As Kansas Attorney General, Derek Schmidt demanded to see Barack Obama's birth certificate in 2012 — and told police not to enforce a COVID gathering limit days before Easter in 2020, after the state had already traced outbreaks to churches.
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.
The House passed the 'Reliable Power Act,' handing federal energy regulators the power to stall EPA rules on power-plant pollution. Here's every Republican with a report card who voted yes.
Food, rent, electricity, healthcare - in America we should be able to afford these basic necessities of life without going bankrupt.
Derek Schmidt 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
In 2024, U.S. farmers sold more than $12 billion worth of soybeans to China. In 2025 they sold zero — and Moody's says the Kansas economy fell into recession due in large part to falling agriculture exports. In April 2025, Derek Schmidt could have voted to repeal the tariffs. Instead he voted to keep them, claiming Trump had given "Kansas farmers and ranchers access to critically important export markets."
Schmidt voted twice in March 2025 to protect the tariffs, and again on Sept. 16 — a legislative sleight of hand, one sentence tucked into a procedural motion that stops the House from even considering legislation to repeal them. Meanwhile total 2025 soybean sales to China came to zero, and Moody's says the Kansas economy is now in a recession due in large part to falling agriculture exports.
We are feeling this directly in our wallets. What is Derek Schmidt doing about that? Making things worse. We deserve better.
We all deserve access to quality healthcare so we can live healthy and productive lives.
Derek Schmidt 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.
As Kansas Attorney General, Schmidt joined 19 other Republican attorneys general in the lawsuit to strike down the Affordable Care Act — a suit the Kansas News Service reported could wipe out popular consumer protections, including the guarantee that insurers cannot refuse to cover people with pre-existing conditions. Schmidt conceded at the time that the potential consequences "give me pause," but pursued it anyway. In June 2021 the U.S. Supreme Court threw the case out, leaving the entire law intact.
We need healthcare to live. Literally. What is Derek Schmidt 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, Derek Schmidt 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 Derek Schmidt 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." Derek Schmidt 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. Derek Schmidt 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 Derek Schmidt 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.
Derek Schmidt 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.
Derek Schmidt 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.
Schmidt spent his 12 years as Kansas Attorney General fighting federal action on climate change. In 2016 he asked a federal appeals court to throw out the EPA's limits on methane, a potent greenhouse gas, calling the rule part of "the cascade of unnecessary and unauthorized regulations pouring out of federal agencies."
In 2021 he joined 11 other Republican attorneys general in suing to block Executive Order 13990, which directed federal agencies to weigh the social cost of greenhouse gas emissions when writing regulations. "No president has authority to impose this massive job-killing cost on our economy by executive order," Schmidt said.
We're all going to pay the price for this with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and premature deaths. 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.
Derek Schmidt 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 4.6%, the highest level since the pandemic
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 and Big Business and Not for Us
Our elected officials should work for us, the people.
Derek Schmidt works for big business and corporate interests, not for Kansans. Look at who some of his biggest backers are:
Watco Companies
American Israel Public Affairs Cmte (AIPAC)
SpaceX
Seaboard Corp
American Bankers Assn
Poet LLC (ethanol)
National Assn of Realtors
Growth Energy (ethanol trade association)
Hodgdon Powder (gunpowder and ammunition)
Berexco Inc (oil and gas)
Derek Schmidt 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 $163 MILLION from Kansas
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.
Derek Schmidt 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, Kansas 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.
In June 2025, Schmidt voted for the Rescissions Act to lock $9.4 billion in DOGE cuts into law, crediting "the Department of Government Efficiency" and calling the vote a "watershed."
We'd like to thank you, Derek Schmidt, 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 Derek Schmidt's job is to act as a check and balance to the executive branch. He and his fellow members of Congress from Kansas 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 Derek Schmidt went along.
Derek Schmidt voted to block the bipartisan effort to release the Jeffrey Epstein files (Roll Call 194, 211–210), protecting the accused pedophiles and powerful elites that were named in them, including Donald Trump. He never signed the discharge petition or co-sponsored the bipartisan release resolution — only reversing after Donald Trump gave House Republicans permission, 11 months later.
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 Derek Schmidt has opposed bipartisan gun safety laws, while offering meaningless thoughts and prayers every time there's a new mass shooting.
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 Derek Schmidt thinks that your freedom doesn't matter and that the government should get to control your body. That's not freedom, that's tyranny.
Took Kansas's effort to cut Planned Parenthood out of Medicaid all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear it in December 2018 — after the state lost at every stage and ran up $899,000 in taxpayer-funded bills to three high-powered East Coast law firms.
Defended Kansas's ban on the most common second-trimester abortion procedure as the named defendant in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt — which the Kansas Supreme Court decided against him 6-1 in 2019, holding that the Kansas Constitution protects the right to end a pregnancy.
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 Derek Schmidt 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 Derek Schmidt'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.
Derek Schmidt 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 Derek Schmidt 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 Derek Schmidt, staunch defender of the Second Amendment to fight back against government tyranny, is doing absolutely 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 Derek Schmidt 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 Derek Schmidt 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.
And Schmidt is actively working to expand ICE's power to terrorize our communities. He sits on the House Judiciary Committee's Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement Subcommittee, where he helps craft the laws that give ICE more funding and fewer restrictions.
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 Derek Schmidt 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 Derek Schmidt supports this madness and voted against the War Powers Resolution that would have stopped it. Does Derek Schmidt work for Israel or the people of Kansas? 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. Derek Schmidt 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.
Schmidt's version of a town hall is a phone call he controls. In March 2026 he and Missouri Congressman Jason Smith held a "Telephone Townhall" on tax policy — constituents dialed an 855 number, and the ground rules were set before anyone picked up: they "will not give individual tax advice." No room, no microphone, no follow-up question, and no way to see how many neighbors are waiting on hold behind you.
It doesn't produce answers, either. At Schmidt's April 29, 2026 telephone town hall, a caller who identified himself as a truck driver asked about rising gas prices. Schmidt acknowledged he was giving "not a very satisfying answer."
When someone organizes a real, in-person Q&A, Schmidt doesn't even reply. Starting in late February 2025, KCUR invited all nine members of Congress representing the Kansas City metro — Schmidt among them — to take live questions from their constituents about DOGE cuts, tariffs, and the rest. Sen. Jerry Moran's office declined; Rep. Sam Graves' office at least acknowledged the invitation. Schmidt's office was among those that, in KCUR's words, never "responded to our request" at all.
The demand was there. Nearly 200 questions came in before the April 21, 2025 event and more than 500 more during the livestream. The venue sold out so fast that organizers had to move it to a bigger church, and more than 1,000 people took part. Only the two Democrats in the delegation, Sharice Davids and Emanuel Cleaver II, agreed to come. KCUR's explanation for the silence from everyone else was blunt: area Republicans "had been instructed by their party not to hold community events at all."
Schmidt's official House events calendar even offers "Town Hall" as one of its event categories. As of August 2026, the only two entries on that calendar are the 2025 observances of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Washington's Birthday.
Derek Schmidt is avoiding us because he doesn't care what we think. We deserve better.
Hates Democracy and Tried to Steal the 2020 Election
As Kansas Attorney General, Schmidt sat on the board of the Rule of Law Defense Fund — the group tied to the Republican Attorneys General Association whose robocall gave out the timing and location of the January 6 march on the U.S. Capitol — until August 2020. The next month his office sent two top aides to an RLDF "war games" summit in Atlanta, where staff of Republican attorneys general gathered, in the words of the group's own executive director, for "conversations planning for what could come if we lose the White House."
We're all going to pay the price for this with increased rates of asthma, cancer, and premature deaths. We deserve better.
