MAGA Report Cards — Iran War

Eli Crane Spent Years Attacking 'Forever Wars' and 'Reckless Spending.' Both Pledges Vanished From His Website After He Voted to Keep Us in a War and for a $4.7 Trillion Debt Increase.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:58:34 +0000

A month ago, the campaign website of Eli Crane told voters two things about him.

It said he opposed spending money on foreign "forever wars." And it said he would "rein in reckless spending" that was piling up the national debt.

Both sections are now gone. So is the anti-abortion line on his "about" page.

The Arizona Mirror documented the changes on September 4, comparing the current site against what it said in July.

What the site used to say

Under a heading that read "fighting for those who fought for us," the site said this as recently as July:

"Instead of funding forever wars and throwing away money we don't have, Eli believes we should be focused on taking care of those who risked it all for our freedom."

The heading is now "fighting for veterans." The forever-wars line is gone, replaced with language about "fraud-ridden nongovernmental organizations."

A second section made the fiscal case:

"As a small business owner, Eli knows you can't just print money. As inflation rates and our national debt skyrockets, Congress continues to spend money we don't have. This is unacceptable and Eli has consistently gone against the grain, voting to rein in reckless spending."

That whole section has been deleted.

What he did in between

Crane has voted three separate times to let Trump keep waging war on Iran without a vote from Congress — against war-powers resolutions on March 5, April 16 and May 14, each of which would have ordered U.S. forces out of "unauthorized hostilities." That war is now in its seventh month.

He also voted for Trump's budget bill, which cut taxes on businesses and the wealthy and is projected to add $4.7 trillion to the national debt.

So the two commitments that disappeared from the website are the two his voting record contradicts most directly.

He was not quiet about this before

Crane is a former Navy SEAL, and opposing foreign war spending was not a footnote on his site. It was something he said out loud, repeatedly, for years.

Here he is on a podcast in 2024, talking about Ukraine:

"They're seeing the headlines, you know, when they pump gas or they're buying groceries, you know, they're struggling to make ends meet. They're wondering, why the hell are we sending, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars over to a country that most people can't find on a map and escalate a war with the biggest nuclear superpower in the world?"

And in 2022:

"It's just that I have to ask myself, are we putting Americans first? And I don't believe that we are. And so that's something when I continue to see us send more money that we don't even have, we have to print this money because we already are... I think, $33 trillion in debt. You know, it really bothers me because we continue to spend money that we don't have on, you know, protecting somebody else's sovereignty and border."

Every argument in those two quotes applies to Trump's Iran war. Gas prices, groceries, money we do not have, escalation abroad. Crane voted to keep it going anyway, and then took the words down.

What the war he backed is costing his constituents

Trump's Iran war has cost the average American household at least $1,200 so far, and Congress has never voted to authorize it. Only about a quarter of Americans think the war has been worthwhile. Eighteen service members have died and 757 have been wounded.

Crane's replacement text points at nongovernmental organizations. His votes point at Tehran.

Why now

Crane's district has been safe Republican territory — Trump carried it by 15 points in 2024. It is not looking safe this year. Polling conducted August 21–24 for his opponent, former Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez, put the race inside the margin of error — Crane 46%, Nez 44%. National Republican leaders had already funneled money into his campaign earlier this year.

The rewritten site pivots hard toward local concerns: protecting rural Arizona land, rebuilding after the wildfires that burned Northern Arizona, helping Arizonans reach the American Dream. The old version never mentioned rural Arizona at all. His "about" page dropped his anti-abortion stance and swapped in a quote saying he is "committed to putting Rural Arizona first."

He is not alone. The Mirror notes that two Kentucky Republicans have scrubbed mentions and photos of Trump from their own campaign sites.

We have covered this pattern before. Andy Biggs, also of Arizona, deleted his "Defending Life" page. Bill Huizenga deleted his own record from his website the day a poll showed him losing. Andy Barr's site dropped the "Trump-endorsed" badge and the rally photo two and a half months after Trump cleared the field for him.

Crane's campaign did not respond to the Arizona Mirror's request for comment.

What the record shows

Eli Crane campaigned for years on opposing foreign wars and reckless spending. He then voted repeatedly to let Trump wage an unauthorized war on Iran, now in its seventh month, and voted for a budget bill projected to add $4.7 trillion to the national debt. Both pledges have since been deleted from his campaign website, along with the anti-abortion line on his "about" page, in a district Trump won by 15 points where his opponent's own polling now puts the race inside the margin of error.

Source

Eli Crane scrubs 'forever wars' and spending pledges he voted against from campaign website, by Jerod MacDonald-Evoy, Arizona Mirror, September 4, 2026. Photo by Gage Skidmore / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0.

Six Months of Trump's Iran War Has Cost the Average American Household About $1,200, and Congress Has Never Voted to Authorize It

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:58:11 +0000

Trump's war with Iran passed the six-month mark with no end in sight and no vote in Congress authorizing it.

An analysis by Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, puts what it has cost the average American household at roughly $1,200 more than they would have paid if the war had never started.

That figure was reported by New Yorker columnist John Cassidy, who is careful about what it is: not a precise accounting, but "a rough sketch" meant to convey the magnitude of the thing. It is worth reading it that way.

Where the money goes

At the pump. Gasoline is up more than $1 a gallon, and diesel by roughly half that. Across the country, those two price hikes together work out to about $93 billion in extra household costs — more than $700 per household, and the largest single piece of the $1,200.

At the grocery store and everywhere else. Inflation has climbed from 2.4% in February to 3.4%. Fuel prices do not stay at the pump; they ride along on every truckload of food, every delivery, every shipped good.

At the Treasury. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has put the direct military cost at $37.5 billion. Internal Pentagon estimates run $80 to $100 billion once damage to bases is included. The House has approved another $73 billion on top, which comes up for a Senate vote in September.

Those last numbers are not in the $1,200. They are the bill that arrives later.

Nobody voted for this

The thing that makes those numbers a political story rather than an economic one is that this war has never been authorized.

On July 23, 2026, the House voted 214-208 to order U.S. forces out. 180 of the Republicans this site tracks voted no and lost — the second time Congress has told the president to stop, and the second time they tried to stop Congress from saying it.

Oversight has not fared better. Idaho's Jim Risch chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the place Congress asks a president why. He would not hold a public oversight hearing on this war.

So a war that no legislature has approved is now costing a typical family $1,200 in six months, and it is being kept going over the objection of a House that has now twice voted to end it — with almost every Republican in that chamber voting the other way.

What they said it would cost

The gas price number is the one that stings, and several of these members have been asked about it directly.

Byron Donalds, asked on national television about Trump's promise to bring prices down, said the promise stands — then explained in the same interview why Americans should pay $4 for gas. Nebraska's Mike Flood, asked on national television to explain the president's line that high gas prices are the price of stopping Iran, said of those prices that you "play the hand you're dealt". Ashley Hinson told a private room the war could become a "political liability" if it dragged on, then voted six times in public to keep it going while taking $64,500 from oil and gas companies.

None of them argued the price had nothing to do with the war. Two of them argued it was worth paying. The third worried out loud about what it would cost her party.

The other ledger

The dollars are the part you can count. They are not the worst of it.

The Pentagon has acknowledged 757 U.S. service members wounded in this war, up from the 624 it acknowledged in July. It has also split its own death count in two, quietly moving four of the 18 dead out of the Iran operation and into a new category called "Overseas Operations," which left the headline figure reading 14. Those are the costs no household budget line captures, borne by a very small number of American families rather than spread across all of them.

The $1,200 is what the war costs everyone else, quietly, at the pump and the checkout.

What it adds up to

Six months into a war Congress has never authorized, Moody's chief economist estimates the average American household has paid about $1,200 more than it otherwise would have — driven mostly by fuel prices, with gasoline up more than a dollar a gallon, and by inflation rising from 2.4% to 3.4%. The direct military bill is somewhere between the $37.5 billion the Defense Secretary has acknowledged and the $80 to $100 billion the Pentagon estimates internally, with $73 billion more approved by the House and awaiting a Senate vote. On July 23, 180 of the Republicans tracked on this site voted to keep it going.

Source

"Iran War Has Cost the Average American More Than $1,200 Over Six Months, Economist Estimates", Common Dreams, September 1, 2026, reporting on analysis by Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics as described by John Cassidy in The New Yorker.

Mike Rogers Spent 20 Years Saying Iran Was Building a Nuclear Weapon. U.S. Intelligence Kept Saying It Wasn't.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 19:34:49 +0000

For twenty years, Mike Rogers (MI) has been telling Americans that Iran was building a nuclear bomb. For most of those twenty years, America's own spy agencies were telling Congress it wasn't.

On August 27, 2026, Jacobin published a review of Rogers's entire public record on Iran, going back to when George W. Bush was still president. It is not a flattering picture. Michigan's Republican candidate for U.S. Senate spent two decades hyping a threat the intelligence community kept knocking down, attacking every attempt at a deal, and pushing for exactly the war we are now in — the one currently showing up in Michigan gas tanks.

He is not shy about it. Since Trump launched the war six months ago, Rogers has called Iran "an imminent threat to our country," said the war was "absolutely right" and "a win-win-win for us," and told the Detroit News that "we are better off today than we were when it started."

Last summer, after Trump's first round of strikes, Rogers told Jewish Insider: "I couldn't have supported [the operation] more. I was for all of this when it wasn't very cool to be for all of this."

That part is true. Here is what the record actually shows.

2006: the report the U.N. called "outrageous and dishonest"

Rogers sat on the House intelligence committee whose staff produced a report in August 2006 declaring that "Iran is seeking nuclear weapons." It said Iran could have a bomb "sometime in the beginning to the middle of the next decade," and that Iran "probably" had a biological weapons program.

The International Atomic Energy Agency — the U.N. inspectors who were actually on the ground in Iran — wrote to the committee to knock it down. The agency objected to the report's claim that Iran "is currently enriching uranium to weapons grade," saying Iran had produced material "only in small quantities that is far below the level that can be used in nuclear arms." And it called the report's suggestion that an inspector had been removed for telling the truth about Iran "an outrageous and dishonest suggestion."

Rogers did not back down much. Asked about the weapons-grade claim, he told CNN the report was "very clear": "It says that we don't believe that they've gotten there. But the point of that whole section is, they are trying to enrich uranium to weapons grade." On the accusation that U.N. inspectors were covering for Tehran, he stood by it flat out.

So the inspectors said the report was wrong. Rogers said the report was fine.

2007: America's own spy agencies said the opposite

Fifteen months after that report, every U.S. intelligence agency put out a National Intelligence Estimate saying the reverse. They concluded with "high confidence" that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 — years before his committee's report told the country it was racing for a bomb.

That assessment has held up. In early 2011, the Director of National Intelligence told Congress that the intelligence community did not know if Iran eventually would decide to build nuclear weapons, and that it was not clear Tehran would decide to do so. And in March 2025, Trump's own Director of National Intelligence testified that "the IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003."

Rogers said it anyway. By Jacobin's count, he publicly claimed Iran had, was pursuing, or was close to a nuclear weapon dozens of times between 2006 and 2026 — on the intelligence committee, later as its chairman, and then for another decade on television. In 2012, a year after that briefing, he told CNN "we know that [Iran is] aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapon program." In 2013 he told CNN "everybody agrees" Iran was doing it. In 2023 he claimed Iran had "helped plan" the October 7 attack, a claim Israel's own military said it had no evidence for.

And last summer, he told Jewish Insider that on the day Trump attacked, Iran "had all three components" of a nuclear weapon — "they just didn't have them assembled." His own party's DNI had testified to the opposite three months earlier.

He took Netanyahu's side against two American presidents

In 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran a public pressure campaign to get President Obama to attack Iran, and threatened to go it alone. Obama refused and pushed for talks instead. Rogers spent that year criticizing him for it.

"I believe that if this is going to work we have to have a credible military option," Rogers told CNN in March 2012. "We can't say all options on the table, oh, by the way, Israel, we don't want you to do anything. That's not very credible."

He went further than that. He said on NPR that the United States and Israel have a defense pact under which "we will defend them if attacked under any circumstances." There is no such treaty. Rogers, the sitting chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was telling the public America was legally bound to fight a war Israel might start.

Three years later, when Netanyahu came to Congress to attack Obama's Iran deal in a speech many in both countries saw as raw foreign interference, Rogers cowrote a Politico op-ed defending it. He accused Obama of trying "to hobble the prime minister," and called Netanyahu's speech "the act of a true and courageous friend."

The terrorist group he helped get off the terror list

There is one more thing in Rogers's Iran file. In 2012, a Guardian investigation into the campaign to delist the Mojahedin-e-Khalq — a group of Iranian exiles pushing for regime change, and at that time a U.S.-designated terrorist organization — found that Rogers "has also received the backing of individuals and groups that support the unbanning of the MEK," and that he "has been among the strongest supporters in Congress of delisting the group, sponsoring resolutions and pressing other members of Congress to support the cause."

The MEK was on that list because it had been responsible for the deaths of Americans. Killing Americans is the exact thing Rogers has spent twenty years saying justifies going to war with Iran.

He fought the deal, then changed his story about it

When Obama reached the interim agreement that became the Iran nuclear deal, Rogers went after it hard. "We've taken away the one thing that brought them to the table," he said on CNN in November 2013. "We have just rewarded very bad and dangerous behavior." He kept it up on Twitter for years after leaving Congress, and he demanded Iran be allowed zero enrichment — a condition Iran hawks have long used to make a deal impossible.

While the deal was in force, Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium shrank to almost nothing. Trump pulled out in 2018, and it grew back. According to Jacobin's review, Rogers claimed on CNN the following summer that he had opposed that unilateral withdrawal. But in a September 2022 op-ed in The Hill, he wrote that the deal was "an agreement that should never have been made in the first place and withdrawing from it made sense, even if the way in which it was handled left much to be desired." His objection, in other words, was the manner — never the result.

The result is the part Michiganders should care about. Pulling out of that deal is what let Iran's uranium stockpile build back up, and that buildup is the thing Rogers now cites to justify the war.

Rogers is not the only Republican whose Iran positions move with whoever is in the White House — Arkansas's senator spent a decade attacking an Iran deal and went quiet the moment Trump signed one. And he is running in a race where an outside group is weighing tens of millions of dollars to put him in the Senate.

What it is costing Michigan right now

This is not a foreign policy debate anymore. It is a bill.

In late March, with the war in its fourth week, Michigan drivers were paying $3.92 a gallon, the highest since August 2023 and up $1.07 in a single month. By late June the state average was about $4.11 a gallon, roughly a third higher than a year earlier — and that same outlet, adding up Pentagon spending estimates, consumer energy costs and Michigan's share of the population, estimated the state's slice of the war's economic hit could top $2 billion. A mid-Michigan farmer said nitrogen fertilizer was "up 40 percent" since the war began.

When an attendee at a March campaign stop raised gas prices with him, Rogers waved it off: "We're gonna be fine, we got plenty of oil." He went on: "You'll get your oil, because we're going to pump our oil right here in America, and we got plenty."

Talking to a local reporter earlier this year, he was a little more honest. The war, he allowed, "brought some costs that are hard to live with, you know, when you're trying to pay your higher electric rate that's gone up the last eight years." Jacobin reports he said it with a chuckle.

Meanwhile Congress still has not voted on any of this. Trump's team argues it does not have to, and House Republicans have been happy to agree. Rogers has said he "doesn't mind" the idea of Congress formally authorizing the war so Trump can keep it going. He is asking Michigan to send him to the chamber that would cast that vote.

What the record shows

For twenty years Mike Rogers (MI) pushed for war with Iran on a claim U.S. intelligence contradicted in 2007 and again in March 2025 — that Iran was building a nuclear weapon. U.N. inspectors called part of his committee's 2006 case "outrageous and dishonest," and he stood by it. He spent years attacking the deal that shrank Iran's uranium stockpile to nothing, and later wrote that withdrawing from it "made sense." The war he wanted started in February. Michigan gas ran about $4.11 a gallon by late June, roughly a third more than a year earlier, one estimate says the state's share of the cost could top $2 billion, and when an attendee raised the prices with Rogers he said, "We're gonna be fine."

Source

Mike Rogers Pushed for War With Iran for Two Decades — Branko Marcetic, Jacobin, August 27, 2026. Photo: Rich Clement / Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Congress Never Voted to Authorize Trump's Iran War. A Group That Helps Troops Leave the Military Says Applications Are Running at Six Times Its Normal Rate.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:48:36 +0000

American service members are asking to be let out of the military because they believe they are being ordered to break the law.

Not a handful of them. MS NOW reported on August 26 that the number of service members applying to leave the armed forces as conscientious objectors has spiked since the war with Iran started in late February, according to the two organizations that help them file. One of those groups says its applications are running at six times their normal rate — higher, it says, than at any point in the past 25 years.

That is the group we send to do the fighting telling us, in the one formal way the military allows, that something has gone badly wrong.

And in nearly six months of this war, Congress has never held a vote to authorize it.

What the troops say they were ordered to do

A conscientious objector application is not a resignation letter. To get out this way, the Pentagon requires a service member to prove a "firm, fixed, sincere and deeply held" moral or religious objection to war. You fill out a written form, you can add supporting letters, and then you sit for round after round of interviews — your chain of command, a chaplain, a mental health evaluator — before the secretary of your service branch signs off. It can take a year.

People do not go through that for fun. Five of them told MS NOW why they started.

One was assigned to support the air campaign against Iran and came to believe the United States was bombing civilian infrastructure, which the Geneva Conventions forbid:

"I realized there's no way that you could interpret the international laws as saying that you're allowed to strike civilian bridges, but in reality, if the president wants to blow up bridges, the lawyers will find a way to say that it is OK to do it, and nobody anywhere up or down the chain of command ever stops and says no."

They raised it with their superiors. They were told most of the targets were "dual-use" — military and civilian at the same time — which, if true, can make a strike legal. It did not settle the question for them.

Another loaded weapons onto planes flying off an aircraft carrier in the Caribbean and watched the planes come back empty, never learning who had been hit.

"You can tell yourself what you want at night and say they were all precision strikes and they were all planned, but there's at least one innocent person that I feel like I indirectly hurt."

These are not protesters. These are the people doing the work.

The boats

The Caribbean flights are part of Operation Southern Spear, the campaign President Trump launched in September 2025 against boats the administration says are carrying drugs. The military has struck at least 60 of them and killed more than 210 people.

One service member told MS NOW they raised concerns about it with their peers but not with their superiors, because they were afraid of retaliation.

Congress had one real chance to look at how those strikes are run, and it dropped it. After the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had verbally ordered a crew to "kill everybody" — including two men found clinging to the wreckage of a boat the U.S. had already blown up — the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee promised a "full accounting." Ten days later, having watched a classified video, he declared the case closed. The public has still never seen that video.

The school in Minab

The single event that comes up most often on these calls is a school.

On the first day of the war, a girls' school in Minab, Iran was bombed. NPR reported that at least 165 civilians were killed, many of them children, and that a preliminary assessment found the United States was at fault. The building may have appeared on an outdated American target list as a military site, left over from when the grounds were part of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base.

Bill Galvin, who counsels service members at the Center on Conscience and War, told NPR the strike comes up on nearly every call:

"It comes up almost always. It's like, 'I can't be a part of something that's doing that.'"

Mike Prysner, who runs the same organization's hotline, told MS NOW that his group normally works with about 50 conscientious objectors in a year. Since the war started, it has taken on roughly 140. A second organization, the GI Rights Hotline at Quaker House, is now walking about 30 people through the application process at once, compared with five to 10 before the war.

Prysner's clients are not who you would expect, either. He said many have served more than a decade, span every rank up to major, and some went to service academies.

"The Iran War was really the breaking point for them when they realized that they had to take action to make sure that they did not participate in something that they were going to regret for the rest of their lives."

Nobody in Congress ever voted for this

Here is the part that belongs to the people we elect.

The war started in late February 2026. Congress has never voted to authorize it. The Constitution gives that power to Congress and to nobody else, and the men and women now filing paperwork to get out are fighting a war their own representatives never approved.

It is not that the question never came up. It came up constantly, and Republicans voted it down.

On July 23, the House voted 214 to 208 to order U.S. forces out of the fighting. It passed anyway — but 182 Republicans we track voted no, and only four Republicans in the entire House voted yes.

One week later the Senate would not even agree to debate it. A motion to pull a war powers resolution out of committee failed 49 to 50. According to Roll Call, that was the 13th time the Senate had voted on ending this war. Thirteen senators we track voted no — and the margin was a single vote.

The committee that exists to ask a president why we are at war has not held a single public oversight hearing on it. Its chairman decided the public didn't need to hear the answers.

Meanwhile 624 American service members have been wounded in this war, according to the Pentagon's own count — a number that appeared in a database with no announcement. The same casualty page quietly dropped four dead soldiers from its total overnight in July.

"Zero retention concerns"

While all of this was happening, Hegseth has been boasting that the military is hitting recruiting highs.

Asked about retention, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told NPR flatly: "There are zero retention concerns for Fiscal Year 2026. Every service is meeting its targets, and any suggestion otherwise is completely false."

That answer is built to be technically survivable. Experts told NPR that service members trying to leave right now wouldn't show up in any hard data for months or even years. Someone who files an application and waits a year for a decision is not missing from anybody's recruiting target yet.

The Defense Department did not respond to MS NOW's requests for comment before its story published.

What the record shows

Two organizations that help service members leave the military say conscientious objector applications have spiked since the Iran war began — one is running at six times its normal rate, the highest in 25 years, and has taken about 140 cases since February against roughly 50 in a typical year. The troops filing them point to an air campaign that killed at least 165 civilians at a girls' school, and to boat strikes that have killed more than 210 people. Congress has never voted to authorize any of it. When the House voted in July to order U.S. forces out, 207 Republicans voted to keep the war going; a week later the Senate refused, by one vote, even to debate the question.

Source

"Troops fighting against Iran and alleged drug smugglers say they are being asked to violate international law," by Priya Sridhar and Peggy Helman, MS NOW, August 26, 2026. Photo via MS NOW: U.S. sea drones strike a submarine and a ship maintenance facility on July 13, 2026, in an undisclosed area of Iran.

Byron Donalds Says Trump 'Did Not Break That Promise' to Lower Prices. In the Same Interview He Defended $4 Gas as the Cost of the Iran War.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:05:33 +0000

Donald Trump ran for president promising to bring prices down on day one. That promise is the reason a lot of people voted for him.

On Friday, August 21, NBC's Kristen Welker asked Byron Donalds — freshly nominated as the Republican candidate for governor of Florida — whether Trump had broken it.

Donalds said he had not. Trump, he said, has done "incredibly well" on the economy, pointing to wages and GDP growth. NBC titled the clip after his answer: Trump "did not break that promise" to keep prices down.

Then, in the same conversation, he said this about the price of gasoline:

"Do I want to see $4 gas? No, I do not. I don't want anybody to have to pay that."

And then he explained why Floridians should pay it anyway: the higher fuel prices, he said, are what it costs to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Read those two answers together

The promise was that prices would go down. The defense is that prices are up for a good reason.

Those are not the same argument, and Donalds made both in one interview. A promise you have to justify breaking is a promise that got broken. If the case for $4 gas is that it's the price of stopping Iran's nuclear program, then say that — but you cannot say it and also say the day-one pledge is intact.

There's a second problem with the reasoning. Donalds also argued the administration is being careful — that Trump has not committed troops on the ground in Iran and won't get stuck in another Afghanistan or Iraq. Fine. But that's an argument about American casualties. It says nothing about whether a Floridian filling up a truck in Immokalee should be paying $4 a gallon for it, or how long they should expect to.

Nobody voted for that trade. It wasn't on the ballot, and it wasn't in the promise.

He is running for governor on affordability

This matters more than a normal cable-news answer, because affordability is the entire platform Donalds is running on in Florida. In the same interview he laid out his plans: tort reform and home hardening to bring down property insurance, a permitting overhaul he says would cut 20–30% off the cost of building a house, and property tax cuts.

That last one is where his own numbers have already run into trouble. Donalds is the loudest voice in Florida for Amendment 3, a property tax cut even Ron DeSantis won't campaign for. When Florida's own state economists priced it at $11.86 billion a year, Donalds' response was that revenue estimators are "often wrong".

So the pattern is consistent. When a number helps him, it's proof. When it doesn't, the people who produced it are unreliable — or the price is justified by something else entirely.

The rest of the affordability record

Donalds has been in Congress since 2021, and his votes there are a better guide to what he'd do about Floridians' bills than a Sunday show appearance.

He cosponsored a bill to block heat protections for Florida's outdoor workers — the people who build the houses he wants permitted faster, working in the state where that protection matters most.

He promised Floridians that data centers won't raise their electric bills. The law doesn't say that, and the developers have given him $894,000.

And one billionaire, Ken Griffin, gave $10 million to a PAC backing him — the single biggest contribution of the race.

What he's actually asking Floridians to accept

Strip away the framing and the ask is simple: keep believing prices are being handled, while paying more, because there's a reason.

Every politician who presides over rising costs eventually reaches for that argument. What's unusual here is watching a candidate make it and insist the original promise is untouched in the same breath — and then run for governor promising to make things affordable.

Florida votes November 3.

Sources

Byron Donalds promotes his economic plans for Florida, defends Trump's record — WLRN, August 21, 2026
Byron Donalds says Trump 'did not break that promise' to keep prices down amid Iran war — Meet the Press NOW, NBC News

Susan Collins Is Asking Mainers for $5 to Help Buy Fuel for Her Campaign Tour. She Voted Five Times to Keep Going the War That Raised Fuel Prices.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:57:35 +0000

On Monday, Susan Collins' campaign sent Mainers an email asking for donations — as little as $5 — to fund a statewide tour running the length of the state, Kittery to Madawaska.

The pitch, as reported by the Daily Beast:

"Organizing a tour of this scale takes a lot of coordination, enthusiasm, and quite literally fuel."

Fuel. That's the word her campaign chose, in the year Mainers have been watching pump prices climb because of a war Collins spent two months voting to continue.

The 60 days

When Trump launched airstrikes on Iran in February 2026, Congress had a tool to stop it. The War Powers Act gives Congress 60 days to end a war a president starts without its approval.

Democrats forced vote after vote. Five times between March 4 and April 22, Collins voted against them, saying it "would send the wrong message to Iran and to our troops."

Then the 60-day deadline arrived on April 30. And on that day, Collins voted to end the war. She was one of only two Republicans to do so.

Her vote came too late to matter. The resolution failed 47–50. The war continued.

This is worth stating precisely, because Collins' campaign points to that April 30 vote as proof she opposed the war. What the record shows is that she voted with her party against five straight attempts to stop it, from March 4 through April 22, and broke ranks only in the last 48 hours of the window — voting yes on the 60th day, when the outcome was already set.

It's a familiar move. She voted against Trump's budget bill too, but only after her own procedural vote had already sent it to the Senate floor. She votes no when her no changes nothing. It reads as moderation and functions as consent.

And her family owns the upside

Here is the part that turns an awkward email into a real conflict.

Collins' annual financial report for 2025 shows her husband, Thomas Daffron, holds up to $150,000 in corporate securities issued by ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 — petroleum companies whose fortunes rise when fuel prices do.

In fairness, Collins' office says Daffron's investment decisions are made exclusively by a third-party adviser, without his consultation. We take that at face value. Nobody is alleging Collins voted on Iran to move an oil stock.

But the arrangement is still the arrangement. For two months, a senator voted to keep going a war that pushed fuel prices up. Her household's portfolio was positioned to benefit from exactly that. And now the campaign is asking Mainers — who have no such hedge — to chip in $5 for gas.

Mainers paying at the pump absorbed a cost. The Daffron portfolio absorbed a gain. The email asks the first group to help with the second's travel budget.

This is the pattern voters keep finding

Collins' financial record has been a recurring problem, and not because opponents invented it:

Her net worth was negative as recently as 2011. It is now up to $9.8 million. Her opponent's campaign puts her investment income at $342,520 a year — more than most Maine households earn from a full year of work.
She failed to report up to $395,000 in stock trades — 24 transactions filed more than 100 days late between 2013 and 2018 — violating the STOCK Act, the same law she championed and helped pass in 2012.
In 2026 she also failed to disclose a Pfizer purchase on time.
Her opponent's campaign says she owns the eighth best-performing stock portfolio in the Senate.
And she opposes a full ban on congressional stock trading, though 81% of Americans support one, including most Republicans.

We've written before about how the math on her "decisive" votes actually works. The shape is consistent: the public position is careful, the paperwork is late, and the portfolio does well.

Maine isn't the only place this happened

The Iran war's cost at the pump has been showing up in Republican districts all year, and members who voted to continue it have gotten creative about explaining the prices:

Mike Flood called $4.06 gas "the hand you're dealt" after voting to keep the war going.
Ashley Hinson took oil money and voted the same way.
Jon Husted's Chevron ties sat alongside his Iran war votes.

Collins' version is distinguished only by the email. The others at least didn't ask constituents to underwrite the fuel.

What Mainers should ask

Collins is running for a sixth term after promising, back at the start, to serve only two.

Two questions are fair to put to her on the tour itself:

If ending the war was the right vote on April 30, why was it the wrong vote in March? The facts didn't change on the 60th day. Only the consequences of her vote did.
Will she divest the petroleum holdings, or at least support the stock-trading ban that 81% of Americans want? "A third party manages it" answers a question about intent. It does not answer a question about incentive.

Maine deserves a senator who pays the same price at the pump that Mainers do — and doesn't pass the hat for it.

Sources

Vulnerable GOP Maine Senator Susan Collins Begs for Gas Money After Upholding Trump's War — Julia Ornedo, The Daily Beast, August 18, 2026.
Collins' Iran war powers vote reversal — The Maine Monitor.
Democratic ad attacks Collins on healthcare, Iran war — FactCheck.org.

Asked Why Americans Should Pay Record Prices for Gas, Mike Flood Said You "Play the Hand You're Dealt"

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:18:23 +0000

On Sunday, August 16, Mike Flood went on "The Hill Sunday" and was asked a simple question. Two days earlier, President Trump had told a crowd of law enforcement officers in Garden City, New York: "For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you're doing it so that a very evil country cannot have… a nuclear weapon." Host Chris Stirewalt put it to Nebraska's congressman directly: "The president's saying that paying high gas prices may just be part of a patriotic duty to help protect the world. Please explain."

Flood's answer:

"Well, prices are too high. I don't want to dismiss that. It's important. It's something that every single person talks about in my district and across the country. … We've done a good job on housing affordability. Obviously, I was the architect of that bill to … increase supply and bring down prices. As it relates to gas prices, you've gotta, you know … play the hand you're dealt."

Play the hand you're dealt.

Here is the thing about that phrase. It's what you say about weather. About a bad harvest. About the cards, which somebody else shuffled and somebody else dealt to you.

Mike Flood dealt this hand.

What the Hand Actually Costs

The day after that interview, AAA put the national average for regular gasoline at $4.06 a gallon — more than 92 cents higher than a year earlier. GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan said that was the highest ever recorded for mid-August.

Not high. Not elevated. The highest mid-August price in the history of the country.

In the same Garden City speech, Trump said of the higher prices from his war on Iran: "I'll never apologize, I did the right thing."

That is the hand. Now here is who dealt it.

He Voted Six Times to Protect the Tariffs

Flood has defended Trump's tariffs from the start. Days after the first round took effect in March 2025, he told reporters that "the right to place tariffs on countries is solely the right of a president" — "And so I have to trust the president." He voted six separate times to protect them — including in April 2025, when he voted to shield the tariffs from any check.

Tariffs are a tax. The Tax Foundation estimates the tariffs raised taxes by an average of about $1,000 per American household in 2025. And Nebraska has taken the hit twice over — farmers bracing for harvest as tariffs and low prices hit, and manufacturers from chocolate makers to farm-equipment companies calling them pain points.

When "every single person" in his district talks to him about prices, they are describing a bill he voted six times to keep them paying.

He Voted to Keep Us in the War

The gas price is not an act of God either. Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz — the shipping route Flood himself named on air, where roughly 20 percent of the world's oil and gas exports originate.

On July 23, the House voted 214–208 to order U.S. forces out of a war with Iran that Congress never authorized. It passed, over the objection of 207 of the 211 Republicans who voted. Flood was one of 182 Republicans we track who voted no — voting to keep American forces in the war whose disruption is driving the price he now describes as a hand he was dealt.

He had a chance to fold. He voted to stay at the table.

And He's Been Paid

Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC, have given Mike Flood $48,340, according to TrackAIPAC's tally of FEC filings through July 5, 2026.

That is not a side note in a story about Iran policy. It is a running theme across the party — we've documented how a handful of billionaires bought the Republican Party's foreign policy — and Flood is on the receiving end of it while telling Nebraskans that the resulting price at the pump is just how the cards fell.

The Tell: What He Said Next

Stirewalt then asked Flood a fair question. Democrats made this exact argument during the inflation spike after Russia invaded Ukraine, and Republicans hammered them for it. Was there any "reverse sympathy"?

Flood didn't engage with it at all. He answered:

"Right now, ironically, Republicans are united, and Democrats are busy trying to defund the police, close prisons, and [cancel] Thanksgiving because it's a colonist holiday, have government grocery stores."

A Nebraskan filling up at record prices got a culture-war riff about Thanksgiving.

That is what happens when a politician has no defense of his own record: he changes the subject to something you're supposed to be angrier about than your grocery bill.

Even Karl Rove Isn't Buying It

You do not have to take a Democrat's word for any of this. Karl Rove — George W. Bush's White House adviser, as Republican as the job gets — said on Fox News that Trump should stop "gaslighting" Americans about the economy:

"The president made a mistake, in my opinion, last week in saying we've got the greatest economy in the history of the world and prices for groceries and gasoline and everything are coming down rapidly. That's not the experience of the American people."

Flood's own instinct in the interview was the same — "prices are too high. I don't want to dismiss that." He knows. He said so on television. Then he dismissed it anyway.

What Nebraskans Are Owed

In May 2026, ahead of a Flood town hall in Madison County, the group Nebraska For Us asked him to prioritize policies that lower prices for Nebraskans struggling to pay the bills: "From rolling back tariffs and providing refunds to ending the war and eventually lowering gas prices, there are many moves our leaders could take." They were asking for the thing he keeps saying he understands.

This is not the first time Flood's public explanation hasn't matched his voting record. He voted to strip federal courts of their power to enforce their own orders, then told a town hall he hadn't read that part of the bill.

There is a pattern in how Mike Flood handles the gap between what he votes for and what his constituents live with. He doesn't defend the vote. He describes the consequence as something that simply happened — a provision he didn't read, a hand he was dealt.

Somebody dealt it. He was holding the deck.

Source

GOP Rep. Mike Flood says 'too high' prices are worth stopping Iran's nuclear ambitions — Ryan Mancini, The Hill, August 16, 2026. Photo: Greg Nash / The Hill.

Josh Brecheen Drew a Red Line on Monday. On Wednesday He Voted for the Exact Thing He Said Was Worthless.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:31:06 +0000

Josh Brecheen has built his whole political identity on one word: offsets. He doesn't vote for new spending unless somebody says where the money is coming from. He was an original cosponsor of the Make DOGE Permanent Act. He pushed the Senate to swallow the DOGE cuts without changing a comma — "It's an easy list. I don't understand the opposition."

On Monday, July 20, 2026, he drew a line. On Wednesday, July 22, he stepped over it.

Monday: the red line

House Republican leaders were assembling a fast-track budget package — a bill written to pass the Senate with a simple majority instead of the usual 60 votes — to pour billions into the Iran war and to push states toward requiring photo ID and proof of citizenship to vote.

Brecheen told The Washington Times he was out unless the package carried the real SAVE America Act — the actual mandate, not a watered-down version.

"I'm not willing to make that investment of deficit spending if they send us back garbage."

Speaker Mike Johnson had floated a compromise: a grant program that would pay states to adopt voter ID and proof-of-citizenship rules voluntarily. Brecheen was asked whether that would be good enough to earn his vote for unpaid-for military spending.

His answer was "not at all." He explained exactly why:

"The grant program is only going to be for states that want to do it. What do you get out of that?" he said. "The reality is, people in the Democrat-leaning states, they don't want to change the system. … Throwing some carrots at them will do nothing."

He wanted Senate Republicans to overrule the Senate parliamentarian — the chamber's referee on what can ride along on a fast-track bill — so the full mandate could pass with 51 votes. And he said that without the real SAVE America Act, he'd join the conservatives refusing to back new spending without offsets.

Clear enough. Two conditions: the real mandate, or the money gets paid for.

Wednesday: he got neither, and voted yes anyway

The budget blueprint the House took up on July 22 authorized up to $95 billion. Per The Washington Times' account of the vote, that broke down as up to $73 billion for Trump's Iran war request, up to $12 billion in farm aid, and up to $10 billion instructed to the House Administration Committee for the election requirements.

That $10 billion is the grant program. It is the carrots.

There were no offsets. That was the single loudest objection in the room — Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio voted no over exactly that, and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky called the defense money a "slush fund" for the war.

The resolution passed 216 to 214. Only two Republicans and one independent voted against it. The Clerk of the House records the roll call.

Brecheen voted Yea.

A two-vote margin means every single yes was decisive. His was one of them.

The best he could manage was a hope, delivered to the same paper he'd drawn the line to two days earlier:

"It better accomplish something. It can't be lipstick on the hog, and we're pretending it's something that it's not."

That is not a red line. That is a wish.

What changed in 48 hours

Not the bill. The bill contained the grant program he'd called worthless and the deficit spending he'd said he wouldn't make.

What changed was the pressure. Trump warned that he was "watching the vote very closely." Vice President JD Vance worked the phones personally, calling members to reassure them the White House was serious about the full SAVE America Act later — not the optional version actually written into the blueprint. The Daily Signal, a conservative outlet, reported that Vance's calls are how skeptical conservatives were brought on board.

So the promise Brecheen accepted, in exchange for voting for a bill he'd said was garbage, was a phone call about what might be in a future bill.

The same afternoon, on the same floor

Here is the part that makes this more than an ordinary flip.

Twenty minutes before the budget vote, the House passed the annual defense authorization bill. Brecheen voted no on that one — one of seven Republicans to do it, breaking with his own leadership and with every other member of Oklahoma's delegation, in a 216-212 squeaker that only cleared because six Democrats crossed over.

He put out a statement the same day explaining himself, which News On 6 published in full:

"While I support providing for a robust national defense, I could not in good conscience vote for this legislation as it authorizes a $263.4 billion (29.6%) increase over the authorized level for the previous fiscal year. … We are currently facing the largest national debt in our country's history, owing over $39.5 trillion, and we simply cannot bear the cost of additional, unpaid-for spending."

He has an argument for why the two votes aren't identical, and it deserves a fair hearing: the defense bill raises the annual baseline forever, while the fast-track package is a one-time expenditure. He said so in the same statement.

But read the next sentence of it. His own proposed fix was that "in the current Reconciliation 3.0 or in a future reconciliation package," Congress should "find meaningful offsets."

Reconciliation 3.0 is the blueprint he voted for twenty minutes later. It has no offsets in it.

At 4:37 in the afternoon he could not in good conscience vote for unpaid-for spending. At 4:57 he authorized up to $95 billion of it.

Who this actually costs

Oklahoma's 2nd District is not a wealthy place, and Brecheen's own voting record has already taken a lot out of it.

An estimated 41,415 people in OK-02 are projected to lose health insurance from the Republican cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in last year's budget law — 23,615 of them off Medicaid, the other 17,800 off ACA coverage. That is the largest projected loss of any Oklahoma district. His district also leans on food assistance more than any other in the state: 55,436 households, 17.6% of every household in the district, including 26,140 households with children.

Those cuts were sold as fiscal discipline. The offsets were the whole justification.

Then $95 billion in war and farm money showed up with no offsets at all, and the man who cosponsored the bill to make DOGE permanent voted for it in exchange for a promise.

And the thing he traded it for

Don't lose track of what the $10 billion is actually for. It is public money spent to push states to make voting harder — proof-of-citizenship paperwork to register, photo ID at the polls. We've written about what that paperwork does to real people: the SAVE Act leans on birth certificates and passports as proof, and as many as 69 million American women don't have a birth certificate with their current married name on it. About half of Americans don't have a passport at all.

Brecheen's objection to the grant program was never that it made voting harder. It was that it wouldn't make voting harder in blue states. His complaint, in his own words, was that "people in the Democrat-leaning states, they don't want to change the system."

He wanted a federal mandate to force them. He settled for $10 billion in carrots, plus a phone call.

Brecheen has represented OK-02 since 2023. He won his Republican primary on June 16, 2026 and is on the ballot again in November.

We deserve better.

Source

George Caldwell, "House Republican draws red line; won't back Iran war supplemental without SAVE America Act or offset", The Washington Times, July 20, 2026, and Lindsey McPherson's July 22 report on the vote. Brecheen's NDAA statement via Alex Cameron, News On 6. Roll call data from the Office of the Clerk of the House. (Photo: AP Photo/Rebecca Slezak, via The Washington Times)

"No Conflict Ever Polls Well": Mike Turner Went on CBS to Tell Dayton Its Gas Prices Are Worth It

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:24:00 +0000

On Sunday, April 12, 2026, Margaret Brennan opened her interview with a poll.

Sixty-four percent of Americans disapproved of the war with Iran. Sixty-two percent said the president had no clear plan. And in Dayton, Ohio, she noted, gas prices were "up a buck from where they were same time last year."

Then she asked the congressman sitting across from her a simple question: how are you explaining to people in your district that this war is worth it?

Mike Turner answered:

"Well, first off, no — no conflict ever polls well."

He went on: "And no one is willing to trade lower gas prices for Iran becoming a nuclear state."

Nobody asked the people of Ohio's 10th District whether they were willing to trade. Turner answered for them, on national television, and moved on.

He is one of the war's most reliable guests

Turner is not a bystander to this war. He has become one of its most visible congressional defenders. He was on "Face the Nation" in April defending it. He was on ABC's "This Week" on July 26, in a week when four American service members were killed in action, calling the war "an inevitable conflict." He was back on "Face the Nation" on August 2, nine days ago.

He is also one of the 207 House Republicans who voted in July to keep American forces in the fighting when the House voted 214-208 to order them out.

So when he goes on television, he is not commenting on someone else's war. He is defending a war he has voted to continue, in front of an audience that includes the district paying for it at the pump.

The exchange that tells you everything

The April interview is worth reading in full, because of how it ends.

Brennan listed the president's public statements about the Strait of Hormuz over about six weeks: the Navy would escort tankers no matter what; he was thinking about taking the strait over; it was someone else's problem and allies should handle it; he'd strike Iran's power plants if it wasn't opened in 48 hours; a two-week ceasefire; ships to clear mines; and then a naval blockade.

"Can you see here why the public doesn't think the president has a clear strategy?" she asked.

Turner's answer: "conflict is going to be fluid," and "your adversary has a vote in this too."

Then Brennan asked whether the Strait of Hormuz had been mined — something the president himself had cast doubt on in a post that morning.

TURNER: No, I think you'll have to ask the president. It's his tweet.

BRENNAN: But that's the point that Congress has not been … briefed on that. As a member, Oversight and Armed Services. Do you feel like this has actually been adequately explained to you? Because the American public does not.

TURNER: The president just tweeted this this morning, so you'll have to ask the president.

He sits on the Armed Services Committee. He sits on Oversight. Asked whether Congress had been told what the Navy is doing in a war Americans are dying in, he said: it's his tweet, ask him.

Brennan closed by noting that CBS would love to ask the president, or the secretary of state, or the secretary of defense — but "members of Congress from his party are the only ones sitting here today."

Nobody in Congress is asking either

Brennan pressed on the same point: there had been no public congressional hearing on the war since it began in February, and the House had been in session for 11 days.

Turner's response was that "there have been hearings on Iran's nuclear ambitions for decades," and that Congress had received classified briefings.

Hearings held years ago about a different situation are not oversight of this war. Classified briefings are not oversight the public can see. And Turner is not alone in offering this answer — in the Senate, Foreign Relations Chairman Jim Risch declined to hold an open hearing on the war at all, and when a Democrat tried to force a war powers vote on the House floor in April, the Republican holding the gavel refused to recognize him and gaveled the session out.

By August, even Turner was conceding the point. Asked on August 2 whether he was satisfied with what the administration was telling Congress, he began with "Yes" — and then, in the same breath: "still the administration could be sharing more with congress. I don't think anybody is satisfied with the level of information we're receiving."

That is a member of the Armed Services Committee saying, five months into a war, that nobody in Congress knows enough about it — and then continuing to defend it every Sunday.

Who pays him

There is a reason his answer to "is this war worth it" comes so easily.

Turner sits on the House Armed Services Committee, which writes the annual defense authorization bill. According to the FEC-derived contribution records compiled by Who Bought My Rep, which cover 2020 to the present, the political action committees of nine major weapons contractors have given his campaigns:

Lockheed Martin — $40,000
L3Harris Technologies — $40,000
General Dynamics — $35,000
RTX (formerly Raytheon) — $34,000
Sierra Nevada Company — $33,000
Boeing — $33,000
BAE Systems — $31,000
Leidos — $30,000
Northrop Grumman — $28,500

That's $304,500 since 2020, from companies whose programs his committee authorizes.

Separately, TrackAIPAC's tally of FEC filings puts Turner's career total from pro-Israel PACs at $232,577, as of July 5, 2026. AIPAC's own PAC accounts for $44,993 of the money Who Bought My Rep has logged since 2020. Over that same period, only about 4% of the $5.3 million he raised came from small grassroots donors, and Who Bought My Rep ranks him 237th out of 440 House members for grassroots funding.

None of that is illegal, and none of it proves he'd hold a different view without it. But it is the answer to a question Brennan didn't get to ask: when Turner weighs a dollar a gallon in Dayton against a war, whose interests are sitting in the room with him?

This is not unique to him. The appropriator who literally holds the pen on the Pentagon's budget, Ken Calvert, took more than $200,000 from defense contractors in the first three months of 2026, the quarter the war began. The industry funds the people who fund it.

What it costs at home

Brennan's question was about Dayton, and Turner never really answered it.

Gas up a dollar a gallon is not an abstraction in Montgomery and Greene counties. It's every commute, every delivery, every small business with a truck.

Turner has now made the same argument twice, in almost the same words. In April it was "no one is willing to trade lower gas prices for Iran becoming a nuclear state." On ABC in July, asked about a senator's argument that ending the offensive would reopen the strait, he called it "a foolish trade … to say, 'Well, we'll have the [strait] open, we'll have lower gas prices, but we'll have a nuclear Iran.'"

Both times he framed it as a trade his constituents were too shortsighted to accept. Both times he was the one who made the trade for them, and neither time did he explain how much longer they'll be paying, or what the plan is, or when Congress will vote on any of it.

And they have no way to tell him otherwise. Turner has not held a public town hall in the nine years his constituents have been asking for one, calls the groups that ask for one "radical groups," and has not said whether he'll debate his opponent before the November 3 election.

He'll answer Margaret Brennan. He won't answer Dayton.

Source

Turner's remarks were reported by Aimee Hancock for the Dayton Daily News: Rep. Mike Turner on Iran war approval ratings: 'No conflict ever polls well' (April 12, 2026). The full interviews are on CBS News. Photo: CBS, via the Dayton Daily News.

"I Just Don't See Any Other Way": Pat Fallon Says We Can't Leave Iran Until American Troops Are on the Ground

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:54:30 +0000

On the morning of April 6, 2026, Pat Fallon went on Fox Business and said the quiet part into a camera.

Asked about the war with Iran, Fallon said:

"I personally think it's going to be boots — at least special ops, American special operators on the ground, with allied allies in the region and air cover. We have to change the tact of the Tehran government or we can't leave. We can't leave until the job is done."

The guest host asked him directly whether that meant boots on the ground.

"I just don't see any other way."

He told Military.com the same day that he "will support whatever level of force is necessary to achieve strategic victory," and that "there is strong resolve among many Republicans in the House to give our military everything it needs to win this conflict decisively and not repeat the mistakes of past limited engagements."

Fallon sits on the House Armed Services Committee. He served four years in the Air Force. When he talks about ground troops, he is not a pundit speculating — he is one of the members who writes the defense bill.

What he is actually proposing

Strip away "strategic victory" and "changing the tact of the Tehran government" and look at the object of the sentence.

Iran has more than 92 million people, according to World Bank figures for 2025. "We can't leave until the job is done" means American forces stay until the government in Tehran changes. That is regime change, described out loud, by a member of the committee that funds it.

"Not repeat the mistakes of past limited engagements" is the tell. The lesson he draws from Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we shouldn't have gone. It's that we didn't go hard enough.

No draft-age American reading this needs that explained.

He also voted to keep Congress out of it

Here is the part that makes the television appearance more than talk.

In July 2026, the House voted on a war powers resolution ordering the president to pull U.S. forces out of the hostilities with Iran — a war Congress had never authorized. That's the constitutional baseline: Congress declares war, not the president.

Fallon voted with 206 other House Republicans to keep the president's hands free — and they lost, 214 to 208.

So the position is this. Fallon wants American ground forces in Iran. He wants them to stay until a foreign government changes. And when the House — the body Fallon serves in — voted to order those forces home, he voted no.

He is willing to send other people's children into a ground war he isn't willing to take a vote on.

Who pays him to be hawkish

Fallon's money runs in the same direction as his microphone.

Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC, have given him $88,088 — a large sum for a member whose district is in northeast Texas, nowhere near a foreign policy constituency. Among his top corporate funders is L3Harris Technologies, a weapons manufacturer with business before the Armed Services Committee he sits on. Only 3% of his money comes from small grassroots donors; he ranks #377 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding.

He has spent 2026 making the rounds on Fox Business and Fox News with the same message on repeat: that Iran has no legitimacy, that its government could collapse if it can't pay its soldiers, that its Revolutionary Guard was never negotiating in good faith — and, on July 27, that America's own munitions stocks are running low.

A wider war means a bigger weapons order. The companies that fill it are on his donor list, and the committee that approves it is his.

None of this proves he says these things because of the money. It doesn't have to. The point is simpler: on the biggest question in front of him — whether Americans die in a ground invasion of Iran — the interests funding his campaign and the position he takes on TV have never once diverged.

What his constituents get

Texas's 4th District is not asking for this.

Fallon's constituents show up to his town halls to ask about Texas Instruments layoffs, Medicaid and Medicare cuts, and whether Social Security will keep up with prices. Those are the questions in the room in Sherman.

The answer they get is a congressman on national television arguing for American ground troops in a country of 92 million.

Source

Nick Mordowanec, "Republican Congressman Says US Boots on Ground 'May Be Required' in Iran", Military.com, April 6, 2026. Photo: AP, via Military.com.

Trump Said a "Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight." David Joyce Called It Bravado — and Said Iran Needed to Be Put to Rest Like a Cancer.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:38:10 +0000

On the morning of April 7, 2026, the President of the United States posted this:

"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will."

He gave Iran until 8 p.m. Eastern. He had already described what he meant in more detail — that "every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o'clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding." Carrying through on that threat would, according to legal scholars, clearly amount to a war crime under U.S. and international law. More than 100 international law experts had already signed a letter saying Trump's actions in Iran violated the United Nations Charter and could amount to war crimes.

That afternoon, at a ribbon-cutting in Columbus, a reporter asked Ohio Congressman David Joyce what he made of it.

What he said

Joyce's answers, as News 5 Cleveland's Morgan Trau reported them:

"The president has his way of negotiating, which is unique to him. I don't speak to the things that he talks about or writes about on his social media."

"I think anybody who's dealt with President Trump since 2015, when he came down the escalator, realizes that he talks a lot in hyperbole."

"You have to measure what happens versus what the president says. But right now I'd like to think that part of the bluster and bravado of what the president has to say should be measured against what he actually does."

Read that last one again. A member of Congress was asked about a public threat to wipe out a nation of tens of millions of people, and his answer was that he'd like to think it was bluster.

"I don't speak to" is not a position

Joyce has been in Congress since 2013. He is not a bystander to American foreign policy. He sits on the House Appropriations Committee — the committee that pays for the bombs.

"I don't speak to the things that he talks about or writes about on his social media" is a thing a friend of the family says at Thanksgiving. It is not a thing a member of Congress gets to say about a threat to destroy a country's power grid.

And the constitutional problem isn't subtle. The war with Iran began in February 2026, and Congress never voted to authorize it. The one branch of government the Constitution actually assigns the war power to had, at that point, done nothing — and one of its senior appropriators was on camera in Columbus explaining that the president talks like that sometimes.

Joyce's own suggested standard was "measure what happens versus what the president says." That is the standard of a spectator. Congress isn't supposed to measure what a president does with an unauthorized war. It's supposed to decide whether he gets to do it.

The quote that wasn't hyperbole

Here's the part that got less attention. In the same set of remarks, Joyce wasn't only downplaying Trump. He was agreeing with him.

"Look, for 47 years they've exacerbated the situation in the Middle East. They've wreaked havoc in every country and spread terrorism beyond their own borders, and so eventually they needed to be stopped... We're going to do what's necessary to finally put this cancer to rest."

"This cancer" is a country — students, farmers, nurses, kids. On the same day his president promised their bridges and power plants would be burning by midnight, David Joyce described the whole thing as a cancer to be put to rest, and said we'd do "what's necessary."

That is not measuring what happens versus what the president says. That's signing on.

What his colleague said instead

Joyce wasn't the only Ohioan asked. Ohio Democrat Rep. Shontel Brown answered the same question this way:

"It was reckless, it's embarrassing, it's insane. It's frightening, to be honest, that this is the person who is in charge right now."

"When my Republican colleagues don't push back or stand up or do their jobs, then [Trump] just continues to push the boundaries and really it's putting this fragile thing we call democracy at great risk."

You can disagree with her politics and still notice that one of these two people answered the question.

How it ended, and what he did next

Eighty minutes before his own deadline, Trump announced a two-week ceasefire brokered by Pakistan, contingent on Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The bridges stayed up.

So Joyce could say he was right about the bravado. But notice what that argument actually concedes: his position was that the President of the United States can publicly promise a war crime and the correct response from Congress is to wait and see whether he means it.

Then came the part where Congress got its say. On July 23, 2026, the House voted 214–208 to order U.S. forces out of the war. Joyce voted no — to keep American troops in a war Congress never authorized — five months after it started, and with eighteen U.S. troops dead since the fighting broke out, four of them in the six days before the vote.

He told a reporter in April that once the House was back in session, "we'll have a good chance to have a serious discussion with the White House on where we're going moving forward."

That discussion, when it finally came to a vote, took him about as long as it takes to press a button.

Source

"Bravado": Ohio GOP Congressman dismisses Trump's warning that a "whole civilization will die" in Iran — Morgan Trau, News 5 Cleveland. Photo: News 5 Cleveland/Scripps.

Ken Calvert Writes the Pentagon's Budget. Defense Contractors Sent Him More Than $200,000 in Three Months While the Iran War Was On.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:15:12 +0000

There is one member of the House of Representatives who holds the pen on the Pentagon's budget. He decides which line items live and which ones die. He decides which contractors get paid.

His name is Ken Calvert, and he has represented part of Riverside County since 1993.

On May 1, 2026, the news outlet NOTUS published an analysis of hundreds of Federal Election Commission filings covering the first three months of the year — January 1 through March 31, the exact stretch when American troops were fighting and dying in Trump's war with Iran. It found that the defense industry poured money into the campaign accounts of the people who decide how much the defense industry gets paid.

Calvert was near the top of the list.

"Rep. Ken Calvert chairs the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which is charged with drafting the Defense Department's budget. The Republican is running in a competitive race after California Democrats gerrymandered his district, and his campaign committee received more than $200,000 during the first three months of 2026 from defense contractor PACs and direct contributions from top defense executives, according to FEC records."

More than $200,000. In three months. From the industry whose budget he writes.

The checks arrived while the shooting was going on

The war with Iran started in February 2026. Congress never voted to authorize it. By late July, the Pentagon's own count showed at least 624 American service members wounded in a war nobody in Washington was ever made to put their name to.

Here is what was landing in Calvert's campaign account during those same weeks, according to the FEC's own database:

Lockheed Martin's employee PAC — $5,000, on March 9
RTX, the parent company of Raytheon — $5,000, on March 4
General Dynamics — $5,000
General Atomics, the drone maker — $5,000
BAE Systems — $5,000
Leonardo DRS — $5,000
AM General, which builds military vehicles — $5,000
Booz Allen Hamilton — $5,000
AeroVironment, Sierra Nevada, Parsons, GE Aerospace, BWX Technologies, Blue Origin, Airbus America, Hermeus, Ursa Major, Applied Research Associates, Applied Intuition, ES3 — $5,000 each

That is not the whole list. It is just the ones who gave $5,000 — the most a PAC may give a candidate for a single election.

All told, FEC records show that at least three dozen PACs tied to defense, aerospace and military-technology companies sent roughly $146,000 to Calvert's campaign committee in those three months — before you count a dollar of what the executives gave personally. Anduril, Leidos, Viasat, KBR, Thales, Parker Hannifin, HawkEye 360, Second Front Systems, AEVEX, Fuse Integration, Pacific Defense Strategies, Air Space Intelligence, Robotic Research, K2 Space, Reliable Robotics — the list reads like an exhibitor floor plan.

NOTUS also found the personal checks. On March 2 and March 3 — which the outlet notes was "days after the Iran war began" — Calvert took two $1,000 donations from executives at AM General: Darrell Duckworth, an executive director, and Ryan DuRussel, the chief financial officer.

Calvert's office did not dispute any of it. His senior congressional adviser, Jason Gagnon, told NOTUS:

"Rep. Calvert appreciates the support he receives from a wide variety of Americans. His votes and actions are always based on what he believes is in the best interest of the constituents he represents and all Americans."

"A wide variety of Americans" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

What that money is buying a seat at the table for

This is not abstract. The Pentagon has asked Congress for a $1.5 trillion budget for 2027 — a jump of nearly $500 billion over what Congress approved the year before, and the highest ever, surpassing the inflation-adjusted peak of World War II. The request asks lawmakers to approve about $1.15 trillion the normal way and to push another $350 billion through a fast-track budget process that needs only a simple majority in the Senate.

The subcommittee Calvert chairs is the body that writes the bill deciding how that money is carved up.

Every company on the list above has a direct financial stake in that decision. They are not donating to Ken Calvert because they admire his views on Riverside County traffic. They are donating to the man holding the pen.

And this isn't a one-quarter blip. Across this election cycle, Calvert has taken $366,000 in defense PAC money against a House average of $29,408 — more than twelve times what the typical member of Congress receives. Only about 6% of his money came from small grassroots donors. Roughly 75% came from PACs, super PACs and large donors.

He also voted to keep the war going

Here is where the money and the votes meet.

On July 23, 2026, the House voted 214 to 208 to order the president to pull U.S. forces out of the fighting in Iran. Calvert was one of 182 Republicans we track who voted no — voting to keep American troops in a war Congress had never authorized in the first place.

He is not the only member of Congress whose donors do well out of this war. We've documented an Iowa Republican who privately called the Iran war a "political liability" to a voter at a campaign stop, then voted six times to keep it going while taking $64,500 from oil and gas. The pattern repeats because the incentives repeat.

But Calvert's case is sharper than most, for a simple reason: most members vote on the defense budget. He writes it.

And he is fighting to keep the gavel

There is one more piece, and it explains why the industry's money got so urgent this spring.

House Republican conference rules bar a subcommittee chair from holding the job for more than three consecutive terms. Calvert has already blown through that limit — he is already serving under a waiver, Roll Call reported in April. His gavel, the outlet noted, "is the most sought-after on the Republican side." If he's reelected in November, he'll need another waiver to keep it.

That is the situation the defense industry was writing checks into. The chairman who signs off on their contracts is in the fight of his political life — California's new congressional map drew him into the same district as fellow Republican Young Kim, so two sitting incumbents are running against each other — and he needs a favor from his own party leadership to keep the job that makes him valuable to them.

Money flows toward exactly that kind of insecurity.

What we're owed

Nobody is alleging a crime here. The donations are legal, they're disclosed, and that is precisely the problem. This is what the system looks like when it's working the way it was designed to work.

A person who spends his working hours deciding how to spend $1.5 trillion of our money on weapons should not spend his evenings collecting checks from the people who sell the weapons. Not while the war is on. Not while Americans are getting hurt in it. Not while he is fighting to hang on to the gavel that makes those checks worth writing.

Calvert says his votes "are always based on what he believes is in the best interest of the constituents he represents." His constituents in Riverside and Orange counties did not ask for a $500 billion increase in the Pentagon budget. Many of them are among the people whose monthly payment for their own health insurance rose 58% on average after he and 196 other Republicans voted to let the tax credits that made coverage affordable expire.

Somebody got taken care of in all this. It wasn't them.

Source

Defense Contractors Pump Big Money Into Congressional Campaign Accounts Amid Iran War — Samuel Larreal, NOTUS, May 1, 2026. Lead photo: Associated Press.

The Same Day the UN Voted, Jim Baird Filed a Bill to Defund It. A Committee Advanced It 28-18.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:08:02 +0000

On May 10, 2024, the UN General Assembly voted 143 to 9 to upgrade the Palestinians' standing at the United Nations. It did not make Palestine a member state. It did not give Palestine a vote. It moved the Palestinian delegation out of the observer seats at the back of the chamber and let it sit among member states in alphabetical order, submit amendments, and speak on behalf of a group.

The same day, Jim Baird introduced a bill to punish the United Nations for it.

He called it the No Official Palestine Entry Act. He introduced it again in the next Congress, on May 6, 2025, with eight cosponsors — among them two fellow Indiana Republicans, Rudy Yakym and Marlin Stutzman.

Most House bills are a few pages of nothing. This one is two pages that would blow a hole in America's relationship with the entire United Nations system. It's worth reading, because it's short.

What the bill actually does

Two laws already on the books tell the U.S. government to stop paying the UN under certain conditions.

The first is from 1990. Public Law 101-246 says no federal funds may go to "the United Nations or any specialized agency thereof which accords the Palestine Liberation Organization the same standing as member states." The second, from 1994, cuts off money to any UN-affiliated organization that grants "full membership" as a state to a group without the recognized attributes of statehood.

That's the standard the U.S. has used for decades. It's the law that forced the United States to stop funding UNESCO in 2011 after that agency admitted Palestine as a full member — a shutoff that eventually cost the U.S. its vote there and led to withdrawal.

Baird's bill takes both of those triggers and replaces them with the same eight words. From the text of H.R. 3208:

…is amended by striking "the same standing as member states" and inserting "any status, rights, or privileges beyond observer status".

…is amended by striking "full membership" each place it appears and inserting "any status, rights, or privileges beyond observer status".

Now read those changes next to what the General Assembly actually did in May 2024: it gave Palestine a seat among member states, the ability to submit amendments, and the right to speak for a group — status, rights and privileges beyond observer status.

That is the trigger Baird's bill writes into law. And it wouldn't cut off one agency. It would cut off the United Nations — the General Assembly itself, plus any specialized agency that does the same thing.

What that means in practice

The specialized agencies of the UN are not an abstraction. They include the World Health Organization, which tracks disease outbreaks. They include the Food and Agriculture Organization — which a Purdue-trained agricultural scientist might be expected to have some feeling for. They include the International Civil Aviation Organization, which keeps international airspace coordinated.

Baird's bill doesn't weigh any of that. It carves out nothing — not disease surveillance, not agricultural research, not air safety. It sets one condition — how a chamber in New York seats one delegation — and hangs American participation on it.

It does contain one carve-out. Section 4 reads, in full: "Nothing is this Act shall be construed to apply to Taiwan." The typo is in the bill. So the principle is not that observer-status delegations must never be upgraded. The principle is that this delegation must never be upgraded.

Who's paying for this

Baird is not a Middle East specialist. His Foreign Affairs subcommittees are Africa, and Oversight and Intelligence. His other two committees are Agriculture and Science. Nothing about his portfolio explains why the UN's seating chart for the Palestinian delegation is the bill he filed, and filed again.

Something else might. TrackAIPAC, using FEC filings, puts the total from pro-Israel PACs to Baird at $25,856 as of July 2026.

That's not a headline number by congressional standards. It doesn't have to be. We've written before about how a handful of donors bought the Republican Party's foreign policy — AIPAC and allied groups spent $8 million to take out a single sitting Republican who wouldn't fall in line. The lesson most members took from that wasn't "I should hold out for more money." It was "I should not be the one they come for."

Filing the No Official Palestine Entry Act, twice now, for free, is how a back-bench member from Indiana makes sure he never is.

This is not a throwaway bill

It would be easy to file this under harmless messaging. It isn't, quite.

The 2024 version didn't just get introduced and forgotten. On July 11, 2024, the House Foreign Affairs Committee ordered it reported out, 28 to 18 — a real committee vote, moving it one step from the House floor. The tally sheet shows every Republican who was in the room voting yes, and four Democrats — Kathy Manning, Greg Stanton, Jim Costa and Brad Schneider — crossing over to join them. It ran out of Congress before it got there. The 2025 version is sitting in the same committee now, waiting for the same treatment.

Meanwhile, in the district Baird actually represents, the Joint Economic Committee projects 21,540 people will lose health coverage — 11,000 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 10,540 losing Medicaid — and 21,647 households rely on SNAP to buy food. Constituents held a town hall without him in March 2025 to ask about exactly this, and his office would not say whether he had any of his own planned. He has found the time, twice, to draft legislation about where the Palestinian delegation sits in a room in New York.

Source

H.R. 3208, the No Official Palestine Entry Act of 2025 — introduced by Rep. Jim Baird, May 6, 2025 — and UN General Assembly presses Security Council to give 'favourable consideration' to full Palestinian membership, UN News, May 10, 2024. Photo: UN Photo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good words. Now watch what he did with them.

The promise he made to a room in Longview

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

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

And then he made a commitment:

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

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

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

What Congress said, and how he voted

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

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

Moran: Nay.

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

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

Moran: Nay.

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

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

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

Why the votes matter more than the quotes

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

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

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

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

What this costs

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

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

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

We deserve better.

Sources

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

Marlin Stutzman Wrote a Resolution on U.S.-Israel Policy. He Says the Idea Came From Israel — and He Checked With Their Ambassador First.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:03:31 +0000

On June 3, 2026, Marlin Stutzman introduced H. Res. 1339 in the U.S. House of Representatives. Its full title runs to 48 words. The short version: it endorses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to phase out the $38 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel and replace it with a "mutual defense cooperation and joint economic investment" arrangement.

You can argue about whether that's good policy. What's remarkable is where it came from, and Stutzman has told reporters the story himself.

"A couple of folks from Israel floated the idea"

Austin Campbell of Responsible Statecraft asked Stutzman how the proposal originated. His answer:

"When a couple of folks from Israel floated the idea of going from the supplemental of $38 billion over 10 years to a trade agreement and defense agreement, we just continued to have those conversations."

Then, before he traveled to Israel, Stutzman contacted Israel's ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, and asked him whether this was — in Stutzman's own words — "a direction that you guys would be comfortable with us going."

Read that sentence as a job description. A member of the United States Congress asked a foreign government's ambassador for advance clearance on a direction of American policy.

The Jerusalem meeting

On May 27, 2026, Stutzman and Rep. Abe Hamadeh of Arizona met Netanyahu at his office in Jerusalem. Stutzman told the Washington Post that after reviewing a draft of the resolution, Netanyahu said "I like it" and added, "This is the direction I've been wanting to go for a long time." Hamadeh is the resolution's only cosponsor.

One week later, the resolution was in the House hopper. Stutzman's own press release does not treat any of this as awkward. It says so plainly:

"Rep. Stutzman introduced this resolution exactly one week after meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu in Jerusalem and receiving his enthusiastic support for the legislation."

And then, right below, the release offers readers two documents: the text of the resolution, and — as a selling point — "A letter of support from Prime Minister Netanyahu."

A foreign head of government's endorsement letter, published by a congressman's office as the case for his own bill.

What's actually in it

The resolution isn't only about money. Its "resolved" clauses commend Netanyahu's proposal, back a new memorandum replacing military assistance, condemn antisemitism — and express gratitude to Netanyahu and the Israeli people for their "courageous partnership with the United States in military operations against Iran."

Its findings recite the operations by name: Israel's "Operation Rising Lion" against Iranian nuclear facilities in June 2025, the American strikes alongside it under "Operation Midnight Hammer," and the joint U.S.-Israeli "Operation Epic Fury," launched February 28, 2026.

That is the war Congress never voted to authorize. Five months after it started, the Pentagon's own records showed at least 624 American service members wounded in it. The House had already told the president to get out: on June 3, 2026 — the same day Stutzman filed this resolution — it passed an almost identical war powers resolution, 215–208, and Stutzman voted no. It passed another one 214–208 on July 23, and he voted no again, with 206 other Republicans.

So the sequence is: back a war Congress never authorized, then write a resolution praising the partnership that fought it, at the request of the partner.

Stutzman has been candid about the other pressure he feels. On why the aid structure needs to change, he told Responsible Statecraft: "Young people are questioning, why are we spending all this foreign aid?" And: "Israel gets wrapped up in that."

He was also asked about civilian deaths in Gaza. His answer:

"Have Israelis killed innocent people? The possibility is obviously there because it's a war zone."

The money

Pro-Israel PACs have given Stutzman $48,892, according to TrackAIPAC, which builds its totals from FEC filings and last updated his card on July 5, 2026. AIPAC's own political action committee is the largest single PAC contribution in his donor file, at $11,494.

We're not saying the check bought the resolution; we have no evidence of that and we don't write things we can't source. We're saying this: the money, the ambassador call, the Jerusalem meeting, the endorsement letter and the resolution all point the same direction, and none of them point toward Fort Wayne.

What Fort Wayne got instead

While Stutzman was drafting American policy toward a foreign government with that government's input, here is what was happening in Indiana's 3rd District, where he voted for the budget bill:

An estimated 24,639 people in IN-03 are projected to lose health coverage by 2034 from the Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts — 12,939 losing Medicaid and 11,700 losing Affordable Care Act coverage — according to Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee.
23,057 households in the district rely on SNAP to buy groceries, including 11,728 with children and 7,455 with someone 60 or older.

Constituents have tried to ask him about it. In March 2025, hundreds of people filled the Allen County Public Library in downtown Fort Wayne for an "empty chair" town hall — Stutzman was one of three Indiana Republicans represented on stage by a chair with nobody in it, and the station reported it had received no response from his office. In July 2025 the state Democratic party held a "People's Town Hall" at the same library and left a chair at the end of the panel table with a sign reading "Rep. Marlin Stutzman"; the Allen County Republican chairman called it a stunt and asked why Stutzman "or any other Republican" would appear at a Democratic event.

He had a week to get from a meeting in Jerusalem to a filed resolution in Washington. In Fort Wayne, when every other member's town halls were being scheduled for the March 2025 recess, 21Alive reported that Stutzman "does not currently have any town halls scheduled" — and that he had cancelled a sit-down interview with the station that week over a scheduling conflict.

Sources

Rep. Stutzman: I consulted Israelis before proposing defense measure — Austin Campbell, Responsible Statecraft, June 24, 2026. Photo: Nathan Howard/Reuters.
REP. STUTZMAN INTRODUCES RESOLUTION TO TRANSITION U.S.-ISRAEL RELATIONS — Office of Rep. Marlin Stutzman, June 3, 2026
H. Res. 1339, 119th Congress — full text, introduced June 3, 2026

John Rutherford Put Out a Statement Backing 'Operation Epic Furry.' His Office Quietly Fixed the Spelling. The War Is Still There.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:50:31 +0000

On February 28, 2026, the United States started bombing Iran. That same day, John Rutherford's office posted an official statement to his House website.

The headline read: "Rutherford Statement on Operation Epic Furry."

The first line read: "U.S. Congressman John H. Rutherford (FL-05) released the following statement on Operation Epic Furry, the U.S. military operation in Iran."

And then, inside the quote he actually put his name to:

"The Iranian regime has set the table for Operation Epic Furry through their forty-seven years of state sponsored terrorism and murder of American citizens."

Three times. Headline, intro, and in his own quoted words. The operation is called Epic Fury.

We're not guessing at any of this. The page is preserved in the Internet Archive at the URL his office originally used — rutherford.house.gov/media/press-releases/rutherford-statement-operation-epic-furry — captured four separate times between the evening of February 28 and the early hours of March 1.

The quiet fix

Here's the timeline the Internet Archive's own records lay out. The "epic-furry" page was captured as late as 04:09 UTC on March 1. By 05:16 UTC — about an hour later — a new page existed at rutherford.house.gov/media/press-releases/rutherford-statement-operation-epic-fury.

Same date on it. February 28, 2026. Same statement. New spelling. No note saying anything had been changed.

Boing Boing's write-up — "GOP congressman John Rutherford praises Operation 'Epic Furry'" — is stamped 07:36 UTC, more than two hours after the URL had already been changed. Somebody in that office was awake in the middle of the night to fix a typo before the biggest write-up of it had even landed. Nobody was awake to reconsider the sentence the typo was sitting in.

What the statement actually says

Strip out the joke and read what a sitting member of Congress published about a war on the day it began:

"It's clear: this evil regime seeks to kill and must be obliterated."

"For the freedom of the Iranian people, and the safety and security of the entire world, I stand behind President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and our U.S. military servicemen and women."

"Our world is safer with President Trump as Commander in Chief."

That's a member of the House Appropriations Committee — a man whose subcommittees write the budgets for Homeland Security and for military construction — announcing his support for a war of regime change that no one in Congress had voted on.

Not "the president should come to Congress." Not "here is the authorization we'll be debating Monday." Just: obliterate them, and I stand behind Trump and Netanyahu.

Congress still never voted

Five months later, that was still the situation. In July 2026 the House voted 214–208 to order U.S. forces out of the fighting, the second time it had done so — it had passed an almost identical resolution 215–208 on June 3 — and both times 207 Republicans voted to keep us in, Rutherford among them. Only four House Republicans voted yes.

By then the bill had numbers attached. The Pentagon's own casualty database showed at least 624 American service members wounded in a war Congress never authorized — a figure that appeared with no announcement, no briefing, and no press conference. The department had already moved four dead soldiers off the Epic Fury casualty page and onto a brand-new category invented after they died.

Rutherford's district is home to Naval Station Mayport, and Naval Air Station Jacksonville sits just across the river in the district next door. The people who get sent to a war like this one live in the district he represents. He did not ask for a vote before it started, and he voted against ending it once it had.

Who's paying for the enthusiasm

Rutherford takes the foreign-policy money too. Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC, have given him $64,283. Just 1% of his campaign money comes from small grassroots donors; 94% comes from PACs, super PACs and large donors.

And he does not take questions about it in person. In March 2025 he told Jacksonville Today he wouldn't hold a town hall because constituents "scream and holler, and act like fools." He has not held one since.

So the record on the biggest thing his office has said in years reads like this: a statement endorsing a regime-change war, published with the operation's name wrong three times, corrected in the dark hours of the same night, and never explained to anyone in Jacksonville — because there's no meeting where you could ask him.

The spelling was the part they fixed.

Sources

Rutherford Statement on Operation Epic Furry — Office of Rep. John Rutherford, February 28, 2026 (Internet Archive capture of the original page)
GOP congressman John Rutherford praises Operation "Epic Furry" — Rob Beschizza, Boing Boing, February 28, 2026

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

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

On May 4, 2026, Darin LaHood sat down with WCBU's Joe Deacon in Pekin and said the war with Iran needed to end.

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

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

He explained why, in terms central Illinois understands:

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

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

On the price tag of the war — which WCBU said analysts and government officials put at approaching $50 billion — he said: "It's a lot of taxpayer money, particularly when we're $39 trillion in debt."

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

June 3, 2026

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

It passed, 215 to 208.

Republicans voted 4 yes, 207 no.

LaHood voted no.

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

His explanation

Five days after the June vote, WGLT published Charlie Schlenker's interview with him. Two answers.

The first was that it would be over soon anyway:

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

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

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

Both claims have since been tested.

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

The Strait of Hormuz did not open either. Eight weeks after LaHood's prediction, on August 2, Ohio Republican Mike Turner was on Face the Nation still naming a reopened Strait as one of the two conditions for ending the war — "so that we return back to an open Straits where commerce and the flow of oil and natural gas can resume." LaHood's Democratic opponent, Paul Nolley, had put it bluntly in the same WGLT story: "Iran is now firmly in control of the Strait of Hormuz, our arsenal has been severely depleted, international alliances further strained and confidence in our nation has been damaged, both at home and abroad."

The part that doesn't reconcile

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

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

He voted no in June, and again in July. The reason he gave for the first was that nothing much was happening militarily. Eighteen Americans are dead.

Where the leverage is

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

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

The town hall he wouldn't commit to

LaHood has represented central Illinois since 2015. During the March 2025 push for him to hold one, he told WCBU's Joe Deacon "I meet with any constituent that wants to meet with me" and "in the past, I've had lots of town halls throughout my district" — but, the story notes, he "did not commit one way or another to holding a town hall." In April 2025 a group called Citizens for IL-16 filled the UAW Hall in East Peoria to standing room only for a town hall of their own. He wasn't there.

He is on the ballot in November. Somebody should read him back the May 4 interview and ask which sentence he'd like to keep.

We deserve better.

Source

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

"Wipe. Them. Out." — Clay Higgins Cheered a Threat the Pope Called Truly Unacceptable

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:39:00 +0000

On April 6, 2026, with the United States and Iran on the edge of a massive escalation, Clay Higgins posted this to X:

"I'll support a ceasefire in Iran when the Iranian terrorist regime of disgusting jihadist fanatical men are all dead, their weapons are destroyed, their homes are rubble, and their lustful dreams of world domination have been pounded into the dust of history. Wipe. Them. Out."

And then:

"Hit them harder than ever Mr. President. Hit them so hard, the Angels in Heaven nod in wonder."

The post included an image that appeared to show a knight with angel wings carrying a flaming sword.

What he was cheering

This wasn't posted into a vacuum. Trump had given Iran until 8 p.m. Eastern on April 7 to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and had written on Truth Social:

"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F——in' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell."

The next morning he escalated further, warning that "a whole civilization will die tonight" if there was no deal.

Power plants and bridges are civilian infrastructure. Power plants run hospitals, water treatment and refrigeration. "A whole civilization" is not a military target list.

Higgins's answer to that was harder.

Two people who said the opposite

Iran's representative to the United Nations, Amir Saeid Iravani, said the threats "constitute incitement to war crimes and potentially genocide," and warned Iran would take "immediate and proportionate reciprocal measures."

You can discount that as the adversary talking. Here's the one you can't.

Pope Leo XIV, speaking to reporters outside his residence south of Rome:

"Today as we all know there was this threat against all the people of Iran. This is truly unacceptable."

The Pope went further. He urged people to contact their political leaders and their congressional representatives to demand they reject war and work for peace.

In south Louisiana, that congressional representative is Clay Higgins. The day before the Pope said it, Higgins had posted a flaming sword.

Read the sentence again

"...their homes are rubble."

Not their bases. Not their weapons — he listed those separately. Their homes.

Whatever you think about the Iranian government, the people who live in Iranian homes are civilians. A sitting U.S. congressman set the condition for a ceasefire as their houses being reduced to rubble.

This is the same member who, in June 2017, hours after the London Bridge attack, wrote of terrorism suspects: "Hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all." He wrote that as a freshman with a Facebook page. He wrote "Wipe. Them. Out." as a nine-year incumbent who chairs a House Oversight subcommittee.

He also voted to make sure Congress had no say

Rhetoric is one thing. Votes are another, and Higgins's line up behind the posts.

The war with Iran began in February 2026 and Congress never authorized it. On July 23, 2026, the House voted 214 to 208 to order U.S. forces out. Higgins was one of 207 Republicans who voted no — voting, in effect, that the president alone decides how long this goes on and how far it goes.

So: no congressional check on the war, and "hit them harder" from the outside.

Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC, have given Higgins $19,546.

What Louisiana gets out of this

Nothing.

Louisiana's 3rd District has real problems. Higgins himself has spent 2026 pressing on one of them — the crawfish industry's labor shortage, which he called urgent in March. That's the job. Angels and rubble are not.

And the district sends its own to these wars. The people who would carry out "Power Plant Day," and who would come home from whatever followed, include his constituents' sons and daughters. He voted to take away the one check Congress had on how long they stay in it.

We deserve better.

Source

Matt Phillips and The Associated Press, "'Wipe. Them. Out.' Rep. Clay Higgins cheers on Trump's threats of Iran's destruction," KPLC, April 7, 2026. Photo: AP via KPLC.

"We Will Turn You Into a Parking Lot": Addison McDowell's Idea of Foreign Policy, Delivered on Newsmax

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:38:12 +0000

On July 16, 2026, Addison McDowell went on Newsmax's Wake Up America and said this about Iran:

"Iran needs to understand something very clearly: If you do not negotiate with the president and you continue to try to kill American troops, and build bombs, and build missiles that you're going to use to attempt to kill Americans, we will turn you into a parking lot."

He wasn't done:

"I think it's very important to realize for the Iranians that these Middle Eastern countries, they might be a stick and Iran might be the carrot, but we are a tree, and we will absolutely swing a bat at them, if they're not careful."

And:

"We're not going to let them. They need to understand who holds all the cards."

The remarks were reported by HuffPost's Jazmin Tolliver.

What "a parking lot" means

Iran has about 90 million people in it. "Turn you into a parking lot" is not a figure of speech about sanctions or about a targeted strike. It is a description of leveling a country — the thing people say when they mean bombing until nothing is standing.

McDowell is a first-term member of Congress from the North Carolina Triad. He was elected in 2024 and sworn in in January 2025. He does not sit on Armed Services. He does not sit on Foreign Affairs. He does not sit on Intelligence. His committees are Natural Resources, the Budget Committee, and Transportation and Infrastructure.

Nothing about his job puts him in a room where he'd know what's actually being planned. What he has is a cable booking.

There is a real war behind the tough talk

This is not a hypothetical conflict he's warning about. It's already happening, and Americans are already paying for it.

The Pentagon has acknowledged that at least 624 U.S. service members have been wounded in Trump's Iran war — a war Congress never authorized, and whose casualty numbers the Defense Department has repeatedly rearranged so they're hard to follow.

Congress has tried twice to end it. On July 23, 2026, the House voted 214–208 to order U.S. forces out. McDowell was one of the 182 Republicans we track who voted to keep us in it.

So the sequence is: vote to keep the war going, then go on television and promise a bigger one.

The people saying this loudest aren't the ones fighting it

There's a pattern here that's worth naming, because McDowell is not the only one doing it.

Florida's Randy Fine posted "Bombs away" and "may the gates of hell open" while U.S. troops were dying. Arkansas's Rick Crawford, who actually does chair the House Intelligence Committee, went on Fox and told the president to "finish the job" instead of asking the questions his chairmanship exists for.

The escalation talk always comes from safe seats. The wounds show up somewhere else.

He does have one relevant credential

McDowell is a member of the Budget Committee. Wars cost money — money that comes out of the same budget his committee writes.

He voted for the budget bill that his own state is now absorbing — a bill that could cost North Carolina 45,000 clean energy jobs and put $24 billion in clean energy investment at risk. North Carolina lost 7,200 manufacturing jobs in 2025 — the only major sector with net losses — while McDowell defended the tariffs driving it, telling a local station to "trust the president".

Budget committee members are supposed to be the ones asking what a thing costs. On Iran, he went the other direction and volunteered to spend more.

The bottom line

A member of Congress threatening to flatten a country of 90 million on morning cable is not strength. It's a man with no relevant committee, no access to the intelligence, and no plan, saying the most extreme thing available because it plays well on the segment.

Meanwhile 624 Americans are wounded, the House has voted to bring them home, and McDowell voted to keep them there.

Source

Jazmin Tolliver, "GOP Rep. Threatens To Turn Iran 'Into A Parking Lot' Over Collapsed Deal" — HuffPost, July 16, 2026.

Idaho's Jim Risch Runs the Committee That Oversees War. He Wouldn't Hold a Hearing on This One.

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:40:00 +0000

On February 28, 2026, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Iran. Congress did not vote on it. Four days before the bombs fell, Trump had stood in front of Congress and delivered a State of the Union address without mentioning the coming war at all.

There is one committee in the United States Senate whose job is to make a president answer for something like that. It is the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Jim Risch is its chairman.

Two weeks into the war, CNN asked him whether the public might benefit from an open hearing — the kind where senators question the officials running a war and the country gets to watch.

Here is what Idaho's senior senator said:

"I want classified information and there's a huge difference between classified information and open information."

That was it. A closed-door session for committee members. Nothing the people paying for the war, and sending their kids to fight it, would ever see.

The chairman is the gatekeeper. That's the whole point.

This is not a case of one senator among a hundred being outvoted.

A committee chairman decides what his committee does. He sets the calendar. He decides which hearings happen, when they happen, who testifies, and whether the doors are open or shut. On foreign policy, Risch holds that gavel. If the Senate was going to publicly question the Trump administration about attacking another country without a vote of Congress, he was the one who had to call it.

He didn't.

And when Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said publicly that Congress needed hearings — "Absolutely we should have hearings," she told CNN, warning that a war funding package worth tens of billions of dollars would struggle to pass without a public justification — Risch's answer was to send her somewhere else.

"Well, she should hold a hearing if that's the case."

Murkowski doesn't sit on Foreign Relations. She has no committee to hold that hearing in. Risch does.

Everyone else was asking. He was the one who could act.

By the time CNN published that story on March 12, the Republican-led Congress had held no open oversight hearings on the war — only closed sessions for members.

The pressure was not coming from nowhere:

The Senate Armed Services chairman was moving the other way. Roger Wicker told CNN he was planning what would have been the first public oversight hearing of the war, with top Defense Department officials testifying. "This would be oversight, yes," he said. "We will conduct oversight."
Senate Democrats had written to Trump two days earlier, asking that "your key cabinet secretaries — including Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth — immediately appear under oath in public hearings."
Back home in Idaho, two guest columnists in the Idaho Capital Sun spent a whole piece in April on one request: hold the hearings. They pointed out that Idaho used to produce the senators who did exactly this — William Borah, who chaired Foreign Relations for a decade between the world wars, and Frank Church, who chaired it after turning against the Vietnam War his own party's president was running.

Risch's position was that classified briefings were enough and that public hearings risk exposing sensitive information.

Notice what that argument would prove if it were true. Every war involves classified information. Congress held public hearings during Vietnam, during Iraq, during Afghanistan. Senators who wanted the secret details got them in closed session, the same as always — and then went in front of cameras and asked the questions the country could hear the answers to. If "some of it is classified" were reason enough to close the doors, no war would ever be examined in public. Which, for more than three months, is exactly what happened.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not testify publicly anywhere on Capitol Hill until June 2 — his first public testimony since the war began at the end of February. And that appearance was the State Department's annual budget hearing, a date already on the calendar every single year, not an oversight hearing anyone called about the war.

He has an F on this. Literally.

The Lugar Center — named for Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, who chaired Foreign Relations himself — grades congressional committees on how much real oversight they actually do. In its report card on the 116th Congress, released in January 2021, seven Senate committees got an F for their oversight of the Trump administration's final two years.

Foreign Relations, under Risch, was one of them. The Lugar Center singled him out:

"For the second Congress in a row, Sen. Jim Risch (R, Ida.) received an F grade, though he chaired two different committees."

Two Congresses. Two committees. Two F's.

There's a well-documented example of how he earned them. In June 2020, Risch's own staff director told Republican committee aides that the chairman was dropping his months-long push to get Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to testify at the routine annual budget hearing — a request the committee had been making for months, and one that had taken on weight after Trump fired the State Department's inspector general at Pompeo's request.

The pattern is the same in 2020 and in 2026: the administration would rather not answer, and the chairman decides not to make it.

What he did do about the war

Risch has not been absent on Iran. He just hasn't used his gavel.

On July 30, the Senate took its 13th vote on ending this war. It was not a vote to end it — it was a vote on whether the Senate would be allowed to debate ending it. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's war powers resolution was stuck in committee, and the motion would have freed it for a floor vote. It failed 49 to 50, one vote short. Risch was one of 13 Republican senators we track who voted no.

The committee that resolution was bottled up in is the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Risch's committee.

So on the two things the Constitution actually gives the Senate here — a say in whether the country goes to war, and the power to make the executive branch explain itself — Risch used one to say yes to the president and simply declined to use the other.

Idahoans can't ask him either

There's a reason this matters more than it would for most senators.

Risch has not hosted a public town hall since 2020, by the Idaho Democratic Party's count. In March 2025, about three dozen Boise residents gathered outside his downtown office to ask for one; his office had room for ten of them, and only to meet briefly with staff. And in April 2026 — while the war he wouldn't hold hearings on was underway — Idaho State University students and the League of Women Voters put on a town hall in Pocatello and invited him. He declined, so they held it with an empty chair.

Add it up. The senator wouldn't hold a public hearing where reporters could ask the administration questions. He wouldn't hold a public meeting where Idahoans could ask him questions. The information about a war Idaho families are paying for and serving in stayed in a locked room, and the only people in it were the ones who already agreed.

Risch is on the ballot again this November. He has been in the Senate since 2009 — 17 years.

We deserve better.

Source

Key Senate chairman hopes to soon have first public oversight hearings on war with Iran — Ted Barrett, CNN, March 12, 2026.

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 207 House Republicans who voted in July to keep us in the war — a vote that side lost, 214-208.

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.

Chris Smith Held the Gavel for Two Minutes. He Used Them to Shut Down a Vote on the Iran War.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:10:00 +0000

Two days earlier, the President of the United States had posted that "a whole civilization will die tonight."

On Thursday morning, April 9, 2026, the House of Representatives met for a pro forma session — the kind of session that exists mostly on paper. Almost nobody is there. A single member walks to the front, bangs a gavel, and the House is technically in session. A few minutes later they bang it again and it's over.

The member holding the gavel that morning was Chris Smith, the Republican who has represented New Jersey's 4th District since 1981.

A handful of Democrats had shown up on purpose. Rep. Glenn Ivey of Maryland asked to be recognized so he could try to pass a resolution limiting the president's ability to keep fighting in Iran. Smith, presiding as speaker pro tempore, would not recognize him. He gaveled the session out.

The other Democrats in the room — Don Beyer, Sara Jacobs, Mary Gay Scanlon, Madeleine Dean, James Walkinshaw and Suhas Subramanyam — shouted over the gavel.

"End the war. Let us vote," Walkinshaw said.

"The Congress needs to consider this. The time has come," Ivey said.

C-SPAN filed the video clip under the title "Fourth Iran War Powers Resolution Blocked in the House." Fourth.

What he was gaveling over

Understand what the country had just watched.

Two days before, on Tuesday, April 7, Trump gave Iran an 8 p.m. deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and posted on Truth Social: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will."

That is a president of the United States publicly threatening to wipe out an entire country. A ceasefire was announced that same Tuesday.

Democrats came to the floor that Thursday because they thought Congress — the branch the Constitution actually gives the war power to — ought to say something about it. Rep. Jacobs put it plainly afterward: "Threatening genocide is not a negotiating tactic."

Smith's answer was the gavel.

To be fair about the mechanics: a request to pass something by unanimous consent in a nearly empty chamber was never going to succeed. Everyone knew that. But Smith didn't defeat the request. He didn't let it be made. He wouldn't let a colleague finish a sentence on the floor of the House about a war nobody in that building had voted for.

This is his pattern, not his slip

Three and a half months later, Democrats finally forced a real vote.

On July 23, 2026, the House voted 214 to 208 to order the president to remove U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran. It passed. Chris Smith voted no — one of the 182 Republicans with a report card on this site who voted to keep us in the war.

He is not an outlier in his party on this. He's part of the wall. The Senate has now been through more than a dozen of these votes, and the answer is always the same: not now, not this way, not with a Republican in the White House. His New Jersey colleague Jeff Van Drew went on national television during the drone panic and blamed Iran for a "mothership" that didn't exist. Different style. Same direction.

The war started in February 2026. Congress has still never authorized it.

The human rights guy

Here's the part that's hard to square.

Smith is the Republican co-chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission — the House's own bipartisan human rights body. He has built a 45-year career on it. He is, by reputation, the House Republican you call when a government somewhere is doing something monstrous to its own people.

Then the President of the United States threatened to end a civilization, and the House's human rights co-chair used his one official act of the day to make sure no one could talk about it on the floor.

He didn't rise to condemn the post. He didn't ask his own party's leadership to bring the House back. He held the gavel, and he brought it down.

Who he does make time for

Smith is not shy about Israel policy when the vote is one he likes.

On April 20, 2024, the House passed the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act 366 to 58. Smith voted yes. The bill's own floor manager, Appropriations Chairman Ken Calvert, told the House it "provides $26.38 billion".

Smith took the floor to speak for it. From the Congressional Record that day:

"Both defensive weapons systems like Iron Dome and David's Sling and all necessary offensive military capabilities must be conveyed without delay to Israel for as long as it takes to defeat Hamas and deter Iran, Hezbollah, and other radical Islamists."

So he can find the floor when he wants it. He had a minute to demand offensive weapons "without delay." He did not have a minute for a colleague asking whether Congress should get a say in the war that followed.

Track AIPAC's tally of Federal Election Commission records puts his career haul from pro-Israel PACs at $241,318 as of July 5, 2026.

He won't take the question at home, either

There's a reason none of this gets asked of him directly.

When constituents rallied outside his Toms River district office in March 2025 demanding a town hall, his own staff could only recall one held in 1992. That is thirty-four years. His constituents built a website just to ask where he is.

So the record stands like this. He will not hold a town hall where a voter in NJ-04 can ask him about the war. And when a member of Congress tried to ask about it on the floor of the House — the one place a representative is guaranteed the right to speak — Smith was the man holding the gavel, and he refused.

That is not a scheduling problem. That is the job of representing people, declined twice.

Source

Emily Brooks and Sudiksha Kochi, "GOP blocks Democrats' attempt to limit Trump's Iran war powers," The Hill, April 9, 2026.

Jeff Van Drew Told Fox News an Iranian 'Mothership' Was Parked Off the Jersey Shore. There Was No Mothership.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:52:00 +0000

In late 2024, people all over New Jersey started looking up and seeing lights in the sky they couldn't explain. Sightings were reported starting November 18, and by one Sunday in December, Gov. Phil Murphy said 49 had come in over a single day. Some were near Picatinny Arsenal, a military research site. Some were near Donald Trump's golf course in Bedminster. Nobody had a good answer yet.

People were nervous. What they needed from their congressman was a straight answer, or an honest "I don't know."

What they got from Jeff Van Drew was Iran.

"These are from high sources. I don't say this lightly."

On Wednesday, December 11, 2024, Van Drew went on Fox News and told a national audience that a hostile foreign government had parked a warship off the coast of the United States and was flying drones over New Jersey from it.

"That mothership... is off the East Coast of the United States of America. They've launched drones into everything that we can see or hear."

He wasn't hedging. He said the information came "from high sources." He said, "I don't say this lightly." And he said the drones should be "shot down."

That is about as serious a thing as a member of Congress can say. He was telling his own constituents that a foreign adversary was conducting an active operation in their airspace, right now, and that our government either didn't know or wasn't telling them.

The Pentagon knocked it down the same day

It took the Defense Department a matter of hours. At a briefing that same Wednesday, deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh was asked about Van Drew's claim.

"There is no truth to that. There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there's no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States."

The Pentagon's assessment, Singh added, was that "these are not drones coming from a foreign entity or adversary." The next day, White House national security spokesman John Kirby said there was "no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or a public safety threat or have a foreign nexus," and that a lot of what people were seeing was ordinary manned aircraft.

Van Drew's response to being told he was wrong was not to check his sources. He went back on Fox the following day and said "we aren't being told the truth," and accused the Pentagon of "dealing with the American public like we're stupid."

What the drones actually were

Five days later, on December 16, 2024, four federal agencies — the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA, and the Defense Department — put out a joint statement laying out what they'd found after chasing down more than 5,000 tips and roughly 100 leads.

"Having closely examined the technical data and tips from concerned citizens, we assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones."

Stars. Some of it was stars. There are more than a million drones legally registered with the FAA, and thousands are in the air on any given day. The agencies said flatly: "We have not identified anything anomalous."

And this wasn't a Biden-administration brush-off that a new government later overturned. On January 28, 2025 — a week into Trump's second term — his own press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the same thing: the drones were "authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons," plus hobbyists and private citizens. The whole thing, she said, "got worse due to curiosity."

No mothership. No Iran. No adversary. A busy sky and a panic.

The panic had a body count risk, and he told people to shoot

Here's the part that should stay with South Jersey voters. Van Drew didn't just guess wrong in public. He told frightened people that enemy aircraft were overhead and that they should be shot down. Firing at an aircraft is a federal crime, and some people were already close to trying.

Reported laser strikes on pilots in New Jersey jumped 269% that December compared with the year before — 59 incidents between December 1 and 16, versus 16 in the same stretch of 2023. A laser in a cockpit can temporarily blind a pilot. The FBI's Newark office had to release a video begging people to stop.

"We're also concerned people will take matters into their own hands and fire a weapon at an aircraft," Acting Special Agent in Charge Nelson Delgado said. "Not only is this act against the law, but it poses an incredible danger to the pilots and passengers on those aircraft."

That is a federal law enforcement agency asking the public to please stop doing the thing a sitting congressman had suggested on television.

The correction nobody was supposed to see

On Friday, December 13, Van Drew quietly changed his story in a written statement:

"While it has been verified that Iran does have three drone ships, new satellite images show they are currently stationed off the southern coast of Iran. This new information only brings us closer to figuring out what is really going on."

Read that again. The ships he said were off New Jersey turned out to be off Iran, on the other side of the world. And somehow that "brings us closer" to the truth. There is no apology in that statement. There is no "I was wrong." There isn't even an acknowledgment that he had told millions of people something false.

The National Iranian American Council, which had written to him the day before asking him to correct the record, made exactly that point. "Spreading misinformation to scare Americans into fearing a so-called Iranian threat is profoundly reckless," said policy director Ryan Costello, who noted the mismatch: "Congressman Van Drew's initial false statement was broadcast to an audience of millions while his retraction was buried in a Friday news dump posted to his website."

Then, when the government finally delivered the answer he had spent weeks demanding, Van Drew put out a statement praising Trump for transparency — "This is what transparency looks like" — and pivoted to warning that "we are nearly a decade behind China in our drone technology." Iran does not appear in it. Neither does the mothership.

This is how he operates

The mothership wasn't a one-off. It's a habit: hear something, say it on Fox as fact, and never circle back.

In January 2026, after federal agents killed Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street, Van Drew went on Fox and said, "Peaceful protesters don't have 9mm weapons with two extra magazines." POLITICO noted what he left out: that was a concealed handgun Pretti had a permit to carry, and eyewitness video showed no evidence he ever drew it. Republican senators were calling for independent investigations. Van Drew was on television building the case against a dead man.

He is also, right now, demanding subpoenas and sworn answers from New Jersey over a voter registration foul-up created by a 2018 law he himself voted for. He is very good at demanding accountability from other people.

And the Iran fearmongering had a sequel. When the actual war with Iran started in 2026 without a vote in Congress, Van Drew called the question of war powers "a judgment call". In July 2026, when the House voted to order U.S. forces out of that war, he voted no.

The bottom line

A congressman's word is supposed to mean something. When Jeff Van Drew says "these are from high sources, I don't say this lightly," South Jersey has every right to expect that he checked. He didn't. The Pentagon corrected him in hours, he accused the Pentagon of lying, and when the facts caught up with him he pushed out a walk-back on a Friday and moved on.

Two years later he is asking those same voters to trust him again — while sticking to telephone town halls. As of March 2025 he had no plans for an in-person one, the kind of room where somebody could ask him about all this to his face.

We deserve better.

Source

Pentagon says mystery New Jersey drones not from Iranian 'mothership' — BBC News, December 13, 2024. Photo: Reuters, via BBC.

The Senate Has Now Voted 13 Times on Ending the Iran War. These 13 Republicans Voted No Every Time It Mattered.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:06:00 +0000

The war with Iran began in February. Congress has never voted to authorize it. Nearly six months later, it is still going — and getting worse.

On Thursday, July 30, 2026, the Senate voted 49 to 50 on a motion to pull Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's war powers resolution out of the Foreign Relations Committee so the full chamber could actually vote on it. The motion failed by a single vote.

That was the 13th time the Senate has voted on a resolution to end this war, according to Roll Call. Thirteen votes. Democrats have forced these to the floor nearly every week since the fighting started. In all that time, exactly one nonbinding resolution has made it through Congress.

They couldn't even agree to talk about it

This is worth being precise about, because it's the part that gets lost.

The July 30 vote was not a vote on whether to end the war. It was a vote on whether the Senate would be allowed to consider whether to end the war. The resolution was sitting in committee. The motion would have freed it for a floor debate and an up-or-down vote.

Fifty senators said no. Not "we disagree" — just "we're not going to discuss it."

And they said it one week after the other chamber of Congress had already spoken. On July 23, the House voted 214 to 208 to order U.S. forces out of the fighting. So the House of Representatives went on record telling the president to stop, and the Senate's response was to refuse to put the question on its own calendar.

Meanwhile, the war is escalating

The timing here is grim. In the days right before this vote, a ceasefire collapsed and the fighting intensified sharply. Iranian forces fired multiple ballistic missiles at U.S. troops in the Middle East on Tuesday — all were intercepted. Trump responded by vowing the U.S. would, in his words, "beat the f—-ing s— out of" Iran. By Wednesday, American forces had launched a heavy wave of strikes on dozens of Iranian military sites.

So on the very day the Senate declined to debate whether this war should continue, American service members were being shot at in a conflict their own Congress has never approved.

Gillibrand put it plainly on the floor: "Under the Constitution, we have the power to end this war today. Let's use it."

Fifty senators decided not to.

Who voted to keep it going

These 13 senators we track all voted Nay — the vote that kept the resolution bottled up in committee:

Alabama — Tommy Tuberville
Alaska — Dan Sullivan
Arkansas — Tom Cotton
Florida — Ashley Moody
Idaho — Jim Risch
Kansas — Roger Marshall
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

It didn't have to go that way, and three of their Republican colleagues proved it. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska all voted to advance the resolution. (One Democrat, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted against it. Mitch McConnell, who is in a rehabilitation facility, did not vote.)

Three Republicans found a way to vote yes. The margin was one vote. Any single senator on the list above could have changed the outcome.

Why this keeps happening

There's a reason a war nobody in Congress authorized has survived 13 attempts to end it.

Voting to keep a war going costs a senator nothing in Washington. Voting to end one means crossing a president who went after Republicans by name the last time they tried it in June — and it means crossing the pro-war money that flows through Senate campaigns. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and allied donors are among the largest spenders in American politics, and several of the senators listed above count them among their biggest backers.

The founders gave the power to declare war to Congress specifically so that one person couldn't march the country into a fight alone. Thirteen times now, the Senate has had the chance to reclaim that power. Thirteen times, these senators have handed it back.

The cost isn't abstract. It's paid by the troops in the missile's path, and it's paid out of the same budget these senators say is too tight to cover health care or child care back home.

How they voted

The record is public and permanent: the official Senate roll call for vote 216 on S.J.Res. 181, 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.

Rick Crawford Chairs the Committee That Checks the Intelligence Behind a War. He Went on Fox and Told Trump to 'Finish the Job' in Iran.

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:45:00 +0000

Sixteen American service members are dead. More than 600 have been wounded since the Iran war began in February. A majority of Americans oppose the whole thing.

On Saturday, Arkansas Congressman Rick Crawford went on Fox News and asked for more.

Asked what President Trump should do about Iran, Crawford answered: "Well, I think he should finish the job, quite frankly."

He wasn't finished. Trump, he said, "has given them tremendous leash, diplomatically speaking, and it's been met with complete disrespect." And then: "So there's really nothing more to do… I support the kinetic action that's being undertaken now."

"Kinetic action" is a phrase people use when they don't want to say bombs.

Why this particular congressman matters

Any member of Congress can go on television and call for escalation. Most of them aren't Rick Crawford.

Crawford is the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. That committee exists for one reason: so that somebody in Congress, on behalf of the American people, looks hard at the intelligence the executive branch uses to justify going to war — and says so out loud when it doesn't hold up.

That's the job. Kick the tires. Ask the uncomfortable question. Make the president show his work.

Instead, the chairman went on Fox News Live and told the president to hit harder.

Trump noticed. Within minutes he posted: "Great job by Chairman Rick Crawford on FoxNews interview – A total Pro!!! President DJT."

When the person whose job is to scrutinize you gets a public thank-you from you for his loyalty, the oversight isn't working. That's not oversight. That's a press shop.

He already had his chance to stop this — and he voted no

This isn't the first time Crawford has been asked to weigh in. On March 5, 2026, the House voted on H.Con.Res.38, a War Powers Resolution directing the president to pull U.S. forces out of unauthorized hostilities in Iran.

That's the constitutional tool. Congress — not the president — has the power to declare war, and the War Powers Resolution is how Congress gets to say "stop."

Crawford voted no.

The resolution failed 212 to 219. Seven votes. If a handful of Republicans — including the chairman of the Intelligence Committee — had voted the other way, Congress would have taken the question back.

So Crawford's position has been consistent, and it's worth stating plainly: he voted to let the president keep the war going without congressional authorization, and now he's on television asking him to expand it.

What "finish the job" is being said next to

Crawford's interview didn't happen in a vacuum. It came the day after Trump said at Camp David that the U.S. "will be hitting them very hard," adding, "at some point, they're going to say, 'We just can't take it anymore.'" Days earlier, Trump told Fox News the U.S. was going to "beat the f---ing s--- out of Iran."

That's the policy Crawford is endorsing when he says finish the job. Not a strategy with a defined objective — a promise to keep hitting a country until it says uncle.

Meanwhile, the war has pushed oil prices to levels not seen in years — which shows up at the pump in every county in Arkansas's First District. The people paying for this war, in dollars and in sons and daughters, are the same people Crawford is supposed to represent.

Follow the money

There is one constituency Crawford has served consistently on this.

According to TrackAIPAC, which compiles FEC filings, Crawford has taken $97,153 from pro-Israel lobby groups and their donors over his career — $20,387 from PACs and $76,766 from individual lobby-aligned donors, as of February 2026.

That's not a huge number by Washington standards. But it doesn't have to be. It just has to be reliable — and it has been.

The question isn't whether $97,000 bought a vote. The question is why the chairman of the Intelligence Committee is the loudest voice for escalation in a war most Americans want ended, and who exactly he thinks he's speaking for when he says it.

The part he skipped

Notice what Crawford didn't say on Saturday.

He didn't say what "finishing the job" means. He didn't say what victory looks like, or how long it takes, or how many more Americans come home wounded, or what happens the day after. He didn't say whether Congress will ever get a vote on any of it.

He said the president has been disrespected, and that there's nothing left to do but keep bombing.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, asked the most important question in American foreign policy right now, gave an answer that fit in a Fox News hit and earned a compliment from the president by dinnertime.

That is what the oversight of this war looks like. And it's why we keep getting more of it.

We deserve better.

Source

Sean James, Trump Praises House Intel Chair After He Called for POTUS to 'Finish the Job' on Iran During Fox News Interview, Mediaite, August 1, 2026.

A Senior Asked Ryan Mackenzie How He Justifies $87 Billion for the Iran War. He Didn't Answer. Hours Later He Voted for More.

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 18:20:00 +0000

On a telephone town hall in late July, an elderly woman in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley got through to her congressman and asked him a question that a lot of people are asking.

Here is what she said to Ryan Mackenzie:

"Honestly, I'd like to know your stance on this, especially when I'm a senior citizen, and I'm being told that our reserve funds, used to pay full retirement benefits for Social Security, will be depleted by 2032. So, we have many, many senior citizens that are doing without many things, and can barely stay in their homes. So, how can we justify spending $87 billion on a war that, frankly, I don't think has really accomplished much of anything?"

That is a clear question. Two parts. What's your stance, and how do you justify the tradeoff.

Here is Mackenzie's entire answer:

"we want to see a peaceful resolution in all of these conflicts as soon as possible."

He did not say where he stands. He did not address the $87 billion. He did not touch Social Security. He said he'd like peace, which is not a position — it's a greeting card.

Less than a day later, he voted

The very next day, Heartland Signal reported, Mackenzie joined 206 House Republicans in voting against House Concurrent Resolution 89 — a measure requiring the president to pull U.S. forces out unless Congress authorizes the war.

It was the fifth time Mackenzie has voted against measures to limit funding or military engagement in the region.

So he did have a stance. He had a clear, consistent, five-vote-long stance. He just didn't want to say it out loud to the woman who asked.

That's the whole story in two sentences. He knew the answer. He knew she wouldn't like it. So he gave her a sentence about peace and then went and voted the other way.

He ran on the opposite of this

Here's what makes the dodge worse.

While campaigning in 2024, Mackenzie specifically raised concerns about the U.S. bombing Iran and about getting into "forever wars." That was his pitch to a swing district.

Then, earlier this year, archived snapshots of his campaign website show that references to military policy — and the word "war" — were quietly removed from his policy priorities page.

His spokesperson's explanation was that "everyone understands that campaigns update their websites between elections," and that this one was updated to highlight cost of living, veterans, and reforming Washington.

Maybe. But a candidate who campaigned against bombing Iran, then voted five times to keep the operation funded, then deleted the word "war" from his own website, then declined to answer a constituent's direct question about the war — that's four steps in exactly the same direction.

His opponent, retired firefighter and union leader Bob Brooks, put it bluntly: "He campaigned on a promise to oppose reckless spending on foreign wars, but has now voted 5 times to continue the cost-spiking war in Iran. Now he is dodging his own constituents and scrubbing his own website because he knows his voting record is indefensible."

What the war is costing people in his district

The constituent's question wasn't hypothetical. It's arithmetic that Lehigh Valley families are doing at the kitchen table.

Gas. The average price in Pennsylvania was $4.22 as of July 31, 2026. A year earlier it was $3.23. That's a dollar a gallon, and it moved after the U.S. began military action in Iran. For anyone commuting to a job in Allentown or Bethlehem, that's real money out of every paycheck.

Social Security. More than 180,000 people in Mackenzie's district collect Social Security. When DOGE's cuts started disrupting Social Security services, Mackenzie went on national television to defend Musk and DOGE.

His spokesperson says he is "unflinching in his support for protecting critical programs like Medicare and Social Security." The woman on the phone was asking him to prove it by picking one over the other. He wouldn't.

He does this by design

The telephone town hall isn't an accident of scheduling. It's the format Mackenzie prefers, and the reason is visible in his record of avoiding the other kind.

In March 2025, when local Democratic groups organized a "People's Town Hall" in Bethlehem that drew more than 400 people with a line out the door, Mackenzie declined the invitation — and scheduled a competing telephone town hall at the exact same hour.
He didn't hold his first in-person town hall until September 2025, and it was a TV taping with an invited audience of 25 business and community leaders — not an open public meeting.
Constituents, many of them seniors, have held weekly protests outside his Salisbury Township office over how hard he is to reach. Mackenzie accused the protesters of "disrespecting" local businesses and neighbors.

A phone line lets you take the question and move on. A room does not.

The bottom line

Pennsylvania's 7th is one of the closest districts in America. Cook Political Report rates it a toss-up, and a House Majority PAC poll released July 9 showed Brooks up four.

That's the context for a congressman who won't tell a senior citizen where he stands on a war he has voted five times to keep funding.

She asked how he justifies it. He still hasn't said.

Source

Richard Eberwein, "Rep. Ryan Mackenzie avoids constituent's question on Iran military spending, then votes for more spending", Heartland Signal, July 31, 2026. Photo: Matt Rourke / AP.

A Handful of Billionaires Bought the Republican Party's Foreign Policy

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:31:00 +0000

In May, a sitting Republican congressman lost his seat because he wouldn't vote the way a lobby wanted him to.

Thomas Massie had represented Kentucky's 4th District for 14 years. He is about as conservative as they come. But he had one habit his party's donors couldn't tolerate: he voted no on foreign aid. All of it. "I have never voted for foreign aid to Egypt, to Syria, to Israel or to Ukraine," he told CBS News.

So they bought the seat out from under him. Massie lost the GOP primary by 10 percentage points in what Al Jazeera called "the most expensive House of Representatives primary contest in the history of the United States" — $37 million spent by the campaigns and aligned super PACs in a single congressional district.

On the night he conceded, Massie didn't sugarcoat it:

"For 14 years, those S.O.B.s in Washington tried to buy my vote. Why did the race get so expensive? Because they decided to buy the seat."

What $8 million buys in one Kentucky district

Here's where the money came from. AIPAC's super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent $4.1 million on mostly attack ads against Massie. The Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund spent another $3.9 million on ads boosting his opponent, Ed Gallrein. A pro-Trump PAC called MAGA KY kicked in $7.4 million more.

The individual checks tell you who was actually behind it. Republican megadonor Paul Singer put in $3 million. Casino billionaire Miriam Adelson wrote $750,000.

Add up everything pro-Israel donor groups spent for and against, and The Intercept counted more than $15.8 million poured into one House race in Kentucky.

Massie's own campaign never had a chance to match that. And he said out loud what most members of Congress only say in private:

"It didn't come from regular people. It's come from billionaires."

The money doesn't come from your neighbors

AIPAC likes to talk about its grassroots members. Its spokeswoman describes "six million grassroots members" who are "determined and eager as ever to participate this election cycle."

The federal filings say something different. When FactCheck.org went through the disclosures for AIPAC's super PAC in the last cycle, the top of the donor list looked like this:

Jan Koum, the WhatsApp co-founder — $5 million
Jonathon Jacobson, a financier — nearly $4.6 million
Bernard Marcus, the Home Depot co-founder — $3 million
David Zalik, the GreenSky CEO — $2 million

That's four men accounting for roughly $15 million. The super PAC had raised about $68.4 million by that August and spent about $56 million of it.

This cycle they're bigger. Pro-Israel groups entered the 2026 midterms with more than $100 million to spend — $96 million of it sitting in AIPAC's super PAC alone. That puts them in what the report called "pretty rare company," alongside the crypto industry, the AI industry, and the political parties themselves.

They pick your primaries for you

The general election is not where this money does its work. Primaries are — because primaries are cheap, turnout is low, and $5 million lands like a bomb.

In the last cycle, AIPAC's super PAC spent $9.9 million to defeat Rep. Jamaal Bowman in New York and another $4.8 million boosting his opponent. It spent more than $5.2 million against Rep. Cori Bush in Missouri. It spent about $4.6 million trying to beat a state senator in a California House primary.

Right now, in Michigan, it's doing the biggest one yet. AIPAC and its affiliated groups have spent close to $30 million backing Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic Senate primary against Abdul El-Sayed — their largest investment in a single race, ever. Michigan votes on August 4.

At their final debate this week, AIPAC was the main event. El-Sayed said he was being outspent twelve to one, and said the quiet part plainly:

"They've set a record in this race to help elect my opponent because they know that she'll be a reliable vote."

That's the whole transaction. Not persuasion. Not debate. A reliable vote.

And when the spending gets embarrassing, the money puts on a costume. Al Jazeera traced how it moves through shell PACs: in Illinois, AIPAC's super PAC sent more than $4 million to a group called "Elect Chicago Women," which passed $1 million to a group called "Chicago Progressive Partnership," which ran ads designed to split the progressive vote. Another $1.3 million went to "Affordable Chicago Now." A voter watching those ads had no way of knowing who paid for them.

They bought Republicans who tried to overturn an election

Here's the part that should matter most to anyone who cares about this country before any other one.

When AIPAC launched its PAC and started endorsing candidates directly, it put out a list of 120 endorsements. More than a quarter of them — 37 Republicans — had voted against certifying Joe Biden as president.

Not "raised concerns." Voted, after a mob attacked the Capitol, to throw out other states' electoral votes.

Jim Jordan was on that list. He has since taken $243,603 from pro-Israel PACs, according to FEC data compiled by TrackAIPAC.

The pattern didn't stop with that one list. Ronny Jackson, hours after the Capitol attack, voted to reject the electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania, and voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the mob. Pro-Israel PACs have since put $87,166 into Jackson, who counts AIPAC among his largest contributors.

When people objected, AIPAC's spokesman explained the policy:

"As a single-issue organization, we remain focused on our mission of building bipartisan support in Congress to strengthen the US-Israel relationship."

Read that again. American democracy is not the single issue. Whether you tried to overturn an American election is simply not a factor. There is one test, and it isn't about America.

What the money actually bought

In February 2026, Trump bombed Iran without a vote in Congress. When members tried to use the War Powers Act to end it, Republicans blocked them — and the rest of us paid at the pump for a war most Americans opposed.

Tom Cotton spent a decade as the Senate's loudest Iran hawk. In 2015 he organized a letter signed by 46 Republican senators to Iran's supreme leader to sabotage a sitting president's nuclear deal. TrackAIPAC's tally of FEC records puts the pro-Israel lobby's investment in Cotton at $2,963,774 — $875,867 through PACs and $2,087,907 from lobby-affiliated donors.

That is the return on investment. Not a policy paper. A war that Congress never voted for.

Republican voters didn't ask for any of this

And here's the thing the money can't fix: Republican voters are walking away from this position, and their representatives aren't moving an inch.

Pew found in April that 57% of Republicans under 50 now have an unfavorable opinion of Israel — up from 50% just a year earlier. Six in ten Americans overall view Israel unfavorably, up nearly 20 points since 2022.

The base moved. The votes didn't. That gap is what capture looks like. When a party's officeholders stop tracking their own voters and start tracking their donors, the primary stops being a conversation and becomes an auction.

So is it a foreign government?

You'll hear this described as a foreign government running the Republican Party. That's not quite what the records show, and the truth is bad enough without the exaggeration.

AIPAC is an American organization. Its donors are American billionaires. The Justice Department treats it as a domestic lobby, not a foreign agent, precisely because the money is American money. Nobody has shown that a foreign government is writing the checks or giving the orders.

Massie's argument — and he's a Republican congressman, not a critic on the outside — is that this is a loophole. His AIPAC Act, introduced in May as the money was burying him, would amend the Foreign Agents Registration Act so that organizations lobbying principally to advance another nation's objectives have to register and disclose, even when the cash is domestic. He was careful about applying it evenly:

"Whether it's Great Britain, Australia, Turkey, Qatar, or Israel, it needs to be reported."

You don't need the conspiracy version. The documented version is plenty. A few billionaires put nine figures into American primaries. They took out a sitting Republican congressman for voting his conscience on foreign aid. They endorsed and funded 37 members who tried to overturn a presidential election, and said so openly. And Congress delivered a war that most Americans, including a growing share of Republicans, never wanted.

Nobody had to be a foreign agent for that to happen. It's legal. That's the problem.

What you can do about it

Ask your representative one question, and don't accept a speech in reply: how much have pro-Israel PACs and their donors given you, and will you vote for Massie's disclosure bill?

If they can't answer the first part, look it up. If they won't answer the second, you have your answer.

Sources

A record-shattering $37M was spent on Kentucky's Massie-Gallrein race. Here's who funded it — Louisville Public Media
Rep. Thomas Massie Loses His Seat in a Win for Trump — and AIPAC — The Intercept (photo: AP)
AIPAC is the top issue at final primary debate between Stevens and El-Sayed in Michigan — JTA
Are your representatives working with the Israel lobby? — Track AIPAC

624 Americans Wounded in a War Congress Never Voted For

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:25:08 +0000

At least 624 American service members have been wounded since President Trump started the war with Iran in February. That's the Pentagon's own number, from its most recent update on July 25.

Six hundred and twenty-four. Every one of them is somebody's kid, somebody's parent, somebody's neighbor. And not one member of Congress ever cast a vote to send them there.

The number nobody was told about

Here's the part that should make you angry. This wasn't announced. There was no press conference, no briefing, no moment where the government looked the country in the eye and said "here is what this war has cost so far."

It just appeared in a database.

The Pentagon splits the total across two pages now: 417 wounded under "Operation Epic Fury" — the name for the initial attack on Iran — and another 207 under a category called "Overseas Operations." The BBC notes it's not even clear whether all 207 of those were hurt in the Iran war.

And the totals keep moving. Task & Purpose reported that the Pentagon's casualty database listed 420 troops injured in the conflict as of Friday — then 624 after the weekend update. More than 200 wounded Americans, added to the public record in one go. Of the 207 wounded since July 7, 182 are soldiers, 21 are from the Navy, and four are airmen.

Meanwhile the Epic Fury wounded count went the other direction. As late as Tuesday it read 482. Now it reads 417.

They did the same thing with the dead

If this feels familiar, it's because we wrote about it three days ago. The Pentagon's site said 18 U.S. troops had been killed in the Iran war. Then it said 14.

Four names didn't disappear, exactly. They were moved — off Operation Epic Fury and onto the brand-new "Overseas Operations" page, which the Pentagon says counts casualties "starting July 7th 2026." Those four are the only deaths listed there.

Who are they? Three soldiers killed when Iranian missiles hit a base in Jordan on July 17, and one killed in Iraq during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone. They died in this war. They just died in the part of it that came after Trump declared the ceasefire was over — the part the administration would apparently rather file somewhere else.

According to the Associated Press, the "Overseas Operations" category showed up on the Pentagon's website for the first time on Sunday. It did not exist until there were deaths that needed a new home.

"An absurd ruse"

You don't have to take a critic's word for it. Take a general's.

"The administration seems to have a real hard time being honest about what is going on — not just about casualties, but about the whole war in general."

That's Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who commanded U.S. forces in Europe when Trump first came to power.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie — a member of the president's own party — called splitting the conflict into separate categories an "absurd ruse" in a post on X.

And David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman from 2000 to 2003 and again from 2009 to 2011, told Task & Purpose exactly why this matters: "In the absence of specific information from the department about these military operations, unfortunately, casualty reporting is one of the few ways that the public can judge how this war is going."

That's the whole point. Spread the count across two pages, invent a new category, and edit the numbers quietly over a weekend, and suddenly nobody outside the building can tell how bad this war has gotten.

The official explanation makes it worse

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell called the shifting numbers "temporary data disruptions" and said "these site anomalies are currently being resolved in coordination with the Military Services."

Site anomalies. That's the phrase the U.S. government chose for four dead Americans changing categories overnight.

And note what the president himself was saying while this was happening. On July 21, Trump posted on Truth Social that the "Iran Military Conflict" had claimed 18 lives. Days later the official page for that conflict said 14. Either the president was wrong, or the Pentagon was — and nobody in charge has explained which.

This is what "no vote" buys you

Every part of this traces back to one decision: Congress never authorized this war, and Republicans in Congress have fought to keep it that way.

In the Senate on June 24, 13 Republican senators we track helped block a war powers resolution, 47–50, that would have ordered U.S. forces out of unauthorized hostilities with Iran.
In the House on July 23, the chamber voted 214–208 to order forces out — and 182 Republicans we track voted no.
When fighting restarted in July, House Republicans backed a legal theory that the ceasefire made this a "brand new" war, resetting Trump's 90-day War Powers clock so he'd never need Congress's permission at all.

That gimmick had an obvious appeal: if Congress never votes, no one in Congress ever has to answer for what the war does.

Now look at what it produced. Since mid-July, the U.S. traded fire with Iranian forces for 13 consecutive nights before the pause that started Friday. More than 200 additional wounded Americans then turned up in the official count over a single weekend — and the public found out from a database, not from anyone in charge. When the House finally did force a vote on July 23 and told the president to bring troops home, 182 of the Republicans we track voted to keep the war going. And when the numbers got ugly, the administration reorganized the numbers instead of the strategy.

The rest of us are paying for it too, in ways that show up closer to home: gas and fuel prices climbed after the Iran war started, squeezing drivers, farmers, and families already stretched thin.

The bottom line

A war costs whatever it costs. What a country chooses is whether to tell the truth about it.

Six hundred and twenty-four wounded Americans. Eighteen dead, or fourteen, depending on which page you loaded and which day you loaded it. A brand-new casualty category that appeared only once there were deaths it could absorb. A spokesman calling all of it a website glitch. And a Congress that has done everything in its power to make sure it never has to put its name on any of it.

Those service members didn't get to choose. They raised their hand and went where they were sent. The absolute least their country owes them is an honest count — and representatives willing to vote, on the record, on whether the war they're fighting should be fought at all.

We deserve better. So do they.

Source

"More than 600 US military service members injured since Iran War began in February," by Brandon Drenon, BBC News, July 27, 2026. Photo: U.S. soldiers carry a casket during a dignified transfer ceremony in Delaware in July / BBC.
"Pentagon reveals hundreds of new Iran war casualties," Task & Purpose, July 26, 2026.

Michael Rulli Represents East Palestine. His 2025 Environmental Score Is 0%.

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:15:00 +0000

Michael Rulli has represented Ohio's 6th District — the eastern edge of the state, from Youngstown down the Ohio River — since winning a special election in June 2024. Two years in, he sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, one of the most powerful committees in Congress, including its Energy and Health subcommittees. That's real power over the air you breathe and the doctor's bill you pay. Here are three things to know about how he uses it.

1. He represents East Palestine — and votes with the polluters anyway

East Palestine sits in Ohio's 6th District. Rulli's own office confirmed it when he hosted Vice President JD Vance and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin there in February 2025 to mark two years since a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed and a controlled burn sent fumes over the town.

So you'd expect the congressman for the most famous chemical disaster site in America to be tough on pollution. He isn't. The League of Conservation Voters scores every member of Congress on votes affecting clean air, clean water and climate. Rulli's score is 0% for 2025 and 2% for his career. Zero percent means that on last year's scorecard — votes on clean air rules, truck pollution limits, endangered species, opening public lands to mining — he did not cast a single pro-environment vote.

His own signature energy bill goes the other way, too. In April 2025 he introduced the National Coal Council Reestablishment Act, which puts the coal industry's advisory council to the Energy Department back in business — and strips out the rule requiring it to be re-approved every two years. It passed the House in September 2025.

Meanwhile the EPA he praised in East Palestine has moved to stop counting the lives saved when it writes air pollution rules, and analysts warn the rollbacks will increase cancer-causing pollution. Trump's budget bill cut through the country's clean energy programs.

Showing up for a photo at the derailment site is easy. Voting like it mattered is the part he skipped.

2. He voted to keep us in the war with Iran

The war with Iran has killed American service members, pushed gas prices to levels not seen in years, and a majority of Americans oppose it.

Congress had a chance to end it. H.Con.Res. 38, the Iran War Powers Resolution, would have directed the president to pull U.S. forces out of hostilities Congress never authorized. Rulli voted no. The resolution failed.

He has taken $38,547 from pro-Israel PACs over his career, according to FEC data compiled by TrackAIPAC. That is not the biggest number in Congress. But when the vote came down to what the people of Mahoning and Columbiana counties wanted versus what the war lobby wanted, we know which way he went.

3. His biggest donor is a crypto billionaire family. The rest is healthcare money.

Rulli has raised $1,092,792 for this cycle. Here is where the top of that list comes from, according to OpenSecrets:

Winklevoss Capital Management — $24,000. The crypto investment firm run by the Winklevoss twins is his single largest source of money.
Memorial Health System — $15,000, Communicare Health Services — $14,000, Blue Cross/Blue Shield — $11,500, and the American Hospital Association — $9,000. That's four of his top twelve, all in healthcare — for a man who sits on the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee, which writes the rules those companies live under.
SpaceX — $11,600 and Koch Inc — $10,000, two names that show up on the donor lists of Republicans who vote to gut environmental rules.

You can look up the whole list yourself at Who Bought My Rep. Nobody on it lives on your street.

What the three have in common

A 0% environmental score in the district that lived through East Palestine. A no vote on ending a war most Americans never wanted. A donor list topped by a crypto firm and stocked with the hospital and insurance companies his own subcommittee regulates.

These aren't three separate stories. They're the same story told three times: when the interests that fund Michael Rulli want one thing and eastern Ohio wants another, eastern Ohio loses. Two years is a short record, but it is a remarkably consistent one. Ohio's 6th gets to decide in 2026 whether consistency is what it wants.