In January 2019, Missouri's Jason Smith yelled it at a Latino colleague standing at the podium, then wouldn't own up to it in the room. His excuse was that Democrats had gone to Puerto Rico during the shutdown — a shutdown he voted three times not to end.
Missouri voters buried two Republican ballot measures on Aug. 4 — one to hand a single congressional district veto power over citizen initiatives, one to swap the income tax for higher sales taxes. Four of Missouri's five Republican congressmen backed the gerrymander that made the first one work.
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.
We all deserve access to quality healthcare so we can live healthy and productive lives.
Jason Smith 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 160,000 more Missourians are projected to be uninsured by 2034 under Trump's budget bill — and that number rises to 230,000 if the enhanced ACA premium tax credits are also allowed to expire — gutting coverage for working families, people with disabilities, and rural communities.
More than 86,000 Missourians dropped ACA marketplace coverage between February 2025 and February 2026 — a nearly 25% decline, among the steepest in the country — after the expiration of the enhanced ACA premium tax credits.
Trump's budget bill hits Jason Smith's own district hard: an estimated 32,167 people in MO-8 are projected to lose health coverage — 13,500 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 18,667 losing Medicaid — according to the Joint Economic Committee.
We need healthcare to live. Literally. What is Jason Smith 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, Jason Smith 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 Jason Smith 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." Jason Smith and his party are now preparing to do exactly that.
These programs are a promise: work hard, pay in your whole life, and your country will be there for you when you need it. Jason Smith 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 Jason Smith 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.
Jason Smith 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.
Jason Smith 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.
Jason Smith 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.
Missouri's MOScholars voucher program is set to grow to $60 million for the 2026-27 school year, with the state treasurer asking for $50 million more on top of that.
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. Jason Smith 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.
Jason Smith 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.
Jason Smith works for billionaires, big business and special interests — not for us. As Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, he writes the nation's tax laws. He decides which corporations get loopholes and which of us pay the bill. And the industries with the most to gain from those decisions are the ones filling his campaign account.
His single largest source of employee donations is Ryan LLC — a global corporate tax firm whose stated mission is to "liberate our clients from the burden of being overtaxed." A tax-avoidance firm is the top corporate donor to the man who writes the tax code. Behind it come the private equity giants Blackstone and KKR, the oil refiners Marathon and Valero, the big banks and the insurance lobby — every one of them with business before his committee.
53% of Jason Smith's $16.1 million came from PACs, and 89% came from PACs and large donors combined. He ranks #342 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding — near the very bottom. Almost none of his money comes from ordinary people in southern Missouri. Look at who some of his top funders are:
Ryan LLC, the corporate tax firm that helps companies cut their tax bills — $86,750 from its executives and employees
Blackstone, the private equity giant — $43,800 from its executives and employees
KKR, the private equity giant — $40,000 from its executives and employees
Marathon Petroleum (MPAC) — $40,000
Valero Energy — $40,000
American Bankers Association (BANKPAC), the banking industry's lobby — $40,000
The Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers — $40,000
Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance (NMPAC) — $40,000
National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors — $40,000
UBS, the global investment bank — $35,000
Jason Smith 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 $489 MILLION from Missouri
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.
Jason Smith stood idly by 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, Missouri 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 cut Missouri's federal workforce by 13% — roughly 3,900 of the state's 29,925 federal jobs, gone between Trump's first day in office and November 2025. In the Kansas City metro alone, 2,800 federal workers were cut, about 10% of the area's federal workforce. The metro is home to major regional offices of the IRS and the Social Security Administration, and Missouri and Kansas host some of the departments hit hardest nationally: Veterans Affairs, Treasury, and Defense.
While DOGE was cutting Missouri's federal workforce, Jason Smith cheered it on. In a February 2025 column on his own House website, he called DOGE one of Trump's "most important tools" and said the agency is "doing a great job."
We'd like to thank you, Jason Smith, for doing absolutely nothing 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 Jason Smith's job is to act as a check and balance to the executive branch. He and his fellow members of Congress from Missouri 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.
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 Jason Smith went along.
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 Jason Smith 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.
Missouri has about 19.6 gun deaths per 100,000 people — 53% higher than the national average, with roughly 1,200 Missourians dying from gun violence every year.
Jason Smith 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 Jason Smith 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 Jason Smith 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 Jason Smith'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.
Jason Smith 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.
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 Jason Smith, 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 Jason Smith 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 Jason Smith 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 Missouri. Since January 2025, more than 3,200 people from nearly 80 countries have been arrested by ICE in Missouri — roughly 2.7 times the number arrested in a comparable stretch at the end of the Biden administration — and about 20% of them had no criminal conviction or charges at all. Immigrants here are often handed over to ICE after nothing more than a traffic stop, and more than 60 individual 287(g) agreements enlisting local Missouri police in federal immigration enforcement had been signed as of March 2026. Many of the people swept up end up at the Ste. Genevieve County Jail, which ICE contracts for up to 400 beds — when Rep. Wesley Bell toured it in May 2026, detainees said they were drinking shower water because they weren't given enough to drink, and lawmakers found cells holding as many as 48 people sleeping on thin inflatable mattresses.
They tried to put a mass detention camp in Kansas City. On January 15, 2026, DHS and ICE officials toured a 920,400-square-foot warehouse at 14901 Botts Road in south Kansas City — a Jackson County legislator who joined the tour said the federal government was "looking to place around 7,500 beds inside." That same afternoon the Kansas City Council voted 12-1 to bar permits for federal detention facilities through 2031. Port KC then severed ties with the property's owner, and in February the owner, Platform Ventures, walked away from the sale, saying it was "not actively engaged with the U.S. Government or any other prospective purchaser." It took a city council, a port authority, and months of local protest to keep a 7,500-bed detention camp out of Kansas City.
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 Jason Smith 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 Jason Smith supports this madness and voted against the War Powers Resolution that would have stopped it. Does Jason Smith work for Israel or the people of Missouri? 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. Jason Smith 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.
In June 2025, constituents held a "Be Heard Missouri" event at the historic Wheatley School in Poplar Bluff to voice concerns about Smith's support for federal cuts to Medicaid, health care, and education. Smith wasn't there — a headshot of him was propped next to the podium, and one constituent spoke directly to the photo instead.
The one event Jason Smith did bill as a town hall in 2026 wasn't open to the public at all: on July 31, he held a "Farmers Town Hall" with the Missouri Rice Council — an industry group, not his constituents at large.
Jason Smith is avoiding us because he doesn't care what we think. We deserve better.
Hates Democracy and Tried to Steal the 2020 Election
Jason Smith was part of the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
On November 6, 2020 — three days after the election — he demanded the Justice Department "open investigations into incidences of election fraud" and sent state election officials "a reminder that the election is not over" — spreading the Big Lie before any evidence existed
On December 10, 2020, he was one of 126 House Republicans who signed an amicus brief in Texas v. Pennsylvania, urging the Supreme Court to throw out election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin
In the hours after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, he voted to reject the certified electoral votes of Arizona and, at 3 a.m. the next morning, of Pennsylvania — one of 139 House Republicans who voted to throw out at least one state's electors
In November 2010, Missouri voters passed the Puppy Mill Cruelty Prevention Act — Proposition B — requiring dog breeders to provide basics like necessary veterinary care and drinking water free of feces. Months later, then-state Rep. Jason Smith was the bill's "leading proponent" when the legislature gutted it — arguing for it in a committee he wasn't even a member of, and overturning the will of the voters.
Smith's own mother ran Smith's Kennel outside Salem — a facility the Humane Society had listed on "Missouri's Dirty Dozen," its October 2010 list of "some of the worst licensed kennels in the state, based on the number and severity of state and/or federal animal welfare violations." She sued the Humane Society over the list.
We're all going to pay the price for this with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and premature deaths. We deserve better.
