The New York Times found photos of a 20-year-old Mike Lawler with his face darkened at a college Halloween party. He said sorry, then spent the same night arguing it didn't count. Three NAACP branches told him it did.
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.
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.
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, Mike Lawler 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 Mike Lawler 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." Mike Lawler and his party are now preparing to do exactly that.
Then the cuts hit his own backyard. When the only Social Security hearing office in the Hudson Valley was slated to close amid DOGE's cuts, Lawler called it "a slap in the face to thousands of my constituents" — then posted again to say the closure "was an action initiated by the Biden admin."
These programs are a promise: work hard, pay in your whole life, and your country will be there for you when you need it. Mike Lawler 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 Mike Lawler 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.
Mike Lawler 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.
Mike Lawler 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.
Mike Lawler 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.
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. Mike Lawler 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.
Mike Lawler 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.
Mike Lawler works for Wall Street and foreign-policy money, not for us. He sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and AIPAC accounts for $417,975 of his funding this cycle, while he votes on the policy it lobbies for. His other seat is on Financial Services, which writes the rules for the private-equity firms, trading houses and crypto exchanges that fill out the rest of his donor list. On top of that, the real estate lobby's super PAC spent $1,384,692 electing him. Only 6% of his money came from small grassroots donors, and he ranks #299 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding. Look at who some of his top funders are:
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — $417,975, while he sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee
The National Association of Realtors' Congressional Fund spent $1,384,692 supporting him — the single largest outside expenditure on his behalf
$100,000 from people at High Opportunity Neighborhood Partners, the housing investment firm
$49,006 from people at Apollo Global Management, the private-equity giant his Financial Services Committee regulates
$48,000 from people at Jane Street Group, the Wall Street trading firm
Coinbase — $32,500 from the crypto exchange, from a member of the committee writing the rules for crypto
$34,750 from people at Blackstone and $32,300 from people at GoldenTree Asset Management
The NRCC — $233,000 from the House Republicans' campaign arm
Mike Lawler 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 $1.1 BILLION from New York
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.
Mike Lawler 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, New York 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.
When Speaker Johnson was short of votes to pass a $9.4 billion package of DOGE cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting, Lawler joined a hallway huddle with the Speaker and afterward agreed to vote yes — and the DOGE cuts passed by two votes, 214 to 212.
We'd like to thank you, Mike Lawler, 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 Mike Lawler's job is to act as a check and balance to the executive branch. He and his fellow members of Congress from New York 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 Mike Lawler went along.
That record is real, and it is why this page doesn't run the usual script. But Mike Lawler describes it as bigger than it is — and on the gun votes that have actually reached the House floor, he has sided with the gun lobby.
He claims a vote he didn't cast. In an August 2025 op-ed defending his gun record, Mike Lawler wrote that in Albany he "backed laws expanding Extreme Risk Protection Orders, requiring background checks for semiautomatic rifles, and cracking down on body armor sales." Two of those three are true. The third is not. New York's semiautomatic rifle licensing law — the one that puts a state, FBI and local background check between a buyer and the gun — passed the Assembly 102 to 47 on June 2, 2022, and Mike Lawler voted no. That was nineteen days after an 18-year-old with a semiautomatic rifle murdered ten people at a Buffalo supermarket — the shooting the entire package was written to answer. He was in the chamber that day: he voted yes on the other two bills he now takes credit for.
He voted to reopen the loophole used in Nashville, Boulder and Club Q. Stabilizing braces let a shooter fire a large pistol like a rifle, and the gun industry used them to sell what are effectively short-barreled rifles without the registration those guns have required since 1934. After braces turned up in one mass shooting after another, the ATF closed the loophole — and in June 2023 Mike Lawler voted to overturn the rule. Everytown counted brace-equipped guns in the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, at Club Q in Colorado Springs, at a Boulder grocery store and in Dayton — 30 people killed across those four.
He voted to pull veterans out of the background check system. On May 21, 2026, by 216 to 201, the House passed a bill barring the VA from reporting a veteran to the federal background check system on the basis that the VA has appointed someone to manage their affairs — whatever the underlying condition — unless a judge separately rules them dangerous. Mike Lawler voted yes. More than 87,000 veterans died by gun suicide between 2003 and 2022, and firearms now account for 74% of veteran suicides — the highest share in twenty years.
New York has 4.4 gun deaths per 100,000 people — one of the lowest rates in the country — because New York keeps passing gun safety laws. Mike Lawler wants credit for that. He just doesn't want to cast the votes. A record you have to embellish isn't a record. 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 Mike Lawler thinks that your freedom doesn't matter and that the government should get to control your body. That's not freedom, that's tyranny.
Voted for the Van Duyne amendment prohibiting the Secretary of Defense from paying for or reimbursing servicemembers' expenses related to abortion services, and then for the defense bill that carried the ban.
Earned a 0% score from Reproductive Freedom for All for his 2025 votes on reproductive rights.
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 Mike Lawler 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 Mike Lawler'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.
Mike Lawler 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 Mike Lawler 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 Mike Lawler, 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 Mike Lawler 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 Mike Lawler 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 New York. For nearly a year, masked ICE agents arrested hundreds of people at New York City immigration courthouses — 26 Federal Plaza, 290 Broadway, and 201 Varick Street — as they showed up for scheduled hearings. More than half of all courthouse arrests nationwide were happening in New York, until the DOJ admitted ICE had misled the court about its legal authority and a judge sharply limited the practice.
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 Mike Lawler 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
And when Trump warned that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" unless Iran met his deadline, Mike Lawler went on CNN to defend the threat: "We're talking about taking decisive action against Iran's energy and civilian infrastructure. That is what the president is talking about. He's not talking about obliterating innocent people."
The American people don't want this war with Iran. But Mike Lawler supports this madness and voted against the War Powers Resolution that would have stopped it. Does Mike Lawler work for Israel or the people of New York? We deserve better.
Unlike many of his Republican colleagues, Mike Lawler does hold in-person town halls. But when he does, constituents show up with a lot to say about what he is doing to them.
At the first of four town halls he had planned for 2025 — a sold-out, 90-minute event at Clarkstown South High School in West Nyack — he was met with shouts, boos, and jeers, with protesters gathering outside the school before the doors even opened.
A week later in Somers, about 600 constituents packed Kennedy Catholic Preparatory School to press him on the Trump-Musk spending cuts, the tariffs, and immigration. When
Emily Feiner of Nyack refused to leave her seat, two officers carried her out and the audience erupted in chants of "Let her stay!" and "Shame! Shame! Shame!" — a scene Rolling Stone described as the town hall descending into chaos.
At a town hall in February 2026, he faced jeers from the crowd over ICE enforcement tactics — with a constituent demanding to know: "What is the line that you won't cross? What can Trump do that you'll say that's wrong?"
We're all going to pay the price for this with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and premature deaths. We deserve better.
