MAGA Report Cards — Blog

Jon Husted's Top Aide Was on a Lobbying Firm's Payroll. Now the Senate Is Being Asked to Investigate.

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:14:19 +0000

Ohio Sen. Jon Husted has a new ethics problem — and this one comes with a formal complaint asking the U.S. Senate to investigate him.

Husted's senior adviser and counsel, Sean Dunn, kept a paid consulting relationship with a Columbus lobbying firm at the same time he was working in the senator's office. According to Dunn's own certified federal financial disclosure — covering 2025 and submitted to Congress on May 14, 2026 — he collected $22,652 from Statehouse Impact Group, a government-relations and lobbying outfit, while serving as Husted's top legal and policy hand.

In plain English: one of the senator's most senior staffers was getting paid by a lobbying firm while helping run the senator's office.

Why this is a problem

Lobbying firms exist to get things from government. A senator's senior adviser has the senator's ear. Put those two roles in the same person and you get exactly the conflict of interest that ethics rules are supposed to prevent.

The watchdogs who study this were not impressed.

"Firewalls are a myth. There's just no way anyone can be both the general counsel to Senator Husted and just a guy. It's unethical."

That's Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project. Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette of the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight explained the real-world danger: an Ohio state lawmaker talking to lobbyists knows that one of them also works for a sitting U.S. senator. That, he said, "is going to add a bunch of additional juice and leverage" — and "it's not the kind of practice I would want to see happening on a regular basis."

A complaint that names Husted himself

This isn't just about a staffer. On May 29, 2026, Columbus attorney Anne Griffin filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics, asking it to investigate both Dunn and Husted.

The complaint argues the arrangement violated Senate Rule 37, which bars staff from cashing in on their Senate influence and restricts them from holding outside "professional services" jobs that create a duty to an outside client. And it points the finger directly at the senator: Husted, it says, bore the primary responsibility to prevent conflicts of interest among his staff — and appears to have failed. It asks the committee to look at whether Husted knew about the side arrangement and did nothing.

Husted's office says it holds its team "to the highest ethical standards" and that Dunn has been "in regular contact with the Ethics Committee." But the office did not answer questions about what Dunn actually did for the lobbying firm.

There's a catch worth knowing: the Senate Ethics Committee almost never punishes anyone. A NOTUS investigation found that since 2007, the committee is 0 for 2,007 — not a single formal disciplinary sanction out of more than two thousand matters it considered. So "we're talking to the Ethics Committee" is not the reassurance Husted's office wants it to sound like.

This fits a pattern, not an exception

If this were Jon Husted's first brush with the cozy world of money and influence, it might be easier to wave off. It isn't.

Ohio's biggest corruption scandal. Husted has long been tangled in the FirstEnergy bribery case — the $60 million bribery scheme behind a $1.2 billion ratepayer-funded utility bailout. He took a $1 million dark money contribution from FirstEnergy in 2017 and was named nearly 400 times during the criminal trial.
Epstein-linked money. Husted accepted $116,892 over the years from Les Wexner, the billionaire the FBI publicly identified as a co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein — then voted to block the release of the Epstein files.
A lobbyist-friendly office. Last year Husted took down a post of himself laughing with lobbyists while bragging about Trump's budget bill.

A staffer moonlighting for a lobbying firm isn't a one-off. It's another data point in a career spent very comfortable around money and influence.

What it means for Ohio

Ohioans send a senator to Washington to work for them — not for whoever is quietly paying his staff on the side. When the line between a senator's office and a lobbying firm gets this blurry, regular people lose. They don't have a consultant on the payroll. They just have a vote, and the hope that their senator is working for them.

A formal complaint now asks the Senate to find out whether Jon Husted lived up to that. Ohioans deserve a real answer. We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Tyler Spence for NOTUS, Top Jon Husted Senate Aide Kept Working for Ohio Lobbying Firm, as republished by the Ohio Capital Journal. Lead image via NOTUS.

Texas Republicans Just Made Ken Paxton Their Senate Pick. Look at the Record They Signed Off On.

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:06:58 +0000

On May 26, 2026, Texas Republicans picked their candidate for the U.S. Senate. They did not pick the four-term incumbent. They picked Ken Paxton.

And it was not close. Paxton took 63.8% of the vote and beat Sen. John Cornyn by 28 points. The Associated Press called the race about an hour after the polls closed. The Brookings Institution called the result a landslide that ended the Bush era of the Texas GOP.

So now Ken Paxton is one election away from the United States Senate. He faces Austin state Rep. James Talarico in November.

Before Texans vote again, it is worth being very clear about who Paxton is. Not the campaign ads. The record. Because this is a man who has spent more than a decade as the state's top law enforcement officer — and the public file on him reads like a rap sheet.

He was indicted, impeached, and reported to the FBI by his own staff

Start with the basics. Paxton was indicted on three felony securities fraud counts in 2015, seven months into his first term as attorney general. He was booked. He took a mug shot. Then he dragged the case out for nearly nine years until he finally cut a deal in 2024 — community service and restitution in exchange for the charges being dropped. There was no acquittal. The case never reached a jury.

Then there is the scandal that nearly ended his career. In 2020, eight of his own senior deputies reported him to the FBI. These were not enemies. They were conservative lawyers Paxton hired himself. They said he had abused the power of his office to help a friend and political donor, Austin real estate developer Nate Paul — and that Paul, in return, had given a job to a woman Paxton was having an affair with.

Within weeks, all eight whistleblowers were fired or forced out.

In 2023, the Texas House impeached Paxton 121 to 23. More than two-thirds of his fellow House Republicans voted to remove him. The Texas Senate later acquitted him — but acquittal is not innocence. A court looked at the same conduct and reached its own conclusion. In 2025, a judge ruled that Paxton's office broke the Texas Whistleblower Act and ordered the state to pay the fired aides $6.6 million. Paxton dropped his appeal, so Texas taxpayers are now paying that bill. You are paying for what he did.

He used the law as a weapon against people he disliked

Here is the part that should worry every Texan, no matter your politics. Paxton turned the consumer protection office — the office that is supposed to go after scam artists and predatory lenders — into a tool for hitting his political enemies.

A 2024 investigation by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune found that Paxton used consumer protection law more than a dozen times in two years to demand records from groups he disagreed with politically. Not one of those investigations was started by an actual consumer complaint. His office confirmed it.

Who did he target? A migrant shelter. A hospital that provided health care to transgender teens. A media watchdog group. These are not consumer scams. They are people Ken Paxton did not like. A Georgetown law professor told the reporters it looked like "a core violation" of what those laws exist to do.

That is the job he wants to take to Washington — except a U.S. Senator helps write the laws for the entire country, not just enforce them in one state.

He tried to overturn an election he lost

After the 2020 election, Paxton filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the certified votes of four states Donald Trump lost — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Other Republican attorneys general refused to put their names on it. Paxton filed it anyway. The Supreme Court tossed it out almost immediately.

Then he spoke at the January 6 rally that came right before the attack on the Capitol, telling the crowd "we will not quit fighting." He was the only state attorney general in the country who refused to condemn the riot. Instead he spread a false conspiracy theory that the rioters were really antifa. There was no evidence. It was a lie.

The man who tried to throw out millions of legal votes now wants Texans to send him to Washington to count theirs.

"Family values" — and two affairs

Paxton has built his whole brand on family values, traditional marriage, and Christian principles. His own life tells a different story. The affair tied to the Nate Paul scandal was only the start. In 2025, his wife of nearly 40 years — Texas state senator Angela Paxton — announced their separation, citing "biblical grounds". In his divorce response, Paxton asked that she receive nothing from their 38-year marriage.

This is a man who has spent years telling other Texans how they are allowed to live and love — and who called LGBTQ+ people and their allies "predators."

This is who Texas Republicans chose

None of this is hidden. Every fact above has been reported for years, by the Texas Tribune, by ProPublica, by CNN, by his own impeachment. Texas Republicans knew all of it. And in May, they did not just nominate him — they handed him a 28-point blowout.

That is the choice now in front of every Texan. The full case against Ken Paxton — the securities fraud, the bribery scandal, the abuse of office, the election lies, the donor money — is laid out on his report card below.

Source

This post was prompted by Judd Legum's A citizen's guide to Ken Paxton in Popular Information, which collects the documented record in one place.

Susan Collins Helped Write the Stock Trading Law — Then Broke It, Failing to Report Up to $395,000 in Trades

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:31:35 +0000

In 2012, Congress passed a law called the STOCK Act. The idea was simple and popular: members of Congress shouldn't be allowed to quietly trade stocks and hide it from the public. They have to report their trades quickly, within 45 days, so voters can see whether their representatives are getting rich off information the rest of us don't have.

Susan Collins didn't just vote for that law. She was the first Republican to back it and helped push it across the finish line. She wanted credit for cleaning up Washington.

So it's worth asking why she's been breaking it.

Up to $395,000 in trades, reported late

A review of Collins' financial disclosures found that she failed to properly report up to $395,000 in stock trades. The news outlet NOTUS counted 24 separate transactions reported more than 100 days late between 2013 and 2018 — long past the 45-day deadline the law requires.

The trades were made by her husband, Thomas Daffron, a former lobbyist. They included shares of big companies like Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, and CVS. Under the STOCK Act, a spouse's trades count — that's exactly the kind of activity the law was written to make public.

And this isn't ancient history. As The Maine Monitor reported, in early 2026 Daffron bought a Pfizer bond worth between $15,000 and $50,000 — and Collins again disclosed it late, days past the deadline. That one matters for another reason: Collins sits on the Senate committee that oversees the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates drug companies like Pfizer.

A law with no teeth — and she knows it

Here's the part that should bother every Mainer. Breaking the STOCK Act is supposed to come with a penalty. But the fines are routinely waived by the House and Senate ethics committees — the lawmakers policing themselves. It's unclear whether Collins faced any penalty at all.

So the law she helped write has a loophole big enough to drive a truck through, and she drove right through it. She got the good headlines for passing it. She skipped the part where she follows it.

She got rich while she was in office

This fits a bigger picture. When Collins first came to the Senate, she wasn't wealthy — as we've documented, her net worth was once negative. Today it's around $9.8 million. Last year alone she earned $342,520 in passive investment income — more than most Maine families make from a full year of actual work.

She now holds one of the best-performing stock portfolios in the entire U.S. Senate. And when asked whether members of Congress should be banned from trading individual stocks altogether — something 81% of Americans support, including most Republicans — Collins has come down against a full ban.

Of course she has. The current system has worked out very well for her.

The "moderate" who plays by her own rules

Collins likes to sell herself as a careful, independent moderate. But this is a pattern. She advanced Trump's budget bill — which cuts Medicaid and food aid for Mainers — the day after a private equity billionaire gave $2 million to a PAC supporting her, then voted no on the final bill once it didn't matter. She promised in 1996 to serve only two terms and is now running for a sixth.

Over and over, Collins says one thing and does another. The STOCK Act is just the cleanest example: she literally wrote the rule, took the credit, and then didn't follow it.

We deserve a senator who lives by the same laws she asks the rest of us to follow.

Source

This post is based on reporting by American Journal News, built on the original investigation by NOTUS and The Maine Monitor.

Dan Sullivan Begged Alaskans for Gas Money While His Groups Spent $1.5 Million at Golf Resorts

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:30:04 +0000

Dan Sullivan likes to look like a regular Alaskan. The Carhartt jacket. The work boots. The just-folks act. But a new look at how his political operation spends money tells a very different story — one with valet parking and a 36-hole golf course.

Sullivan's political groups have spent more than $1.5 million at luxury hotels and golf resorts since 2015 — that's almost his entire time in the Senate. And while he was living large on his donors' dime, he was emailing Alaskans asking them to chip in a few bucks to help him "pay for gas."

You read that right.

$5 gas for you, golf resorts for him

In 2025 alone, Sullivan's groups spent $333,291 on lodging, meals, and catering. That's more than double what they spent the year before. In the first three months of 2026, 92% of his food and lodging spending happened outside Alaska. This is not money being spent in the state he represents. It's outside donor money, spent far away from the people he answers to.

Where did it go? Some of the highlights:

$160,737 at La Quinta, a Palm Springs golf resort once used to film The Bachelorette.
More than $151,000 at the Kiawah Island golf resort in South Carolina — site of a PGA Championship — including spending during a government shutdown.
$21,000 at The Phoenician in Scottsdale, Arizona, where rooms can run up to $9,500 a night.
$3,500 at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach, Florida.

Now here's the part that should make every Alaskan angry. While all of this was happening, Sullivan's campaign sent out fundraising emails begging Alaskans for $3, $5, and $10 donations to help him "pay for gas." At the time, Alaska gas prices had climbed to around $5.20 a gallon — nearly a dollar above the national average. And his campaign already had $7 million sitting in the bank.

He didn't need your three dollars. He just wanted you to feel like you were on the same team.

"Self-Serving Sullivan"

The Alaska Democratic Party didn't mince words. Party Chair Eric Croft put it bluntly:

"While we're paying $5 for a gallon of gas, choosing between paying for groceries or health care, and struggling to afford housing, Self-Serving Sullivan has literally been wining and dining Lower 48 special interest donors at luxurious golf resorts."

That's the whole story in one sentence. While Alaskans were doing the math at the gas pump and the grocery store, their senator was picking up the tab at five-star resorts — with money raised off the very people who are struggling.

It's not just the resorts

The luxury habit isn't only on the road. Back in Washington, Sullivan dined at one upscale spot, Bistro Cacao, 21 times in 14 months, spending around $21,500 at a place The Washingtonian described as where "Capitol Hill power brokers fill the tables." He visited the 116 Club — a private DC haunt full of high-powered lobbyists — 10 times. He once dropped $5,376 in a single visit to Joe's Stone Crab.

This is who Sullivan spends his time with. Not Alaskans worried about heating oil. Lobbyists and special-interest donors, over expensive dinners, in rooms most of us will never see.

The pattern is the point

This is the same Dan Sullivan whose biggest personal asset is up to $5 million in his family's chemical company stock — a company that once paid nearly $61 million to settle federal fraud charges. The same senator who skips town halls when angry Alaskans show up to ask him questions. The same senator who voted for Trump's budget law that cuts Medicaid and food help for Alaska families.

Over and over, the story is the same. When it's his donors and his comfort, the money flows freely. When it's regular Alaskans, he asks them to pitch in.

We deserve a senator who spends his energy on us — not one who treats Alaska like an ATM and the rest of the country like a vacation.

Source

This post is based on reporting by American Journal News, drawing on spending records compiled by the Alaska Democratic Party.

Dan Sullivan Got Rich Off a Company That Defrauded the Government — Then It Kept Winning Federal Contracts

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:28:11 +0000

Senators love to talk about cracking down on "waste, fraud, and abuse." Dan Sullivan is one of them. He has spent the last year selling Alaskans on Trump's budget law by promising it would root out fraud in programs like Medicaid.

So here's a fair question: what about the fraud in his own portfolio?

Sullivan's single largest asset is up to $5 million in stock in a company called RPM International. It is not some random investment. RPM was founded by his grandfather, and today it is run by his brother, Frank C. Sullivan, who serves as chairman and CEO. The Sullivan family fortune is built on this company.

And RPM has a history Sullivan doesn't bring up at his fundraisers.

A $61 million fraud settlement

In 2013, RPM and its subsidiary Tremco Inc. agreed to pay nearly $61 million to settle a federal lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. The charge: cheating the government on roofing contracts.

According to the Justice Department, Tremco failed to give the federal government the same price discounts it handed to its other customers. It also steered government buyers toward expensive products while hiding the fact that cheaper versions of the same materials were available. In plain English, taxpayers got overcharged.

The full cost to RPM, once legal fees were counted, topped $65 million.

The case didn't come out of nowhere. It started with a whistleblower — a former Tremco vice president named Gregory Rudolph, who had spent more than 20 years at the company before he resigned and blew the whistle. For exposing the scheme, he received more than $10.9 million as his share of the recovery. That is how seriously the government took it.

Sullivan profited before, during, and after

The settlement was finalized in 2013. Sullivan was elected to the U.S. Senate the very next year, in 2014. The whole time, he has held his RPM stock and collected the income from it.

Think about the timeline. A company gets caught allegedly defrauding the federal government. It pays tens of millions to make the case go away. And the man who owns up to $5 million of its stock then gets elected to the body that writes the rules for that exact government — and keeps cashing in.

It gets worse. Even after the fraud settlement, RPM kept winning new federal contracts — millions of dollars' worth. The company that overcharged taxpayers wasn't shut out. It stayed on the government payroll. And the senator from Alaska kept profiting from it.

This fits a pattern with Sullivan

If this were a one-off, maybe you could call it bad luck about who your relatives are. But it isn't.

Sullivan has voted again and again to advance RPM's interests. As we've documented on his report card, he voted to block an EPA amendment that would have let the agency crack down on cancer-causing pollutants — a vote that lined up neatly with the interests of the chemical and coatings company his family owns.

And RPM isn't the only stock that's gotten him in trouble. Sullivan secretly traded shares of Mowi — the world's largest farmed-salmon company and a direct competitor to Alaska's own fishermen — and failed to disclose those trades for months, breaking the STOCK Act, the law meant to keep members of Congress from trading on inside information.

His stock portfolio has outperformed the market by double, making him one of the best-performing investors in all of Congress. For a "regular Alaskan," he sure does win a lot on Wall Street.

The hypocrisy is the point

Here's what makes this more than just an awkward family story.

Sullivan went around Alaska telling people that Trump's budget law — the one that cuts Medicaid and food assistance for working families — was about stopping "waste, fraud, and abuse." He pointed the finger at the people who rely on those programs, as if struggling Alaskans were the problem.

But most fraud in programs like Medicaid isn't committed by the people getting help. It's committed by corporations and contractors — companies exactly like the one that made the Sullivan family rich.

When a poor Alaskan needs Medicaid, Sullivan calls it waste. When his own family's company allegedly cheats the government out of tens of millions and keeps the contracts flowing, he says nothing at all. One rule for us, another rule for him.

We deserve a senator who works for Alaskans — not one who lectures us about fraud while quietly profiting from it.

Source

This post is based on reporting by American Journal News, confirmed against the U.S. Department of Justice settlement announcement and contemporaneous business reporting.

What Arkansas's Republicans in Congress Are Costing You

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Out of 50 states, Arkansas ranks 49th on the measures we track — health, crime, food security, schools, and more. That's not an accident of geography. It's the result of choices, and a lot of those choices are made in Washington by the six people Arkansas sends to Congress.

Here's the honest version: these numbers describe where Arkansas already stands. The new part is what our own members of Congress just voted to cut on top of it — and who gets hurt when they do. Let's go through it.

They voted to gut the thing keeping rural hospitals open

Arkansas stands to lose an estimated $8–11 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade. That money is what keeps the lights on at rural hospitals — and in Arkansas, many of them will simply shut down when it disappears.

Arkansas is already scraping the bottom of the barrel for overall health, women's health, maternal mortality, infant mortality, obesity, and life expectancy. Researchers warn the proposed Medicaid cuts would hurt rural areas, including Arkansas kids, the hardest. When the nearest hospital closes, a heart attack or a difficult birth becomes a much longer drive. For a lot of families, that drive is the difference.

The hungriest state in America — and they cut food help anyway

Arkansas has the highest food insecurity rate in the country. Nearly 1 in 4 kids here faces hunger every single day. 240,000 Arkansans rely on SNAP — food stamps — every month, and a University of Arkansas report found that nearly 30% of Arkansans face food insecurity.

So what did our delegation do? They voted for a budget law that cuts SNAP and hits Arkansas's already-dwindling surplus. In the hungriest state in America, they made it harder for families to put food on the table. You can see what hunger already looks like in Arkansas — and the people who voted to make it worse represent the very towns where it's worst.

They picked a trade fight that's crushing Arkansas farmers

Farming is the largest industry in Arkansas, contributing over $24 billion to the state economy — about 14% of everything Arkansas produces. And right now, Arkansas farmers are getting squeezed.

The tariff fight has Arkansas soybean farmers reeling, watching their biggest export markets dry up. Then came a plan to send billions in aid to Argentina — a direct competitor — which sparked outrage among American farmers who are struggling to hang on. Our delegation backed the policies that started the squeeze, and Arkansas growers are paying for it.

DOGE bragged about cuts. Arkansas paid the bill.

DOGE claims it "saved" Arkansas $237 million — but look at what that actually meant on the ground. DOGE disrupted the federal response to the bird flu outbreak that directly hit Arkansas. And it destroyed USAID, which through its Food for Peace program normally buys around $2 billion of American crops a year to feed impoverished countries. Arkansas grows roughly 40% of all the rice in the United States — so when that buyer vanishes, Arkansas farmers lose a customer.

Meanwhile, there were 178,000 layoffs in Arkansas in 2025. Our delegation didn't stand in the way of any of it.

One of the most dangerous states — and all six took the gun lobby's money

Arkansas is one of the worst states in the country for violent crime, murder, and firearm deaths. After the mass shooting in Fordyce, Arkansas leaders offered thoughts and prayers. What they haven't offered is action — and there may be a reason. All six Arkansans in Congress accepted NRA donations.

Who voted for this

These are the members of Congress representing Arkansas who voted for the budget law behind the Medicaid and SNAP cuts, backed the trade policy hurting farmers, and stood by while DOGE tore through the state:

Tom Cotton — U.S. Senator
Rick Crawford — U.S. Representative
French Hill — U.S. Representative
Steve Womack — U.S. Representative
Bruce Westerman — U.S. Representative

Arkansas ranking 49th isn't destiny. It's the score so far. In 2026, every one of these seats is on the ballot — and Arkansans get to decide whether the people who voted to make a hard situation harder get to keep doing it.

Compare Arkansas to Other States →

Trump Blocked the Biggest Housing Bill in Decades — Until Republicans Pass a Voter Suppression Law

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000

This week Congress did something it almost never does: it passed a big, bipartisan bill to make housing cheaper. Then it stopped cold — because the President wouldn't sign it.

On Wednesday, June 24, 2026, President Donald Trump canceled the signing ceremony for the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. The White House had supported the bill. The staff had already set up the desk and the presidential seal. Then Trump said he wouldn't sign it until Congress passes a separate bill — one that has nothing to do with housing and everything to do with making it harder to vote.

This is what holding people hostage looks like. Affordable housing for millions of families is the ransom. A voter suppression bill is the demand.

A rare win — passed by almost everyone

The housing bill wasn't close. The Senate passed it 85–5 on Monday. The House passed it 358–32 on Tuesday. Republicans and Democrats both voted for it in huge numbers. After years of fighting over everything, Washington actually agreed on something people across the country are desperate for.

And people are desperate for it. Home prices are up 54% since 2020. Last year the typical home cost nearly five times what a typical family earns in a year. Rents are still 17.2% higher than before the pandemic. For a whole generation of younger Americans, buying a first home has gone from "someday" to "never."

The bill tries to fix the root problem: there aren't enough homes. It cuts red tape and speeds up construction. It makes it easier to build cheaper starter homes, manufactured homes, and small rental units in people's backyards. It limits big corporate landlords from buying up single-family homes. It expands rental help and adds new protections for renters. It even helps towns turn old, abandoned buildings into housing.

It's not a magic wand. But it's the most serious housing bill in decades, and the real estate industry, homebuilders, and housing advocates all backed it.

The demand: a bill that makes it harder to vote

So why won't Trump sign it? He posted that the signing was canceled until Congress passes the SAVE America Act — a bill that would require every American to show documents proving citizenship in order to register to vote.

That sounds simple. It isn't. Most people don't carry a passport or a birth certificate around, and a lot of people can't easily get one.

The Brennan Center estimates that more than 21 million citizens don't have ready access to the documents the bill would demand.
Roughly 69 million women who changed their name when they got married have a birth certificate that no longer matches their legal name — which could block them.
Voting as a noncitizen is already illegal, and study after study has found it vanishingly rare.

In other words, the bill solves a problem that barely exists by creating a giant new one for millions of real voters — married women, rural Americans, working people who don't have a passport in a drawer. That's the price Trump has put on housing relief.

They have the votes. They just won't use them.

Here's the part that should make every voter pay attention.

Those margins — 85–5 and 358–32 — aren't just big. They're what's called "veto-proof." If Trump actually vetoes the housing bill, Congress can override him and make it law anyway. They have more than enough votes. They could do it in a day.

So far, they won't. Speaker Mike Johnson said he talked to Trump and is "confident the president would sign the bill" — which is another way of saying he'd rather wait and hope than stand up to Trump and override him. And the voter bill Trump is demanding? Senate Majority Leader John Thune has already admitted Republicans don't even have the votes to pass it in the Senate.

Read that again. Republican leaders won't use the votes they do have to deliver housing relief, because Trump wants a voter bill they don't have the votes to pass. Their own constituents are stuck in the middle.

This is the whole game. The same members who go home and talk about the "cost of living" had a finished, bipartisan, veto-proof housing bill in their hands — and chose to wait on Trump instead of overriding him. The cost of that choice lands on regular people.

Who pays for the delay

Every week this drags on is a week that builders don't break ground, that projects sit in limbo, that the housing shortage gets worse. Economists warn the country is already on track to fall another 2 million homes short over the next five years without action. As one Redfin economist put it, for buyers hoping for relief, having to wait even longer is "a tough pill to swallow."

And it didn't have to be this way. The bill passed. The pen was ready. The only thing standing between American families and the most significant housing law in a generation is a President using their homes as leverage — and a Republican Congress that has the power to act and is choosing not to.

The bottom line

Affordable housing isn't a left or right issue — 443 members of Congress just proved that. But Trump turned a rare bipartisan win into a hostage situation, demanding a voter suppression bill in exchange for relief that families need now. Republican leaders have the votes to override him and refuse to. When your rent goes up and the starter home stays out of reach, remember who had the fix in hand and decided to wait.

Source

This post is based on AP News reporting: "What Trump's refusal to sign bipartisan housing bill into law means to homebuyers and renters" (June 24, 2026).

Sarah Sanders Called a Jonesboro Factory a Chinese Threat — After Her Own Team Said It Was Innocent

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In December 2023, Governor Sarah Sanders looked into a camera and told Arkansas that two companies in our state were "linked to the CCP" — the Chinese Communist Party. She made it sound like a national security emergency.

There was one problem. Her own people had already told her, in writing, that it wasn't true.

Hundreds of pages of emails and court records obtained this week by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette show that Sanders' own agriculture secretary, her own attorney general, and his staff all knew the main target of her attack — a machine-parts maker in Jonesboro called Risever Machinery — was following Arkansas law. They said so to each other for days. Then Sanders went on social media and smeared the company anyway.

The scary story

Back in December 2023, Sanders' administration sent referral letters to Attorney General Tim Griffin asking him to investigate two businesses. One was Risever Machinery in Jonesboro. The other was Jones Digital, a cryptocurrency miner in Arkansas County. Both leased their land. The state claimed they might violate Act 636, the 2023 law Sanders signed that bars foreign-controlled businesses from owning Arkansas farmland.

Sanders' office leaned in hard. Her team told the public the Jonesboro company was connected to China. She put out an official press release with the headline "Sanders Administration Holds China Accountable." And on December 21, 2023, she posted a video across X, Facebook, and Instagram with the kind of language that grabs headlines:

"Communist China is America's greatest threat, and I won't let them buy up and exploit Arkansas land. ... We simply can't trust those who pledge allegiance to a hostile foreign power."

It's a powerful message. It would be a fine message — if the companies she named had actually done something wrong.

Her own team already knew the case had collapsed

Here's what the court records show was happening behind the scenes while Sanders worked the cameras.

Act 636 only covers agricultural land — land outside city limits. Just two hours after the referrals went out, an investigator in the attorney general's office pulled a property map and pointed out that Risever sits inside Jonesboro city limits, on land owned by the city. By the law's own definition, it wasn't farmland at all.

It got worse for the state's case from there. Risever turned out to be a family-owned company based in Hefei, China — not a government operation. It makes machine parts for companies like Caterpillar, Volvo, and Komatsu. It was recruited to Arkansas years earlier by former Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson. And its lawyer — Hutchinson's own son — sent Griffin a deed proving the property was inside city limits and asked him to close the case.

Then Sanders' own appointees lined up and said the same thing to each other:

Agriculture Secretary Wes Ward — Sanders' own appointee — said he believed Risever was "in compliance with Arkansas law."
Attorney General Tim Griffin wrote to his staff: "Looks like no Chinese involvement." Two minutes later he added: "Looks like they were wrongly accused."
Deputy Attorney General Alexandra Benton emailed a Sanders staffer to warn that Risever "is indeed compliant."

All of that happened before Sanders posted her video calling the company a Communist China threat. She had been told. She said it anyway.

"They're wanting to save face"

The most damning part isn't even the original mistake. It's what happened after the truth was clear.

The day after Sanders' video, Griffin's office was scrambling to put out a statement clearing Risever. According to the records, Sanders' press secretary at the time, Alexa Henning, called Griffin's spokesman and pushed him to make sure the statement still labeled Risever a "Chinese-owned company" — "even though they're not violating Arkansas law." Griffin's spokesman summed up the governor's office in four words: "They're wanting to save face."

On December 22, 2023, Griffin put out the statement anyway. He concluded that Risever "is not in violation of Arkansas's law regarding foreign ownership of real property." Other outlets reported the same thing: the company was found not to be violating the ban.

The case was over. The company was cleared. But the headline Sanders wanted was already out there, doing its work.

Real businesses, real harm

This isn't a victimless political stunt. Real companies and real people got hurt.

Risever paid back a state grant when it didn't hit its hiring targets — it was a business trying to operate by the rules, and it got branded a foreign enemy by its own governor. The other company Sanders named, Jones Digital — now called Jones Eagle — fought back in court. It's run by Qimin "Jimmy" Chen, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in China. He says the state targeted him unfairly, and a federal judge agreed enough to block Arkansas from enforcing these laws against him. That case is still grinding through the federal courts — on the taxpayers' dime.

Think about what that means. A U.S. citizen got painted as a threat to the country by the governor of his own state, and he's had to spend years in court clearing his name over a law the state may not even be allowed to enforce.

The same playbook, over and over

If this feels familiar, that's because it is. This is exactly how Sarah Sanders operates: sound the alarm, grab the headline, hide the details, and move on when the facts catch up.

She built her national career doing it. As White House press secretary, she admitted to federal investigators that she made up a claim about FBI agents losing faith in James Comey — she had no evidence for it. As governor, she bought a $19,000 lectern and tried to hide how it was paid for. She even tried to gut Arkansas's open-records law so we couldn't check up on her in the first place.

And she ran the exact same China play again less than a year later. In 2024, her office accused an American company buying a Fort Smith factory of being a Communist Chinese front — and her own attorney general's staff called that one a "comms stunt" with no proof behind it, too. The company was cleared. The pattern repeats because it works: the scary headline travels, the quiet correction doesn't.

The bottom line

Strip away the politics and here's what's left. Sarah Sanders accused a Jonesboro company of being tied to Communist China. Her own agriculture secretary said it was in compliance. Her own attorney general said it was "wrongly accused." Her own deputy attorney general warned that it was "indeed compliant." All of that was in writing, before she ever hit "post." She said the scary thing anyway, and her office pushed to keep the smear alive even after it was proven false — because they were "wanting to save face."

We don't need a governor who treats the truth as optional and law-abiding businesses as props for a press release. We're smart enough to see the con. We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Neal Earley of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: "Staff for Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, others knew company she vilified on social media in 2023 was 'wrongly accused'", June 25, 2026.

13 Republican Senators Just Voted to Keep Us in Trump's Iran War

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The Constitution is clear about one thing: Congress, not the president, decides whether the country goes to war. Last week the Senate had a chance to stand up for that rule. Most Republicans chose Trump instead.

On the night of June 24, 2026, the Senate voted 47 to 50 to block a war powers resolution that would have ordered U.S. forces out of unauthorized hostilities with Iran. The motion failed, and the war kept going — with no vote of Congress ever authorizing it.

What makes this worse is what happened the day before.

A 24-hour flip

On Tuesday, June 23, the Senate actually did the right thing. It passed a war powers resolution, 50 to 48, directing the president to remove U.S. troops from the fight with Iran unless Congress voted to approve it. Four Republicans crossed party lines to support it.

Then President Trump got angry. He went after the Republicans who voted to rein him in. And almost overnight, the Senate caved and reversed itself. On Wednesday, with a couple of senators flipping under pressure, the chamber blocked a nearly identical measure and handed Trump a win.

So in the span of one day, the Senate went from telling the president to stand down to telling him to carry on. The deciding factor wasn't new facts about Iran. It was pressure from Trump.

Who voted to keep us in the war

These 13 senators we track all voted against reining in the war — voting the way that keeps American troops in a conflict Congress never approved:

Shelley Moore Capito — West Virginia
Tom Cotton — Arkansas
Lindsey Graham — South Carolina
Bill Hagerty — Tennessee
Jon Husted — Ohio
Cindy Hyde-Smith — Mississippi
Roger Marshall — Kansas
Ashley Moody — Florida
Pete Ricketts — Nebraska
Jim Risch — Idaho
Mike Rounds — South Dakota
Dan Sullivan — Alaska
Tommy Tuberville — Alabama

Every one of them had a simple choice: defend the Senate's own power to decide on war, or hand that power to Trump and the war hawks. They picked Trump.

It's worth noting the contrast. Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine voted for ending the war both times. It can be done. These 13 just chose not to.

This isn't a small thing

Going to war is the most serious decision a government can make. American lives are on the line. So is a huge amount of money — money that comes out of the same budget these same senators say they want to cut when it's time to fund health care or food assistance back home.

The founders worried about exactly this. They didn't want one person to be able to drag the whole country into a war on his own. That's why they gave the power to declare war to Congress. When senators refuse to even vote on whether a war should continue, they're not being humble — they're dodging the single most important job they have.

And dodging is the theme here. Instead of holding a real debate about whether fighting Iran is in America's interest, these senators voted to make the question go away. No debate, no authorization, no accountability — just a green light handed to the White House.

Following the money

It's fair to ask why so many senators are this eager to keep a war going.

One answer is the money. The pro-war lobby spends heavily in Senate races, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — which pushes hard for U.S. military backing of Israel's wars, including against Iran — is one of the biggest spenders in American politics. Several of the senators on this list count AIPAC and its allied donors among their largest backers. When your biggest donors want a war, voting to end that war gets a lot harder.

That's the quiet part. These votes aren't just about Iran policy. They're about who these senators actually answer to — and too often, it isn't the people back home who'll pay the bills and bury the dead.

The bottom line

For one day, the Senate remembered that Congress is supposed to decide on war. Then Trump pushed back, and most Republicans folded.

The 13 senators above had the power to demand a real vote and a real debate before more Americans are sent to fight. They used that power to do the opposite — to keep the war going and keep themselves out of the way. When the next bill for this war comes due, in dollars or in lives, remember that they had the chance to stop it and chose not to.

We deserve senators who answer to us, not to a president's temper or a lobby's checkbook.

How they voted

This post is based on the official U.S. Senate roll call for Vote 192 (S.J.Res. 185), June 24, 2026, with reporting from NPR, CNN, and UPI.

The Republicans With the Worst Records on Guns

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

We all want the same thing: to feel safe at school, at church, at the grocery store, and in our own homes. So it should be simple. But it isn't, because the people we send to Washington keep choosing the gun lobby over our kids.

The numbers are not close. Every day, 125 Americans are killed with guns, and more than 200 are shot and wounded. A child or adolescent is killed with a gun in this country every 2 hours and 48 minutes. Compared to every other wealthy nation on earth, the United States is an outlier — and not because Americans are more violent, but because we make it easy to get a gun and hard to pass a law about it.

Here's the part they don't want you to remember: you can support the Second Amendment and support common-sense gun safety at the same time. Most gun owners do. But the six Republicans below don't. They've blocked bipartisan safety laws, taken the gun lobby's money, and handed out thoughts and prayers while the funerals piled up. Here's their record.

Cindy Hyde-Smith — blocked gun safety while kids were dying

Mississippi has the highest firearm mortality rate and the highest murder rate in the entire country. You'd think that would make a senator from Mississippi want to act. Cindy Hyde-Smith did the opposite. In 2022, after a string of mass shootings, she voted against even advancing bipartisan gun safety legislation — not against the final bill, against letting the Senate debate it at all.

This is a pattern. She earned the grim distinction of being profiled as "the senator who blocked gun control while students lay dying at Saugus High School." Mississippi leads the nation in gun deaths, and its senior senator's answer has been to make sure nothing changes.

Dan Sullivan — "sickened" by mass shootings, then votes no every time

Alaska has the highest violent crime rate in the country and is near the top for murder and firearm deaths. Dan Sullivan knows this. After a weekend of mass shootings, he told reporters he was "sickened" by the bloodshed.

And then he voted no — again. When PBS asked every senator what action should be taken on guns, Sullivan's record was the same as always: nothing that the NRA, which endorsed him, wouldn't approve. Being "sickened" doesn't stop a single bullet. Votes do, and Sullivan keeps casting his the wrong way.

Rick Crawford — wants to make it easier to get a gun

Arkansas is one of the worst states in the country for violent crime, murder, and firearm deaths — and all six Arkansans in Congress have taken NRA money. Rick Crawford isn't just blocking gun safety; he's pushing the other direction. He put out a statement opposing any ban on semi-automatic firearms and insists the answer to gun violence is just to "enforce current gun laws" — the standard line for doing nothing new.

So every time there's another mass shooting, Crawford offers the same meaningless thoughts and prayers, then goes right back to work trying to expand gun access in a state that already buries some of the most gun victims in America.

Pat Harrigan — the congressman who sells the guns

Most of the people on this list vote for the gun industry. Pat Harrigan is the gun industry. He co-owns firearms companies ZRODelta, UnBrandedAR, and US Optics — businesses that manufacture and sell handguns, rifles, and shooting accessories. So when he opposes every gun safety measure and works to expand gun rights, he isn't just serving a lobby. He's protecting his own bottom line.

North Carolina loses about 1,800 people to gun violence every year — a rate 27% higher than the national average. The man his district sent to Congress profits from the products doing the killing, and votes accordingly. That's not a conflict of interest he's hiding — it's his résumé.

Derrick Van Orden — NRA-endorsed, and brought a loaded gun to the airport

Derrick Van Orden is NRA-endorsed and has reliably opposed bipartisan gun safety laws. He's also the cautionary tale for why those laws exist. In 2021, Van Orden was caught with a loaded 9mm handgun in his carry-on bag at the Cedar Rapids airport — one round in the chamber, full magazine. He pleaded guilty, was fined, put on probation, and ordered by the court to take a firearm safety course.

Wisconsin loses about 735 people to gun violence every year. The man representing its 3rd District couldn't safely get himself through a security line — but he'll fight any law that asks anyone else to be more careful.

Greg Murphy — an "A" from the NRA

Greg Murphy carries an A rating from the NRA — the gun lobby's seal of approval, earned by opposing gun safety measures and actively working to expand gun rights. Like his fellow North Carolinian Harrigan, Murphy represents a state that buries roughly 1,800 people a year to gun violence, and his answer is to make guns easier to get, not harder to misuse.

The pattern

Look at these six together and the excuse falls apart. It isn't that gun safety is impossible — it's that they won't do it. A senator from the deadliest gun state in the nation blocks debate. A senator says he's "sickened" and votes no anyway. A congressman literally sells the guns. Another forgot his loaded pistol at the airport and still fights the rules. This isn't six bad apples. It's the party's position on guns, and they're proud of it.

The good news is simple: every one of these seats is up to us. In 2026, we get to decide whether the people writing our gun laws answer to the NRA or to the families burying their kids. We deserve better — and we can vote for it.

3 Things to Know About Rick Crawford

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Rick Crawford has represented Arkansas's 1st District since 2011. That's 15 years in Washington — a long time to get to know someone. His district is full of farm country, working families, and small towns. So who has he actually been fighting for?

Here are 3 things to know.

1. He waved off the trade war that's crushing Arkansas farmers

Arkansas runs on agriculture. And Trump's tariffs and trade war with China have hammered farmers here — China was the biggest buyer of American soybeans, and that market dried up.

What did Crawford say about it? That tariffs "won't be a problem" — even as his own state's ag officials were sounding the alarm. He kept defending the tariffs and the trade fight while prices for the people back home kept climbing.

Then it got worse. The Trump administration handed Argentina — a direct competitor of American soybean farmers — a $40 billion bailout. Almost right away, Argentina cut its soybean export taxes and China bought up Argentine soybeans instead of ours. American farmers, meanwhile, were offered a much smaller $12 billion in aid. Our tax dollars went to help our farmers' competition. Crawford did nothing to stop it.

2. He works for big business

Want to know who Rick Crawford listens to? Follow the money. His top donors include some of the biggest corporations in the country:

Boeing
Koch Inc.
Lockheed Martin
Union Pacific
Caterpillar
Tyson

That's a long list of powerful companies — and a short list of regular Arkansans. The Koch network in particular has poured money into politics for years to get the policies it wants. When your campaign is paid for by giant corporations, it's not hard to guess whose phone calls get returned. You can see the full picture at Who Bought My Rep.

3. He blocks even basic gun safety laws

We all want our kids to be safe at school. In America, 125 people are killed with guns every single day, and a child or teenager is killed with a gun every few hours.

You can believe in the Second Amendment and still want common-sense steps to keep guns away from dangerous people. Most Americans do. But Crawford opposes a ban on military-style semi-automatic weapons and says we should just "enforce current gun laws" instead of passing new safety measures. After every mass shooting, that's the same answer — thoughts and prayers, and no action.

One pattern, three examples

These aren't three separate problems. They're three versions of the same one: when it comes time to choose between Arkansas families and the powerful interests that fund him, Rick Crawford keeps choosing the donors. After 15 years in Washington, that's not a misstep — it's the whole job description. In 2026, Arkansas gets to decide whether it's still the job it wants done.

3 Things to Know About Jake Ellzey

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000

Jake Ellzey has represented Texas's 6th District since 2021. He sits on the powerful Appropriations Committee, which controls how the government spends our money. That's a lot of responsibility. Here's how he's used it.

Here are 3 things to know.

1. He won't meet you face to face

A big part of a representative's job is to actually listen to the people he represents. Jake Ellzey makes that hard.

Instead of holding open, in-person town halls where anyone can show up and ask a tough question, Ellzey runs his constituent meetings as telephone town halls. You call in, the staff screens it, and the congressman stays safely on the other end of a phone line. There's no room full of neighbors, no follow-up questions, no being looked in the eye.

It's a lot easier to dodge hard questions when nobody can see your face. When a politician avoids meeting voters in person, it usually means he knows they're not happy with him.

2. He votes against the environment every single time

We all want clean air and clean water for our kids. Jake Ellzey keeps voting the other way.

He has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025, and just a 5% lifetime score. That's not a few bad votes here and there — that's voting against clean air and water protections nearly every chance he gets. He's lined up behind rolling back environmental rules so big companies can pollute more and pay less. We're the ones who end up breathing it.

3. He wants to ban abortion nationwide

America is supposed to be the land of freedom — including the freedom to make your own private medical decisions with your family and your doctor.

Jake Ellzey doesn't see it that way. In January 2025, he signed on as an original cosponsor of the "Life at Conception Act" (H.R. 722). That bill would give full legal "personhood" to a fertilized egg "at the moment of fertilization." In plain terms, it's a path to banning abortion across the entire country — with no exceptions — and it could even put popular fertility treatments like IVF at risk.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Ellzey thinks the government should make that decision for you.

So who is Jake Ellzey accountable to?

Not the voters he won't sit across a table from. Not the families breathing the air he keeps voting to pollute. Not the patients whose most private choices he'd hand over to Washington. The through-line in all three is the same: Jake Ellzey doesn't act like he answers to the people back home. The 2026 ballot is the one place that can change his mind.

3 Things to Know About Jim Jordan

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Jim Jordan has represented Ohio's 4th District since 2007. That's 19 years in Congress, and he's now one of the most powerful members of the House as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. With all that power and all that time, you'd expect a long list of things he's done for the people of his district.

You'd be wrong. Here are 3 things to know.

1. In nearly 20 years, he's never passed a single law

This sounds made up, but it isn't. Despite serving in Congress for almost two decades, Jim Jordan has never sponsored a single bill that became law. Not one.

That's not what he's there for. Jordan isn't in Washington to write laws that help Ohio. He's there to perform — to go on TV, to put on a show in committee hearings, to chase Trump's enemies and protect Trump's friends. Meanwhile, the people of Ohio's 4th District have gotten basically nothing to show for 19 years of seniority. We're paying him to do a job he isn't doing.

2. He defied his own subpoena — then issued 91 to other people

Here's a story about one set of rules for Jim Jordan and another for everyone else.

In 2022, Congress issued Jordan a lawful subpoena, ordering him to testify about what he knew about January 6th. He refused. Other officials who defied similar subpoenas — like Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro — were convicted and sent to prison. Jordan faced zero punishment. Instead, he got promoted to Chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

And from that chair, what did he do? He issued at least 91 subpoenas of his own, spending an estimated $20 million of our tax dollars chasing political enemies and conspiracy theories. He found nothing. A man who ignored a subpoena himself now hands them out by the dozen. The rules apparently only apply to other people.

3. He's accused of turning a blind eye to sexual abuse

This one is serious. Jim Jordan was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University from 1987 to 1995 — the years when the team doctor sexually abused at least 177 student-athletes. Former wrestlers say Jordan knew about the abuse and did nothing to stop it. Jordan denies it.

It gets worse. One former wrestler says Jordan called him and pressured him to take back his accusation, asking him not to support reports of the abuse. In July 2025, Jordan was deposed under oath in a federal lawsuit tied to the abuse. We should hold our leaders to a higher standard than this.

Nineteen years, and this is the record

Look at the three together and a portrait comes into focus: a man who has wielded enormous power and produced almost nothing for the people who sent him there. No laws passed. Subpoenas for everyone but himself. And grave questions he has never had to answer. Jim Jordan is very good at the fight and the camera; the part of the job that's supposed to help Ohioans is the part he's never gotten around to. In 2026, voters can decide whether nineteen years is long enough to wait.

3 Things to Know About David Joyce

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

David Joyce has represented Ohio's 14th District since 2013. That's 13 years in Congress — plenty of time to judge whose side he's on. The answer, again and again, turns out to be the people at the top.

Here are 3 things to know.

1. He voted to take health care away from hundreds of thousands of Ohioans

Everyone deserves to see a doctor when they're sick without going broke. David Joyce voted the other way.

He backed Trump's budget bill — the so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" — which cut more than $1 trillion from health care and food assistance. For Ohio, that means real damage close to home. The state stands to lose about $33 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade — money that keeps rural hospitals open and doctors working.

The result? An estimated 356,000 Ohioans are projected to lose their health coverage, on top of the 113,000 who already lost coverage when tax credits were allowed to expire. When you cut that many people off insurance, the rest of us pay more, too — fewer covered patients means higher premiums for everybody.

2. He cut taxes for the rich

Here's the trade-off that bill made. Those health care cuts didn't go to pay down the debt. They helped pay for tax cuts — and most of the benefit flowed straight to the top.

The math is blunt: $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts to fund $1 trillion in tax giveaways for the richest 1 percent. This in a country where the 400 wealthiest families pay a lower tax rate than a lot of teachers and nurses. Joyce voted to make that gap wider, taking from working families to give to the rich.

3. He works for powerful private interests

It's not a mystery why Joyce votes this way. Look at who funds him. His top donors include:

General Dynamics
Blackstone Group
Ernst & Young
Holland & Knight

These are giant defense, finance, and consulting firms — not the families of Ashtabula or Lake County. When the people writing your campaign checks are powerful corporations, it shows up in your votes. See for yourself at Who Bought My Rep.

What it adds up to

Strip health coverage from working Ohioans, hand a tax cut to the people who least need one, pick up the phone when corporations call — these aren't unrelated votes. They're a sorting system, and ordinary Ohioans keep landing on the losing side of it. Thirteen years in, that's not a stray decision here and there; it's how David Joyce does the job. Voters get the final say on it in 2026.

3 Things to Know About Mike Kennedy

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Mike Kennedy has represented Utah in Congress since January 2025. Here's the thing that makes his record stand out: he's a family physician. A doctor. Someone who took an oath to care for people's health. That makes some of his votes especially hard to explain.

Here are 3 things to know.

1. He's a doctor who voted to take away people's health care

Mike Kennedy is a practicing family physician. He's spent his career caring for patients. Then he voted for Trump's budget bill that will cause an estimated 80,000 Utahns to lose their health insurance.

And he didn't do it quietly. He defended the Medicaid cuts in a published op-ed, writing that they "cut waste while preserving resources for the people it was intended to serve." Tell that to the families who are about to lose their doctor. Kennedy has eight children of his own — presumably he'd want every one of them to be able to see a physician when they're sick. He just voted to take that away from a lot of other people's kids.

2. He embraced the gun fringe after a school shooting

After the 2018 Parkland school massacre, Kennedy — then a Utah state legislator — spearheaded the state's School Safety Commission. Sounds good, right?

Here's what happened next. Just days later, he publicly touted a meeting with the founders of the Utah Gun Exchange — the group that rallied roughly 1,000 counter-protesters and a turret-topped, military-style vehicle against the 8,000 students who marched for gun control at March For Our Lives. The man in charge of Utah's school safety effort was buddying up with the people mocking kids who just wanted to stop getting shot. As the Salt Lake Tribune's columnist put it, the guy behind Utah's school safety push "embraces the gun fringe."

3. He put the government in charge of families' medical decisions

Kennedy talks a lot about freedom and getting government out of your life. But as a Utah state senator, he sponsored SB16, the 2023 law that bans gender-affirming surgery and hormone therapy for transgender minors.

Think about what that means. A family, working with their own doctor, makes a private medical decision for their child — and Mike Kennedy's law overrides them. Kennedy, himself a physician, called that kind of care "a radical and dangerous push for children." This from a man who otherwise insists the government should stay out of your business. The bill passed and became law.

A doctor, sworn to do no harm

Take all three together and the contradiction is hard to miss. Mike Kennedy spent a career as a physician — then voted to pull coverage from 80,000 of his neighbors, sided with the gun fringe after kids were shot at school, and put politicians in the exam room in place of families and their own doctors. The oath was to put patients first. His record in Congress puts something else there. Utah decides which one shows up in 2026.

3 Things to Know About Celeste Maloy

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Celeste Maloy has represented Utah in Congress since November 2023. She sits on both the Appropriations and Natural Resources Committees — putting her in charge of the public lands and environment policies that shape life across the West. Here's what she's done with that seat.

Here are 3 things to know.

1. She tried to sell off Utah's public lands

Utah's public lands — its canyons, deserts, and wilderness — belong to all of us. Celeste Maloy tried to put a chunk of them up for sale.

She pushed to sell more than 10,000 acres of Utah public land near St. George, slipping it in as an amendment to Trump's budget bill to help pay for tax cuts. The idea drew bipartisan opposition and was eventually stripped out. She also sponsored the Ending Presidential Overreach on Public Lands Act, which would gut a century-old conservation law that has protected millions of acres of American wilderness. It fits her record: a 3% score from the League of Conservation Voters in 2025.

2. She works for billionaires and big business

Look at who's funding Celeste Maloy. Her top donors include:

AIPAC
Berkshire Hathaway
SpaceX
Delta Airlines

That's billionaires, big tech, and powerful interest groups — not the families of southern Utah. When those are the names on your donor list, it's worth asking whose interests really come first. You can dig into it at Who Bought My Rep.

3. She crusades against "waste" — after steering taxpayer money to her own nonprofit

Maloy is a member of the House DOGE Caucus, publicly backing the mass firings and spending cuts that have hit Utah families. She tells Utahns to "ignore the hysteria" over the cuts and says she'd "like to see agencies do less with less" — even as those cuts hammer national parks, the IRS, and federal workers across the state.

But here's the part she'd rather you didn't know. For someone crusading against "government waste," Maloy has her own history with taxpayer dollars. Before Congress, she personally lobbied Utah lawmakers in 2019 to hand $300,000 in state money to a public-lands nonprofit she had helped launch and later led as president. Watchdog reporting found "scant evidence" of what the group actually accomplished — and it was quietly dissolved in 2023, right when she launched her run for Congress. Waste, it seems, is only a problem when someone else is spending the money.

What ties it all together

Sell off the public lands Utahns share, take the money from billionaires and big business, preach against "waste" while steering tax dollars to your own nonprofit. The theme running through all three is the gap between what Celeste Maloy says and who she actually works for. Utahns get to close that gap at the ballot box in 2026.

3 Things to Know About Greg Murphy

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 06:00:00 +0000

Greg Murphy has represented North Carolina's 3rd District since 2019 — 7 years in Congress. He's also a practicing physician who sits on the committee that writes the nation's health care policy. That combination should make him a champion for patients. It hasn't.

Here are 3 things to know.

1. He pushed one of the ugliest lies about abortion

America is supposed to be the land of freedom — including the freedom to make private medical decisions with your own doctor. Greg Murphy wants the government making those decisions instead.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Murphy posted an offensive tweet celebrating it and drew sharp criticism for how he justified the ruling. Worse, he went on to push one of Trump's most dishonest claims about abortion — the false smear that Democrats want to "kill babies" after birth. That's not a real position anyone holds; it's a lie meant to scare people. A doctor, of all people, should know better than to spread it.

2. He takes money from the health industry he regulates

Here's a conflict of interest hiding in plain sight. Murphy is a physician who sits on the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee — the panel that shapes policy for the entire health care industry. And that same industry funds his campaigns. His top donors include:

McKesson Corporation
East Carolina Anesthesia Association
East Carolina ENT
American College of Radiology

So he writes the rules for the same industry that pays his bills. That's not looking out for patients — that's looking out for the people cutting the checks. See for yourself at Who Bought My Rep.

3. He cheered on the DOGE cuts hitting North Carolina

When Elon Musk's DOGE started chainsawing through the federal government, plenty of North Carolinians got hurt. The state lost at least $714 million in canceled grants and contracts — money for research, services, and jobs.

Greg Murphy's response? He cheered. On Facebook, he mocked the people raising concerns, writing that it was "somewhat comical" that Democrats weren't applauding DOGE. He was even reported to be "delighted" by an agency that laid off workers and hamstrung Social Security. DOGE promised to save trillions and didn't — it cost the government more than it saved while gutting services people rely on. Murphy was clapping the whole time.

Who does Greg Murphy actually serve?

A vicious lie told to score a political point. A regulator cashing checks from the industry he regulates. A cheerleader for cuts that cost his own state hundreds of millions. The common thread isn't hard to find: at every turn, Greg Murphy lands on the side of his donors and his party, and North Carolinians foot the bill. They get to weigh in on the arrangement in 2026.

3 Things to Know About August Pfluger

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 05:00:00 +0000

August Pfluger has been the U.S. Representative for Texas's 11th District since 2021. He sits on a powerful energy committee and chairs a Homeland Security subcommittee. That's a lot of power for one West Texas congressman. The question is who he uses it for.

Here are 3 things to know about him.

1. He works for big oil, not for you

Look at who pays for August Pfluger's campaigns, and a pattern jumps out fast. His top donors read like a who's who of the oil and gas business:

Permian Resources
Valero
Marathon Petroleum
Occidental Petroleum
Exxon Mobil

These companies don't hand over money out of kindness. They expect something back. And Pfluger delivers. He has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 — and a 0% lifetime score. That means on vote after vote, he sided with polluters over clean air and water for the families in his own district.

When you want to know who a politician really works for, follow the money. Pfluger's money comes from big oil, and so do his votes. You can see the full list of who's funding him at Who Bought My Rep.

2. He tried to overturn the 2020 election

This one matters, because it's about whether your vote counts.

After the 2020 election, Donald Trump lost — fair and square, in court after court. But August Pfluger went to work trying to throw the result out anyway. Even before he was sworn in, in December 2020 he signed a letter with 25 other members-elect demanding an investigation into so-called "irregularities" that didn't exist.

Then came January 6, 2021. A mob attacked the U.S. Capitol to stop Congress from counting the votes. And what did Pfluger do just hours later? He voted to reject the electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania — two states that voted for the other guy. He was trying to toss out millions of legal votes from other Americans.

A week later, when the House moved to impeach Trump for stirring up the mob, Pfluger voted no. He said holding Trump accountable would "only further divide our country."

Think about what that means. The Capitol got stormed, and Pfluger's response was to back the very effort that caused it.

3. He wants the government to control your body

In December 2025, Pfluger signed on as a cosponsor of the "Life at Conception Act", also called H.R. 722.

Here's what that bill actually does. It would give full legal "personhood" to a fertilized egg — "at the moment of fertilization." That's not a small thing. A law like that could be used to ban abortion across the country with no exceptions, and it could even threaten common fertility treatments like IVF that families use to have babies.

This is the government reaching into the most private decisions a person can make. Pfluger thinks politicians in Washington — not you, not your family, not your doctor — should be the ones in charge of those decisions.

Whose side is August Pfluger on?

Big oil over West Texas families. His party's lie over the votes you legally cast. Washington over your own most private decisions. Pick any one of the three and the answer comes out the same — the people of his district are never the ones he's working for. He's counting on that going unnoticed. The 2026 ballot is where it gets noticed.

197 Republicans Voted to Spike Your Health Insurance Premiums

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

If you buy your own health insurance, your bill is about to jump. The extra help that millions of families use to afford their plans — the enhanced premium tax credits — expired at the end of 2025. Congress could have stopped that. Republicans had two chances. They blew both on purpose.

Here's what happened, and here's every Republican we track who made it happen.

Two votes, one result

First, the Senate. On December 11, 2025, the Senate took up a bill (S. 3385) to extend the very tax credits that keep insurance affordable. Republicans filibustered it. The motion to move forward failed 51–48 — it needed 60 votes — so the bill died without ever getting an up-or-down vote.

Then, the House. On December 17, 2025, House Republicans passed their own health bill, H.R. 6703, and gave it a friendly name: the "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act." There was just one problem. It does not extend the expiring tax credits — the one thing that would actually keep premiums down for next year. The Congressional Budget Office found it would leave about 100,000 more people uninsured.

So one chamber blocked the fix, and the other passed a fake one. Same outcome: your costs go up.

What it costs you

This isn't a small change. If the tax credits go away, the amount families actually pay out of pocket for the same plan would more than double — about a 114% jump on average.

On top of that, insurance companies are raising their sticker prices about 26% for 2026. Put those together and a lot of people simply can't afford to stay covered. Enrollment is projected to fall from 22.3 million people in 2025 to around 17.5 million in 2026 — millions of Americans priced out of their own health insurance.

These are the people who get hit: small-business owners, farmers, early retirees, gig workers, and anyone who doesn't get insurance through a big employer. In other words, a huge share of the working families these members were elected to represent.

The "alternative" that wasn't

When you block the real fix, you need something to point to. That's what H.R. 6703 is for. It loosens the rules on "association health plans" — cheaper plans that don't have to cover all the benefits a normal plan does. It lets members go home and say they "voted to lower premiums." But the bill leaves the actual price hike in place, and the CBO says it covers fewer people, not more. It's a press release, not a solution.

The Senators who blocked the fix

Twelve Republican senators we track voted to filibuster the extension and let your premiums climb:

Tommy Tuberville (Alabama)
Tom Cotton (Arkansas)
Ashley Moody (Florida)
Jim Risch (Idaho)
Roger Marshall (Kansas)
Cindy Hyde-Smith (Mississippi)
Pete Ricketts (Nebraska)
Jon Husted (Ohio)
Lindsey Graham (South Carolina)
Mike Rounds (South Dakota)
Bill Hagerty (Tennessee)
Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia)

The Representatives who voted for the fake fix

185 Republican House members we track voted to pass H.R. 6703 — the bill that slaps a "lower premiums" label on a plan that doesn't lower premiums:

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

The bottom line

Every one of these members will tell you they care about the cost of living. But when a bill landed on their desk that would have kept health insurance affordable for millions of their own constituents, they killed it — and then voted for a knockoff designed to give them cover. The price hike is real. The "alternative" is not. And in 2026, the people paying double for their insurance get to remember exactly who chose that for them.

How they voted

Senate — S. 3385, Roll Call Vote 644 (Dec 11, 2025)
House — H.R. 6703, Roll Call Vote 349 (Dec 17, 2025)

3 Things to Know About Riley Moore

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 03:00:00 +0000

Riley Moore has represented West Virginia's 2nd District since 2025. In his very first year, he landed a seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee, which controls federal funding. He's wasted no time using that power — mostly to gut the programs West Virginians count on.

Here are 3 things to know.

1. He punishes anyone who takes climate change seriously

Riley Moore has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 — a perfect zero in his first year against clean air and water.

This isn't new for him. Back when he was West Virginia's State Treasurer, Moore barred five of the country's largest financial firms — BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo — from new state banking contracts. Their crime? Weighing climate risk in their investment decisions. Moore decided that even thinking about the climate was reason enough to punish them. That tells you exactly where his loyalties are.

2. He works for big business

Speaking of loyalties — look at who funds Riley Moore. His top donors include:

Cleveland-Cliffs
FirstEnergy Corp
Koch Inc
Valero Energy
Marathon Petroleum
Northrop Grumman

That's a roster of big steel, big energy, and big defense companies. When those are the people paying for your campaign, it's not surprising you'd spend your first year in Congress looking out for them instead of the folks back home. See for yourself at Who Bought My Rep.

3. He led the DOGE cuts — then begged for the money he slashed

This is the one that really stings. While Elon Musk's DOGE was hacking grants and jobs out of West Virginia, Moore wasn't just standing by. He was leading the charge to make the cuts permanent.

He was appointed to head the Republican Study Committee's Task Force on Rescissions — the group in charge of turning DOGE's chaotic cuts into actual law. He called it "only the first step — more cuts are coming." He helped push through a $9.4 billion package of cuts, slashing things like public broadcasting and foreign aid.

Then he came home and asked for money — from a program his own side is trying to gut. In 2026, Moore requested $250 million to fix West Virginia's drinking water, paid for by an EPA fund the Trump budget wants to shrink to about a fifth of its size. On June 3, 2026, he literally held up a jar of brown tap water from a McDowell County home and pleaded for a scaled-back $50 million. The Appropriations Committee — the very committee he serves on, controlled by his own party — voted him down.

You can't spend a year cheering on the cuts and then act shocked when the money for clean water isn't there.

The pattern behind the headlines

Punish anyone who takes the climate seriously, take the money from big business, lead the charge to slash federal funding and then quietly ask for it back. Each one looks like its own story; together they tell a single one. Riley Moore governs by ideology and donor wish-list, and when the bill comes due, West Virginians are the ones who pay it. In 2026, they get to decide whether that's the deal they want.

Tom Cotton Spent His Whole Career Bashing an Iran Deal. Then Trump Made One.

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:00:00 +0000

For more than ten years, Tom Cotton has had one signature issue: Iran. He built his whole career on being the loudest, angriest voice in the Senate against any deal with Tehran. So when a president signed a deal to trade limits on Iran's nuclear program for sanctions relief and economic help, you'd expect Cotton to be screaming from the rooftops.

He isn't. And the reason tells you everything about who Tom Cotton really works for.

According to a June 20 report in Politico, Cotton is "in a Trump-induced jam." Donald Trump and JD Vance just signed a 14-point agreement with Iran that looks a whole lot like the one Cotton spent a decade attacking. Only this time, the president is a Republican. And suddenly Arkansas's senior senator has lost his voice.

What Cotton did the last time

Go back to 2015. President Obama was working with other countries to get Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Cotton, a brand-new senator, didn't just vote no. He organized a public letter signed by 46 other Republican senators and sent it straight to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The letter warned Iran that any deal not approved by Congress was just a temporary "executive agreement" that the next president could rip up.

It was a stunning move — a freshman senator going around his own president to undercut a deal with a foreign government. He made his name on it.

What Cotton is doing now

Fast forward to today. Trump and Vance are selling a strikingly similar agreement: curbs on Iran's nuclear program in return for sanctions relief and other economic favors. The exact kind of deal Cotton swore was a betrayal when Obama did it.

So how loud is the Senate's "foremost Iran hawk" now? Here's the strongest thing he could bring himself to say, on Fox News:

"Certain aspects of this deal are a step in the wrong direction."

That's it. He even went out of his way to credit Trump for "making Iran weaker than it's been in decades." A decade ago he treated this kind of deal like a national emergency. Today, with a Republican in the White House, it's a polite "certain aspects."

This is the same pattern we see from Tom Cotton over and over. He's far from the only Republican who screamed about Obama's Iran deal and then went soft on Trump's. His "principles" only seem to apply when a Democrat is in charge.

He clearly knows the deal is bad — he just won't fight it

Here's the part that should make Arkansans angry. Cotton isn't quiet because he thinks the deal is fine. On a Little Rock TV station, KTHV, he spelled out exactly how dangerous he thinks it is. He warned the agreement would let Iran sell oil again — as much as $6 billion a month — and said this about the money:

"That money … we know is not going to build new hospitals or day cares. It's going to go to replenish their drone stockpiles, their missiles, to support terrorists."

So by Cotton's own words, this deal hands billions to Iran to fund missiles and terrorists. That's the kind of thing he'd normally turn into a months-long crusade. Instead, he's tiptoeing around it because the person who signed it is Donald Trump.

When Trump blew up Cotton's separate, careful work on a surveillance program and then publicly tried to cancel a hearing Cotton had scheduled, Cotton briefly pushed back — and got hammered for it. Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon called him "out of control" and said he "should be turfed out" of his seat. Cotton folded almost immediately and postponed the hearing.

That's the whole story in a nutshell. When the choice is between standing up for what he claims to believe and bowing to Trump, Tom Cotton bows.

Who is he actually working for?

If Cotton won't stand up to Trump and won't really fight a deal he says funds terrorism, who is he serving? Follow the money.

Cotton has been a longtime favorite of right-wing pro-Israel donors, and one analysis pointed to around $4.5 million in AIPAC-aligned support backing the young senator. His tough-on-Iran brand was always good for business. Meanwhile, 88% of his funding comes from outside Arkansas. The people paying for Tom Cotton's career mostly don't live here.

And the folks who do live here? He won't even talk to them. Reporters at the Capitol tried again and again to ask him about Iran and the surveillance mess this week, and Cotton enforced a blanket "no comment" policy in the hallways. That's not new. He hasn't held a real, open town hall back home in years. In 2025 he skipped an angry town hall to attend a $7,000-a-plate fundraiser instead.

The bottom line

Tom Cotton is up for reelection and expected to win easily. He's counting on us not noticing the switch.

But the record is plain:

When a Democrat made a deal with Iran, Cotton went rogue and wrote to a foreign dictator to blow it up.
When a Republican made nearly the same deal — one Cotton himself says will fund missiles and terrorists — he mumbled "certain aspects" and went silent.

That's not a hawk. That's not principle. That's a politician who cares more about staying in Trump's good graces and keeping his out-of-state donors happy than about telling Arkansans the truth. We're too smart to fall for it. We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting from Politico: "Tom Cotton, the Senate's foremost Iran hawk, is in a Trump-induced jam" by Jordain Carney, June 20, 2026.

Ken Paxton Says Local Prosecutors Are Too Soft on Crime. His Own Office Offered a Child Abuser One Day in Jail.

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:00:00 +0000

A man admitted he molested a young boy. Ken Paxton's office offered him a deal to serve one day in jail and never register as a sex offender.

That's not a typo. One day. And it took a judge — not the prosecutor — to stop it.

The case happened in Waco. A local attorney named Adam Hoffman was charged with continuous sexual abuse of a young child, a first-degree felony that can carry 24 years to life in prison. Prosecutors said he abused a boy who was between 8 and 10 years old, over a period of years. The boy told the court that Hoffman raped him and showed him pornography.

The case was being run by Ken Paxton's Attorney General's office. After the first trial ended in a hung jury, Paxton's prosecutors offered Hoffman a deal: drop the felony, plead guilty to two misdemeanors, serve a single day in jail, and skip the sex-offender registry. A man who admitted to abusing a child would have walked away with a record no worse than someone who got in a bar fight.

The judge had to do the prosecutor's job

When the deal came to court on April 16, the judge couldn't believe it.

"One day. Seriously? Somebody has to sell me on the wisdom of it."

That was Judge Roy Sparkman, a visiting judge who had served on the bench as a Republican. He refused to sign off. Paxton's prosecutors came back with 30 days. The victim's mother spoke up and said even that wasn't enough — "He's dangerous. This isn't justice." So the judge raised it to 60 days himself.

Think about that. The person whose entire job is to fight for the victim was the one pushing for one day. The judge — who is supposed to stay neutral — was the one fighting to make the punishment fit the crime.

This is the same Ken Paxton who calls everyone else soft on crime

Here's why this matters far beyond one courtroom.

For years, Ken Paxton has gone after local district attorneys across Texas, accusing them of being soft on crime and letting criminals run free. Last year, his office rolled out a new rule aimed at what he called "rogue" district attorneys. In his own words, local prosecutors in big counties had "endangered lives by refusing to prosecute criminals and allowing violent offenders to terrorize law-abiding Texans."

Strong words. He even tried to give himself the power to remove elected DAs from office if they didn't fall in line. (A Texas judge struck the rule down as outside his authority, and Paxton is appealing.)

So when an actual child sex abuse case landed on Ken Paxton's own desk — a case his office had full control over — how did Texas's self-appointed tough-on-crime crusader handle it?

He offered the guy one day.

Even fellow Republicans noticed the hypocrisy. Williamson County District Attorney Shawn Dick, a Republican, put it plainly: it is "ironic that Paxton is now facing criticism for this outcome when he frequently criticizes the work of local prosecutors who are faced with these difficult decisions daily."

It wasn't a one-time mistake. It was a pattern.

The judge in the Hoffman case said something that should stop every Texan cold:

"I'm seeing a pattern here that is concerning me. If they get a mistrial, all of a sudden it's just a little misdemeanor with a slap on the hand."

He wasn't guessing. He'd seen it before. Court records show three serious felony cases that Paxton's office took to trial, lost to a mistrial, and then quietly settled for little or no jail time:

The Hoffman case — child sex abuse, pled down to two misdemeanors and (after the judge stepped in) 60 days.
A murder-for-hire case in Waco — a man accused of trying to hire a hit man ended up pleading to a misdemeanor "terroristic threat" and a four-day jail sentence.
A Bexar County human trafficking case — a man charged with holding two girls and a woman against their will and forcing them to perform sex acts for money. He got probation and skipped the sex-offender registry. Two years later he was rearrested and is now serving 22 years.

In every single one, the judge had to insist on a harsher punishment than what Paxton's office first proposed.

A veteran prosecutor who once led Paxton's own human trafficking division said she was sickened by how the trafficking case turned out. "You've got to be willing to go to trial on hard cases," she said. The prosecutor who cut the deal instead "walked away from that obligation."

What was Ken Paxton actually doing instead?

These are difficult cases — that part is real. Prosecuting child abuse is painful and messy, and a hung jury puts prosecutors in a genuinely hard spot. Experts the reporters talked to said so honestly.

But difficulty isn't the issue here. The issue is the man in charge.

While these cases were collapsing into one-day and four-day sentences, Ken Paxton was busy. He was indicted for securities fraud and dragged that case out for nearly nine years. He was impeached by the Texas House — with more than two-thirds of House Republicans voting to remove him — after eight of his own top deputies reported him to the FBI for bribery. He was running for U.S. Senate. He was attacking other prosecutors.

What he apparently wasn't doing was making sure his office fought hard for a child who said he'd been raped.

Who Ken Paxton really works for

A week before the Senate primary, this case has become a political problem for Paxton, and his rivals have been hammering him on it. That's the campaign angle. But strip the politics away and the simple facts are damning enough.

Ken Paxton wants more power over how crime is prosecuted in Texas. He says he's the one who's tough, and everyone else is soft. Then his own office — the one place where the buck actually stopped with him — offered a man who admitted molesting a child a single day behind bars.

He didn't keep that predator off the registry because the law forced him to. His prosecutors chose that deal. A judge had to overrule them to get to 60 days.

Ken Paxton has spent a decade telling us he's the toughest lawman in Texas. His own record says he's the one cutting the deals. We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Neena Satija (The Texas Newsroom), Taylor Goldenstein (The Texas Tribune), and Molly-Jo Tilton (KWBU): "Inside the Waco child sex abuse case Ken Paxton's office agreed to settle for one day in jail," Houston Public Media, May 19, 2026, with additional reporting from KERA News and the Texas Attorney General's office.

Sarah Sanders' Office Knew the 'Chinese Spy' Story Was Fake — and Pushed It Anyway

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Back in the summer of 2024, Governor Sarah Sanders' office told Arkansas a scary story. A company was buying an old factory in Fort Smith, right next to a National Guard base. And according to her team, that company might secretly be a front for Communist China.

It was the kind of story that grabs headlines and makes people afraid. There was just one problem. It wasn't true. And now court records show that Sanders' own staff knew there was no proof — and pushed the story out anyway.

The scary story that wasn't true

On July 23, 2024, Sanders and her Agriculture Secretary, Wes Ward, sent a letter to Attorney General Tim Griffin. They asked him to investigate a Fort Smith property, claiming there was "reasonable suspicion of ownership ties with China and the Chinese Communist Party." They pointed out the site sat close to the Ebbing Air National Guard Base, and made it sound like a national security threat. The attorney general opened an investigation.

The company was Olivet — an American business buying a former Trane factory. Some of its executives have family ties to Taiwan. That matters, because Taiwan is a longtime ally of the United States and a rival of China. The two are not the same. But Taiwan's formal name is the "Republic of China," and that little detail seems to be all the confusion Sanders' team needed.

A few weeks later, the whole thing fell apart. On August 13, 2024, Griffin announced his investigation had found no Chinese ties at all. The company did not violate Arkansas law. The state had to do a complete about-face on its own accusation.

Her own staff called it a "comms stunt"

Here's the part that should make every Arkansan angry. This wasn't an honest mistake. We know that now because the texts came out in court.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's Dale Ellis dug through court documents and found text threads between the attorney general's own staff. In those messages, Griffin and his people called the governor's plan to paint an empty Fort Smith factory communist red "a comms stunt" — short for a communications stunt. They accused the Sanders administration of putting "comms before substance." In plain English: the headline came first, and the facts came second, if at all.

It gets worse. Deputy Attorney General Alex Benton told her co-workers that she had asked the governor's office to do its homework — its "due diligence" — before going public with the accusation that Olivet was a Chinese agent. The governor's office said no. According to Benton, a governor's staffer named Chafer Stanley said they "would rather have a media hit and have to walk it back later."

Read that again. They would rather get the press hit and walk it back later. They knew they might be wrong. They chose the headline anyway.

They mixed up China and Taiwan — then made it worse on purpose

So how did Sanders' office turn an American company into a fake Chinese plot? Partly by getting the basic facts wrong, and partly on purpose.

Sanders' communications director at the time, Alexa Henning, appears to have confused China and Taiwan — two very different places — and then carefully word-smithed the official statements to make Olivet look as sinister as possible. On top of that, internal emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act suggest the state already knew Olivet was behind the land purchase before it ever announced an investigation, which raises a simple question: if they knew who it was, why pretend it was a mystery threat?

This is the same playbook Sanders runs over and over. Sound the alarm. Grab the headline. Hide the details. When the truth finally comes out, just move on like nothing happened.

Real people, real harm

It's easy to treat this like a political game. It wasn't a game for Olivet.

A real, law-abiding American company got publicly branded as a tool of a hostile foreign power. The accusation made national news. The state's own investigation later cleared the company completely — but by then the damage was done. That's a business trying to invest in Arkansas, hire Arkansans, and use a building that had been sitting empty. Sanders' team smeared them to score political points, then walked it back when the cameras moved on.

This is who gets hurt when leaders care more about looking tough than telling the truth. People and businesses who broke no law pay the price for someone else's headline.

She still won't admit it

When reporters asked Sanders about all this at a press conference, she did what she always does. She didn't admit her office lied. She didn't apologize to the company. Instead she went on the attack and doubled down, insisting a Chinese threat is still out there:

"I think it is a fundamental responsibility of our state, and frankly of our federal government, to protect from Chinese infiltration."

Protecting the country from real threats is a fine thing. Inventing a fake one to get on TV is not. And Sanders knows the difference, because her own staff was warned in writing that the proof wasn't there.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Sarah Sanders built her national career on telling people things that weren't true. As White House press secretary, she admitted to federal investigators that she made up a claim about FBI agents and had no evidence for it. As governor, she bought a $19,000 lectern and then tried to hide how it was paid for. She even tried to gut the state's open-records law so we couldn't check up on her in the first place.

The China stunt fits the pattern perfectly: say the scary thing, grab the headline, and count on us not to read the fine print.

The bottom line

Strip away the politics and here's what's left. Sarah Sanders' office accused an American company of being a Communist Chinese front. Her own attorney general's staff warned, in texts now sitting in court records, that the claim was a "comms stunt" with no proof behind it. Her office said it would rather get the "media hit" and walk it back later. The investigation found nothing. The company was innocent the whole time.

We don't need a governor who treats the truth as optional and real people as props. We're smart enough to see the con. We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting by the Arkansas Times: "Dem-Gaz brings receipts showing governor's office lied about land purchasers' inexistent Chinese ties" by Austin Gelder, June 18, 2026, drawing on original court-records reporting by Dale Ellis of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Steve Womack Spent Years Demanding a Crackdown on Drug Dealers. Then He Got His Own Son Out of Prison.

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

On Thursday, January 15, President Donald Trump commuted the federal prison sentence of James Phillip Womack — the son of Arkansas Congressman Steve Womack. James had been sentenced in May 2024 to eight years in federal prison for distributing methamphetamine. Trump cut that short with the stroke of a pen, and Steve Womack thanked him for it.

That's the short version, and you can read it in People. But the longer version is the one Steve Womack doesn't want you to think about — because for years, he has told the rest of us that people who deal drugs belong behind bars, no excuses. Then his own family got the one thing he's spent his career denying everyone else: a way out.

What Steve Womack has told us for years

Steve Womack loves to talk tough on drugs. When the person in the White House was a Democrat, there was no problem too small for him to blame on lax enforcement and an open border.

He publicly demanded that President Biden "take action on fentanyl", arguing the country needed harsher enforcement, not mercy.
He cosponsored a bill to curb the trafficking of fentanyl and pushed to make tough drug penalties permanent.
He argued, in his own words, that securing the border was the key to fighting "the use and abuse of fentanyl and other dangerous drugs in our communities."

His message was always the same: drug crime is a scourge, dealers are the enemy, and the answer is to lock people up and crack down harder. He even backed the Trump administration's claim that drug trafficking justified extreme measures — the same week the administration was rounding people up over drug charges and pointing to drugs to justify an invasion of Venezuela.

That's the public Steve Womack. Hard line. Zero tolerance. Lock them up.

What he did when it was his own family

Now look at what happened when the person facing prison was a Womack.

James Womack wasn't a first-timer who made one bad choice. According to court records reported by Arkansas station THV11, he had arrests dating back to 2007. He was arrested in 2018 on more than ten charges — several involving drugs and guns — and was sentenced in state court to nine years. He was released early in 2020, then arrested again. In April 2023, federal prosecutors indicted him for distributing more than five grams of meth and for possessing a firearm as a convicted felon. In May 2024, a federal judge gave him eight years.

A felon. A gun. Meth. A long record. If this were anyone else's son — say, one of yours — Steve Womack would point to it as exactly the kind of case his "tough on crime" agenda is supposed to put away.

Instead, his son walked. Trump commuted the eight-year sentence, and the congressman released a statement calling it a "gracious and thoughtful action" and thanking the president for a personal phone call to his family. Even the Daily Beast noted the obvious: a MAGA congressman's meth-dealing son got freed while Trump's people were out arresting other people for the very same kind of crime.

Two sets of rules

Here's what should bother every Arkansan in the 3rd District, no matter how you vote.

When a regular family in Northwest Arkansas is torn apart by addiction and someone ends up in federal prison for distributing meth, that person serves the eight years. There is no phone call from the president. There is no commutation. There is no member of Congress on the other end of the line.

Steve Womack knows this better than anyone — because he's the one who voted for and cheered on the system that does it. He spent years telling us mercy was weakness and the answer was to crack down. He just didn't mean it for his own.

Steve Womack himself once said his family wasn't asking for special treatment. Back in 2018, after his son's arrest, he said, "as an adult, he is accountable for the choices he's made," and added that the family would "honor and respect the criminal justice system that will decide his fate." That sounded principled at the time. It turned out to have an expiration date. The moment that same justice system handed down a sentence he didn't like, Womack went straight to the president and got it undone.

We can have real sympathy for any family struggling with a loved one's addiction — that pain is real, and it's everywhere in Arkansas. But sympathy is exactly the point. Thousands of Arkansas families are living that same nightmare right now, and they don't get a White House rescue. They get the full weight of the laws people like Steve Womack wrote.

What this really tells us about Steve Womack

The commutation isn't just about one family. It's a window into who Steve Womack works for now.

Think about what just happened. The president did Steve Womack the biggest personal favor a politician can ask for: he freed his child from prison. What do you suppose Womack owes him in return? After a gift like that, is there any Trump demand — any bill, any vote, any loyalty test — that Steve Womack is going to stand up to on your behalf? Does he look like a man who's going to tell Donald Trump "no" about anything ever again?

This is the same Steve Womack who has already voted with Trump to gut health coverage for 28,000 people in his own district, hand tax breaks to the wealthy, and rubber-stamp DOGE cuts that pulled more than $1.7 million in grants out of his district. He was already a reliable yes-man. Now he's a yes-man who owes Trump his son's freedom.

Steve Womack got to play the law-and-order hardliner for years while quietly cashing in the one favor most of his constituents will never have access to. That's not tough on crime. That's two sets of rules — a hard one for us, and a soft one for the well-connected.

We deserve a representative who lives under the same laws he votes for. We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting from People: "Donald Trump Orders Prison Release of GOP Congressman's Son, Who Got 8 Years for Distributing Meth" by Bailey Richards, January 18, 2026, with additional reporting from THV11 and The Daily Beast.