A Wall Street Journal investigation found ICE is paying contractors millions to scan social media around the clock, then using subpoenas to unmask Americans who criticize the agency. Nobody has been charged. That may be the point.
A 1,000-mile road trip through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky found people who can't afford toilet paper. The unemployment rate hasn't moved. The only thing that changed is the law all 23 Republicans from those states voted for.
On July 23 the House voted 214-208 to order U.S. forces out of Trump's unauthorized war with Iran. These 182 Republicans we track voted no — the second time Congress has told the president to stop, and the second time they tried to stop Congress from saying it.
Food, rent, electricity, healthcare - in America we should be able to afford these basic necessities of life without going bankrupt.
Kevin Hern has supported the current administration's tariffs and other policies which have led to:
Half of all Americans struggling to afford groceries
47% struggling to afford their utility bills
47% struggling to afford healthcare
48% struggling to afford housing
1 in 4 Americans saying they have skipped a medical checkup due to affordability
23% skipping a prescription dose
Gas prices skyrocketing
Brent Rendel, a third-generation farmer in Miami, Oklahoma, put it plainly: "All of our inputs keep up with inflation, but what we sell doesn't." He is selling soybeans at $11 a bushel — what he was paid for them at times 30 years ago — while fuel and fertilizer, his largest input costs, keep climbing. U.S. soybean exports to China collapsed from 985 million bushels in 2024 to just 218 million in 2025 after Trump's 34% tariff, and a Texas A&M study found that duties on imported phosphate fertilizer raised costs for American producers by roughly $6.9 billion between 2021 and 2025.
We are feeling this directly in our wallets. What is Kevin Hern doing about that? Making things worse. We deserve better.
We all deserve access to quality healthcare so we can live healthy and productive lives.
Kevin Hern disagrees:
He voted to cut more than $1 trillion in federal health care and food assistance as part of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act"
He voted to let ACA tax credits expire, increasing health costs for millions of Americans, driving many of them to switch to cheaper plans or abandon health insurance coverage altogether. And the less people there are with coverage, the higher the rest of our premiums will be.
He wants to repeal the ACA, reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending, and add work requirements to Medicaid.
An estimated 174,000 Oklahomans are at risk of losing SoonerCare (Medicaid) coverage under Trump's Big Beautiful Bill — with uninsured rates projected to climb by a further 95,000 people.
After voting for the Big Beautiful Bill's Medicaid cuts, Hern told a Tulsa Regional Chamber forum that he didn't know just how sweeping the impacts would be on local health care systems — then praised the bill's new Medicaid work requirements anyway: "What we don't want to do is waste benefits on people who are able to take care of themselves."
We need healthcare to live. Literally. What is Kevin Hern doing to help us? Making things worse. We deserve better.
Wants to Gut Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security
Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security aren't handouts. They're earned benefits that we pay into out of every single paycheck, our entire working lives, so that we can see a doctor, take care of our parents, and retire with dignity instead of going bankrupt when we get old or sick.
For years, Kevin Hern and his party have been quietly laying the groundwork to gut these programs. Now they've said the quiet part out loud.
They admitted the plan. Speaker Mike Johnson told the "Moon Griffon Show" that "entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and things like Social Security ... have to be adjusted and fixed," and that "We have a plan to do that next year ... desperate times call for desperate measures."
We know what the plan looks like. The Republican Study Committee — a caucus of more than 170 House Republicans that includes Speaker Johnson and his top three deputies in leadership — released a budget calling for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and converting Medicare into a privatized "premium support" model that would hand seniors over to for-profit insurance companies.
They already started. The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that Kevin Hern supported cut roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid to help pay for tax cuts for the richest 1 percent.
Even Republicans admit what "reform" means. Sen. Josh Hawley, on the push to "address" and "reform" these programs: "That's usually code for 'cut.' I'm not in favor of that."
It's a broken promise. Donald Trump pledged in 2024, "I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare." Kevin Hern and his party are now preparing to do exactly that.
Hern's vision for your retirement, in his own words — the American Dream "is not a destination. It is a place that you continue to work until you're not here anymore" — said at a Ways and Means Republican meeting while pushing to add work requirements to more safety-net programs
These programs are a promise: work hard, pay in your whole life, and your country will be there for you when you need it. Kevin Hern wants to break that promise so he can keep cutting taxes for billionaires. We deserve better.
Cut Taxes for the Rich, While Making the Rest of Us Pay For It
We all need to pay our fair share to the government so it can provide the services that benefit all of us.
But billionaires in the U.S. pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and nurses. That's not fair.
The wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the U.S. paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2 percent. For comparison, the average American taxpayer in the same year paid 13 percent.
23 of the largest and most profitable companies in the US paid no federal corporate income taxes from 2018-2022. And 109 corporations paid zero federal tax in at least one of those years.
The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" that Kevin Hern supported will reduce taxes for the top 1 percent of taxpayers by more than $1 trillion over the next decade, while raising taxes for the poorest Americans.
Kevin Hern is on the side of the billionaires and big business. We deserve better.
We all deserve clean air, clean water, and a healthy planet to live on.
Kevin Hern has supported the repealing and rolling back of environmental protections and climate change regulations, all so that billionaires and big business can plunder natural resources and destroy our environment in the name of profit.
Is Intentionally Wrecking Our Public Schools and Our Kids' Futures
Nine out of ten American children — 49.6 million of them — go to a public school. It's where they learn to read, where they eat breakfast and lunch, where kids with disabilities are guaranteed an education by law, and where a kid from any family, rich or poor, religious or not, gets a fair shot.
Kevin Hern and his party are taking that apart on purpose: draining public school money into private and religious schools, pushing one religion into everybody else's classrooms, and shutting down the federal department that is supposed to look out for our kids.
He voted to create the first national private school voucher in American history. It is hidden inside the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." You give up to $1,700 a year to a charity that hands out private school scholarships, and the government gives you back every penny you gave on your taxes. It costs you nothing — no other tax break in the country works that way. Each person is capped at $1,700, but any number of people can do it, so there is no limit on what it drains from the Treasury. It starts January 1, 2027. Congress's own scorekeepers say $26 billion over ten years; one tax research group says as much as $51 billion every year — more than the government spends on Title I ($18.4 billion) for poor schools and IDEA ($14.6 billion) for kids with disabilities combined. And "low-income" means a family earning three times what a normal family in their area earns still qualifies — in some places, $500,000 a year.
They are giving away our tax dollars to families who are already wealthy and were never in public school to begin with. Every state that has tried it gets the same result — the money goes to people already paying private tuition: 95% of Arkansas voucher users never attended a public school. In Florida's first year of universal vouchers, 69% of new recipients were already in private school and only 13% had ever set foot in a public one. In Iowa, two-thirds were already in private school. We aren't rescuing kids from bad schools — we're cutting checks to families who never needed them, with the money coming out of the schools 90% of our kids actually attend.
And the kids who do switch end up doing worse. Four careful studies found the same thing. In Washington, DC, voucher kids fell behind in math. In Louisiana, a student who started in the middle of the class dropped to the bottom third in math after three years. Indiana and Ohio found the same. Kids with disabilities lost the most.
The money goes to religious schools that can turn our kids away. Ohio now spends nearly $1 billion a year on vouchers, the vast majority going to Catholic and evangelical schools — schools that, unlike public schools, can reject your child over their religion, their disability, or who their parents are, or for ANY REASON AT ALL with almost no accountability for the public money they take. Many have simply raised tuition to capture the vouchers instead of enrolling more students.
Households earning over $150,000 take 40.8% of the money, up from 38.8% the year before.
Our public schools took generations to build, and they are the one institution that has to take every single child who walks in the door. Kevin Hern is helping tear them down and hand the pieces to private interests. Our kids will pay for it for the rest of their lives. We deserve better.
A good job where we can make a living to support our families, own a home, and have a good life. That's the American Dream.
Kevin Hern supports policies and an administration that are turning the American Dream into a nightmare.
There were 20.8 million layoffs in the U.S. in 2025
55% of employed Americans say they're concerned about losing their jobs
The unemployment rate is 4.2%
In 2025 the U.S. economy averaged just 15,000 jobs added per month, a dramatic decrease from the monthly average of 125,000 the year before Trump took office.
Overall employment for workers without college degrees fell by 361,000 jobs from January to September 2025.
58,000 net manufacturing jobs have been lost from April, when the administration announced "Liberation Day" tariffs, to September 2025.
Works for Billionaires, Big Business & Special Interests and Not for Us
Our elected officials should work for us, the people.
Kevin Hern came to Congress as a McDonald's franchisee — he owned 10 Tulsa-area restaurants when he first ran in 2018, and almost 20 percent of his donations came from people in the restaurant industry, many of them fellow McDonald's owners from other states. The Frontier nicknamed him the "McCongressman." He now sits on the Ways and Means Committee, which wrote the Big Beautiful Bill's tax provisions. But his most revealing moment came when his company KTAK collected $1.07 million in PPP pandemic loans — later forgiven — while he loudly opposed government spending. The White House called him out by name for attacking student debt relief for ordinary Americans after taking that forgiveness himself. Only 1% of his money came from small grassroots donors, and he ranks #434 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding — near the very bottom of the House. Look at some of his top funders:
McDonald's — $45,000 from its corporate PAC plus $40,117 from its people, to the franchisee who built his fortune on the brand
The rest of the industry he came from: the National Restaurant Association ($42,500), the International Franchise Association ($40,000) and the American Hotel and Lodging Association ($35,000)
The lobbies whose tax treatment his Ways and Means Committee writes: the American Bankers Association, the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers and the National Beer Wholesalers Association — $37,500 each
HF Sinclair — $40,000 from the refiner
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — $149,950, most of it individual donors AIPAC recruited and earmarked to him rather than money from its own treasury
People at Winklevoss Capital Management, run by crypto billionaires Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss
Defending Our Values PAC spent $808,341 supporting his Senate run — a super PAC whose money came almost entirely from a single group, Public First Action, Inc.
Fellowship PAC spent $300,000 supporting him — a super PAC that took $10,000,000 from one Wall Street firm, Cantor Fitzgerald
The NRSC — $62,000 from the Senate Republicans' campaign arm
Kevin Hern is funded by billionaires, big business and special interests. No wonder he's not doing anything to improve OUR lives. We deserve better.
Let Elon Musk and DOGE Cut More Than $377 MILLION from Oklahoma
We all want a government that works for us as efficiently and effectively as possible. Unfortunately our government doesn't always work that way, so reform is badly needed. Given how big and complicated the government is, it's a tough problem that needs well-thought out solutions, so that we don't make things worse.
That's not what we got.
Kevin Hern didn't just stand by — he went on Fox Business to cheer while billionaire and ketamine-addled chaos monkey Elon Musk and his DOGE goons chainsawed their way through the U.S. government, promising to save the government at least $2 trillion annually in waste, fraud and abuse. Because they had no idea what they were doing and no one to stop them, in the end our government suffered, people suffered, Oklahoma suffered, government spending actually went UP and Elon Musk became even richer.
Elon Musk and DOGE:
Had access to and exfiltrated (stole) all our sensitive personal information.
Kneecapped the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which had returned over $26 billion to the American people since 2011.
Attempted to cut $4 billion in funding for medical research.
Will cost the federal government an estimated $500 billion in lost tax revenue (that could pay for programs for us), due to cuts at the IRS.
Laid waste to the employees at several government departments, removing their top experts and most skilled practitioners, and making their services less effective for all of us. This badly affected veterans, who make up 30% of the federal workforce.
DOGE closed the NOAA Radar Operations Center in Norman — the national hub for weather radar maintenance — and shuttered the Social Security Administration office in Lawton, five Bureau of Indian Affairs offices, and 15 federal offices in total across the state.
Hern didn't just go along with it — he went on Fox Business to mock anyone who objected, telling Maria Bartiromo that Democrats "were just going crazy that it was Elon Musk finding it" and that Congress couldn't do the oversight itself. Trump posted "Way to go, Kevin!!!" the same day.
We'd like to thank you, Kevin Hern, for cheering on Elon Musk while an unelected South African big tech billionaire took a chainsaw to vital U.S. government functions and completely failed to make the government more efficient. We deserve better.
As a member of Congress, part of Kevin Hern's job is to act as a check and balance to the executive branch. He and his fellow members of Congress from Oklahoma have completely abdicated their responsibility. These spineless cowards are rubber stamping everything Donald Trump wants to do, no matter how crazy, dangerous or harmful. And we've seen the results. We deserve better.
We deserve to feel safe in our neighborhoods, schools, and places of worship.
In order to do that, we need to take real steps to prevent gun violence. And despite what we've been told, it is possible to support the 2nd Amendment and support common-sense gun safety laws at the same time. But Kevin Hern has opposed bipartisan gun safety laws, while offering meaningless thoughts and prayers every time there's a new mass shooting.
A child or adolescent is killed with a gun every 2 hours and 48 minutes in the U.S.
Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the U.S. are 33 times greater than in Australia and 77 times greater than in Germany
Every day, 125 Americans are killed with guns, and more than 200 are shot and wounded
Women in the U.S. are 28 times more likely to be killed with a gun than women in other high-income countries.
Oklahoma has about 19.1 gun deaths per 100,000 people — roughly 49% higher than the national average, with approximately 794 Oklahomans dying from gun violence every year.
Kevin Hern is OK with our kids dying, as long as he has his guns. We deserve better.
America is the land of FREEDOM. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to start a business, freedom to choose your own career path, freedom to make your own medical decisions, freedom to raise your children according to your values, and freedom to pursue happiness. Freedom is what makes America great.
Unless you're a woman and you're making the deeply personal decision about whether to have a baby or not. A decision that will dramatically affect the rest of your life. In that case Kevin Hern thinks that your freedom doesn't matter and that the government should get to control your body. That's not freedom, that's tyranny.
Arkansas House of Representatives candidate (and pastor) Robb Ryerse stated it well: "Abortion should remain safe and legal. These are personal decisions best made by patients, their doctors, and their faith — not politicians. You don't have to agree with every decision someone makes to believe they should be free to make it. That's what personal liberty means." Almost 2/3 of Americans agree and believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. But Kevin Hern thinks he knows better, and doesn't believe that we should have the freedom to make our own decisions. We deserve better.
In America our vote represents our will. It gives us the power to make the change that we want to see in the world.
Unfortunately that's not a sentiment that Kevin Hern's billionaire and big business donors can stomach. Because when we have voting power, we use it to make our lives better, and they lose power. Read about all the ways they're trying to take away our voting power on our about page, then come back here.
Kevin Hern has opposed legislation to make voting easier while supporting the SAVE Act, which would force every single American citizen to prove their citizenship status in person when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. For the vast majority of Americans, this would mean presenting a passport or birth certificate at their local election office. This would disenfranchise millions of U.S. citizens: 146 million Americans do not have a passport, and 69 million women who have married do not have a birth certificate that matches their new legal name. Working-class and low-income Americans would also be disproportionately disenfranchised if the bill became law, as the vast majority of these groups do not possess a passport.
YOU HAVE POWER. Why else do you think Kevin Hern and his bosses are working so hard to take it away? Don't let them. We deserve better.
Whether white, black, or brown, we should all be able to live in America and exercise our constitutional rights without fear that law enforcement will turn on us.
But the current administration has created a secret police force that is abusing their power against anyone who stands in their way, U.S. citizen or not. They claim to be going after "the worst of the worst", but are taking daycare workers, day laborers, grandmas and kids who are valued members of our communities. And Kevin Hern, staunch defender of the Second Amendment to fight back against government tyranny, is doing nothing while the government tyrannizes us.
ProPublica:They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world's most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force.
ProPublica:Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they're showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can't access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there's a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.
New York Times:Masked and heavily armed, ICE agents are sent to cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis to terrorize immigrant communities and brutalize people who challenge their efforts to stop and detain anyone deemed suspicious. To expand its reach, ICE greatly lowered its recruitment standards, effectively enlisting anyone who cares to sign up. To attract new officers, ICE advertises the chance to do violence to people deemed "enemies" of the United States, likening civil immigration enforcement to a war on a dangerous, alien force. The result is an agency whose agents' first recourse appears to be violence or the threat of violence.
They are executing American citizens. On January 7, 2026 an ICE agent in Minneapolis murdered an American citizen, a mother of 3, by shooting her in the face as she tried to drive away. Then the killer walked away, and our government lied and tried to gaslight us about what happened. Decent politicians condemned the murder. What did Kevin Hern have to say? Nothing.
They are executing American citizens: Part 2. On January 24, 2026 ICE agents in Minneapolis murdered an American citizen, a 37 year old ICU nurse, who was filming their activity and trying to help others. Then our government lied and tried to gaslight us about what happened.
And the list of the dead keeps growing. ICE agents — on duty and off — keep killing members of our communities, while Kevin Hern says nothing:
On December 31, 2025, an off-duty ICE officer in Northridge, Los Angeles shot and killed Keith Porter Jr., a 43-year-old U.S. citizen and father of two who was born and raised in Compton. Federal officials called it self-defense against an "active shooter," but Porter's family says he was peacefully returning home and never posed a threat — and witnesses reported only three shots, matching his autopsy and contradicting claims of an exchange of gunfire.
On July 7, 2026, an ICE officer in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old father of three and small-business owner who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years. Agents had been hunting a different white van. Harris County's medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, and his co-workers disputed ICE's claim that he used his vehicle as a weapon.
On July 13, 2026, an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine shot and killed Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old Colombian father who was legally authorized to work in the U.S. and supported his wife and 3-year-old daughter by delivering food and cleaning a veterinary clinic. He was not the target of ICE's warrant — agents were looking for someone else — and were not wearing body cameras. Even Maine's Republican Senator Susan Collins urged DHS to halt non-urgent vehicle stops in the state.
It's happening here in Oklahoma. When Yingchao Fan's car rolled over on Interstate 40 in Sequoyah County during a January snowstorm, he called 911 for help — and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol troopers who showed up asked about his immigration status and arrested him instead. Fan had a federal work permit and a pending asylum case, and faced no criminal charges — not even a traffic citation. Oklahoma now has more than 30 law enforcement agencies deputized to make immigration arrests under so-called 287(g) agreements — up from just three before 2025 — after Gov. Kevin Stitt's "Operation Guardian" signed up the Highway Patrol, the Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Narcotics and the Department of Corrections. The result: Oklahoma ranks fifth in the nation for ICE arrests per resident, more than 1.3 times the national rate, with 48% of those arrests happening at local jails. Asked what share of her detained clients had criminal charges, immigration attorney Lorena Rivas answered: "I would say it's very low. Very low... Several of them maybe have a traffic citation, but it's very minimal, like no driver's license, speeding, nothing violent."
Oklahoma is being turned into a detention hub. CoreCivic, a private prison company, reopened the Diamondback Correctional Facility in Watonga — a 2,160-bed prison that sat vacant for 15 years — under an ICE contract expected to bring the company roughly $100 million a year, with a guaranteed minimum of 1,200 detainees. Immigrants are also being held at the Cimarron Correctional Facility in Cushing, the Kay County Detention Center in Newkirk and a string of county jails. Then, in January 2026, documents obtained by The Washington Post revealed that ICE wants to convert a 415,981-square-foot warehouse at 2800 S. Council Road in Oklahoma City into a 1,500-bed detention center — one of 16 planned nationwide. Mayor David Holt found out from the press: "The federal government operates in our community and doesn't think it's their role to inform me." The city said federal law exempts detention centers from local zoning and that it does not believe it has the power to stop it. Attorneys describe what happens next as a shell game — ICE moves people out of state before a judge can review their case. "If you have someone who's detained at Cimarron and they think, OK, we're going to the Northern District of Oklahoma or the Western District of Oklahoma to file our habeas, and then with zero notice ICE transfers that person overnight to Texas, well, all of a sudden you can't file that habeas petition in Oklahoma anymore," said University of Tulsa law professor and immigration attorney Alex Gavern.
In April 2025, Hern quietly went along on the Republican congressional trip to CECOT, the El Salvador mega-prison where the Trump administration sent immigrants deported from the U.S. A photo posted by the U.S. Embassy placed him there; when a reporter asked, his office would say only "We cannot confirm or comment on the Congressman's location for security purposes."
If ICE can murder innocent U.S. citizens without repercussions, what could they do to you? ICE is out of control and a danger to us all - no one is safe. What's Kevin Hern going to do about it? Absolutely nothing. We deserve better.
Voted for the Unnecessary and Unpopular War in Iran
War destroys human lives, families and innocent people, causes economic ruin, and triggers immense suffering. War should always be the option of last resort.
In order to distract from the Epstein Files, Donald Trump started an illegal war of choice with Iran, and now:
We are being dog-walked by Israel, who has been trying to convince presidents to attack Iran forever, and finally found one dumb enough to do so
The American people don't want this war with Iran. But Kevin Hern supports this madness and voted against the War Powers Resolution that would have stopped it. Does Kevin Hern work for Israel or the people of Oklahoma? We deserve better.
Avoids His Constituents and Refuses to Hold In-Person Town Halls
Good leaders meet with their constituents and have town halls where citizens can voice concerns, ask questions, and provide input on policies. Kevin Hern doesn't want to hear what we have to say. He only wants to talk to his rich donors or people who agree with him.
Hern used to face Oklahomans in person. In February 2025 they pressed him hard — and within weeks the public events stopped. The last time he is known to have taken open questions from a room of constituents was that February meeting.
In February 2025, at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Glenpool, constituents pressed Hern over Elon Musk and the mass firing of federal workers — one asked whether he would "call Elon Musk in to under oath explain what he's doing?" Another said "nobody is stopping him." Hern told the room he didn't know how many federal employees had been laid off in Oklahoma, and never criticized the cuts — pivoting instead to getting "our fiscal house in order."
Weeks later, a scheduled public lunch with Hern in Tulsa, hosted by the Koch-founded group Americans for Prosperity, was canceled after "more than 100 activists" signed up to attend. AFP told the station the event "was rescheduled and reworked," and would not be open to press.
That same day, after House Speaker Mike Johnson urged Republicans to stop holding in-person town halls, a Tulsa station asked every member of Oklahoma's delegation whether they would keep meeting constituents. Rep. Stephanie Bice said she would continue her regular monthly town halls and Rep. Josh Brecheen said he was "committed to doing town halls" — but Hern "did not respond to our several attempts to reach" him.
On April 17, 2025, Indivisible Tulsa hand-delivered invitations and held a town hall for Hern, Sen. James Lankford and Sen. Markwayne Mullin at All Souls Unitarian Church. None of the three showed, and constituents asked their questions to three empty seats. Hern was in El Salvador that week on a congressional trip, touring the CECOT mega-prison — a visit he went on Newsmax to promote, saying of the men held there: "These folks will never see the light of day."
More than a year later — through the rest of his House term and into his campaign for the U.S. Senate — there is no public record of Hern holding another open, in-person town hall in Oklahoma. He has found time for Newsmax, for donors, and for a prison in El Salvador. He has not found time for a room full of Oklahomans who might disagree with him.
Kevin Hern is avoiding us because he doesn't care what we think. We deserve better.
In December 2020, he joined 125 other House Republicans in signing the Texas amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin
Hours after the Capitol attack, Hern voted to reject Biden's Electoral College wins in both Arizona and Pennsylvania. Both objections failed
In 2021, he violated the STOCK Act — the federal law designed to prevent insider trading by members of Congress — filing nearly two dozen July trades worth as much as $2.7 million weeks after the deadline.
He sits on the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health — while personally owning health-care and medical-technology stocks including Johnson & Johnson, UnitedHealth, Masimo, and Boston Scientific. The president of the ethics watchdog CREW called that "a conflict of interest that, if they were in a different branch of government, would require their recusal."
Protected Pedophiles by Blocking Release of the Epstein Files
Jeffrey Epstein ran a global sex trafficking network that sexually abused dozens of girls and women for decades. The FBI identified at least 35 minors with similar abuse histories. When finally released in 2026, the files — over 3 million pages, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images — revealed what UN human rights experts called "disturbing and credible evidence" of a possible global criminal enterprise. Those experts said some of the conduct may meet the threshold for crimes against humanity, including sexual slavery, torture, and enforced disappearance.
For months, House Republican leadership blocked every vote to release these files — and Kevin Hern went along.
Only once Trump relented did Kevin Hern vote for the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November 18, 2025 — a bill that passed 427 to 1. When releasing the files cost him nothing, he was happy to go along. When it counted, he protected the powerful.
We're all going to pay the price for this with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and premature deaths. We deserve better.
