MAGA Report Cards — Town Halls

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

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

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

On September 9, it canceled.

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

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

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

What Tiffany said about it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why fewer appearances is the strategy

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

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

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

He is not the only one

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

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

The short version

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

Source

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

Dan Sullivan Used Official Senate Letterhead to Tell 19 Alaska Communities What He's Delivered for Them. Senate Rules Bar That Letterhead From Campaign Correspondence.

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:41:00 +0000

In the week before Labor Day 2026, thousands of Alaskans opened an email from their senior senator. The subject line said "Delivering for" — and then the name of their own town. Inside, on official United States Senate letterhead, was a list of everything he says he has won for that town.

Dan Sullivan is running for a third six-year term this November. Alaska reporter Dermot Cole, who published the emails, said readers sent him copies addressed to at least 19 different places: Fairbanks, Anchorage, Bethel, Nome, the Mat-Su Valley, Kenai, Juneau, Haines, Wrangell, Ketchikan, Kodiak, Homer, Prince of Wales Island, Sitka, Soldotna, North Pole, Utqiagvik, Delta Junction and Petersburg.

Every one of them opened the same way: "I am contacting you to share an update on some of the important work I've been doing on behalf of" — and then the town's name. Every one closed with a version of the same sentence: "The [town] community is so important to Alaska." Every one ended with his signature.

Nobody asked for these. Cole called them what they look like: unsolicited campaign material, sent at government expense, two months before an election.

What the Senate's own rules say

The Senate Select Committee on Ethics publishes a plain list of what official Senate letterhead may and may not be used for. It is not buried, and it is not ambiguous. Under Improper Use of Senate Letterhead, the very first items are:

Solicitation of a financial contribution or other form of assistance for any campaign or election.

...

Any campaign or campaign-related correspondence.

Personal correspondence.

Political or partisan correspondence, including political endorsements.

The reason the rule exists is money. Senate letterhead is bought and printed with public funds, and the Ethics Committee's guidance on campaign activity explains why that matters: under federal law, "official funds may only be used for the purposes for which they were appropriated. Accordingly, Senate resources may only be used for official purposes, and official resources may not be used to conduct campaign activity."

Sullivan has a campaign. It reported $7,295,069 in the bank at the end of July. It could have paid for these emails.

The timing is the tell

Congress wrote itself a rule about exactly this problem. Under the franking statute and Senate Rule 40, a senator may not send mass mailings in the 60 days before a general election. This year's election is November 3, which put the start of that blackout on September 4.

Sullivan's emails went out right before it.

The rule has a gap he can drive through, and he did. The Ethics Committee states flatly that "the Franking Regulations do not apply to electronic communications," and that the committee "does not generally review mass emails, as they are not sent under the frank."

So the mailbox rule and the inbox rule are not the same rule. But the letterhead rule does not care what the envelope is made of, and it is the letterhead rule that says campaign correspondence does not go on Senate stationery.

Congress noticed the blackout was coming and pushed material out ahead of it. That is not a Sullivan invention. Indiana's Mark Messmer bought a taxpayer-funded TV ad touting his votes that stopped running on September 2, exactly 62 days before Election Day — right at the line.

He will email your town. He will not stand in front of it.

Here is what makes the "Delivering for" emails hard to read as constituent service.

In March 2025, Alaskans in Fairbanks, Anchorage and Juneau organized their own town halls and Sullivan did not come to any of them. In Fairbanks, about 175 people packed the Noel Wien Public Library auditorium and set a life-size cardboard cutout of him in the middle of the room to stand in for him. One constituent told the room, "You should probably know my address by now; I leave you voicemails every single day." In Juneau, on March 20, nearly 170 people did the same thing at the Mendenhall Valley Public Library. Anchorage's, the same night, drew a crowd the organizers put at more than 600 and was well attended aside from the elected officials.

Asked about it in Juneau on March 20, 2025, Sullivan told reporters he had already held what he called "the ultimate town hall" — his own address to the Alaska Legislature, which he gave in Juneau that day. "There were 60 elected officials who could ask me any question they wanted," he said. As for the constituents in the library auditoriums: "If it's all about screaming and yelling and viral moments that they want to send out to their colleagues? You know, it's not necessarily the most constructive way to do what I just did in there."

Eighteen months later, with an election two months out, he emailed those same communities to say each one "is so important to Alaska," and that he is "honored to have the privilege of serving as your United States Senator."

The people in Haines and Bethel and Utqiagvik could not ask him a question in March 2025. They can receive his email now.

The same trick, over and over

Every member of Congress gets an allowance of public money to communicate with the people they represent. It exists so you can find out what your representative is doing. It is not a campaign budget, and the line between the two is the single most reliably abused line in Congress.

Minnesota's Michelle Fischbach spent $51,000 of public money in three months on mass communications while not holding an in-person town hall in her district.
Georgia's Mike Collins spent more than $400,000 in office money on TV ads built around Trump praising him, ads that look nearly identical to his campaign spots.
Pennsylvania's Rob Bresnahan had a taxpayer-funded video surface in Google's political ad library under his campaign account, and a constituent filed an ethics complaint.
Colorado's Gabe Evans spent more than $320,000 of public money advertising himself and routed $225,000 of it to the same firm his campaign pays.

None of them ran out of campaign money first. Neither did Sullivan.

Who is actually paying for his campaign

Sullivan's emails are addressed to Alaskans. His donors are not.

Individuals have given his campaign committee and his leadership PAC $10.15 million this cycle. Only $991,911 of it came from Alaska — more than 90% came from outside the state, and Florida, at $1,001,881, edged out the state he represents. Counting everything raised for him since 2020, campaign money and outside spending together, 7% has come from small grassroots donors and 73% from PACs, super PACs and large donors.

That is the campaign that had the money to send these emails. Instead they went out on the Senate's stationery.

What the record shows

Dan Sullivan sent at least 19 versions of a town-by-town list of his own accomplishments to thousands of Alaskans on official Senate letterhead, days before the September 4 start of the 60-day pre-election blackout on mass mailings. The Senate Ethics Committee's published rules say that letterhead may not be used for "any campaign or campaign-related correspondence," and federal law says Senate resources may only be used for official purposes. His campaign had $7.3 million in the bank, and more than 90% of the individual money behind him this cycle came from outside Alaska. The communities he emailed had already held town halls without him, in front of an empty chair.

Source

Dermot Cole, Sullivan misuses Senate letterhead for unsolicited campaign emails, Reporting From Alaska, September 6, 2026. Photo: official U.S. Senate portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Vivek Ramaswamy Says a Candidate Who Won't Debate 'Can't Lead the State.' He Never Debated the Republican Who Took Nearly 18 Percent Off Him in the Primary.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:22:00 +0000

Vivek Ramaswamy has a test for whether someone is fit to run Ohio.

"If you certainly are not willing to debate then you certainly can't lead the state," he said on Fox News last week, after Democratic nominee Amy Acton declined his invitations to debate. In a Statehouse News Bureau interview on Thursday he called debates "a basic part of the job interview" and said Acton should "show up."

Earlier this year, when Ramaswamy was the overwhelming favorite in Ohio's Republican primary, a Republican named Casey Putsch was asking him for exactly that.

"Debate me," Putsch said in one public challenge. He went on to campaign on the line: "Vivek won't debate me."

There was no Republican gubernatorial debate. Putsch got nearly 18 percent of the primary vote anyway, TiffinOhio.net reported.

Putsch was on the ballot

This matters because the usual excuse does not apply. Putsch was not a write-in or a protest candidate. He qualified for the Republican gubernatorial primary ballot alongside Ramaswamy and Heather Hill, and official Republican ballots listed all three tickets.

Nearly one in five Republican primary voters picked him over a candidate with a national profile and, by then, tens of millions of dollars behind him. Ramaswamy never debated him.

He had a rule about this in 2023

Three years ago, Ramaswamy was the one demanding that a frontrunner show up.

In May 2023, with Donald Trump weighing whether to skip the Republican presidential primary debates, Ramaswamy told Fox News Radio's Guy Benson Show: "I think it would be fundamentally uncourageous for Donald Trump to refuse to debate." Republicans, he said, "should be unafraid of open debate," and he was not going to let Trump "get away with that very easily."

Then Trump skipped the first debate. By August, Ramaswamy told CNN he had "no issue" with Trump missing the first couple, though he would object if Trump sat out the whole season.

So the standard has now moved three times. Skipping debates is uncourageous when Trump considers it. It is acceptable when Trump does it. It is disqualifying when Amy Acton does it. And it was not worth discussing when Casey Putsch asked.

There is a third candidate still waiting

Libertarian nominee Don Kissick has also been asking. He posted video of himself putting the question to Ramaswamy after an Ohio Conference of Teamsters event, and says he is "still waiting" for a commitment from either major-party candidate.

Ramaswamy has accepted invitations from CNN and Cincinnati's WLWT. He framed them as a two-man affair: "Ohioans deserve a substantive debate between their two candidates for Governor. I challenge Amy Acton to join me on the debate stage." Kissick and his running mate James Mills say they feel left out of the conversation — "Ohio voters deserve to hear from every candidate who earned a place on the November ballot," Mills said.

The standard, in other words, applies to the opponent Ramaswamy wants on a stage and to nobody else.

Why Acton says no

Acton's campaign has not argued debates are unimportant. It says the volume and content of the attacks aimed at her make sharing a stage counterproductive. Her campaign manager, Phil Stein, said Ramaswamy and allied groups have spent more than $50 million on attack ads.

Independent newsrooms have found real problems in those ads. PolitiFact rated Ramaswamy's claim that Acton "called off" Ohio's 2020 primary "Mostly False," noting that Republican Governor Mike DeWine has repeatedly said the decision was his. The Cincinnati Enquirer found that an ad blaming Acton for the isolation and death of a Republican activist's mother concerned a woman who lived in Kentucky and died after Ohio's stay-at-home order had ended and after Acton had left her state post.

University of Akron political scientist David Cohen calls Acton's decision "political malpractice," and voters are entitled to weigh that. The League of Women Voters of Ohio has taken no position on either candidate — its director, Jen Miller, said only that the league encourages "every political candidate in Ohio to participate in nonpartisan candidate events." None of it changes what Ramaswamy did when the request pointed at him.

The other questions he won't answer

Refusing debates is one item in a longer list. Cleveland.com has described this governor's race as having "a transparency problem" centered on Ramaswamy: he did not provide a position when the outlet surveyed candidates on marijuana policy, and did not answer on expanding online gambling either.

That gambling question followed him into September. Asked directly last week, after a reporter noted the industry money behind his campaign, he said only that he would "take a fresh look and a fresh perspective to this whole discussion." The Sports Betting Alliance has given $650,000 to the super PAC working to elect him.

For months before that, he would not tell Ohio where he stood on the state's most pressing issues — he ran attack ads until cleveland.com badgered a platform out of him.

What the record shows

Vivek Ramaswamy says a candidate unwilling to debate "can't lead the state." He never debated Casey Putsch, the Republican who won nearly 18 percent of Ohio's GOP gubernatorial primary vote against him, and Ohio had no Republican gubernatorial debate at all. The Libertarian nominee says he is still waiting for an answer. In 2023 Ramaswamy called it "fundamentally uncourageous" for a frontrunner to duck debates, then dropped the objection once the frontrunner was Donald Trump.

Source

Ramaswamy refused to debate his GOP challenger. Now he says candidates who won't debate 'can't lead.' by Bonnie Lucas, TiffinOhio.net, September 5, 2026. Photo: YouTube, via TiffinOhio.net.

Eric Burlison Said Town Halls Are Where 'Only Political Nutjobs Show Up.' His Opponent Just Offered Him Any Weeknight in October.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:17:20 +0000

The House's last scheduled voting day before the election is October 1. After that, members go home, keep drawing their salary, and campaign.

On Sunday, September 6, 2026, the Springfield News-Leader ran a letter from Missi Hesketh, the Democratic candidate in Missouri's 7th Congressional District, making Eric Burlison an offer for those weeks. She wrote that she would make herself available "any Sunday-Thursday evening in October to have an organized and civil public forum" alongside him.

She also made a claim about why she had to say it in a newspaper instead of by phone:

"Congressman Eric Burlison and his staff dodge every single person who calls or emails his office or campaign attempting to set up a public forum."

That is her characterization, and she is running against him. But it is not a hard claim to check, because Burlison has been unusually open about how he feels on this subject.

He said it out loud

In March 2025, Burlison told St. Louis Public Radio's Jason Rosenbaum that "the town halls create a dynamic where only political nutjobs show up."

He said it after his fellow Missouri Republican Mark Alford was confronted by angry constituents at a town hall in late February 2025 over federal layoffs, tariffs and the war in Ukraine. Burlison allowed that some people had legitimate concerns, but said an in-person town hall creates "a dynamic that you're inviting all of the most extreme people to come to," the Springfield Daily Citizen reported.

Around the same time, Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina, who chairs the House Republicans' campaign committee, was telling members to hold their town halls virtually instead of in person.

Burlison already did. He still does — his office reported holding one in January 2026.

What happened when constituents asked in person

On Thursday, March 13, 2025, constituents of the 7th District gathered outside Burlison's Springfield office on East Ridgeview Street to protest his refusal to hold town halls. One of them, John Jennings, said he would collect questions from the crowd and hand-deliver them to the office in the hope that Burlison would respond.

Burlison's spokesperson told KY3 that in-person town halls "have become a target for organized opposition groups."

That is the whole argument, stated plainly: the people who want to ask him questions in a room are the wrong kind of people.

The difference between a phone call and a room

A telephone town hall is not a town hall with worse audio. It is a different event with different rules.

The office decides who gets on the line and which questions get read. Nobody in the audience can see how many people are waiting, or hear a question that the screener skipped, or follow up when the answer misses. There is no video, no local reporter in the back of the room, and no way for a constituent to know whether the person next to them was asking the same thing.

That is why a public forum in October is a real request and a tele-town hall is not an answer to it.

What he would have to answer for

Burlison represents southwest Missouri. A public forum in October would fall inside the final five weeks before an election in which his constituents get to weigh in on what he has done with the seat.

There is material. In March 2024 he was one of nine members of the House who would not vote to condemn Russia for kidnapping Ukrainian children; the resolution passed 390 to 9. He wrote to the Joplin City Council backing a data center that hundreds of his own constituents had turned out to oppose, and in July 2026 told a Jasper County candidate forum that "what the business is doing doesn't matter." Hesketh's letter also points at Missouri Republicans' support for Amendments 4 and 5, the ballot measures that would have made it harder for citizens to use the initiative petition process and swapped the state income tax for higher sales taxes. Missouri voters buried both on August 4, 2026, by 80 and 83 percent.

Those are the sort of questions a room asks and a screener does not have to pass along.

What the record shows

Eric Burlison has said publicly that in-person town halls attract "only political nutjobs," his office has said they are "a target for organized opposition groups," and he holds his town halls by telephone instead. Constituents protested outside his Springfield office over it in March 2025 and got that answer. On September 6, 2026, his opponent offered to appear with him on any weeknight in October, when the House is out of session after its first day and he will be home in the district anyway.

Source

"Will Eric Burlison campaign in public?", a letter from Missi Hesketh in the Springfield News-Leader, September 6, 2026.

Morgan Griffith Hasn't Held an In-Person Town Hall in Over Ten Years. Now He Won't Debate His Opponent Either.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:16:10 +0000

On Monday, August 24, 2026, Joy Powers wrote to the man she is running against and asked him to debate her three times: once in far Southwest Virginia, once in the New River Valley, and once on the eastern edge of the district. She proposed that the two campaigns jointly pick the hosts, the venues, the moderators and the format, with the questions coming from voters.

On Friday, September 4, Morgan Griffith wrote back and said no.

"I do not need a jointly negotiated format to tell voters what I believe. They already know. I would rather spend the fall listening to them and fighting for them than trading rehearsed lines with you on a stage."

His campaign shared the letter with The Roanoke Times, which reported the refusal on September 6.

"They already know" is doing a lot of work

Griffith has represented Virginia's 9th District since January 2011 — fifteen years, and he is in his eighth term. His claim is that voters in Southwest Virginia already know where he stands, so a debate would add nothing.

There is a straightforward test of that claim, and Griffith has been failing it for a decade.

In March 2025, he told the Kingsport Times News, in writing, "I have not done brick-and-mortar town halls in more than ten years." He called in-person town halls inefficient and dismissed complaints about their absence as "Democratic talking points." He prefers telephone town halls — where constituents without a landline have to call a district office in advance to opt in.

His predecessor in that seat, Rick Boucher, told the same paper that "most years while I was in Congress, I held 70 or more in-person town halls across the district."

When constituents in Abingdon got tired of waiting, they held their own town hall in April 2025 and left a chair empty for him. He did not come. In February 2025, about 20 people turned up at his staff's monthly office hours at the Bedford Municipal Building to demand one in person. "He does not come to the district, he does not listen to his constituents," the organizer, Karen Nuzzo, told WSET. Griffith was in Washington; his staffers took notes.

So the record is: no in-person town halls for more than ten years, no appearance at the one his constituents organized for him, and now no debates.

He asked for details, then said no to them

There is one more piece worth putting in order, because it undercuts his stated reason.

When a reporter asked him about the debate challenge at a Virginia Tech event on August 28, Griffith said "one of the problems" was that Powers' challenge lacked specifics.

"Where are they going to be? Who is the moderator going to be? What's the format? What's going to happen? I mean, all of this has to be negotiated."

Powers' letter had already said the two campaigns "should jointly agree on hosts, venues, moderators, and format, with questions coming directly from voters across the Ninth District." That is an offer to negotiate exactly the things he said needed negotiating.

A week later he turned it down on the grounds that he did "not need a jointly negotiated format."

The safe seat is the point

The 9th is the most conservative congressional district in Virginia. Griffith won it in 2024 by 45 percentage points. He has also raised nearly six times more money in 2026 than all three of his Democratic challengers combined, the Roanoke Times has reported.

That is the actual answer. He does not have to show up, so he does not.

Powers, a 34-year-old cattle farmer from Bedford County who is new to politics, put it this way in her response:

"After 16 years in Washington, he should be able to stand in front of the people he represents and answer for his record. A debate is not a favor to me. It is something he and I owe to the people asking us to represent them."

Answering for the record is the part that costs something. In July, eight school-based health clinics closed across his district, and Virginia's community health centers wrote to him asking him to intervene — he chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health. We wrote about that letter last month. Those are the questions a moderator asks and a telephone town hall screener does not have to.

The short version

Morgan Griffith has told his constituents in writing that he has not held an in-person town hall in more than ten years, skipped the empty-chair town hall they organized for him in 2025, and on September 4, 2026 declined all three debates his opponent proposed. He has held the seat for fifteen years, won it last time by 45 points, and has out-raised his challengers by roughly six to one. His stated reason for refusing to debate is that voters already know what he believes.

Source

Rep. Morgan Griffith turns down debates with 9th District challenger Powers by Ben Orner, The Roanoke Times, September 6, 2026.

Brad Finstad Hasn't Held a Town Hall in His District. Talking to Him at the Mankato Golf Club Started at $250.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:47:54 +0000

Southern Minnesota votes on November 3. Brad Finstad is asking for a third full term representing the 1st District — Worthington to Winona, 21 counties — and he has spent the term declining to stand in a room with the people who live there and take their questions.

He has not stopped meeting people. He has been quite busy. It just costs money.

Two evenings in August

On Tuesday, August 18, 2026, the Finstad Victory Committee held an evening reception for the congressman at the Mankato Golf Club, 100 Augusta Drive, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. The invitation — one of two published by MeidasTouch — lists what a conversation costs:

Chairman: $10,000
Champion: $5,000
Sponsor: $3,500
Host: $1,000
Supporter: $500
Friend: $250

Under his name, the invitation lists the reason to buy in: "Agriculture, Armed Services, Small Business Committees." Not his views. His committee seats — the places where the decisions get made.

That same Tuesday evening, from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m., his opponent Jake Johnson held a Nicollet County town hall at the Courtland Community Center. The flyer's promise, in block letters: "IN-PERSON. UNFILTERED. OPEN TO EVERYONE." Admission was nothing.

Six days later, on Monday, August 24, Finstad was at the Take 16 Event Center in Luverne for another reception, 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., cash bar and hors d'oeuvres. Suggested minimum contribution: $250. Maximum: $7,000 per person, $10,000 per PAC. Checks to "Finstad for Congress."

MeidasTouch counted at least ten such fundraisers in Minnesota and Washington over six months, against zero town halls in the district. We can't independently verify the full count — but the invitations themselves are unambiguous, and the town hall number is confirmed by his own local press coverage below.

"Come with their pitchfork"

Asked by KAAL why he won't hold a town hall, Finstad said such events let agitators "come with their pitchfork and scream and have a hissy fit in front of the cameras to get their viral time that they desperately want."

The Post Bulletin asked him about that line on May 27, 2026. He did not walk it back.

"I don't regret saying it at all."

He said the people asking for a town hall don't want a conversation. They want to "interrupt and disrupt." He offered a story as proof: a woman approached him at a parade and asked him to hold a town hall.

"And I said that's great, but what do you want to talk about?"

When she repeated the request, he said he told her, "But I'm here with you right now. What's the conversation you'd like to have," and, in his telling, "she didn't have anything."

That is the case for the defense. A constituent asked her congressman for the one format where she could ask a question in front of her neighbors, and he treated the request itself as evidence she had nothing to say. Nobody at the Mankato Golf Club had to pass that test. They had to pay $250.

What he does instead

Finstad's substitute for a town hall is the tele-town hall — a conference call. In 2025 he held four of them, on February 27, March 26, April 30 and June 25, according to KTTC's count.

Two details about those calls come from his own press office:

As many as 5,000 randomly selected residents are dialed in for each one.
Dial-ins are not allowed. You cannot call in to join. His office says this keeps non-constituents out.

So the participants are chosen by his operation, and nobody who wasn't chosen can get on. Finstad's defense of that arrangement:

"We have reached thousands of people in the tele-town halls and there has been multiple opportunities for people to ask questions. We've answered all the questions all around the things we've talked about today. We're not screening out the tough questions; we are talking about the issues that people that hop onto those calls want to talk about. And so it's been productive."

KTTC pointed out that other Republicans do it the old way — Iowa's Ashley Hinson took an hour of questions from a crowd of about 150 in Mason City in late April 2025, cheers and jeers both. Asked whether colleagues doing that made his position harder to sell, Finstad said:

"No, I'm just focused on the way that I know best to do it in the environment that we're in. And I know that there is way more productive conversations that we can have if we sit around a table and treat each other like human beings, in the most southern Minnesota way possible."

Sitting around a table and treating each other like human beings is, in fact, what was on offer at the Mankato Golf Club. The table cost between $250 and $10,000.

Asked in August 2025 whether he would hold any in-person town halls before the 2026 election, he gave no direct answer. A year later, he still hasn't held one.

He is not too busy

The Post Bulletin followed him through a full district day in Rochester on May 27, 2026. It was packed: a groundbreaking at Rochester International Airport with Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, a working lunch with Minnesota Farm Bureau leaders, a roundabout dedication, a newspaper interview, and a meeting with a high school senior he had nominated to the Air Force Academy.

Back-to-back-to-back. None of it a town hall.

The schedule is the point. This is not a member who can't get to the district or can't find an hour. It is a member whose calendar has room for everything except the hour where anyone can stand up.

His opponent is doing the thing he won't

On June 11, 2026, Johnson announced a county-by-county town hall tour of all 21 counties in the district, running from June 20 through the end of August — open to the public, questions taken from the audience, not pre-screened.

Johnson's framing: voters "want an opportunity to speak with their representative," and "It's something that they just do not feel like they're getting with Congressman Finstad." He added: "We shouldn't just meet with the people who we're comfortable with, who kind of say the things that we want them to say."

The last stop on that tour, in Dodge County, is the day after this post. Finstad's count of open, in-person town halls this term remains zero.

The pattern is the party's, not just his

Finstad's position tracks a national instruction. After Republican members were shouted down at events in early 2025, national Republican Party leaders urged GOP lawmakers to skip in-person town halls altogether. Finstad is one of many who took the advice — Roger Marshall, who once bragged about holding 105 town halls, went more than 500 days without an open one, and Jeff Hurd left about 400 constituents waiting in a Grand Junction church, then called it "political theater".

The cost is not abstract. A town hall is where a farmer gets to ask, on the record and in front of the local paper, why the tariffs their congressman called a "short term" problem from April 2025 to February 2026 are still here. A phone call with 5,000 people chosen by the congressman's office is not that, and a $250 reception at a golf club is not that either.

What the record shows

Brad Finstad has not held an open, in-person town hall in Minnesota's 1st District, and has not committed to one before the November 3 election. On the evening of August 18 he attended a reception in his honor at the Mankato Golf Club where the suggested contributions ran from $250 to $10,000 and the draw advertised on the invitation was his committee assignments; his opponent held a free town hall open to anyone that same evening in Courtland. Six days later Finstad was at another $250-minimum reception in Luverne. Asked why he won't take unscreened questions, he said the people requesting a town hall want to "have a hissy fit," and told a reporter in May 2026 that he does not regret saying it.

Source

Fundraiser invitations published by Troy Matthews, Brad Finstad Holds 10+ Fundraisers But Zero Town Halls in Six Months, MeidasTouch, August 28, 2026. Finstad's quotes and district schedule from Brian Todd, No town hall, but U.S. Rep. Brad Finstad says he's been productive in office, Post Bulletin, June 2, 2026 (photo: Maya Giron / Post Bulletin), and Brock Bergey, DIGGING DEEPER: Rep. Finstad defends position on town halls, KTTC, August 13, 2025.

Cindy Hyde-Smith Hasn't Debated an Opponent Since 2018. Her Campaign's Answer to 'Where's Cindy' Was a Line About George Soros's Apartment.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:31:24 +0000

Mississippi votes on November 3. Absentee voting opens September 19. And Cindy Hyde-Smith, running for a second full term in the U.S. Senate, has not agreed to a single debate or a single public town hall.

On Thursday, August 27, 2026, her Democratic opponent Scott Colom held a press conference in downtown Jackson to launch a "Where's Cindy" tour — five town halls in five Mississippi cities between August 31 and September 4, open to voters and their questions.

His ask of the incumbent was modest to the point of being embarrassing:

"She needs to do one town hall. She can pick the reddest county in the state."

One. Anywhere she likes. In front of the friendliest crowd in Mississippi.

The answer was not an answer

Hyde-Smith's campaign manager, Jake Monssen, responded to the "Where's Cindy" question by listing her funding announcements — Delta State's aviation program, a rural hospital collaboration in Franklin County, other towns around the state.

Then he added this:

"I can tell you where she isn't. Sen. Hyde-Smith isn't with Scott Colom in George Soros' apartment in NYC, promoting gender transition surgeries for children and other extreme policies of the radical left."

Read what actually happened there. A sitting United States senator was asked, through her campaign, whether she would stand in a room in Mississippi and take questions from Mississippians. Her campaign's official reply was a sentence about a billionaire's apartment and surgery on children.

It is not a scheduling answer. It is not a "we're considering it." It is a change of subject dressed up as an insult — and nothing else in the statement came any closer to a yes or a no.

Soros has donated to Colom's campaign; he donates to Democratic candidates regularly. Colom's response has been that hundreds of Mississippians have donated to him too. Neither fact has anything to do with whether Hyde-Smith will take questions anywhere in Mississippi.

She has done this before

This is not a first-time dodge. It is her pattern, and the record is short enough to state completely:

2018 — Hyde-Smith debated Mike Espy during the special election runoff.
2020 — running for her first full six-year term against the same opponent, she did not debate him at all.
2026 — no debate agreed to, no town hall agreed to, with the election nine weeks out.

One debate, eight years ago, in the one race where she was an appointed senator who had never been on a ballot for the seat and could not avoid it.

Ty Pinkins, an independent also on the November ballot, has challenged both party nominees to debate. Colom said he would take any debate "any time our junior senator shows up."

What she is avoiding being asked about

The "busy announcing funding" defense is worth taking seriously for a second, because it tells you what a town hall would be about.

Colom used the same press conference to hit Hyde-Smith for not standing up to President Trump on tariffs, on agriculture policy, and on the war with Iran — three things driving up what Mississippians pay.

"Listen, she totally gave away our voice on tariffs. If you look at the Constitution, it's clear that the Congress, including our senator, is supposed to be Mississippi's voice when it comes to tariffs."

Those are the questions a farmer in the Delta gets to ask at a town hall and does not get to ask at a ribbon-cutting. Announcing a grant is a press release with a podium in front of it. Nobody in the room gets to ask why beef and diesel cost what they cost, or why, in Colom's words, their senator gave away Mississippi's voice on tariffs.

There is also the matter of the man asking for the debate. Hyde-Smith already blocked Scott Colom once — she killed his federal judgeship by refusing to return a blue slip, a procedure a Mississippi segregationist invented to keep civil rights judges off the bench, after Roger Wicker and two Republican governors had backed him. She never had to explain that decision to a room of voters either.

A Republican habit, not a Mississippi one

Hyde-Smith is one of many. In Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn skipped a public forum, wouldn't say whether she'd debate, and claimed she had done "lots of forums" until a TV station checked with her opponents and found it wasn't true. In Minnesota, Brad Finstad says the people asking him for a town hall just want to "have a hissy fit", and answers constituents only on phone calls his own office fills.

The common thread is that none of them lose anything by refusing. There is no rule requiring a debate. The only cost is whatever voters decide to charge them for it.

What the record shows

Cindy Hyde-Smith has agreed to no debate and no town hall in a race that ends November 3, with absentee voting starting September 19. She has debated an opponent exactly once, in 2018, and skipped debating the same opponent in 2020. Asked this week to hold one town hall in the reddest county she could pick, her campaign manager's public response was that she is not in George Soros's New York apartment promoting surgery for children.

Source

Taylor Vance, Colom calls on Hyde-Smith to participate in debate and town hall before election, Mississippi Today, August 28, 2026. Photo: Jacquelyn Martin / AP.

Jon Husted Told Disabled Ohioans His Medicaid Vote Wouldn't Hurt Them. He Skipped Their Forum and Went Shooting Clay Targets.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:56:58 +0000

On Thursday, August 20, Ohio's disability community set aside four hours to hear from the people who want to run their state.

The Ohio Disability Candidates Forum ran from noon to 4 p.m. at the Fawcett Center in Columbus. It was organized by the Ohio Olmstead Task Force, billed as nonpartisan, and built to be easy to attend: ASL interpreters, live captioning, a universal changing station, and a request that everyone come fragrance-free. Fourteen statewide candidates were invited — the Republican and the Democrat for every office on the November ballot. The questions were written and shared in advance, so nobody could be ambushed.

Jon Husted was on the list. He did not come.

At 3:10 p.m., an attendee typed into the event's question channel asking whether Husted was joining. Staff answered that he was not — that he was "unable to participate."

At 8:19 p.m., Husted's verified account posted photographs of him at the Black Wing Shooting Center, north of Columbus, shooting clay targets. "It's National Shooting Sports Month!" the post read. "It was great to be at the Black Wing Shooting Center in Columbus today with fellow Ohio sportsmen and hear about the issues that matter most to them."

He had time that day to hear about the issues that mattered most to somebody. Just not to them.

The vote behind the empty chair

This forum mattered because of a vote Husted already cast.

Husted voted for Trump's budget bill — the one Republicans called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — which carries the largest cut to Medicaid in the program's history. KFF puts Ohio's share of that at roughly $33 billion in lost federal Medicaid money over the next decade, about a 13% cut against what the state spends now.

The piece of it disability groups have spent a year warning about takes effect January 1, 2027. Roughly 769,000 Ohioans will have to prove, every month, that they worked or studied or volunteered 80 hours. The Urban Institute projects that paperwork alone could cost as many as 356,000 Ohioans their coverage by 2028.

That is on top of the people Ohio has already lost. When the Obamacare tax credits expired, 161,385 Ohioans dropped their plans — and Ohio lost a larger share of its ACA enrollment than any other state in the country.

And more than 45,000 Ohioans with disabilities are on Medicaid waivers. Waivers are the thing that pays for a caregiver to come to your house so you don't have to live in an institution. Under federal law, waiver services are optional. That is exactly why advocates are frightened: when a state budget gets squeezed, the optional things go first. Ohio has already seen where that road ends — we've written about how Husted helped nursing homes make themselves harder to sue for abuse and wrongful death.

"There's nothing in this bill that would impact them"

Husted has told Ohioans, over and over, that none of this reaches disabled people.

In July 2025, as the bill moved through Congress, he told News 5 Cleveland that people with disabilities would not be affected: "There's nothing in this bill that would impact them." His office told NBC4 the same week that "Disabled Americans, children, and their caretakers are at no risk for losing benefits because of this bill."

Later that month he posted a statement on his Senate website saying there were "whoppers of a lie" going around about Medicaid, and that the law would leave Ohioans with more health care than ever.

Here is the problem with that. The 80-hour work rule is the specific provision disability groups flag as the danger, and the Center for American Progress found it reaches at least 2.6 million adults nationally who have trouble working because of a disability or illness but who don't get SSI or disability insurance — so they get no automatic exemption. Those people keep their coverage only if they fill out the forms correctly, every month, forever.

On a Columbus radio show in October 2025, Husted called the Medicaid changes "purposeful." "So I love fighting for those things," he said. "I love doing that kind of stuff."

The forum on August 20 was four hours in a room where people living on those waivers could have asked him about that. He was not there.

This is not new for him

Husted's record on disability benefits did not start in the Senate. It started when he ran the Ohio House.

In April 2005, three months into his speakership, Husted led a House budget proposal that eliminated the Disability Medical Assistance program — which paid for prescriptions and doctor visits for about 15,000 very low-income adults described at the time as destitute and chronically ill. The same proposal cut off Medicaid for 25,000 working-poor parents earning between 90% and 100% of the poverty line.

The next March, he voted for Senate Bill 7, an overhaul of Ohio's workers' compensation system that made it harder for injured workers to qualify and shorter for them to collect. It:

required objective medical proof that a workplace injury had made a pre-existing condition substantially worse, instead of a worker's own report of more pain;
narrowed who counts as permanently and totally disabled, overturning an Ohio Supreme Court ruling that had treated the loss of a single limb as the loss of two body parts;
capped non-working wage-loss payments at 52 weeks, down from a 200-week allowance.

It passed the House 58 to 37 and became law.

The hug

In June 2025, a Columbus attorney named Sarah Bloom Anderson brought her 14-year-old daughter Audrey to Husted's Washington office. Audrey has PURA Syndrome, a chromosomal disorder. She relies on a waiver that pays for a full-time caregiver at home.

Husted hugged her. His office posted the photo.

Then he voted for the bill.

Bloom Anderson told the story months later at a campaign event in Columbus. "You can't hug my daughter, look her in the eyes and tell her Medicaid won't be cut," she said, "and then sign that bill."

One more thing

Three years ago, as lieutenant governor, Husted stood in front of a camera and handed CareSource the 2023 Governor's Inclusive Employer Award for hiring people with disabilities. "Governor DeWine and I have made working with Ohioans with disabilities an important priority in our administration," he said.

CareSource was a listed sponsor of Thursday's forum. Its logo sits on the event page, a few inches above the roster of candidates — a roster with Husted's name on it.

A photo op with a disabled teenager is easy. An award ceremony is easy. Four hours of pre-written questions from the people your vote actually lands on is not, and he skipped it. It's the same pattern we've seen from him on electric bills, where his own party's internal memo calls data centers an "anchor" around his campaign — the appearances are managed, and the accounting never happens in public.

Ohio votes November 3.

Source

Husted skips disability forum, posts clay-shooting photos hours later — R.L. Porter, TiffinOhio.net, August 21, 2026. Photo: screenshot via Senator Jon Husted / YouTube.

Richard Hudson Told House Republicans to Stop Holding In-Person Town Halls. Since Then They Have Held 231. Democrats Have Held 1,042.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 09:48:32 +0000

Here is a number worth sitting with.

Through June 29 of this year, Republicans in Congress had held 39 in-person town halls — 17% of all the town halls they held at all. Democrats held 451 town halls in the same six months, two-thirds of them in person.

That count comes from LegiStorm, which has been tracking town halls for years. Those 39 are the fewest in-person town halls the company has ever recorded for Republicans in the first half of any year.

It did not used to be this way. In the first half of 2024, Republicans held more town halls than Democrats — 309 to 214 — and 229 of theirs, nearly three quarters, were in person. Then came 2025: Republicans held 378 town halls but only 122 in person, while Democrats jumped to 924. This year Republicans are down to 234 town halls, 39 of them in person.

Something changed between those two years. We know exactly what it was, because it was said out loud in a room full of members of Congress.

The order

On Tuesday, March 4, 2025, House Republicans went into a closed-door conference meeting. Richard Hudson — the North Carolina congressman who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, the group that raises the money and runs the campaigns for every House Republican on the ballot — stood up and told them to stop holding in-person town halls.

NOTUS reported it from the meeting: Hudson told members to switch to tele-town halls or Facebook Lives instead. His stated reason was that they could still hear from constituents that way, without "disruption from activists."

The unstated reason was in the same story. Going online would also avoid "the recent images of Republicans running off stage, getting drowned out by boos and being challenged on unpopular cuts to programs like Medicare and Medicaid." At the time, Congress was writing the budget bill that would cut $2 trillion in spending, much of it out of Medicaid.

Speaker Mike Johnson backed him at his weekly press conference: "There are other avenues to do it than just going in to try to give the other side sound bites."

We wrote about that meeting, and about the tele-town hall Hudson went on to hold himself — 50 minutes, eleven screened callers, and a constituent who asked about Medicaid and got told the cuts were "just rumors". Seventy-two days after he said that, he voted for the cuts.

Now the receipts are in. Since March 2025, Republicans have held 231 in-person town halls. Democrats have held 1,042. The advice worked. Republicans stopped showing up, and they have not started again.

"It's a good way to get shot"

MS NOW's Mychael Schnell asked House Republicans why, and several answered on condition that their names not be used. That detail alone tells you something: these are elected officials who wouldn't put their name on their reason for not meeting voters.

"They're a setup. It's just a setup to get us — get you off something off guard. And for me, personally, it's a good way to get shot. There's a lot of crazies out there right now."

The same lawmaker added: "I just don't feel like there is any gain to be had."

Another said the reasons were political, logistical and about safety: "It's the disruptive factor. It's the screaming factor. But it's also, truthfully, a security factor."

Nobody should wave away the safety part. Political violence in this country is real and members of both parties have been targeted. But Democrats have held 1,042 in-person town halls since Hudson gave that advice, under exactly the same threat environment. Whatever is different here, it isn't the danger. It's the questions.

And listen to the order those reasons come in. Disruptive. Screaming. Then security.

Jeff Van Drew blames the voters

Jeff Van Drew, the New Jersey Republican who switched parties in 2019, gave MS NOW the version with no hedging in it. He endorsed the virtual events fully, and he blamed the people who show up at the real ones.

"The Democrats have bastardized this and ruined town halls."

He called the traditional format "completely nonfunctional and noninformational," and said town halls that are "completely weaponized and abusive and demeaning and crude and rude" don't work for anybody.

This is Van Drew's long-running position, not a new one. He told the Press of Atlantic City last year that in-person events just bring out "the same 50 or 100 people who just don't like you."

On March 13, 2025, about 600 people lined the road outside his Northfield office to ask him to protect Medicaid and Social Security. They brought their concerns in writing to hand in at the door. The doors were locked and the building was closed.

Six hundred is not fifty. And the "crude and rude" framing is how this always gets sold — Mike Bost said his constituents' protests were staged, with paid protesters, and offered nicer-looking signs as evidence. Brian Fitzpatrick went on national television to call in-person town halls a "three-ring circus". Dan Meuser, asked to name a recent town hall, couldn't come up with one — and says he won't turn up at his constituents' weekly protests because he doesn't want to be a "piñata."

Angry voters are not a scheduling problem. They're the feedback.

What replaced it

The replacement is the telephone town hall, and it's worth being clear about what that is. Your congressman's office picks who gets to speak. It picks the order. It cuts the line whenever it wants, and nobody in the room can see anybody else's face — because there is no room.

Rob Bresnahan, the Pennsylvania Republican, is a clean example. In March 2025 he held his first telephone town hall, an hour long, taken from his office in Washington. More than 9,000 constituents dialed in. His office put out another release later celebrating that 15,000-plus people joined a telephone town hall about the government shutdown.

The big participation numbers are always the pitch. They're also the point — 15,000 people on a phone line is 15,000 people who each got, at best, one question and no follow-up.

We've watched how these go. Mike Carey promised to post the call-in number for his telephone town hall, never did, and then put out a press release celebrating that 12,000 people joined. Brad Knott's first three town halls were all by telephone; when a constituent in rural Harnett County got through to ask how he could vote to cut Medicaid, he answered that lawmakers "stand ready" to fix it later.

That is the format Hudson recommended, and that is what it produces.

One Republican still does it

Not everyone took the advice. Mike Flood, who represents a safe Republican district in Nebraska, was lambasted at a forum in May 2025 — and kept holding them. He told MS NOW he promised in 2022 to hold three town halls a year and intends to keep the promise.

"Things only get better when you go to the town square and you have an exchange of ideas. For me, it works."

He also punctured the excuse his colleagues are using. The viral clips, he said, come from a tiny slice of the event: "The reality is, a lot of the times, the same people that might be animated against me, they're clapping with me when I'm talking about supporting Ukraine or where I'm at on certain issues."

One Republican stood in the room, took the shouting, and reports that it's fine. That is the whole case against every excuse in this story, delivered by a Republican.

Someone else is holding their town halls

The seats aren't staying empty. Democrats have been going into Republican districts and holding the events themselves.

In December 2025, Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania traveled into Bresnahan's district — Pennsylvania's 8th — to take questions from voters who aren't his. He told MS NOW he may do it again.

"Republicans know their agenda is deeply unpopular, so they're hiding from their constituents. After voting to gut healthcare, raise costs and shower billionaires with tax breaks, they won't even defend their record back home."

The NRCC's response, from spokesman Mike Marinella, was that "House Republicans are meeting voters where they are, delivering results that matter to working families."

Meeting voters where they are. The voters are in Northeastern Pennsylvania, in Fayetteville, in South Jersey. The congressman is on a phone in Washington choosing which of them gets to talk.

The part that isn't about town halls

A town hall is not a favor. It's the one hour where the person casting votes in your name has to stand in a room, in front of neighbors who can see his face, and account for them — and where the follow-up question is not his to switch off.

That's why they stopped. Not because voters got ruder, but because the votes got harder to defend: Medicaid cuts, rising costs, the Epstein files, a war nobody voted on. Every one of those is a question with no good answer at a microphone, and every one of them is a question a screener can drop.

Hudson didn't invent members ducking their constituents. What he did was turn it into official party guidance, in his capacity as the man who funds their campaigns — and 231 to 1,042 is what that guidance bought.

Source

The Republican town hall is vanishing — and Democrats see an opening — Mychael Schnell, MS NOW, August 20, 2026, and Why Republicans are hiding from their own voters — Nick Hilden, AlterNet, August 20, 2026. Photo of Rep. Richard Hudson: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images.

Thirteen Groups Spent Weeks Planning a Candidate Forum. Jefferson Shreve Never Wrote Back.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:39:19 +0000

Thirteen organizations across Indiana's 6th Congressional District spent the summer trying to put on one event: a forum where voters could hear from the two people running to represent them.

They booked nothing fancy. They asked both campaigns for two available dates by July 31, so volunteers could find a venue, set up a livestream, organize watch parties in outlying counties, and give the public enough notice to show up.

Cinde Wirth's campaign sent the dates.

Jefferson Shreve's campaign never replied — "despite receiving the invitation by certified mail and hand delivery to both his Greenfield and Richmond offices," the coalition wrote in a joint letter this week.

Under the nonpartisan bylaws of both the League of Women Voters and the NAACP, a forum needs at least two candidates. So the forum was cancelled.

Who was asking

This is worth spelling out, because of what Shreve's campaign said next.

The coalition was: League of Women Voters chapters in Brown/Bartholomew, Wayne, Henry, Hancock, Johnson and Marion counties; NAACP units in Richmond, Bartholomew-Columbus and Greater Indianapolis; Indivisible Wayne County and Central Indiana; South INDY-visible; and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbus.

The League of Women Voters has been running candidate forums since the 1920s. It has bylaws requiring nonpartisanship — that is the whole reason the event had to be cancelled rather than held with one chair empty.

Their stated goal:

"Our goal was simple: make the forum accessible to as many voters as possible through a central location, live-streaming and county watch parties for those who could not attend in person."

What his campaign called them

When The Republic asked Shreve's campaign why it never responded to an invitation delivered by certified mail, campaign spokesman Kory Wood didn't say the schedule didn't work. He didn't say they'd offer another date. He said this:

"The event was nothing more than a far-left rally masquerading as a 'non-partisan' forum, all evidenced by a cursory review of the participating organizations' websites and affiliations."

That is a sitting congressman's campaign describing the League of Women Voters and the NAACP as a far-left rally.

It is also an answer to a question nobody asked. The coalition's complaint wasn't that Shreve declined. It's that he never responded at all — not to say yes, not to say no, not to propose different terms. If the objection was that the sponsors were biased, that objection could have been raised in July, in writing, and the groups could have adjusted or the public could have judged the exchange for itself.

Instead, the invitation went unanswered — certified mail, hand delivery, two district offices — until a reporter called.

This is not the first time

Shreve has a record here.

In May 2025, Democrats in the 6th District held what they called a "People's Town Hall" after Shreve declined to attend. It was part of a broader run of "empty chair" town halls that drew crowds across Indiana — events where constituents showed up, the congressman didn't, and organizers left a seat out for him.

Since then, constituents have gone to him instead. They've gathered outside his Greenwood office to protest the use of Camp Atterbury for ICE detention and the state's redistricting push. They've demonstrated against immigration policy in the same city.

When you won't hold the meeting, people hold it on the sidewalk.

Why it matters right now

The 6th District covers Johnson County plus all or parts of Bartholomew, Fayette, Hancock, Henry, Randolph, Rush, Shelby, Union and Wayne counties, and southern Marion County. That's a lot of ground, and the one event that would have put both candidates side by side before the November 3 election is off.

They have plenty to ask about. Shreve is one of the cosponsors of a bill that would void surrogacy contracts outright based on the nationality of the intended parents. He reversed himself on guns after once being rated F by the NRA. He has been trading stocks after tariff announcements. And ICE detention at Camp Atterbury is happening inside his district.

Every one of those is a fair question. A forum is where a voter gets to ask it and hear the answer in the candidate's own voice, next to the other candidate's answer.

Shreve won 64% of the district in 2024. But he took just 53% in his May 2026 primary against challenger Sarah Janisse Brown — and only 51% in Bartholomew County.

Incumbents who feel safe show up. Incumbents who don't, don't.

The simple version

Thirteen nonpartisan groups, six League of Women Voters chapters, three NAACP units. Certified mail. Hand delivery to two district offices. A July 31 deadline that came and went.

No reply. Forum cancelled. And then, only when a reporter asked, an insult.

The coalition's closing line to voters was to go look the candidates up themselves at VOTE411.org, since they couldn't get one of them into a room.

Source

Andy East, The Republic: "Coalition cancels 6th District candidate forum after Shreve doesn't respond." Photo: The Republic.

A Childhood Abuse Survivor Asked Clay Higgins Why He Was the Only 'No' on the Epstein Files. The Town Hall Went Downhill From There.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:08:39 +0000

Clay Higgins opened his town hall in Crowley on Thursday night with a plea for civility.

"Perhaps you don't agree with the person sitting next to you, politically, or person that lives across the street, maybe you don't vote the same, but you breathe the same air man. We are all Americans we stand in glory underneath the same flag."

"We owe that to each other, so as your Congressional Representative, which I am humbled to be."

According to The Advocate, questions about glyphosate, environmental regulations, SpaceX and the Epstein files then led to heated exchanges — including one in which Higgins told a constituent he would personally carry him out of the building.

The question he came to Crowley to avoid

A resident identified themselves before asking anything:

"As a survivor of over a decade of childhood abuse at the hands of an army veteran, I must ask why you are the only Congressman who voted not to release the Epstein files."

That is not a gotcha. That is a constituent explaining why the question matters to them personally, and then asking it plainly.

Higgins's answer was that releasing the files would violate 200 years of criminal justice procedure by mandating the release of confidential criminal investigative files. He said he wasn't happy about victims' confidential names being released. He said we need to let the justice system play out before politicizing an investigation.

"Innocent until proven guilty, is that not our standard."

We have been through this answer before. When Higgins cast the lone vote against the Epstein Files Transparency Act, 427 to 1, he gave the same explanation — and the bill already let the attorney general redact victims' personal information, child abuse material, and anything touching an ongoing case. The protection he says he was defending was written into the text he voted against.

It's also worth remembering what Higgins does in Congress. He chairs the Oversight subcommittee that voted to subpoena those same files — over his own objection. He is not a bystander to the question a constituent put to him.

Then he offered to carry a man out

The exchange that blew up was about glyphosate — the weed killer sprayed on crops, in a district full of them. A resident asked about it. The back-and-forth escalated.

Here is Higgins:

"If the gentleman would allow me to answer his questions, if you want to run for Congress, knock yourself out."

The resident's reply, per KLFY: "Oh no, we have that in common, I don't like politicians."

Somewhere in that exchange Higgins told the man he would carry him out of the building himself. Another attendee heard it as a threat and shouted:

"These are the people you serve, don't threaten him, I heard you threaten him, it's on video, you said you're going to take him out yourself."

To be precise about what's established: The Advocate reports as fact that Higgins told a constituent he would personally carry him out of the building. The characterization of that as a threat — and the "take him out" phrasing — comes from an attendee in the room, who said it was recorded.

Either way, a sitting congressman who opened the evening asking Americans to respect one another spent part of it telling a voter he'd remove him from the room by hand.

The other thing he wanted to talk about

Higgins also addressed rumors about SpaceX coming to Vermilion Parish, and volunteered his personal regard for Elon Musk:

"I've broken bread with him on a few occasions, he's one of the smartest, and the oddest man I've ever met."

A congressman telling constituents about breaking bread with the world's richest man, at a meeting where they came to ask about pesticide spraying and a child sex trafficking investigation, is its own kind of answer about whose company he keeps.

Why town halls matter here

Republicans in Congress have largely stopped holding these: 39 in-person town halls in the first half of this year, the fewest LegiStorm has ever recorded, and 17% of all the town halls they held. Higgins deserves the narrow credit for showing up in a room where people could ask him things.

But showing up is the floor, not the achievement. What Crowley got was a plea for civility, a recycled explanation for the most conspicuous vote in the House, an anecdote about Elon Musk, and an offer to carry a constituent out of the building.

The survivor who asked that question still doesn't have an answer that matches the bill's actual text.

Source

Joel Thompson, "Clay Higgins calls for unity as Crowley town hall turns heated over key issues," The Advocate, and "Tensions rise during Crowley town hall," KLFY, Aug. 14, 2026. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Ashley Hinson Has Missed 196 Votes in Congress. Her Attendance Record Looks Great, Because Nobody Counts the Ones She Skipped.

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:58:49 +0000

There is a number politicians like to quote about themselves: their voting attendance. Ashley Hinson's looks fine.

The reason it looks fine is that the number almost nobody publishes is the one where the work actually gets done.

According to congressional records, Hinson has missed 163 committee votes and 33 floor votes since she joined the House in 2021 — about 196 in all. A few line up with bouts of COVID in January 2022 and April 2026. The vast majority are unexplained.

Committee votes are usually left out of a member's public attendance record. So a representative can skip 163 of them and still show up in the data as reliably present.

What she missed

Hinson sits on the House Appropriations Committee. That is the committee that decides what the federal government funds. Here is a sample of the votes she wasn't there for.

May 2025 — funding for the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. The committee manager explained that the increase was meant to handle the surge in AI-generated child sexual abuse material and the strain it was putting on law enforcement. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received more than 400,000 reports involving generative AI in 2025, and identified more than 275 children as direct victims of AI-generated abuse material across 2024 and 2025.

September 2025 — three votes on violence against women in one day. One to increase funding to enforce the Violence Against Women Act. One to increase funding for transitional housing grants for domestic abuse victims. One to fund a community-based violence intervention program. She missed all three. Domestic violence deaths in Iowa rose between 2021 and 2024.

Funding for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Skipped.

Health care. A 2023 vote on the doctor shortage in the Veterans Affairs system. A 2025 vote to increase funding for senior nutrition programs. A 2025 vote to fund a program that trains physicians to work in rural areas — in a state where rural hospitals are the whole argument.

2026 — data center transparency. An amendment that would have required data centers to publicly disclose construction plans and directed the Energy Department to analyze what they do to utility bills. Iowa now has 116 data centers, and several Iowa communities have passed moratoriums to stop more from being built. Hinson's position, as she told KGAN this month, is that data center rules "are best decided at the local level" — which is a curious thing to say about an amendment whose entire purpose was to give local communities the information to decide.

The fundraiser

The clearest one is from this summer.

On June 24, 2026, the House Appropriations Committee voted on 11 amendments to the 2027 Defense Appropriations bill — the bill that funds the Pentagon. Hinson missed seven of them.

The amendments covered how the Defense Department spends its money, the proposed drawdown of American troops stationed in Europe, and changes to which military officers are eligible for promotion.

An email from Grand Valley Consulting, a firm that advises Republican candidates, shows Hinson had a fundraising lunch scheduled that same day with West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito. Tickets ran from $1,000 to $2,500.

The progressive outlet MidasTouch posted video of Hinson walking into the event while the voting was still going on.

What she has made time for

Hinson is running for the Senate seat Joni Ernst is vacating. She has not held a single town hall with constituents this year. She has held plenty of campaign events.

She has also had time for other things. Within an hour of Josh Turek winning the Democratic Senate primary, her campaign was out with an attack ad making three claims he has never supported. At the Plymouth County Fair, she had time to defend Medicaid work requirements and suggest people here illegally were getting benefits — something federal law already bars.

The pattern isn't that Hinson is lazy. She is working extremely hard. She is working on getting a promotion.

Why committee votes are the ones that matter

If you only watch floor votes, you miss most of Congress.

By the time a spending bill reaches the House floor, the decisions have been made. The amendment that would have added money for the child exploitation task force either got adopted in committee or it didn't. The domestic violence housing grants either survived markup or they were gone. A member who shows up for the final floor vote and skips the markup has arrived after everything was settled.

That is where 163 of Hinson's absences are. It is also the part of the job voters have the least visibility into, which is exactly why an above-average attendance figure can sit on a campaign website next to a record like this one.

A recent Emerson College poll has Hinson leading Turek by three points. Iowans have until November to ask her one question, which she has so far had no forum to answer: where was she?

Source

Ashley Hinson missed almost 200 votes in Congress — Jesse Valentine, American Journal News, August 13, 2026. Photo: Nick Rohlman / The Gazette via AP.

90,000 People in Gabe Evans's District Get Food Stamps. He Voted to Cut Them and Won't Say How Many Lose Out.

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:58:22 +0000

On the morning of August 11, 2026, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins came to Henderson, Colorado, for a private roundtable with members of the state's agriculture community. It was the third time in six weeks that Gabe Evans had shared a stage with a member of Donald Trump's cabinet.

9NEWS reporter Marshall Zelinger was there, and he asked Evans a simple question.

"Congressman, you voted to make it harder for families to receive SNAP benefits, and those changes take effect in less than two months. There are about 90,000 people in your Congressional District who receive SNAP benefits. How many do you think, or do you expect to lose these food benefits? And why is that a positive for taxpayers?"

Evans did not answer. Rollins stepped back to the microphone — "I'm sorry, I know you wanted to talk to him first, but I live this every single day" — and took it in his place. As 9NEWS put it: "Before Evans could say whether he knew the number, Rollins explained the work requirement changes."

He was asked again. He still did not answer. The second time, he told the reporter: "If you want an answer from that, you'll have to answer the question that I asked you last year at the state Capitol first, thanks, Marshall."

That's it. That's the whole answer. Ninety thousand of his own constituents are two months out from a change he voted for, and the man who voted for it will not say — or does not know — how many of them lose their groceries.

The subject he changed it to

Instead of the number, Evans wanted to talk about something else.

"Let's look at the SNAP error rate. Under [John] Hickenlooper, as governor, it was about 5%, under [Jared] Polis, it's ballooned up to 10%."

He said that means about $12 million a month of Colorado's roughly $120 million monthly SNAP budget isn't reaching the people who need it — "because of mismanagement here in the state of Colorado."

Here is what he left out.

Colorado's payment error rate for fiscal year 2024 was 9.97%. The national rate that same year was 10.93%. Colorado isn't an outlier. Colorado is doing better than the country as a whole. Only eight states in America came in under 6%.

So the "ballooning" Evans is describing happened nearly everywhere, and Colorado ballooned less than most. Blaming one governor for it is like blaming your mayor for a heat wave.

And the second thing he left out is bigger: an error rate is not a fraud rate. The Congressional Research Service says it in plain words: "This rate is not a measure of fraud." It counts overpayments and underpayments — a caseworker misapplying a rule, a family reporting the wrong number on a form, a typo. Even the USDA describes it as program waste, not fraud.

We've walked through exactly how that formula works and the trap buried inside it. A state gets punished for paying a family a little too much. A state gets punished not at all for wrongly cutting an eligible family off. So the cheapest way for any state to drive its error rate down is to deny more people and process fewer of them.

Evans is holding up a number that rewards kicking people off food assistance, and using it as his reason for kicking people off food assistance.

What's actually coming to Colorado

About 612,700 Coloradans get SNAP every month — roughly one in ten people in the state. In Colorado, 1 in 6 kids already faces hunger.

Ninety thousand of those people live in Evans's district, Colorado's 8th. It is one of the most closely divided House seats in the country.

Nationally, the cuts Evans voted for are already showing up. More than 4 million Americans have dropped off SNAP in nine months — while unemployment stayed flat and grocery prices kept climbing. The researchers who study this say the pattern doesn't match a jobs story at all. It matches a program that got harder to get into.

And as the reporter noted, the new work requirement rules land in weeks, not years.

Evans could have said "I expect a few thousand people in my district to lose benefits, and here's why I think that's worth it." That's an argument. He didn't make it. He recited a statistic about paperwork.

He's done this before

The second time Zelinger pressed him, Evans referred back to a May 2025 news conference at the Colorado state Capitol. At that one, he was asked how taking people off Medicaid and pushing them into emergency rooms helps medical providers in his district.

His answer then: "Do you want illegal immigrants on Medicaid, Marshall?"

Between that day and this one — more than a year — Evans never said how many of his constituents were at risk of losing health coverage either.

He does keep making claims about it. He voted for Trump's budget bill and then told Colorado it wouldn't hurt anyone's health care, calling the warnings "fear mongering." A year later, nurses named 12 Colorado hospitals at risk, including ones in his own district.

The pattern is the same both times: vote for the cut, refuse to count the cost, attack the person asking.

Three cabinet secretaries. Zero open town halls.

Evans told 9NEWS he has personally done more than 300 in-person meetings, town halls, roundtables and site visits, that his staff has held roughly 2,500 more across Colorado, and about 200 in Washington.

When Zelinger asked why he can find time for Trump cabinet officials but hasn't held a general public town hall anyone can show up to, Evans said: "Incorrect. We had a text go out to everybody for a town hall that we did with the secretary of energy, just a couple of weeks ago."

9NEWS could not find a record of an in-person town hall open to the general public. What they did find was a June 29 event hosted by the America First Policy Institute — a conservative organization founded by Brooke Rollins, the same secretary standing next to him in Henderson. Evans's campaign did not answer a follow-up asking whether there was some other public town hall with Energy Secretary Chris Wright, or what "a text go out to everybody" meant.

None of this is new for him. Evans went his first three months in Congress without holding a town hall at all, and when he finally held a telephone-only one on April 2, 2025, it came "after weeks of calls from some voters in his district" — making him the last member of Colorado's entire congressional delegation to hold one.

Three weeks after that, more than 100 people gathered at a "People's Town Hall" in Thornton. Evans didn't come. So they put their questions to a cardboard cutout of him instead. A hospice nurse asked it: "Hey Gabe, did you know that 25% of your constituents … are on Medicaid?"

Who he's making time for

Three Trump cabinet members have come through Colorado's 8th District in six weeks: Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Homeland Security's Markwayne Mullin, and now Rollins. Evans is in one of the most competitive races in the country, facing Democrat Manny Rutinel in November.

He has time for the cabinet. He has time for a conservative think tank's event where the questions were moderated. He has time to lecture a reporter about a state error rate that is better than the national one.

He does not have an answer for the 90,000 people in his district who are about to find out whether they still get to eat.

Source

Marshall Zelinger, "After voting for SNAP benefit changes, does Rep. Gabe Evans know how many in his district will lose food assistance?", 9NEWS, August 11, 2026. Photo: 9NEWS/KUSA.

A Maine Woman Wrote Susan Collins Again and Again About Her Detained Husband. She Got Back a Newsletter.

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:30:08 +0000

On August 11, 2026, more than 150 people lined Main Street outside Susan Collins' office in Biddeford, Maine.

They were there about a vote. In June, Collins voted to give U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement roughly $70 billion in new funding with no reforms attached — one of the Republican senators who did. They were also there about a killing. On July 13, an ICE officer shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian father, during a vehicle stop in the middle of Biddeford. He was not the person ICE was looking for.

But the moment from that protest worth sitting with is smaller than either of those things.

Seven months, and a newsletter

Alessia Gaspar Da Silva's husband, Marcos, was taken by ICE in January. He is still in custody.

She told the crowd what those months have been like for him: fed once every 30 hours, denied medical care, moved to different states without anyone telling her.

"He's been gone for seven months. It feels like a lifetime," she said.

Then she said what happened when she asked her senator for help. She reached out to Collins' office repeatedly. What came back was a newsletter, listing the senator's accomplishments.

"Collins has not done anything. She has no accountability. No transparency. No transparency for the people that are … being terrorized."

A constituent whose husband has been held for seven months wrote her senator and received a list of that senator's achievements. That is not a policy disagreement. That is a constituent service failure, and it is the kind of thing a 30-year incumbent is supposed to be good at.

Why the bodycam promise lands badly here

Collins has an answer ready when Maine asks her about ICE. Two and a half weeks after Guerrero was killed, she announced that ICE would deploy body cameras nationwide by the end of August, and that "at my request" the agency had agreed to send Maine's first.

We went through that claim when she made it. The short version: at 2:48 in the morning on June 5, the Senate voted on an amendment setting aside at least $300 million to put body cameras on immigration officers and to make the footage available to Congress and to the people filmed. Collins voted against it. Less than two hours later she voted for the $70 billion with no strings attached.

The agents in Biddeford were not wearing body cameras. There is no body camera footage of what happened to Guerrero.

So when Collins offers Maine a bodycam announcement, she is offering a fix for a gap she voted twice to leave open.

What the neighbors saw

Monica Davis lives a few blocks from Guerrero's family. She was helping a friend move when she saw a girl running down the road saying, "They've just killed someone, ICE just killed someone in the street."

"I will just never forget that moment of discovering that it had happened right here in the center of town, right next to our home."

Pam Ericson teaches in Lewiston public schools and came from Bath. She described what the enforcement surge has done to her classroom: "I work with kids who just came to the United States, and they don't come to school. I have to give them rides, their families won't go to work. It's very scary."

State Sen. Henry Ingwersen of York County was blunter: "Susan's vote to fund ICE with no strings attached was shameful."

The hearing down the street

The protest happened the same day Rep. Chellie Pingree announced that members of Congress will hold a field hearing in Biddeford on ICE's use of force in the Guerrero case. It is set for 11 a.m. on Monday, August 17, at Biddeford High School's Little Theater, and it is open to the public. Pingree will be joined by Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, and Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts.

Biddeford Mayor Liam LaFountain said he hopes Republicans show up too:

"Johan's family and the people of Biddeford deserve a full and independent understanding of what occurred. Federal authority must come with federal accountability, and Congress has an important role to play in providing that oversight when the exercise of federal authority results in the death of a member of our community."

The family's attorney, Ben Gideon, told Maine Public that the family is cooperating with the Maine Attorney General's investigation, but that no federal investigators have reached out to them.

The gap

Susan Collins' whole political identity rests on being the senator who is different — the moderate who breaks with her party when Maine needs her to.

Here is what Maine got. She voted against $300 million for body cameras and for footage the public could see. She voted for $70 billion with no oversight. An ICE officer killed a young father in a Maine downtown. She announced a bodycam program as her own achievement. A woman whose husband has been detained for seven months got a newsletter.

And on August 17 there will be a hearing about all of it, in the same city as that office, open to anyone who wants to come.

Source

Biddeford protest targets Sen. Collins over ICE funding by Eesha Pendharkar, Maine Morning Star, August 11, 2026. Photo: Eesha Pendharkar/Maine Morning Star.

Stephanie Bice Chairs the Subcommittee on Talking to Constituents. She Won't Stand in a Room With Hers.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:08:43 +0000

There is a subcommittee in the U.S. House whose job is figuring out how members of Congress should talk to the people who elected them. It is called the Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation, and Stephanie Bice is its chairwoman.

Right now, through the end of this month, that subcommittee is asking the public for ideas. The August 3 announcement says Bice and Ranking Member Norma Torres are "seeking actionable ideas to modernize how the House and the Legislative Branch, generally, work on behalf of the American People," and are "particularly interested in bold, creative ideas." Submissions close August 31.

Here's a bold, creative idea for the chairwoman: stand in a room in Oklahoma City and answer questions from the people who live there.

She has been asked that, on the record. Her answer was that the phone reaches more people.

What she told a constituent who asked

On a telephone town hall in late July 2025, a caller got through — by the caller's own account, only by pretending to ask about something else — and put it to her directly. Oklahoma Watch's Em Luetkemeyer reported the exchange:

"Without dodging my question or giving me the okey doke, can you tell me why you are not holding in-person town halls, where you can look your constituents in the face, eye-to-eye, and answer tough questions?"

"These town halls, telephone town halls, are a joke, and are screened, carefully screened. I had to pretend to be asking another question. I would have never gotten this question in."

Bice did not say she would consider it. She defended the phone line, and the reason she led with was arithmetic:

"Let me make this very clear: I can reach several thousand constituents when I dial out for these telephone town halls. I am never going to get that kind of engagement if I'm doing in-person town halls. I am lucky to get a couple hundred, and that's on a great day," Bice said. "I do not dodge my constituents."

She said it was her 30th telephone town hall, and, later in the call: "I do these because they are effective, and I will continue to do them."

Note the argument. It is a volume argument: thousands beats hundreds, so the format that reaches thousands wins. She offered two more reasons on that call — that the phone lets committee chairmen dial in to help answer questions, and that seniors can listen from home instead of driving somewhere on a winter night. Not one of the three is a reason she cannot also stand in a room.

Her own witness testified that the volume argument is wrong

On December 17, 2025, Bice gaveled in a hearing in room 1310 of the Longworth Building. Its title: "The Future of Constituent Engagement with Congress."

In her opening statement, she said this:

"Communicating with our constituents is absolutely essential for doing our jobs, the jobs we were elected to do. Assisting with casework, responding to questions, and explaining our positions on the issues of the day requires interacting with our constituents in effective and meaningful ways."

And this:

"Rather than assume that they will read our letters and emails, we should figure out how to meet our constituents where they are at today, tomorrow, and into the future."

Then she introduced her first witness. She read his credentials into the record herself: Dr. Michael Neblo of Ohio State University, who — in her own words from the dais — "has designed 'Deliberative Town Halls' for the U.S. Congress, the Chilean Constitutional Convention, and the Australian, Nigerian, and U.K. legislatures."

Neblo's testimony was about exactly the thing Bice had told a caller, months earlier, was not worth her time. He told her subcommittee that at best only one in five constituents contacted their member last year, that just 13% of citizens trust Congress, and that the silence isn't apathy:

"They are frustrated because they believe Congress does not care what people like them think and only listens to organized interests and party activists, so they see no reason to engage."

Then the numbers that answer Bice's volume argument directly. Only 9% of surveyed citizens said they wouldn't engage if invited to a forum they believed was authentic and consequential. When his team runs deliberative town halls, he testified, "previously disengaged citizens prepare, show up, and contribute more than those who already call your office," and 94% call the experience "very valuable for our democracy."

And on which channels people actually respect:

"Citizens rated such forums as the most legitimate and effective way to communicate. Mass emails and social media scored lower."

Neblo also drew the distinction that sits at the center of this whole story:

"Lobbyists might be clients of Congress, but citizens want to be partners in self-government."

That went into the record of Bice's own hearing, from the witness she invited. Then she went back to dialing out.

Four months later, she got money for it

On April 17, 2026, Bice and Torres announced that funding had been approved for a "first-of-its-kind Constituent Engagement Innovation Project" — a plan to let members pick from a wider range of vendors for the software that handles constituent mail.

Bice's quote in the release:

"This project represents a major breakthrough in improving how lawmakers engage with constituents. Having easy access to the latest tools and services for connecting with constituents can dramatically improve our district outreach efforts and ensure we are engaging constituents where they are."

Where her constituents are is Oklahoma City. A software procurement reform is a fine thing to do. It is not a substitute for being in the room, and Neblo told her committee why: an office can have "stellar customer service and constituents will still find that problematic," because "citizens want to be partners in self-government," not customers.

The one in-person event she scheduled was in the wrong district

A few weeks after that phone call, an in-person "Coffee with Congresswoman Bice" turned up on the calendar for September 26, hosted by the WesTen District.

Her Democratic opponent, 2020 Oklahoma Teacher of the Year Jena Nelson, posted a map. As Raw Story reported, the venue was outside Oklahoma's 5th District.

"Well, folks, I was going to acknowledge that my opponent finally scheduled an in-person forum event in CD-5 after four long years, but it turns out the venue isn't even in CD-5," Nelson wrote. "Apparently, she can't remember what she gerrymandered out of her own district."

The event came off the host's website. Nelson later posted an email from the venue: "WesTen District has cancelled the September 26 Coffee with Congresswoman Bice due to scheduling conflicts."

By Nelson's count, that was the first in-person forum Bice had put on the calendar in four years. It was in the wrong district, and then it was gone.

Why this is worse than an ordinary dodge

Plenty of members hide from their constituents. We've written about Jim Baird, who skipped the town hall 250 people held for him, and about Kevin Hern, whose office wouldn't say where he was while he toured a foreign mega-prison. Bice's colleagues in Oklahoma are not a high bar.

What makes Bice different is the gavel. She is not a backbencher avoiding a hard room. She holds the chair of the one subcommittee in the House whose stated purpose is improving how Congress connects with the American people. She convened the hearing. She picked the witness. She wrote the press release about engaging constituents "where they are." She is, this month, publicly inviting the country to send her ideas about it.

And the answer she has already given to the most basic idea anyone could send her — look your constituents in the face — is that the numbers are better on the phone.

What Oklahomans wanted to ask about

It's worth remembering what the questions were. That July 2025 call was mostly about the budget bill Republicans had just passed. Oklahoma hospital leaders were warning it could cut federal reimbursements to Oklahoma hospitals by $8.7 billion over the next decade and eliminate nearly 15,000 jobs. Oklahoma Watch reported the same bill put 131,000 Oklahomans at risk of losing SNAP benefits.

Those are the questions the caller said had to be disguised to get asked at all. Meanwhile Bice's other signature project has been a resolution declaring the national anthem should only be sung in English, which has sat untouched in committee for over a year.

We deserve a representative who will stand in a room in her own district and take the question she doesn't want.

Sources

The Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation Seeks Input on the Future of Congressional Modernization, Committee on House Administration, August 3, 2026; the official transcript of the December 17, 2025 hearing "The Future of Constituent Engagement with Congress"; and Em Luetkemeyer's reporting for Oklahoma Watch, published by KOSU on August 4, 2025. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Pete Stauber Bragged About His Union Bill at the Teamsters Hall. Then He Voted Twice to Kill It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:54:24 +0000

There is a way to tell whether a politician actually wants a bill to pass. It isn't the press release. It's the boring procedural vote nobody covers — the one that decides whether the bill gets a vote at all.

On June 9, 2026, Pete Stauber faced that vote twice on his own bill. He voted no both times.

The bill was his

In September 2025, Stauber co-authored the Faster Labor Contracts Act with Rep. Donald Norcross, a New Jersey Democrat. It's a real bill about a real problem: workers vote to form a union, and the employer simply runs out the clock instead of bargaining. Under the bill, an employer has to start negotiating within 10 days, a federal mediator steps in after 90 days, and after another 30 days the dispute goes to binding arbitration.

Stauber's own news release said it takes an average of 458 days to reach a first contract. He leaned hard on his biography:

"As a former police office who organized my union, I've seen firsthand how unfair and frustrating this process can be for some. That's why I am proud to partner with Representative Norcross to hold employers accountable and ensure workers have a real voice at the negotiating table, because when our workers succeed, our entire nation succeeds."

That's from the Mesabi Tribune's write-up of the September 2025 introduction, which also carried praise for him from Teamsters general president Sean O'Brien and from Local 346 in Duluth. Nearly 20 national unions endorsed the bill.

Good bill. Good instinct. Then it needed him.

The night at the union hall

On the evening of Wednesday, January 28, 2026, Stauber went to the Teamsters Local 346 hall in Duluth's Lincoln Park neighborhood to talk to members about the bill.

Constituents heard he'd be there. They filled the sidewalks on both sides of the building in subzero cold, holding signs, hoping for a word about ICE operations in Minnesota and about copper-nickel mining.

They didn't get one. Stauber left through the back.

The Duluth News Tribune editorial board wrote it up two days later, and it is worth reading in full. Two things happened that night:

The press was shut out. Only WDIO-TV was let in. Reporters and photojournalists from other outlets — including card-carrying members of the Minnesota Newspaper and Communications Guild — were stopped at the door. A TV journalist from Northern News Now was physically pushed out by a man in a Teamsters jacket. (Local 346's secretary-treasurer, Zak Radzak, apologized: "We do not condone the physical contact of anyone.")
Stauber snuck out the back rather than take questions from the people standing outside.

The editorial board's verdict on the congressman was blunt: he "has long been avoiding gatherings open to the public," and his tele-town halls — "with attendees handpicked and the questions of the softball variety" — are not a substitute. "Controlled conference calls aren't accountability."

One constituent outside the hall told the paper: "You don't get much opportunity because he has not made himself available to any of us for a very long time."

Stauber's office didn't respond to the News Tribune's request for comment about the meeting.

So: a room full of union members got the pitch. The neighbors outside in the cold got a back door.

The two votes that decided it

The bill never got scheduled for a floor vote, so Norcross had to force it there with a discharge petition — a rare maneuver where a majority of the House signs a paper to yank a bill out of leadership's hands. The 218th signature went on it on May 20, 2026.

The Teamsters thanked the seven Republicans who signed it by name: Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Brian Fitzpatrick, Don Bacon, Max Miller, Riley Moore, and Rob Bresnahan.

The bill's Republican co-author was not on that list.

That set up two procedural votes on June 9, and both of them were the real vote. Here is the official record from the House Clerk:

Roll call	Question	Result	Stauber
2026-212	On Motion to Discharge, H.Res. 1140	Passed, 220–199	Nay
2026-215	On Agreeing to the Resolution, H.Res. 1140	Passed, 221–201	Nay
2026-216	On Passage, H.R. 5408	Passed, 230–193	Yea

On the motion to discharge, exactly 9 Republicans voted yes. On the rule, 11 did. Stauber — the bill's Republican co-author — was in neither group.

Then, once the bill was safely on the floor and 210 Democrats had guaranteed it would pass, he voted yes. Twenty Republicans did.

Read the sequence again. He voted twice to keep his own bill from getting a vote. Had his position won, the Faster Labor Contracts Act would have died in Speaker Johnson's desk drawer without ever reaching the floor. Only after that failed did he vote for it.

Then he took the credit

The next day, Stauber's office put out a press release headlined "Stauber Legislation to Speed Up First Contracts for New Unions Passes House."

Timothy W. Andrew, a Duluth attorney who has represented labor unions since 1992 and is a state bar–certified labor and employment law specialist, called it out in the News Tribune in June:

"He was happy to be a cosponsor of the bill when it made him look independent and pro-worker. … That is the definition of having it both ways. Union members know the difference between solidarity and political convenience."

Andrew's point about the press release: "What he disingenuously failed to mention was that when the bill needed help getting to the floor, he voted against it."

His advice to voters in the 8th District: "judge Stauber not by the headline he posted afterward, but by the vote he cast when the bill's future was on the line."

We have watched another Republican work this exact play — Maria Elvira Salazar handing out oversized novelty checks for money that came from bills she voted against, then telling a camera she couldn't remember the votes. The mechanics are identical. Vote where the party wants you, then send the press release where the voters are.

What "friend of labor" is supposed to mean

Stauber's district is union country — the Iron Range, the Duluth port, the building trades. He built his political identity on being the Republican who organized his police department's union. He sells that story constantly.

The rest of his record on working people is easier to read than the June 9 sequence:

He voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill, saying he would "not be complicit in paving a destructive and irreversible path towards socialism" — then, weeks later, announced nearly $9.4 million in FAA grants to 29 airports in his district without mentioning that the money came from the bill he'd voted against.
When Trump doubled steel tariffs to 50%, Stauber thanked him for protecting "our way of life on the Iron Range." In February 2026 he voted against ending Trump's tariff emergency on Canada — Minnesota's largest export market, which bought nearly $7.1 billion in Minnesota goods in 2023. That resolution passed anyway, 219–211, with six Republicans crossing over. He wasn't one.
In February 2026, union workers stood outside his Hermantown office asking him to address what ICE raids were doing to the region.

The Faster Labor Contracts Act is the clearest case because he co-wrote it. He knew what it did, he knew who it helped, and he told a hall full of Teamsters he was for it. When the House asked him whether it should get a vote, he said no. Twice.

We deserve better.

Sources

Duluth News Tribune, Local View: Stauber's faster-contracts flip-flop was pure hypocrisy, by Timothy W. Andrew (June 27, 2026)
Duluth News Tribune Editorial Board, Our View: Snubs by Stauber, Teamsters unacceptable (Jan. 30, 2026)
Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives — roll call votes 212, 215 and 216 (June 9, 2026)

Photo: Constituents rally outside the Teamsters Local 346 hall in Duluth while Rep. Pete Stauber met with members inside, Jan. 28, 2026. Dan Williamson / Duluth Media Group.

The Sault Ste. Marie Area Lost $82.9 Million to Trump's Canada Tariffs. Jack Bergman Hasn't Said a Word About Tariffs in Two Years.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:52:00 +0000

There is one road crossing between Michigan and Canada for hundreds of miles in either direction. It's the Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge, and it connects two cities with the same name — one in Michigan, one in Ontario. People up there don't really think of it as a border.

"We don't like to say there's a border there, because we're twin cities. We're one family, the countries of Canada and the United States," Don Gerrie, the mayor of the Michigan Sault, told a crowd of about 1,100 people gathered for the annual bridge walk in late June.

Now look at what's happened to that bridge under Trump's trade war, as ProPublica reported on July 31, 2026:

270,000 fewer crossings last year — nearly a 24% drop from 2024, a steeper fall than at any of Michigan's other border crossings.
At least $82.9 million in local spending gone, according to an estimate from the International Bridge Administration that runs the span — $62.7 million of it on the Michigan side, $20.2 million on the Ontario side.
Halfway through 2026, commercial traffic has fallen nearly another 15%.

The bridge pays for its own upkeep out of tolls. Its own five-year plan, issued in December, warned that "border challenges negatively affecting bridge traffic, trade and tourism may significantly reduce bridge revenue or increase expenditures beyond operational sustainability."

The person who represents all of this in Congress is Jack Bergman.

What he has said about it: nothing

ProPublica went looking for what Bergman has had to say about the tariffs hammering his own district. Here is what they found.

Since Trump started his second term, there has been no mention of tariffs at all in the press releases, articles, and op-eds on Bergman's website. Not one. The only times Sault Ste. Marie comes up on his site in that entire period are an infrastructure project and a February 2025 letter to the president about a man he said was a Venezuelan gang member crossing the border.

ProPublica contacted Bergman, his office, and his campaign — multiple times — asking what he plans to do about what's happening to his constituents. They got no response.

He didn't show up at the bridge walk, either.

He used to talk about Canada constantly

This is the part that makes the silence deliberate rather than accidental.

In 2020, Bergman was appointed to an interparliamentary group that exists so American and Canadian lawmakers can talk to each other. He used the occasion to brag about the Soo bridge as a place where "millions" cross every year "to conduct business, shop, work and enjoy what each country has to offer."

During Trump's first term he vowed to work with the Canadian Parliament to "expand market access between both our nations." He championed Trump's own North American trade deal, pointing to what it would do for Michigan's farmers, small businesses, and consumers.

That's the same trade deal Canada's prime minister, Mark Carney, says the U.S. tariff campaign started out "in direct violation" of. The Trump administration declined to give the pact a long-term extension when it came up for review this year.

Bergman was loud when the trade relationship was a win he could take credit for. He went quiet the second it became a cost his constituents had to eat.

Who's actually paying

Wilda Hopper co-owns Bird's Eye Outfitters in the Michigan Sault. Between fewer Canadian customers and rising costs, she told ProPublica her business is down about 27% from last summer. The hurt is worst in the off-season, when a gear shop and cafe in the U.P. survives on locals — and for her, "locals" has always included the people on the Ontario side.

Michael Broadway, a geographer and professor emeritus at Northern Michigan University, put the cause plainly: "What Canadians have done, of course, is they're boycotting the U.S." Ordinary people can't do much about federal policy, he said, "but what they can do is they can vote with their feet." Nationwide, the number of Canadians returning home from the United States dropped more than 25% last year.

It isn't only tourism. Michigan's agriculture department found that exports to Canada fell 12.3% last year, which its report called a sign of "severe strain with a country that is our strongest trading partner." Agriculture is Michigan's second-largest industry. We've written about what the same trade war is doing to Michigan's 10,000 soybean farms, and about the 119-year-old New Hampshire dairy farm the Canada tariffs are crushing — the pattern is not unique to the U.P. It's just especially brutal there, because the U.P. has one bridge.

Even Republicans who hold state office are saying it out loud. State Sen. John Damoose, a Republican who represents the area in Lansing, told ProPublica: "I can tell you that I've spoken to business after business up in the Sault Ste. Marie area, and in the eastern Upper Peninsula, and they're all feeling the pressure from this. Mackinac Island's feeling the pressure, everybody is feeling the heat from this deterioration in our relationship with Canada."

Damoose remembered that after last year's brutal ice storm, Canadians drove across the Soo bridge to help Michiganders put the electrical grid back up. "This is our best friend in the entire world," he said.

He'll blame Canada — just not Trump

Bergman is not incapable of criticizing Canada. Two weeks before the ProPublica story ran, he and three Michigan colleagues wrote a letter demanding Canada do more about wildfire smoke drifting over the state — a letter that came with a 0% League of Conservation Voters score attached to his name.

So the pattern isn't that Bergman avoids Canada as a subject. It's that he'll pick a fight with Canada when Trump is picking one, and go silent when Trump's policy is the thing costing the Michigan side of his district $62.7 million.

The other reason nobody can ask him about it

There's a simple reason this has gone on for two years without Bergman ever having to answer for it.

He doesn't appear to have held a public town hall in the district since his first year in office — 2017. Nine years. Constituents told ProPublica they've had almost no chance to talk to him in person.

That is not an accident either. Asked about town halls last year, Bergman reached back to 2017 and said "the left, the resist movement" had "disrupted good people who were trying to ask questions" — "like a bunch of middle-school kids who weren't paying attention to the teacher or the principal." Then: "we will always be available to meet with constituents and small groups and talk about issue things — but we're not doing drama, sorry."

When voters in Escanaba organized a town hall anyway, he didn't come. They put out an empty chair. Two more were lined up in Houghton and Traverse City, where nobody expected him either.

There's one more detail ProPublica turned up. Bergman owns a house in Louisiana, and has faced years of allegations that Michigan isn't really where he lives. Julie Hoffmeyer, who used to work on Bergman's staff and backed one of his primary challengers, said the congressman calls his property in the western Upper Peninsula a "cabin" or a "camp." Bergman has answered past challenges to his residency by saying his Michigan home is his primary residence and that he's a registered voter in the state.

Where this leaves the U.P.

Bergman won his August 4 primary with Trump's endorsement. His reelection is also backed by the Michigan and U.S. chambers of commerce. He faces Democrat Callie Barr again in November.

His constituents are down a quarter of their border traffic, $62.7 million in spending, and a working relationship with the only country they share a bridge with. Their congressman has issued not one word about the policy that did it — while separately facing an ethics complaint from two of his own constituents over his top aides' side consulting business, and while refusing for nine years to stand in a room and take questions.

A congressman who won't say anything about the biggest economic story in his district isn't representing it. We deserve better.

Source

Anna Clark, "Trump's Canada Tariffs Decimate Border Crossings, Business in Upper Michigan" — ProPublica, July 31, 2026. Photography by Emily Iris Elconin for ProPublica.

Brian Fitzpatrick Has Announced One Open Town Hall Since 2017. On National TV, He Called Them a "Three-Ring Circus" Funded by Dark Money.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:59:00 +0000

Brian Fitzpatrick does a lot of television. He is a regular on the Sunday shows, and he is good at them — calm, bipartisan-sounding, the co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus.

On March 9, 2025, he was on CBS's Face the Nation, and Margaret Brennan asked him a question he does not get asked in Bucks County, because in Bucks County he does not stand in a room where anyone can ask him anything.

Her question, from the transcript:

"Earlier this week, we saw guidance from the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee urging members to hold virtual town halls, suggesting that holding them in person was not a good idea. Will you still hold town halls with your constituents?"

He got out four words — "Yeah, we, we--" — before Brennan cut in to say that some town halls "have gotten quite heated recently." Then he answered:

"Oh, I know. No. I think every member needs to find the best way to communicate with our constituents, and there's a number of ways to do that. I think what Chairman Hudson is referring to are the what's turning out to be a circus, a three-ring circus, where you go to a high school gymnasium. The protesters show up. They hold signs up, and you have legitimate concerns from some other people that are never heard because they're getting shouted down by people that are there to make a spectacle, oftentimes that are funded by some of these dark money groups. So there's- it's about communicating to your constituents in a way that you can get your message out, that you can hear their concerns. And every single district does it different, depending on- on where they're at."

Two things are worth pulling out of that.

One: he never answered the question

Brennan asked whether he will hold town halls. He began to say something, was interrupted, and never came back to it — the Courier Times, watching the same segment, wrote that he "appeared to start saying he would." What he gave instead was a description of why other people's town halls are bad and the observation that every district does it differently. He never said yes, and he never said no.

The next day, the Bucks County Courier Times reported that a search of the press releases on his official website had turned up exactly one announcement for an open, in-person town hall. It was from August 2017. None were scheduled.

He was first sworn in in January 2017. That is one announced open town hall across a career now in its tenth year.

What he does hold are telephone town halls.

Two: the "dark money" claim came with no evidence

"Oftentimes that are funded by some of these dark money groups."

Fitzpatrick named no group, produced no funding record, and offered no example. He said it on national television about people in his own district who want to ask him questions.

This is a familiar move now. In Illinois, Mike Bost told a hometown paper "we know that the protestors are paid — there's not a question," and the evidence he gave was expensive-looking signs and unnamed "United States intelligence". The logic is the same in both cases, and so is the function: once you decide the people objecting are hired, you don't have to answer any of them.

Here is who was actually objecting in Bucks County.

What his constituents did

March 5, 2025 — four days before the Face the Nation appearance — more than 100 volunteers with Indivisible Bucks County went to his Middletown office and delivered 700 letters from constituents, asking him to push back on the administration and to hold a town hall. Some carried signs reading "town hall now."

His office did not respond to the Courier Times' questions about the letters, or about whether he would schedule a town hall.

March 19, 2025 — hundreds of residents packed Doylestown Borough Hall for a town hall his constituents organized themselves, held during congressional district work time. Every chair and much of the floor was full.

One chair was left empty, with his name on it.

Local speakers went through what people had come to ask him about: cuts to Title One school funding, libraries and museums, immigration enforcement in the county, the SAVE Act's voter registration restrictions, cancelled farm programs, Medicaid, federal employees who had been fired, and threats to LGBTQ+ rights.

Nobody shouted anybody down. There was nobody there to shout down.

The part that doesn't add up

Fitzpatrick's whole political identity is that he is the reachable Republican — the one who works across the aisle, who talks to everyone, who co-chairs the caucus whose entire premise is talking to people you disagree with.

He is also, by his own website's record, a congressman who has announced one open town hall since 2017.

He will take a question from Margaret Brennan on a Sunday morning. He will not take one from a retiree in a high school gymnasium in Doylestown.

And the reason he gave for the difference, on that Sunday morning, was that the retiree is probably being paid.

What a town hall is for

There is nothing in the Constitution requiring a member of Congress to stand in a gym and get yelled at. It is not a legal duty.

It is, though, the one setting where anyone who shows up gets to ask, the follow-ups aren't controlled, and the person asking gets to decide what matters. A telephone town hall is a broadcast. A press hit is a broadcast. Only the room is a conversation.

Fitzpatrick represents one of the most closely divided districts in America. Those are precisely the constituents with the most to say to him, and they have been asking to say it in person for years.

Seven hundred letters, an empty chair, and one announced town hall in nine years.

Source

Chris Ullery, "Brian Fitzpatrick: 'dark money groups' turn town halls into 'circus;' no plans to hold one", Bucks County Courier Times, March 10, 2025; the town hall exchange is quoted from the CBS News Face the Nation transcript of March 9, 2025. Photo: Bucks County Beacon.

"It's Not That People Don't Like Me. It's That People Don't Know Me Yet." Monica De La Cruz Has Never Held an In-Person Town Hall.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:39:12 +0000

In May 2026, at a private fundraiser, Monica De La Cruz told her donors what her own pollster had found.

"We ran the poll and what we found was that I am up by only one point."

"One point. And I said, 'Oh, sweet Lord Jesus.' Right? That's not good."

Someone in the room recorded it. Punchbowl News reporter Max Cohen obtained the audio, and Raw Story reported it on June 9, 2026.

She had an explanation ready for the donors: redistricting had handed her a lot of new territory. Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, put the same point to the Texas Observer this way — "Eighty percent of that district she hasn't represented in the last two … election cycles. They really don't know her." So, she told the room:

"It's not that people don't like me. It's that people don't know me yet."

And the conclusion she drew from that is that fundraising had become critical.

There is another way to fix the problem of people not knowing you. You go to a room, in a town where they live, and you stand up and take their questions. De La Cruz has been in Congress since January 2023, and she has never done it.

The phone is the whole system

De La Cruz has told reporters plainly that this is deliberate. KRGV covered one of her phone town halls in March 2025 and reported that since she was elected to the 118th Congress, she has chosen to do them by phone because of the size of her district, which runs from Hidalgo County up along U.S. 281 toward San Antonio.

"I cannot do a town hall in each city, so this allows me to touch everybody at one time."

Nobody asked her to hold one in every city. They asked her to hold one.

Here is what "touching everybody at one time" looked like in practice on that call:

Her team picked the questions. De La Cruz described them as "questions that all of the district is interested in."
UnidosUS's Texas state director, Eric Holguin, was on the line and never got called. "I was not able to get a question in," he said. His question went into a queue.
KRGV's own reporters tried to ask a question. They were put in the queue too.
Everyone left in the queue was invited, at the end, to leave a voicemail.

Holguin's assessment: "People have legitimate concerns about Medicaid, SNAP Medicare and none of those were really addressed."

His request was modest. "We urge her to have an in-person town hall where we can have a respectful conversation, and she has an opportunity to explain why she votes a certain way."

Asked about the screening, De La Cruz explained who she thought was in the queue:

"Unfortunately, sometimes people get in the queue, and they have ill intentions and others are intentional and sincerely wanting to have clarity and information."

Taylor, the UTSA professor, told KRGV what the format signals.

"If you are engaging in this type of behavior, it suggests to me, that you are afraid of your constituents, and you are afraid to somehow be able to provide answers."

"Here is the problem, you do this long enough, people are going to get cynical and believe politicians are not representing them, or their best interest, and they believe they have something to hide."

What she told the callers about Medicaid

The screened phone call is not just a matter of style. On that same March 2025 call, De La Cruz was asked about Medicaid cuts. She answered:

"We have not made any cuts. When we voted for the budget resolution that was a top line number, it was a number."

Three months later, on July 3, 2025, she voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — the bill that turned that number into law.

Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee project that 65,193 people in Texas's 15th District will lose health coverage from the Republican cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act — 61,700 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 3,493 losing Medicaid. In the same district, 55,480 households — about 21% of all households — relied on SNAP in 2024, including 34,489 with children and 23,321 with someone 60 or older. The same bill cut that too.

The caller who was told "we have not made any cuts" has no way to follow up. That is what the queue is for.

By April 17, 2026, groups including the Latino Victory Texas Coalition and Poder Latinx were protesting outside her McAllen office over exactly this — cuts to food banks and to health coverage. Her office's response was that she is "delivering for South Texans."

What she is doing with the campaign instead

If the problem is that people don't know her, the fix she has chosen is not to meet them.

In March 2026, when Bobby Pulido won the Democratic primary, De La Cruz went on X and called him a "quinceañera act" and a "part-time Texan." She said the Democratic establishment "thinks it can buy this seat with a celebrity who brags about living in a foreign country." Her account reposted a Western Journal piece about his decade-old tweets and a New York Post item about a 2010 music video.

The quinceañera line did not land the way she meant it. In a majority-Hispanic South Texas district, Pulido treated it as an invitation, opened a page for booking requests, and — by the time the Texas Observer caught up with him in July — said he had performed at more than 50 quinces, handing out "Make Quinceañaras Great Again" hats.

Set the two side by side. Her opponent's campaign strategy is showing up at 50 family parties in the district. Hers is a fundraising appeal built on the fact that voters don't know her.

This is a party position, not a personal quirk

De La Cruz is following instructions. In March 2025 — the same month as that phone town hall — the chairman of the House Republicans' campaign arm told the entire conference to stop holding in-person town halls and switch to tele-town halls and Facebook Lives, so that video of members being confronted over Medicaid cuts would stop appearing. Ohio's Mike Carey ran a version where the phone number never got posted.

The strategy has an obvious short-term logic and one long-term cost, and De La Cruz named the cost herself, to her donors, in a room she thought was private.

People don't know her yet.

Sources

The leaked fundraiser audio was obtained by Max Cohen of Punchbowl News and reported by Raw Story on June 9, 2026. The phone town hall was reported by Sarah Cervera for KRGV Channel 5 on March 25, 2025. Photo: KRGV.

A Constituent in Angier Asked Brad Knott How He Could Vote to Cut Medicaid. His Answer Was That Congress Could Always Fix It Later.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:31:52 +0000

On September 19, 2025, WUNC's Colin Campbell wrote up a town hall that Brad Knott had held for North Carolina's 13th District.

The first sentence of the story tells you most of what you need to know:

"Instead of holding an in-person town hall, Knott took questions from his constituents over the phone for about 45 minutes."

It was his third such event since taking office in January 2025. All by telephone. To join, you registered in advance and waited for an automated call.

Then a constituent asked him about Medicaid.

The question

A resident of Angier — a small town in Harnett County, in the rural southern end of Knott's district — asked him about the Medicaid cuts in Trump's budget bill, which Knott had voted for.

"As our representative, how do you support these cuts? How do you reconcile them with the need to ensure continued access to health care for rural communities like the one I live in?"

That is a direct, specific, entirely fair question from someone who lives with the consequences.

The answer

"We allocated tens of billions of dollars if there are emergencies in rural healthcare spheres and spaces, and if there are changes that need to be made, we stand ready to do it, whether it's in Congress or the state legislature of North Carolina."

Take that apart.

"We allocated tens of billions of dollars if there are emergencies." That's the rural health fund written into the same law that made the cuts — money states have to apply for, set against a much larger permanent reduction. It's the standard answer, and we've watched it get used before: Mississippi's Michael Guest spent a recess promoting $206 million from that fund after voting for the law projected to take billions out of the state's Medicaid funding.

"If there are changes that need to be made, we stand ready to do it." He is describing a future Congress fixing a law he voted for. He was in the room when it passed. He had a vote. He used it.

"whether it's in Congress or the state legislature of North Carolina." And here the responsibility gets handed to Raleigh — to the state that will be absorbing the loss.

The other argument he made was that the provisions wouldn't take effect for two years, leaving time to adjust.

It is closer to fifteen months. Both the work requirement and the new six-month eligibility redeterminations begin with the first quarter that starts after December 31, 2026 — January 1, 2027, about fifteen months after he said it. What he has right is the part he didn't say out loud: the date falls after the next election.

What's actually coming to North Carolina

North Carolina stands to lose an estimated $49.9 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade. The Modern Medicaid Alliance puts up to 195,000 North Carolinians at risk of losing coverage.

In the same WUNC story, Governor Josh Stein is cited warning that the bill could threaten five North Carolina hospitals with closure, as they take on more uninsured patients who can't pay their bills.

And this is a young program in North Carolina. The state expanded Medicaid only at the end of 2023; hundreds of thousands of people gained coverage, many of them in exactly the rural counties Knott represents. The ink was barely dry when Congress voted to pull the funding out from under it.

The Angier resident wasn't asking a hypothetical.

Three town halls, zero rooms

There's a reason the format matters here.

On a telephone town hall, the office controls who gets on the line, which questions reach the member, and when the call ends. There's no follow-up. There's no one else in the room hearing the answer and deciding whether it satisfied them. There's no moment where a congressman has to look at a person and say "the fund will cover it."

In March 2025, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Richard Hudson — himself a North Carolina congressman — told House Republicans in a closed-door meeting to stop holding in-person town halls and use tele-town halls and Facebook Live instead. We wrote about what happened when Hudson took his own advice and told his constituents the Medicaid cuts were "just rumors."

Knott's constituents have asked for the real thing. In April 2025, the Johnston County Democratic Party publicized an Indivisible invitation to Knott for a town hall in Johnston County. What his district got instead were three calls.

To Knott's credit, on that third call he did take a hard question and answer it in his own words rather than dodge it. The problem isn't that he refused to speak. It's what he said — and that he said it to a phone line he controlled instead of a room he didn't.

What he's told them since

This is the same member of Congress who voted for the SAVE Act months after having voted from an address he didn't live at, and who got to Washington on nearly $2 million his own family put into a super PAC.

The pattern isn't hard to read. On the votes that cost his district money, he votes with his party. On the questions his district asks about it, he takes them by phone.

The Angier resident wanted to know how a representative reconciles a vote with the people it hurts.

Two years, he said. We stand ready.

Source

Colin Campbell, "In telephone town hall, NC Congressman Knott talks healthcare, guns, immigration," WUNC, September 19, 2025. Photo: Office of Congressman Brad Knott, via WUNC.

Trent Kelly's Constituents Have Been Asking for a Town Hall Since 2017. By 2025 There Was a Protest Outside His Office Every Friday, and Someone in It Was Still Asking.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:21:55 +0000

On a Friday afternoon in March 2025, more than 30 people stood outside Trent Kelly's district office on Seventh Street North in Columbus, Mississippi, holding signs at passing traffic.

One of the signs read: "Honk if you support Ukraine." Another said "Cutting Medicaid is murder."

They had been showing up every week. The organizer, Annis Cox of Columbus, told the Commercial Dispatch the group had more than doubled in size since the previous week. Here's how she described why:

"(What unites us) right at this second is probably all the time we've spent irritated in our hearts and our minds about stuff that was going on and not having a place (for them), besides ourselves and our families, our echo chambers – but a lot of times you're singing to the choir. Now … the people driving by, they can see us and they can say, 'Yeah.'"

One of the regulars, Fred Kinder, had been there since the protests started on February 28. What frustrated him, he said, was never hearing where his own congressman stood until a roll call came out.

"It's about time that somebody took a stand. … I think Trent (Kelly) should hold a town hall meeting."

He was not the first person in Columbus to ask.

They started by asking nicely. In 2017.

This is not new. It has been going on since Kelly's first full term.

In January 2017, more than 20 members of a community group called Columbus Action Together walked into Kelly's Columbus office at noon on a Friday. They were worried about the push to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They were not there to shout. They were there, the Dispatch reported, "to make an appointment to have a town hall-style meeting with Kelly."

Twenty-one of them left their names and phone numbers on a sign-in sheet.

"This was just to make an appointment to have a face-to-face meeting, and it makes an impression to have a strong group show up … rather than just individuals," one member, Bridget Smith Pieschel, told the Dispatch.

Another organizer, Melissa Cooper, said what she wanted to ask was simple: what will replace the Affordable Care Act, if anything?

The group specifically said they didn't expect Kelly to be there — Congress was in session. They just wanted a date on a calendar.

Paul Howell, the district director in Kelly's Tupelo office, called Smith Pieschel that afternoon after the group left and stayed on the phone about 45 minutes. According to her account, he could not promise when the group would be able to meet with Kelly.

Kelly himself was at a Republican conference in Philadelphia and could not talk to the Dispatch by press time. He answered by email, through his communications director:

"Constituents have been complaining about the Affordable Care Act since it became law. That's why we in Congress are making it a top priority to solve the problems in healthcare."

That was the answer to "what will replace it."

One of the women asking had a specific reason

The Dispatch talked to Rachel Gamache, 58, of Columbus. She had lost her pharmacist job the year before and moved to town. Her husband was on Social Security and Medicare. She had signed up for coverage through the Affordable Care Act — about $80 a month — while she waited for a job to open in her field.

"It's been really helpful. We live comfortably with the amount of money we have."

She wanted to know what would happen to that. The statement from Philadelphia was the answer she got.

Then his party made the dodge official

In March 2025 — the same month those Friday protests were growing outside his Columbus office — Republican leadership formalized the avoidance.

At a closed-door meeting on March 4, 2025, National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Richard Hudson told House Republicans to stop holding in-person town halls. His suggested replacements: tele-town halls and Facebook Live. The reasoning, as NOTUS reported it, was to avoid the spectacle of booing and jeering after videos of angry constituents confronting Republican members went viral.

We wrote about that directive — and about what Hudson did on his own tele-town hall, where he told constituents the Medicaid cuts were "just rumors."

So the pattern in Columbus wasn't an accident or a scheduling problem. Not answering was the strategy. And Kelly's district is one of dozens where you can watch it work: constituents ask, nobody answers, and eventually the only place left to say something is a sidewalk.

What they wanted to ask him about turned out to matter

The 2017 group wanted to know what would replace the Affordable Care Act. The 2025 group was carrying a sign that said "Cutting Medicaid is murder."

In July 2025, Kelly voted for Trump's budget bill. Roughly 714,600 Mississippians — about 24% of the state — were on Medicaid in 2024. Analysts project the law will add about 115,000 Mississippians to the uninsured by 2034 — 28,000 of them in Kelly's own district.

Nobody in Columbus got to ask him about it first.

He isn't the only one, and that's the point

Across the country, Republicans have spent this cycle running the same play. Bob Latta's constituents held two town halls for him in 2025 and talked to an empty chair. A 90-year-old has stood outside French Hill's office every Thursday for a year. John Carter's last in-person town hall was in 2013.

Mississippi's 1st District belongs on that list. In 2017 the answer to a room full of raised hands was a statement emailed from a conference in Philadelphia. By 2025 the asking had moved to the sidewalk.

The job description

A staffer can return a call. A press office can issue a statement. The one part of this job nobody can do for you is stand in a room full of the people who hired you and take a question you didn't pick.

Trent Kelly has been in this seat since 2015. His constituents have been asking for that room since 2017.

In March 2025, Cox said she intended to keep the protests going — noon to one, every Friday, on the sidewalk outside his door.

Source

Abigail Sipe Rochester, "Weekly protests outside Rep Trent Kelly's office grow in size and message," The Commercial Dispatch, March 15, 2025.

The Dayton Daily News Asked Mike Turner If He'd Debate or Hold a Town Hall. He Answered a Different Question.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:19:43 +0000

On Wednesday, August 5, 2026, a room full of Greene County residents packed into VFW Post 8312 in Beavercreek. They came to ask questions of Kristina Knickerbocker, the Democrat running for Ohio's 10th Congressional District. Questions were collected in advance and read out by a Yellow Springs councilman. People asked about the cost of living. They asked about health care.

Then Knickerbocker turned and made an offer to the man who has held the seat since 2003.

"Mike Turner, I would love to debate you. You've been in office for 30 years and I'm sure you have a lot to say … we have 90 days until the election. The people need to hear from you."

Two days later, the Dayton Daily News put the question directly to Turner: would he debate her, or hold a town hall on something like term limits or health care?

Here is his complete answer:

"My opponent advocates for a government-run, taxpayer-funded, healthcare system that eliminates employer-provided health insurance. She supports a socialist agenda that I will fight against, that leaves Americans without adequate healthcare and destroys the federal budget."

Read it again. There is no "yes." There is no "no." There is not one word about a debate, and not one word about a town hall. He was asked whether he would stand in a room and take questions, and he responded with a press release about his opponent's health care plan.

That is not a scheduling conflict. That is an answer designed so that no one can write down what he said.

This has been going on for nine years

Mike Turner has represented the Dayton area in Congress since 2003. That is 23 years. In all that time, his constituents have never stopped asking him for the same simple thing, and he has never stopped finding new ways not to give it to them.

February 2017. Dozens of people gathered outside Turner's Dayton office carrying binoculars, telescopes and dogs — a mock "search party" for their own congressman. They wanted to talk about the Affordable Care Act, education and immigration. They said calls to his office got them automated responses. One protester said Turner was in Europe. His staff would not say where he was.

"We have a lot of questions, and we would like to ask him in person," one of them, Heather Christle, said.

The picture at the top of this post is from that day. It's a hand-drawn Where's Waldo sign, with Turner's face on the striped shirt, walking away from a signpost that reads "Mike Turner Town Hall."

March 2017. Local groups gave up waiting and held the town hall themselves, at a Dayton school. More than 200 people showed up, according to the organizers. Turner was in Washington and didn't attend. His office didn't immediately respond to WYSO's request for comment.

"There is a huge outcry for some kind of responsibility to be taken by our representatives," said Davin Flateau of Dayton Indivisible For All.

Instead of showing up, he accused them of a federal crime

What Turner did next is the part worth sitting with.

Rather than simply decline the invitation, he issued a statement claiming that a woman involved with the groups was impersonating the late civil rights leader Ella Baker.

"The leader of Dayton Indivisible purports to be Ella Baker. She is not and she along with the leadership of her fraudulent group know her true identity."

He went further, saying she had "fraudulently contacted my office and impersonated Ella Baker in violation of 18 USC section 1001" — a federal criminal statute — and adding that "we assume she has also misrepresented her true identity in fund-raising and group organizing."

And then the punchline:

"Congressman Turner will not be attending any events held by the fraudulent leadership of the fraudulent group Dayton Indivisible."

Roll Call checked it out. The woman's name is Christie Baker. Her middle name is Ella. She goes by Ella Baker. She was the treasurer of a different organization — the Miami Valley Progressive Caucus, not Dayton Indivisible — and its president, Mathias Detamore, said she had never claimed to be the civil rights icon at all.

"That is such a far-reaching attempt to smear her character is is laughable," Detamore said. "We have Mike Turner's attention. He is scared."

So a sitting congressman accused one of his own constituents of a federal crime, got her group wrong, and used it as the reason he could not attend a public meeting. The people who asked to speak with him got a lawyer's letter instead of a conversation.

2025: "these radical groups"

Eight years later, nothing had changed except the wording.

On August 7, 2025, Turner spoke to the Dayton Defense trade group inside the DoubleTree by Hilton in Fairborn. Outside, about 40 people stood at the corner of Presidential and Center Park, with more on the Wright State Way pedestrian bridge over Interstate 675 holding a sign for drivers: "Talk to us, Turner."

"He needs to talk to his constituents," said Pam Beatty, of Oakwood. "He's never held a town hall, and we have questions. I think he owes us some answers."

Carol Finley, also of Oakwood, said Turner's staff had been good to deal with. "But we never hear from Turner," she added.

Turner's written response, given to the paper the day before:

"People see me all the time. I meet with and speak with local groups and organizations frequently and answer questions. I'm not going to participate with these radical groups who are only interested in promoting themselves and not our community."

Look at what he was doing the next day. He was inside a hotel ballroom, answering questions from a defense industry trade association. "People see me all the time" is true if you are a defense contractor with a badge. The 40 people on the sidewalk were the ones who couldn't get in.

This is the same maneuver a lot of Republicans have settled on. Mike Carey, another Ohio Republican, held a telephone town hall whose call-in number his office never posted, and then spent that autumn's shutdown at closed-door events with chambers of commerce and a Labcorp facility. It isn't improvisation, either: in March 2025 the chairman of the House Republicans' campaign arm told the entire conference to stop holding in-person town halls and switch to tele-town halls and Facebook Lives, because the videos of members getting booed were becoming a problem. Turner is following the playbook. He's just been running it since long before it was written down.

The one thing he can't call a radical group

Here is why the 2026 version is different.

For nine years Turner has had an excuse available: the people asking are activists, they're organized, they're partisans, they're fraudulent, they're radical. Whatever you think of that excuse, it at least had a target.

Kristina Knickerbocker is an Air Force veteran and an oncology nurse practitioner. She is the other name that will be printed on the ballot on November 3. A debate between the two candidates for a congressional seat is not a protest, and it is not organized by anyone Turner can accuse of impersonating a civil rights leader. It's the most ordinary event in American politics.

He still won't say yes.

He is not the only one. Marsha Blackburn would not say whether she'd debate in her governor's race, and the rival campaigns say the forums she cited never happened. It turns out that once you've decided you never have to answer a question in public, the reasons write themselves.

What Dayton actually loses

Turner sits on the Armed Services and Oversight committees and has represented this region for 23 years. He has a great deal to account for and, by his own description, a file full of things to do for his community.

The district he'll represent after redistricting covers all of Montgomery and Greene counties and part of Butler County. Those voters are living with gas prices that Margaret Brennan told him on CBS in April were "up a buck from where they were same time last year" because of a war he defends. The questions in Beavercreek were about the cost of living and health care. There is no forum in which those voters can put them to him.

He'll answer Margaret Brennan on CBS. He'll answer the Dayton Defense trade group at the DoubleTree. He'll answer with a paragraph about socialism when a reporter asks him a yes-or-no question.

He will not answer them.

At the Beavercreek VFW, Knickerbocker proposed that town halls be required for members of Congress.

"Without town halls, without a direct line of communication to your congressperson, they are failing you."

Ninety days out from the election, that is not a policy proposal. It's a description of the last nine years in Ohio's 10th District.

Source

Kristina Knickerbocker's debate challenge and Turner's response were reported by London Bishop for the Dayton Daily News: Knickerbocker wants Rep. Turner to debate her before U.S. House election (August 7, 2026). The 2025 Fairborn rally was reported by Thomas Gnau for the same paper. Photo: WKEF/dayton247now.

"We Know That the Protestors Are Paid. There's Not a Question." Mike Bost's Evidence: Expensive Signs.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:23:12 +0000

In March 2026, Mike Bost gave a phone interview to the Effingham Daily News. Partway through, he made a claim about the people protesting ICE:

"We know that the protestors are paid. There's not a question … We know that from our United States intelligence, who's been supporting the groups. They've been involved with them for years because they like to cause chaos."

He added:

"Most of them, when you ask the protestors: 'What are you protesting?' They can scream 'ICE,' but they don't really know what ICE does."

The reporter, Marie Adamick, wrote down what he offered as the basis for it. Per the Effingham Daily News: "Certain protestors use more-expensive signs, leading Bost to believe they have some sort of financial backing."

Nicer signs, and unnamed intelligence he didn't identify. That is the whole case.

"There's not a question" is doing a lot of work

Notice the construction. Not "I suspect," not "I've heard reports." There's not a question. A member of Congress telling his constituents that a fact is settled, when the evidence he supplies for it is the production quality of poster board.

He named Minneapolis and Chicago as where this is happening. He did not name the intelligence agency, the report, the briefing, or the groups. He did not say who is paying, how much, or how anyone knows.

There is a reason this matters beyond one loose quote. Once you decide the people objecting to something are being paid, you no longer have to answer any of them.

Which is exactly what he does with his own constituents

Bost has represented Illinois's 12th District since 2015. He does not hold in-person town halls. He holds telephone town halls.

He explained why at the top of one of them on March 11, 2025, as WPSD Local 6 reported:

"We're now in a time when live town halls are being overrun by organized protests and partisan activist groups. When they are starting to crash these across the country, it doesn't help anyone."

Same idea, a year earlier: the people who show up aren't really constituents, they're an operation.

So look at who actually showed up. That night, more than 50 people stood outside his Murphysboro office. They have names, and the paper printed them.

Judy Ashby's Carbondale Positive Action Committee organized it — the fifth protest the group had held since Presidents Day. Her stated goal was building a local network: "The more we do that, the more we'll be on a solid foundation to really make a difference."

Bonnie Cotter didn't make her own sign — she carried one about DOGE. Her question for her congressman:

"Bost is not a person who serves his constituents. What are five things you did today for your constituents? Not your donors, not your party."

Karen Frailey is a Pope County resident who lived in Jackson County for more than 30 years. She had signed up for Bost's February telephone town hall and never got a call. Her point:

"He represents everybody here and everybody in the district, not just the people that think like him. For years I wouldn't call because I thought it didn't make a difference, but even if he and his staff don't think the same way I do, they need to get calls from people so that they understand that people are unhappy."

That is a retired woman from deep southern Illinois asking to be phoned back. It is not a paid operation.

The February town hall that never called anybody

The reason Frailey was there is its own small story. Bost scheduled a telephone town hall for February 24, 2025. So many people who signed up never received the call that he had to apologize on Facebook and reschedule.

When he ran the make-up call on March 11 — with a new phone vendor — he told listeners that a big in-person town hall draws a few hundred people while his own call, he said, reached 100,000 households. That number is the pitch. It skips the part where reaching a household means a phone ringing, and being heard means being one of the few who get to ask anything.

The protests didn't stop. Constituents have circulated a petition demanding an in-person town hall. Ashby's summary to the Daily Egyptian was this: "Normally he doesn't show up in person. He just talks on the phone, and the calls are monitored," she said of Bost. "He doesn't just listen to everybody, and so he doesn't show up."

The same paper found Abby Butler at that protest. She had driven an hour and a half from Massac County to stand on a sidewalk in Murphysboro at dusk, because of a budget resolution she thought would cut Medicaid: "That's our grandmothers. That's us."

This isn't new for him either. Back on May 8, 2017, four days after he voted for the bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, around 60 people demonstrated outside his Carbondale office over what it would do to people with pre-existing conditions. Nine years of southern Illinoisans standing on sidewalks outside his offices, and his read on the phenomenon is that somebody's paying them.

What he says he does instead

To be fair to Bost, he told the Effingham Daily News his office does engage with protesters:

"At times when it's hot outside, we bring them water and ice cream, so they don't get too hot. They brought their petitions in at one time, and they reach out, and we'll take their calls, and we'll do everything that we can legally do."

Water and ice cream is decent. It is not a town hall. Bringing a popsicle to someone standing outside your door because you won't take their question inside is not constituent service — it's hospitality offered in place of accountability.

And on the same March 2025 call where he said live town halls get overrun, he put the choice to people this way:

"Protest in the streets if you want because that's your right, and if you want to do that, that's wonderful. But do you really want to cure the problem, or do you just want to say you hate Trump and you hate Republicans?"

Judy Ashby, Bonnie Cotter and Karen Frailey would each have been happy to answer that question. In person. If he'd ever scheduled one.

Source

Marie Adamick, "US Rep. Mike Bost defends ICE, supports Iran war", Effingham Daily News, March 6, 2026, and Brandyn Wilcoxen, "Bost hosts rescheduled telephone town hall; dozens protest in Murphysboro", WPSD Local 6 / The Southern Illinoisan, March 11, 2025. Photo by Brandyn Wilcoxen / The Southern.

Two of Laurel Lee's Constituents Went to Her Office Hours With Questions. A Staffer Cut Them Off to Read a Statement.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:28:10 +0000

In spring 2025, Elizabeth Bird and her husband drove to Pasco-Hernando Community College to attend their congresswoman's "mobile office hours."

They weren't expecting to meet her. They just wanted to know where she stood.

What happened next, Bird wrote in the Tampa Bay Times on April 11, 2025, is the clearest short description anyone has written of how Laurel Lee does constituent services.

"Let's pause for a moment, so I can read you a statement"

They were shown into a conference room, met a friendly aide, and started asking questions. Lee has talked publicly about disaster preparedness — so how did she feel about DOGE's cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the threats to FEMA, in a state that gets hit by hurricanes every year?

The young woman smiled and cut us off, "Let's pause for a moment, so I can read you a statement of Rep. Lee's views."

Off she went, Bird wrote: the president was elected with a mandate to secure the borders and increase government efficiency, and so on.

Great, they said. But what does Rep. Lee think?

She supports his inspiring leadership.

Is there anything he's doing that gives her pause? Any daylight at all?

Apparently not — but they could sign up for her newsletter to find out where she stands.

They tried again. Lee is a lawyer and a former circuit judge; she had just introduced a bill about the proper handling of sensitive government data. Did she have any concern about DOGE walking into every agency in Washington, or about the weakening of protections against cyberthreats?

Another sidestep: Rep. Lee stands with the president's commitment to cut waste and fraud, as voters demand.

Bird asked about Trump's attacks on judges and the rule of law. Sign up for her newsletter and all will be revealed.

Then the practical questions. Congress was out of session — were there any public events where constituents could talk with Lee directly? None were planned. Was Lee aware of a town hall scheduled that same week in Temple Terrace? Yes — but it wasn't official, and she wouldn't be going. She's a very busy woman.

About 200 people showed up to talk to an empty stage

Bird and her husband went to that Temple Terrace town hall. So did around 200 of their neighbors.

It was not, she wrote, a hostile or unruly crowd — it was "an orderly array of people speaking their minds to their absent representative."

A veteran, worried about cuts at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
A retired NOAA officer, laying out how the cuts would affect hurricane warning systems.
A teacher, describing threats to his ability to teach history and civics.
Parents, alarmed at the gutting of the federal health agencies.
Residents worried about what tariffs would do to their retirement accounts — two weeks before Trump's April 2025 tariff announcement sent the markets into a tailspin.

Some of them had worked with Lee before and remembered her as someone who sought bipartisan solutions and listened. They said they were baffled.

This is worth sitting with, because it undercuts the usual excuse. These were not activists bused in from somewhere. Several were people who had previously worked with her. The Tampa Bay Times editorial board had endorsed Lee for reelection only months earlier, praising her as "a constructive voice on cybersecurity, elections and governmental oversight issues" who "has done a good job of staying in touch with her constituents."

The follow-up email Lee's office sent after Bird's conversation with the staffer said: "I am ready to get to work … I enjoy hearing from constituents like you."

What she does instead: a phone line

Lee has not stopped communicating. She has picked formats where nobody can follow up.

On Monday, August 25, 2025, she held a telephone town hall. WMNF reported that 9,600 listeners dialed in. Lee used it to walk through her bills and to promote Trump's budget bill, which she called "landmark legislation that protects Americans from the single largest tax hike in history."

Asked by a Temple Terrace resident whether she supported the migrant detention camp in the Everglades, Lee said she did, arguing there is "simply a limited amount of detention space available in federal detention centers."

That's the format. Callers can't see how many people are waiting, can't tell who got skipped, and can't push back when the answer doesn't answer the question. The person running the call decides who gets on the air. It is a broadcast with a phone number attached.

She is not alone in preferring it. In Arkansas, a 90-year-old woman stood outside French Hill's office every Thursday for 52 straight weeks asking for a real town hall, and got telephone town halls instead. It has become the standard House Republican answer to an angry district.

As of today, her office hours have no dates on them

Here's the current state of play. Lee's official House website has a page for Mobile Office Hours — the very thing Bird went to in 2025. It explains that "Congresswoman Laurel Lee's staff members will be available to meet with anyone who needs help with a federal agency or has questions or comments on federal issues."

Not Lee. Her staff.

And as of August 10, 2026, the page lists no dates and no locations at all. In place of a schedule, it says:

"We are currently reorganizing the Mobile Office Hours Schedule. Please call the district office for immediate help."

Even the version of the event where Lee doesn't show up isn't currently scheduled.

What they wanted to ask about is not going away

The questions Bird's neighbors brought to that empty stage were not hypothetical, and they've only gotten more concrete since.

The Joint Economic Committee's House Minority staff, allocating a Congressional Budget Office estimate down to districts, projects that 45,545 people in Florida's 15th District will lose health insurance by 2034 — 42,800 losing Affordable Care Act coverage, and 2,745 losing Medicaid under the cuts in the bill Lee voted for. USDA data shows 36,368 households in her district rely on SNAP to buy groceries, including 16,502 with children in them.

Those are her constituents. They are entitled to stand up in a room and ask her, out loud, in front of their neighbors, why she voted the way she did — and to hear the answer in her own voice, not read off a card by a young staffer.

Representing people means being present for them, including when they're angry. Lee's own website has an "Event Request" form and a "Meeting Request" form. What it does not have is a date.

Sources

Desperately seeking U.S. Rep. Laurel Lee — Elizabeth Bird, Tampa Bay Times, April 11, 2025
U.S. Rep. Laurel Lee hosts a telephone town hall — WMNF 88.5 FM, August 26, 2025. Photo: Office of Rep. Laurel Lee.

Mark Messmer Has Never Held an In-Person Town Hall. A Library Director Says His Chief of Staff Asked Her Staff to Call the Police on 12 Constituents.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:28:06 +0000

On June 20, 2026, about 70 people gathered in the Browning Rooms at the Central Library in Evansville for a town hall with their congressman.

Their congressman did not come. He also never told them he wasn't coming.

Mark Messmer has represented Indiana's 8th District since January 2025. In that time, according to WNIN, he has not held a single in-person town hall anywhere in the 21 counties he represents. The closest thing was a telephone call-in event in May 2025, where a staffer decided which questions reached him.

The invitation

Wendy Bredhold, president of Indivisible Evansville, did it by the book. She called Messmer's office first, and they gave her an email address to send the request to.

Her letter, dated May 15, 2026, is published in full on WNIN's site. It is about as non-confrontational as an invitation to a politician gets. It offers him opening remarks about "your experience in Congress thus far and the issues you are currently focused on." It spells out the ground rules: attendees must "remain civil, limit themselves to one question at a time, and ask questions rather than make statements." It offers to change the format entirely if he'd prefer: "We are also happy to discuss any format preferences or accommodations that would help make the event constructive and comfortable for your office."

The reply, in Bredhold's account:

"I did call Representative Messmer's office and I said I wanted to extend this invitation and they said okay, here's the email address. Send the request to this address, I did, I was very polite, I offered him all kinds of accommodations. They didn't reply at all."

It later turned out the Indiana Republican convention was in Fort Wayne that same Saturday. Nobody from his office mentioned that either. As Bredhold put it:

"That would have been an easy thing for them to tell me: 'It's the Republican State Convention so he has to politely decline.' But instead I got no answer and didn't know until after we had scheduled the event."

So the group held the meeting anyway. Bredhold ran a slideshow on Messmer's record in the Indiana Statehouse and in Congress, and on where his campaign money comes from. People wrote their questions for the absent congressman on poster board and held them up. One member held a sign with his face on it.

March 2025: the library called on to call the police

This didn't start in 2026.

Messmer's office runs "mobile office hours" — staffers at a table in a public building, taking questions one at a time. On March 11, 2025, about a dozen constituents showed up at the Warrick County Public Library. Most were seniors. They wanted to ask their questions as a group rather than one-by-one, and the library offered a bigger conference room so they could.

What happened next is the account of the library's own director, Brooke Bolton, in WNIN's reporting: a Washington, D.C.-based staffer — Bolton identified him as Messmer's chief of staff, Michael Curcio — phoned the library and asked staff to call the police on the attendees.

The library refused.

"My staff told (Curcio) that no one was breaking any rules of this library," Bolton said. "They were not being hostile, they were not being disruptive."

The topics those seniors had come to raise were Medicaid, Social Security, and care for a special-needs child. One of them, Kristina Bickle, described what they were after:

"So really, all we were wanting to do was have a public discourse in which we could ask questions in a respectful way of the people who are supposed to represent the people who represent us. That's all we wanted."

Bolton said the library had never had anything like it happen at a congressional office-hours event before. She added that they'd host Messmer's staff again — in a bigger room next time.

March 2025: 300 people outside his office

Eleven days later, on Saturday, March 22, 2025, people rallied outside Messmer's Evansville office asking for a town hall. "We held an event here on Saturday and over 300 people at least were here to express their concerns," Bredhold told WFIE. On the Monday, dozens of letters were delivered to his office — on health care, on economic policy, on environmental rules.

Messmer's statement to WFIE was gracious and beside the point:

"The Evansville weekend protest reflects how blessed we are to live in the United States of America. And while I disagree with many of their positions, I fully respect and embrace their right to freely protest. I am in Washington, D.C. today so I was not in the Evansville office to receive the letters the protesters dropped off, but my staff was happy to collect them."

He respects their right to protest. He has never given them the meeting they were protesting to get.

May 2025: the telephone town hall

Under that pressure, Messmer did agree to something — a virtual town hall on May 6, 2025, held by phone with a moderator and screened questions.

About 30 people gathered at the McCullough Library in Evansville to listen together at an event they called "Unmuting the 8th District." Roughly nine of them submitted questions to his staff. None were chosen.

Bredhold described the format:

"Once he answered a question or read his answer, whatever the case may be, he was done. There was no opportunity for follow up, like people were silenced after."

WNIN's account of the call is worth reading in full. In the first half hour, a few harder questions got through — one caller pushed back on Trump's tariffs. After that, the questions turned friendly. One asked about the effort to rename the Gulf of Mexico, which prompted this from Messmer:

"'The Gulf of America' just makes more sense."

Another asked how DOGE's cuts could be made permanent. Another simply thanked him for supporting a county music festival.

Laura Brown had wanted to ask him to publicly commit that he wouldn't support sending any 8th District resident to a foreign prison — a petition with more than 600 signatures behind it. She didn't get on. Tom Zeta wanted to ask who exactly was defining "waste, fraud and abuse" in the DOGE cuts. He didn't get on either.

Messmer's office didn't answer WNIN's questions about how many people registered, how questions were picked, or whether rejected questions would ever be answered.

Mitzi Mathieu, listening at the library, summed up the evening in three words: "It's just unbelievable."

The pattern

Line it up:

A dozen seniors ask to be heard as a group — the library director says his chief of staff tried to get the police called.
Three hundred people rally for a town hall — he issues a statement about how blessed we are to live in America.
He holds one call-in event where a staffer screens every question, and not one of the nine questions submitted by the group that organized around it makes the broadcast.
Twelve months later, a polite written invitation offering him any format he likes gets no reply at all.

He is not unavailable, exactly. He turns up at events around the district. What he does not do is stand in a room in his own district and take an unscreened question from someone who might disagree with him.

That's not unique to him — we've documented Republicans who were told to stop holding in-person town halls as a matter of party strategy. But Messmer is running for re-election in November 2026, and he has now gone his entire first term without doing it once.

Bredhold's read on why it might finally matter:

"I think that he's, he's quite vulnerable right now, given that he's gotten, he's been under a lot of criticism for how he's not available to constituents, he's not available to the media, he refuses to answer any questions, like that's not going to make him a very popular guy."

Source

John Gibson, "Town Hall Carries On Without Messmer", WNIN, June 24, 2026. Photo by Brody Atchley / WNIN News.

Ken Calvert Wrote an Op-Ed Cheering DOGE. Then His Constituents Set Out an Empty Chair for Him, Two Weeks Running.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:22:35 +0000

There is a particular way of holding office that goes like this: take the loudest possible public position, then arrange your calendar so that nobody can ask you about it.

Ken Calvert has been representing part of Riverside County since 1993. In February 2025, as Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency was firing federal workers by the thousands and cancelling grants across the country, Calvert sat down and wrote an opinion piece for the Orange County Register. The headline was not subtle:

"DOGE is doing what must be done to protect taxpayers"

It ran on February 12, 2025. He closed by predicting that "the hyperbole and dramatics from the left will only grow more frantic" as DOGE kept working.

Eight days later, on February 20, his own constituents showed up outside his Palm Desert district office. "Some demonstrators tried to speak with Congressman Ken Calvert at his Palm Desert office," KESQ reported that afternoon, "but it appeared he wasn't there."

"It's just another day in paradise"

That week, across the country, Republican members of Congress were getting an earful. Politico reported on February 24, 2025 that town halls in red districts had turned into shouting matches over Musk and the firings — and that almost none of the Republicans involved had changed their minds.

Calvert was among them. Politico reported that he saw protesters gather at his Palm Desert office and said it didn't change his support for Musk:

"I'm used to it. It's just another day in paradise."

That is a genuinely remarkable thing to say about people who drove to your office to tell you they're frightened about their health care and their jobs. Not "I hear them." Not "I disagree, and here's why." Just: I'm used to it.

The empty chair

The protests didn't stop. By late March, constituents in Palm Desert had started holding what they called "empty chair" town halls — a public forum with a chair set out for the congressman who wouldn't come.

On March 23, 2025, KESQ News Channel 3 covered the second straight week of them. The organizer, Jared Milrad, who lives in Calvert's district, said he was worried about what was coming for Social Security, Medicaid and Medi-Cal.

"We organize an empty chair town hall to encourage our Congressman to come forward and hear from his constituents," Milrad said. "Unfortunately, it's our second week doing this event. He hasn't come to our town hall yet."

The station asked Calvert's office for a response. Here is the full list of things his team offered instead of an in-person town hall:

telephone town hall meetings held "last year"
a Veterans Service Organization Roundtable
a Senior Resource Fair
visits with city leaders in the Coachella Valley about "their federal priorities"
a roundtable with Riverside County healthcare leaders
campaign-season telephone town halls and "events throughout the district regularly"
a promise of "additional telephone town halls and other events with constituents"

Every single item on that list is an event where Calvert controls who is in the room, or where there is no room at all.

A telephone town hall is not a town hall. Nobody can see how many people are waiting to speak or who got skipped. Nobody can stand up. Nobody can follow up when the answer doesn't answer the question. The person running the call decides which callers get on the air, and no one outside can ever know what was screened out. That is the entire appeal of the format — and Calvert is far from the only one who has figured that out. In Arkansas, a 90-year-old woman stood outside French Hill's office every Thursday for 52 straight weeks asking for the same thing, and got telephone town halls instead.

Who he wasn't in the room with

It's worth being specific about who was on the other side of that empty chair, because "constituents are upset" is easy to wave off.

In the district Calvert represented at the time, according to the California Budget & Policy Center's February 2025 fact sheet:

84,800 residents relied on CalFresh — California's food assistance program — bringing $195 million a year in grocery money into the district
93,916 children — about 70.6% of the kids in the district — were eligible for free or reduced-price meals at school
96,330 tax filers claimed the Child Tax Credit, worth $220 million to families there
46,200 filers claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit, worth another $106 million
60.3% of renters were paying more for housing than they could afford

Those are the households on the receiving end of "waste, fraud and abuse." They are the ones who wanted twenty minutes and a microphone.

The appropriator who cheered on the people taking away his own power

Here is the part that should bother even people who liked DOGE.

Calvert doesn't just sit on the House Appropriations Committee. He chairs its defense subcommittee — one of the most powerful spending jobs in Congress. Appropriating money is the specific constitutional power the House holds over the executive branch. It is, quite literally, his job.

DOGE's whole method was to stop spending money that Congress had already voted to spend, without asking Congress. And Calvert, the appropriator, wrote a newspaper column saying he was "pleased that President Trump is empowering people to audit these organizations."

He then backed it with votes. On June 12, 2025 and again on July 18, 2025, Calvert voted for the Rescissions Act of 2025 — a bill the House first passed at $9.4 billion, and which became law cancelling $9 billion Congress had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting. He voted to take back money his own committee had appropriated, at the request of a White House that had simply decided not to spend it.

An institution's power doesn't get taken from it. It gets handed over, by people like Calvert, who found it more convenient to be on the winning team than to defend the job they hold.

He's got a new district now, and still no room to stand in

In 2026, California's new congressional map drew Calvert into the same district as fellow Republican Young Kim, forcing two sitting incumbents to run against each other in a redrawn 40th District that sweeps from Orange County suburbs into Riverside County.

Which means a very large number of people who will be represented by Ken Calvert if he wins have never had a chance to ask him anything at all.

They can watch his television ads. They can read his op-eds. They can call a phone number and hope they get picked.

What they can't do — what people in his district have been asking to do since February 2025 — is stand up in a room, in front of their neighbors, and make him answer out loud.

Thirty-three years in Congress. The chair is still empty.

Sources

Ken Calvert: DOGE is doing what must be done to protect taxpayers — Orange County Register, February 12, 2025
'Congress works for us' – Protest in Palm Desert over Elon Musk — Luis Avila, KESQ News Channel 3, February 20, 2025
House Republicans unfazed by protests: 'We're moving forward with the cuts' — Ally Mutnick and Lisa Kashinsky, Politico, February 24, 2025
Community demands answers from Rep. Calvert at town hall — Shay Lawson, KESQ News Channel 3, March 23, 2025. Lead photo: KESQ.

'I Don't Intend to Debate Alex.' Julie Fedorchak Refused to Debate, Skipped Her Party's Convention, and Still Won't Hold a Town Hall.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:14:20 +0000

On May 24, 2024, Julie Fedorchak stood on a stage at KFGO in Fargo and debated her Republican rivals for North Dakota's open U.S. House seat. She did three of the four primary debates that year. Then she debated her Democratic opponent twice more before November.

She won. She has been North Dakota's only member of the House ever since.

In 2026, running as the incumbent, she was asked whether she would debate her primary challenger. Here is her answer, given to the North Dakota Monitor in mid-April 2026:

"I don't intend to debate Alex. He hasn't laid out any real differences in his record with mine, and there's not a lot of issues to debate, in my opinion."

There's not a lot of issues to debate, in my opinion. That is a sitting member of Congress deciding, on her own, that her state has no questions for her.

Her opponent disagreed, and so did the people he'd been talking to

Alex Balazs is not a fringe figure in this story. He's the candidate the North Dakota Republican Party actually endorsed at its 2026 state convention. He told the Monitor:

"Everybody I've talked to wants a debate. Everybody wants us to get out there and discuss issues."

He said the invitation would stay open for any debate, at any time, and that he thought her choice was "the wrong choice." He also said public officials should want to get in front of constituents to discuss the issues and make their policy preferences known.

Fedorchak beat him in the June 9 primary anyway, with 73% of the vote. She never took the stage with him.

She also skipped the convention where he was endorsed

Here's why Balazs got the party's endorsement without a fight: Fedorchak didn't go.

In March 2026 she and every other Republican statewide incumbent skipped the NDGOP endorsing convention and petitioned their way onto the primary ballot instead. Bob Harms, a former state party chair who has attended every convention since 1988, told the Monitor what that meant:

"It is absolutely unprecedented. It has never happened."

Fedorchak's explanation was one sentence: "I'm focusing the bulk of my time doing the hard work North Dakotans elected me to do."

Delegates responded by voting to strip the party's brand from candidates who skipped. Asked about it in April, Fedorchak said she'd spent 30 years building the Republican Party and that "our Republican brand has actually never been stronger."

Set aside who's right about the state party. Notice the shape of it: the convention where members of her own party ask questions, she skipped. The debate where her opponent would ask questions, she declined. That's two.

And she has never held an in-person town hall. Not once.

That's three.

Fedorchak has been in Congress since January 2025 and has never held a public, in-person town hall meeting. She holds virtual "Fedorchak Forums" and telephone events instead, and she defends the choice on reach:

"We get thousands of people on those calls at one time and much more than you'd be able to connect with in an in-person town hall."

Asked back in March 2025, at her very first tele-town hall, why it wasn't in person, she said: "I simply haven't found any other venue that allows me to talk to like tonight 3,000 North Dakotans probably more than that because of Facebook and the online options."

By August 2025 she'd stopped hedging and started dismissing the format outright, telling the Monitor that in-person town halls are:

"a forum for political theater that has turned into yelling and screaming, and not a productive conversation about the consequential issues."

North Dakotans have been asking for one since her first spring in office. In March 2025 about 50 of them rallied outside the delegation's Bismarck offices repeatedly calling out "We want answers." A married couple, the Lebaks, paid for five digital billboards around Bismarck-Mandan displaying the word "MISSING" in reference to the all-Republican delegation — put up, Henry Lebak said, after several unsuccessful attempts to reach them.

Balazs, by contrast, committed to holding regular in-person town halls if elected. That contrast was on the table in the primary. She wouldn't debate it.

The "1,100 meetings" answer

Fedorchak's defense is that she's everywhere. She says she has held more than 1,100 meetings with North Dakotans in her first term — events in the state and in Washington, many with agriculture and energy producers and chambers of commerce.

The Monitor noted the obvious problem in the same story: some have criticized Fedorchak and other members of the delegation "for holding events that are open to invited guests but not the general public."

That's the distinction that matters, and it's the one every one of these choices protects. A meeting with the chamber of commerce is a meeting she agreed to. A virtual forum is a meeting she moderates. A telephone town hall with 3,000 people on the line is a meeting where she picks the questions.

A debate, a convention floor, and a room full of constituents with microphones are the three formats where somebody else decides what she gets asked. She has avoided all three.

What people would ask if they got the chance

It isn't a mystery.

They would ask about the 17,926 North Dakotans projected to lose health coverage — 7,255 of them off Medicaid because of the budget bill she voted for, the other 10,671 as the Affordable Care Act's enhanced premium tax credits lapse — and about the op-ed she published telling them the worry was about "cuts that simply don't exist."

They would ask about the 22,340 North Dakota households on SNAP. They would ask why the bill she introduced to end wind and solar tax credits makes sense in a state where wind generates more than a third of the electricity.

She is not the only one who has figured out that the safest room is the one you control. Jeff Hurd called a town hall 400 people showed up for "political theater" and has done telephone events ever since. It works — right up until enough voters notice that "I don't intend to debate" and "I've been really transparent about my positions" were said in the same interview.

Source

Rep. Fedorchak not planning to debate NDGOP opponent Balazs before primary — Michael Achterling, North Dakota Monitor, April 17, 2026. Photo by Amy Dalrymple / North Dakota Monitor.

250 People Chanted 'Where Is Jim?' at a Town Hall Jim Baird Skipped. The Year Before, He Flew to Cape Town, Sydney and Dublin.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:04:37 +0000

On Sunday, March 30, 2025, more than 250 people filled two rooms of the West Lafayette Public Library. They brought signs. They brought questions. They had a congressman in mind.

Jim Baird was not there. He had been invited, several times.

"Kinda doing his job for him," is how Matt Gyure of Greater Lafayette Indivisible described the evening to WTHR. His group had reached out to Baird's office repeatedly — to ask why he wasn't holding town halls, and to invite him to the one they were organizing anyway.

The room did what rooms do when the chair is empty. Attendees stood up and talked about Medicaid, about the federal budget, about Elon Musk. One woman said: "What representative Baird and his colleagues are doing is taking the lives of America's most vulnerable and sacrificing them on the altar of conservative billionaires."

At some point the room broke into a chant: "Where is Jim?"

13News reached out to Baird's office and his press secretary that day — for comment, and to ask whether he had any town halls planned. They did not get a response.

This was not the first time somebody asked

Go back a year, to April 2024. There was a 4th District candidates forum at that same West Lafayette Public Library. Baird did not attend that one either. His campaign said he was in Washington because Congress was in session.

His Republican primary challenger that year, Charles Bookwalter, said this to the room:

"Where's Jim Baird? He's the incumbent and he's not here. Where's he been? He only comes back when he needs your vote."

Same question, same library, two different years, two different sets of people. A congressman who wanted to be found would have noticed by the second time.

Even his 2026 primary challenger ran on it. Craig Haggard, a state representative who took Baird on in the May primary, told Based in Lafayette he was running "because I believe we need someone who will show up, be accountable and work for the people of Indiana." Baird won the nomination anyway, and is on the ballot in November for a fifth term.

What he did find time for

Baird files a financial disclosure every year with the Clerk of the House, and Section H of it lists travel somebody else paid for. For most of his time in Congress that section says "None disclosed."

Then comes his annual report covering 2024, filed August 12, 2025. Three trips, all paid for by the Aspen Institute Congressional Program:

Dates	Itinerary
Feb. 18–24, 2024	Washington, D.C. → Cape Town, South Africa → Washington
May 25 – June 1, 2024	Washington, D.C. → Sydney → Washington
Aug. 11–20, 2024	Washington, D.C. → Dublin → Washington

That's roughly three weeks on three continents in a single calendar year, on someone else's dime.

Nobody is saying a member of Congress shouldn't travel and learn about the world. That's rather the point: the calendar was never the problem. He found a week for Cape Town in February, a week for Sydney in May, and ten days for Dublin in August. He could not find one evening for the West Lafayette Public Library, in the district that elects him.

The office nobody wants to work in

There's one more measure of how this office runs, and it comes from the trade publication that tracks congressional staffing.

In October 2023, LegiStorm published its analysis of House staff turnover. Reporter Keturah Hetrick wrote:

"Reps. Brandon Williams (R-N.Y.), Jim Baird (R-Ind.) and Mary Peltola (D-Alaska) each have turnover roughly three times the average and round out the House's five worst staff-retention rates."

Five worst in a 435-member House. Three times the average rate of losing people.

Staff are the constituent-service operation. They are who answers when you call about a Social Security check that stopped, a VA claim that stalled, a passport that won't come. When an office churns through them at triple the normal rate, the institutional memory of your case walks out the door with them.

So the picture from the outside is consistent: constituents can't get a town hall, reporters can't get a call back, and the people hired to help you don't stay long.

What he doesn't want to be asked about

It's worth being specific about what those 250 people came to the library worried about, because it wasn't abstract. The room that Sunday was charged about Medicaid, Social Security and school lunches — cuts that were still being drafted.

Three months later, Baird voted Aye on final passage of Trump's budget bill, on July 3, 2025. In IN-04, the Joint Economic Committee projects 21,540 people will lose health coverage — 11,000 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 10,540 losing Medicaid. Another 21,647 households in his district rely on SNAP to buy groceries, including 12,569 households with children and 7,735 with someone 60 or older.

And on the cuts coming out of Washington that February, he told Fox59:

"I am concerned about our indebtedness. We've been concerned about that for quite some time, and apparently, this is a means for accomplishing that."

That's the whole answer. It is a lot easier to say that to a TV camera in Washington than to a librarian in West Lafayette who wants to know what happens to her mother's coverage.

He is not the only one who figured this out. Jeff Hurd skipped a town hall 400 people showed up to and called it "political theater". The playbook is the same everywhere: telephone town halls you control, mobile office hours staffed by aides, and no room where a constituent gets to follow up.

Baird represents 16 counties. He can find Cape Town. He can find West Lafayette.

Source

'Doing his job for him' | Indiana District 4 residents hold town hall without congressman accepting the invite — Ashton Hackman, WTHR 13News, March 30, 2025, and Hundreds ask 'Where's Baird?', vent during West Lafayette town hall, Based in Lafayette via The Indiana Citizen. Photo: Dave Bangert / Based in Lafayette.

400 People Waited for Jeff Hurd. He Called It 'Political Theater' and Blamed George Soros.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:36:21 +0000

On Friday, February 21, 2025, about 400 people filled the First Congregational Church in Grand Junction. They had questions about rising child hunger, about cancer research being terminated, about Medicaid — which covers roughly 154,000 people in their congressional district. They had come to ask their brand-new congressman.

Jeff Hurd wasn't there. He never answered the invitation.

The four local Indivisible groups who organized it said they reached out to Hurd and his staff multiple times and never got a response. The local TV station that covered it asked Hurd's office for comment and didn't get one either. So the event went ahead without him, and the room did what rooms do when the chair is empty: they talked to each other about what was happening to them.

Hurd had been sworn in seven weeks earlier.

What he said when asked about it

Six days later, Colorado Public Radio's Ryan Warner asked him directly. Why didn't you respond, or attend?

Here is Hurd's full answer:

"Well, listen, I'm interested in hearing from my constituents. I am not interested in political theater and I want to have constructive dialogue. I think Indivisible, if you look at the funding sources for these sorts of organizations, left-wing pressure groups, George Soros, I think that they have an agenda that is not about communicating with the elected officials and helping to advance that constructive dialogue. So I certainly expect that I will be having town halls and hearing from my constituents. I would just rather do it in a politically productive way rather than political theater."

Four hundred of his own constituents drove into Grand Junction on a Friday to talk to him, and his explanation for standing them up was George Soros.

That's the tell. Not one word about the people who actually showed up — who they were, what they wanted to ask, whether any of them had a point. Just the organizers' funding, a billionaire's name, and a phrase — "political theater" — that does all the work of dismissing a room full of voters without engaging a single thing any of them said.

He also made a promise in that answer: "I certainly expect that I will be having town halls."

What happened next

He did hold town halls. By telephone.

Two weeks after the CPR interview, on March 11, 2025, Hurd held his first tele-town hall, taking questions on DOGE, energy policy and Ukraine.

This was not an improvised choice. The Colorado Sun's Jesse Paul reported on March 24, 2025 that the National Republican Congressional Committee had recommended telephone and virtual town halls to incumbents. His verdict on Hurd is four words: "Hurd heeded the advice."

The format stuck. In February 2026, a year later, Hurd held another telephone town hall — more than 12,000 constituents listening in, an hour of questions on voting laws, energy, immigration, tariffs and Colorado River water. He said he plans to keep hosting similar forums.

The difference between the two formats is not a technicality. In a room, anybody can stand up, and a follow-up question is just the next thing out of their mouth. On a phone line, someone in the congressman's office decides which callers get through, in what order, and when the hour is up. Twelve thousand people can "attend" and not one of them can insist.

By June 2026 it had become a campaign issue. The Aspen Times reported that both Democrats running for the seat "have also knocked Hurd for his lack of in-person town halls since being elected," and that his primary challenger says Hurd "has been largely absent when it comes to interacting with voters." His Republican challenger's line: "Jeff Hurd has hidden from the voters. We call him, 'never seen, never Hurd.'"

Meanwhile, people kept showing up anyway

The pattern of the empty church repeated all year, in smaller rooms.

In April 2025, dozens of protesters rallied outside his Pueblo office over the Medicaid cuts, and AFSCME members said he hadn't responded to any of their requests to meet. In May 2025, after he voted for that bill anyway, constituents came to his Grand Junction office to say so; his district director took notes and collected their letters, and afterward his office told the paper that Indivisible had never tried to arrange an official meeting.

The scheduling is the point. There is a version of this where a congressman schedules the meeting.

This is a playbook, not a personality

If Hurd's arrangement sounds familiar, it should. Arkansas's French Hill has a 90-year-old constituent who has stood outside his office every Thursday for a year asking for an in-person town hall — he does his by telephone too. Ohio's Mike Carey promised to post the call-in number for his telephone town hall and never did, then put out a press release celebrating that 12,000 people joined.

Same year, same party, same substitution: a number that can be reported to reporters, standing in for a room where anyone can raise a hand.

The standard

Nobody is entitled to a friendly audience. A member of Congress can walk into a hostile room, take the questions, disagree out loud, and leave — that happens, and it's how the job is supposed to work.

What Hurd did instead was decide in advance that the people who wanted to see him weren't really constituents, they were an "agenda." Once you believe that, you never have to be in the room.

Four hundred people came. He called it theater. Eighteen months later, they're still waiting.

Source

Interview: GOP Rep. Jeff Hurd speaks on DOGE, Medicaid and Nazi salutes — Kiara DeMare, Tom Hesse and Ryan Warner, Colorado Public Radio, February 27, 2025. Photo: Emily Hale / KVNF, via Aspen Public Radio.

Richard Hudson Told Every House Republican to Stop Meeting Voters. Then He Got on the Phone and Told His Own Constituents Medicaid Cuts Were 'Just Rumors.'

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:34:16 +0000

On Tuesday, March 4, 2025, House Republicans filed into a closed-door conference meeting. Their constituents were furious — about DOGE, about mass firings, about what was coming for Medicaid — and members were getting shouted down at town halls back home. Video of Republicans walking off stages was everywhere.

Richard Hudson, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, stood up and gave them a solution.

Stop holding in-person town halls.

As NOTUS reported from the meeting, Hudson told his colleagues to switch to tele-town halls or Facebook Lives instead. His reasoning was that members could still hear from constituents that way, while avoiding "disruption from activists."

The other way to describe that is: you can hear the voters, but the voters can't be seen or heard by anyone else.

The advice was about the pictures, not the listening

The timing tells you what this was about. The same reporting noted that going online would avoid "the recent images of Republicans running off stage, getting drowned out by boos and being challenged on unpopular cuts to programs like Medicare and Medicaid." Congress was in the middle of writing a budget bill that would cut $2 trillion in spending, much of it out of Medicaid.

Speaker Mike Johnson backed him up at his weekly press conference: "The best thing that our members can do is communicate directly, frequently, consistently, with their constituents. There are other avenues to do it than just going in to try to give the other side sound bites."

Hudson's spokesperson, Will Kiley, posted on X that Hudson supports members talking to as many constituents as possible. "Using technology makes this a heck of lot easier," he wrote.

Democrats' campaign arm was blunter. "So House Republicans' political strategy is 'see no families nor workers,' 'hear no protesters', 'speak to no one' and hope everyone gets less angry at them when they rip away Americans' health care? Got it," said DCCC spokesperson Viet Shelton.

It's worth being precise about who said this and what job he holds. Hudson isn't a random member with an opinion about scheduling. The NRCC chairman raises the money, recruits the candidates, and sets the campaign strategy for every House Republican on the ballot. When he tells the conference to stop appearing in public, that's the party's official advice to more than 200 members of Congress about whether to face the people who elected them.

Then he showed everyone how it's done

On April 22, 2025, Hudson took his own advice and held a tele-town hall. CityView, the nonprofit newsroom in Fayetteville, listened to the whole thing.

Here's what a Hudson town hall looks like:

50 minutes long. Eleven questions.
Callers apologized for barking dogs and asked "can you hear me?" before speaking.
Hudson's office ran a telephone survey during the event — "press 1 for jobs and the economy," "press 2 for immigration and border security" — five separate times, which CityView compared to a customer-service hold loop. CityView could not establish how the moderators chose the questions, or whether the survey fed into the choice.
Nearly half the questions were about veterans and the military — safe ground in a district that includes Fort Bragg.

One caller got through on DOGE. A Fayetteville veteran named Sam told him: "I've worked on Fort Bragg. I've been to Europe fighting. And you know, I'm just wondering what you are going to do about an unelected official who is ransacking our government. You are an elected official and I just hope that you do something."

Hudson's answer was that Elon Musk only made recommendations, and cabinet secretaries made the decisions. "In some cases, maybe they move too fast," he said. "And so I've asked some questions about some specific moves in certain agencies, but overall, I think the process has been good."

He'd already told the Associated Press that voters would "reward us" for the DOGE cuts.

The Medicaid answer

The most important moment of that call came from a woman named Sylvia. She said she had taught in the Fayetteville area for 16 years and could no longer work because of a disability. She had health coverage because North Carolina expanded Medicaid to cover single adults like her. She wanted to know if Republicans were going to take it.

It was a sharp question, and she had the mechanics right. North Carolina's expansion is written so that it rolls back automatically if Washington stops covering 90% of the cost. And Hudson sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which had just been handed the job of finding $880 billion in cuts from the programs it oversees — Medicaid included.

Here is what he told her:

"There's been a lot of rumors that Republicans in Congress are going to cut Medicaid. That's just simply not true. But what we are going to do is we're going to look and see how many illegals are on Medicaid and we're going to stop giving them the benefits. We're going to look at able-bodied adults. And if you're an able-bodied adult with no dependents and you can work, then you either need to be looking for a job, getting an education or working."

Seventy-two days later, on July 3, 2025, Hudson voted for the budget bill that cut Medicaid. His "Aye" is on the roll call.

North Carolina stands to lose an estimated $49.9 billion in federal Medicaid money over the next decade because of it. Up to 195,000 North Carolinians are at risk of losing coverage — from the same expansion that covered hundreds of thousands of people like Sylvia. We put the full accounting of what that bill costs the state — Medicaid, food aid, farmers, DOGE grants — and the name of every North Carolina Republican who voted for it in one place.

Sylvia didn't get a straight answer. She got the word "rumors."

Somebody else had to hold the town hall

Two days after Hudson's phone call, Democrats brought an in-person town hall to his district anyway. On April 24, 2025, about 400 people packed the Haw River Ballroom to hear Sen. Chris Murphy, Rep. Maxwell Frost, state Democratic chair Anderson Clayton, state House Minority Leader Robert Reives, and state Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls. Murphy's line was that a congressman's job is to show up for his constituents, and that Hudson was hiding.

It became a national program. Democrats launched "People's Town Halls" in Republican districts that spring, and their pitch named him directly: "Voters across the country are furious, and instead of facing their constituents, Republicans are avoiding hosting in-person town halls because NRCC Chair Richard Hudson told them to hide."

By October 2025, NC Newsline reported, no North Carolina Republican had held an in-person town hall since the one in Asheville that March.

Why this one matters more than most

Plenty of members of Congress avoid their constituents. We've written about a lot of them — in Pennsylvania, constituents have protested outside one congressman's office every Monday for over a year asking for an open town hall, and he can name none that he has held, and says he won't turn up at the protests because he doesn't want to be a "piñata".

What makes Hudson different is that he didn't just dodge. He institutionalized the dodge. He took a personal instinct to avoid an uncomfortable room and turned it into official party guidance for the entire House Republican conference, in his capacity as the man who funds their campaigns.

Hudson has been in Congress since 2013 — thirteen years — representing the 8th District until redistricting renumbered his seat the 9th in 2023. The district covers part of Cumberland County including Fort Bragg and parts of Fayetteville, plus all of Hoke, Moore, Randolph, and Alamance counties. Those are the people who don't get to ask him a follow-up question, because the format doesn't allow one.

A town hall isn't a gift a congressman gives you when he's feeling generous. It's the one moment where the person casting votes in your name has to stand in a room and account for them, in front of neighbors who can see his face while he answers. Hudson's advice to his party was that this part of the job is optional now.

Then he went and proved it. Fifty minutes, eleven callers, and a Medicaid answer that his own vote contradicted ten weeks later.

Source

N.C. Rep. Richard Hudson Tells Republicans to Quit Doing In-Person Townhalls — Daniella Diaz and Reese Gorman, NOTUS, republished by The Assembly, March 4, 2025. Photo: Angelina Katsanis/POLITICO via AP Images.