason these members can put out a report card claiming credit for money they tried to block, and mostly get away with it. They are counting on you not checking.

Check.

Source

Steve Peoples, "Republicans promote pandemic relief they voted against," Associated Press, May 6, 2021. Photo: AP Photo/Susan Walsh, Pool, File.

Big Companies Are Getting Their Tariff Money Back. You're Not.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:55:00 +0000

For two years you paid more. More for coffee. More for shoes. More for a washing machine, a set of tires, a kid's video game console. You paid it at the register, a little at a time, and nobody handed you a receipt that said "tariff."

Then in February the Supreme Court ruled that the whole thing was illegal — that the 1977 emergency law President Trump used to tax nearly everything coming into the country never gave him that power in the first place. The government now has to give the money back.

$166 billion of it.

Here's the punchline: it isn't coming to you. It's going to Amazon, Apple, Ford, General Motors and Nike.

The refunds are real, and they're enormous

Because tariffs are technically paid by the company that brings the goods across the border, the company is the one legally owed the refund. And the checks are clearing. As of the end of June, Customs and Border Protection had authorized $104.29 billion in refunds and actually paid out $71.06 billion, according to the Cato Institute's tracking of the court filings.

Look at who's cashing in, as reported by Newsweek this week:

Apple — up to $2.2 billion, which helped power what the company called its strongest June quarter ever
Ford — $1.3 billion
Nike — nearly $1 billion
Amazon — about $600 million in one quarter alone
General Motors — $500 million

And it's not spread evenly, either. Cato found that while CBP had approved refunds covering nearly 60 percent of the total money owed, those approvals covered only 30 percent of the actual import entries. Translation: the giants got processed first. As Cato put it, "the deck is stacked against small firms that lack the resources to fight for and obtain what the government owes them."

The big guys have trade lawyers. The corner store had to close.

You paid it. That part isn't in dispute.

Nobody serious argues otherwise anymore. A study by the Kiel Institute that examined $4 trillion in shipments found foreign exporters absorbed only about 4 percent of the tariff burden — the other 96 percent got passed on to buyers here. The researchers described the roughly $200 billion collected in 2025 as "a tax paid almost entirely by Americans."

The nonpartisan Yale Budget Lab put the average effective tariff rate at 16.8 percent — the highest since 1935 — and estimated the price increases cost the typical household about $1,700 in 2025 alone.

So: you were charged. The charge was ruled illegal. The refund is going to somebody else.

Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, said it about as plainly as it can be said this weekend: "Corporations passed on the cost of Trump's tariffs to working people, consumers. They will pocket the refunds. More profits for corporate shareholders and we get screwed. Again."

Some companies are sharing. Most aren't.

Credit where it's due — a handful said they'd pass something back. Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said the company had identified a "limited set of circumstances" where it charged customers an import surcharge, and promised: "When we receive those refunds, we will proactively contact affected customers and automatically issue refunds to them." FedEx, UPS, Walmart and Costco have all said they'll return value to customers in some form. Costco CEO Ron Vachris told investors in March that "our commitment will be to find the best way to return this value to our members."

Notice what pushed Amazon there, though. It wasn't conscience. It was class-action lawsuits and public pressure.

Now the other side. Apple says the refund will go toward its investment projects and hasn't committed to sharing a dime with customers. And Nintendo argued last month that when you paid the higher price, you agreed to it — so you're "not entitled" to any of the rebate.

Read that again. You paid an unconstitutional tax through a higher sticker price, and the company's position is that the checkout screen was a contract.

Congress could fix this in an afternoon. It won't.

There is a bill. Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Rep. Frank Mrvan introduced the Tariff Relief for Consumers Act in March. It's simple: any company collecting more than $5 million in tariff refunds has to pass an equal amount back to consumers as discounts or rebates on things like groceries, infant formula and hygiene products — and can't shovel the refund into stock buybacks and dividends until it does. Small businesses under $10 million in revenue are exempt so they can recover in full.

Its status, five months later: referred to the House Ways and Means Committee on March 5, and nothing since. One action on the docket. Three cosponsors. Republicans run that committee and they have not moved it an inch.

And before anyone says this is just Democrats writing press releases — the same thing happened to the Republican version. Sen. Josh Hawley's American Worker Rebate Act, which would send tariff money back to families as rebate checks, was introduced on July 28, 2025 and referred to the Senate Finance Committee. More than a year later, the bill's record shows exactly one action, zero cosponsors, and nothing since. Republicans control that committee too.

A Republican senator's own bill to give this money to workers has been sitting untouched in a Republican committee for over a year. That's not gridlock. That's a choice.

Remember the $2,000 check?

In November, Trump posted on Truth Social: "A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone." It got wall-to-wall coverage. People planned around it.

It doesn't exist. There's no law, no appropriation, no check. Yale ran the numbers and found a $2,000-per-person rebate would cost about $450 billion — roughly twice all the tariff revenue expected in 2026. Trump also claimed the government took in "more than 600 Billion Dollars in Tariffs." The Bipartisan Policy Center put 2025 gross tariff revenue at $289 billion; CBP's own number was closer to $200 billion.

Columbia Business School economist Brett House was blunt about the whole framing: "It's not a dividend when you give money back to people that they paid earlier."

He's right — and it's worse than that. They're not even giving it back to the people who paid it.

How we got here

None of this was an accident, and Congress was not a bystander. When the tariffs were in force, House Republicans didn't just decline to stop them — they rewrote the rules so nobody could vote on them. On September 16, 2025, on a 213–211 vote, they passed House Resolution 707, which switched off the section of the National Emergencies Act that lets Congress force a vote to end a president's emergency — all the way through March 31, 2026. It was the second time they'd pulled that lever. Only three Republicans voted no: Thomas Massie, Kevin Kiley and Victoria Spartz. Rep. Suzan DelBene, who voted against it, called it "capitulating to the largest tax increase on Americans in history."

That's the pattern, and we've written about it before. Congress holds the tariff power under the Constitution. Republicans hold Congress. Every time there was a chance to protect their own constituents from this tax, they used the rulebook to make sure the vote never happened.

Meanwhile the administration is now in court fighting parts of the refund order, which Cato — a libertarian think tank, not exactly a left-wing outfit — warns could let the government "end up keeping tens of billions of dollars that it unlawfully confiscated."

The bottom line

Strip away the trade jargon and here's what happened to you:

Republicans in Washington let a president levy a tax that Congress alone had the power to levy.
You paid it — about $1,700 a year — every time you checked out.
The Supreme Court said it was illegal.
The refund is going to Apple, Ford, Nike, GM and Amazon.
The bills to send some of it back to you are sitting in Republican-run committees, untouched.
The $2,000 check you were promised was never real.

We all got screwed. Big business cashed in. And the people who could have stopped it at any of those six steps are the same people asking for your vote in November.

Source

"Tariff refunds split companies as consumers demand share of $166B," Newsweek, August 3, 2026. Photo: Wolf von Dewitz/picture-alliance/dpa/AP.