Tag Archive for: Congress

Bureaucrats’ Political Donations Hint Census Bureau Over-Counting for Democrats May Not Be Coincidental

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Undercounting the population in red states like Texas and Florida in 2020 cost Republicans at least six seats in the House of Representatives, while overcounting in blue states like California and New York contributed to 18 new Democratic seats, according to Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Texas).

“In 2020, the Census Bureau undercounted in primarily deep-red states like Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas, all red, while overcounting in radical blue states like Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, and Rhode Island,” Hunt told a November 19, 2025, hearing of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government.

“This egregious error led to many states being denied proper representation in Congress and the Electoral College. So much so that these errors costs Republicans … six seats in the House. In addition to the 2020 miscounting, including illegal immigrants in the Census has improperly granted radical Left blue states 12 additional seats in the United States House of Representatives. That is a total of 18 seats gain and that is a huge problem. And those are the facts,” Hunt told the hearing.

The Census Bureau acknowledged the over and under counts in a May 2025 report. The Census Bureau uses its population counts as the basis for determining how many House of Representatives seats are in each of the 50 states. The census counts all present individuals without distinguishing between citizens and noncitizens, meaning a higher head count gives a state more House seats, without regard to citizenship status. It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in all federal elections, as well as the vast majority of state and local contests.

Not all of the undercounted states were red, as deep-blue Illinois was among this group, while not all of the overcounted states were blue. Ohio and Utah, both red states, were among the over-counted group, according to the Census report.

Most congressional Republicans like Hunt support requiring Census Bureau counters to at least include a question about the citizenship of every counted individual, while most congressional Democrats oppose such a requirement. The issue has intensified in recent years, especially during the Biden administration’s open-border era in which millions of illegal immigrants crossed into the U.S.

Legislation originally introduced in the House of Representatives in 2025 by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) — The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — requires proof of citizenship when registering to vote and provides criminal penalties for violations. The measure, which has 110 House co-sponsors, including Hunt, passed the lower chamber but has not been acted upon by the Senate. President Donald Trump supports the measure.

Hunt did not address the issue of whether political bias within the Census Bureau’s workforce could be a factor in the significant under and overcounting, but The Washington Stand’s review of Federal Election Commission (FEC) campaign contribution data for the years 2023, 2024, and 2025 found a huge bias in favor of Democrats among donors who said they work for the agency.

During the three years indicated, the FEC records disclosed 4,037 contributions by individuals who listed “U.S. Census Bureau” as their employer. Of those contributions, 3,583 went to Democrats, compared to 455 made to Republicans, for a 7-1 ratio. The average Democrat contribution was for $29, while the average Republican contribution was $229.

Interestingly, the total dollar value of the contributions by Census Bureau workers to Democrats was $104,597, only slightly more than the $104,130 total given to Republicans.

Federal workers like those at the Census Bureau are covered by the Hatch Act, which bars partisan political activities by government employees while on official duty. The Hatch Act does not limit the right of government employees to work for candidates while off-duty, to contribute to the candidates of their choice, or to participate in activities supporting candidates, as long as federal property is not used in the process.

Two-thirds of the Democratic contributions, or 1,999 of the 3,582 total, were given through Act Blue, a digital site that acts as a conduit for campaign funding from individuals to favored candidates. Winred, the similar digital site created by Republicans to counter Act Blue, accounted for only 253 contributions to GOP candidates by Census Bureau workers.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, received 347 contributions from Census workers, compared to just 69 for Trump, her 2024 Republican rival.

Apprised of the Census Bureau employee contribution bias, Hunt provided the following statement to The Washington Stand:

“The inaccuracies and deliberate manipulations embedded in Democrat-led Census reporting expose a level of corruption that plagued the previous administration and continues today under radical Left leadership. Despite these efforts, the American people saw through the deception and delivered a decisive victory for Donald Trump in the last election.

“Now, with Republicans holding all three chambers of government, we have both the responsibility and the obligation to correct these abuses immediately and restore integrity to the process by ensuring that Census data reflects only United States citizens.

“The irony is unmistakable. For years, Democrats have warned of a supposed threat to democracy, while actively engaging in the very practices that undermine it — manipulating systems designed to distort representation and influence elections. Democracy is not endangered by transparency and lawful governance. It is endangered by those who abuse institutions for political gain.”

Hunt will not be in the House of Representatives in 2027, as he is seeking the Republican nomination for the Senate in a hotly contested primary that also includes Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the Lone Star State’s long-serving incumbent, Senator John Cornyn. The primary election is March 3.

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Corporation for Public Broadcasting Votes to Dissolve amid Defunding Battle

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The Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s (CPB) Board of Directors voted to officially dissolve the organization on Monday. According to a press release, the decision comes in response to moves from the Trump administration and within Congress to pull its federal funding.

Nearly 60 years ago, authorized by the U.S. Congress under the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, CPB’s roots trace back to a time when commercial broadcasting dominated the airwaves, and there was a push for alternatives that prioritized education and public service over profit. Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Act aimed to create a system free from political interference, emphasizing “strict adherence to objectivity and balance.” Over the years, federal appropriations formed the backbone of CPB’s budget, often exceeding $400 million annually in recent decades, with peaks around $525 million before the cuts — with roughly 70% of funds distributed to local stations.

However, in May 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to terminate federal funding for public media outlets such as CPB on the grounds that its reporting failed to be “fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan.” Only months later, the Senate passed the Rescissions Act of 2025, effectively cutting $9.4 billion in federal funding flowing to CPB and its affiliates. This included $1.1 billion specifically earmarked for public broadcasting through fiscal years 2026 and 2027. This rescission package, which also targeted foreign aid, passed along largely party lines, with Republicans arguing that taxpayer dollars should not subsidize what they (and many others) perceived as ideologically slanted content.

In response, CPB had sued the Trump administration as it began scaling down its operations — and to no avail, it would seem, in light of their final decision announced Monday. The dissolution process, set to conclude by late January 2026, involves “the responsible distribution of all remaining funds in accordance with Congress’s intent” as well as the preservation of archives in partnership with institutions like the University of Maryland and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.

The organization ultimately pinned the blame on “sustained political attacks that made it impossible for CPB to continue operating as the Public Broadcasting Act intended.” As Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of CPB, put it, “When the Administration and Congress rescinded federal funding, our Board faced a profound responsibility: CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks.”

Echoing this, Chair of CPB’s Board of Directors Ruby Calvert claimed “what has happened to public media is devastating,” adding that “after nearly six decades of innovative, educational public television and radio service, Congress eliminated all funding for CPB, leaving the Board with no way to continue the organization or support the public media system that depends on it.”

Calvert ultimately expressed optimism that “public media will survive, and that a new Congress will address public media’s role in our country because it is critical to our children’s education, our history, culture and democracy to do so.” As Harrison went on to claim, “public media remains essential to a healthy democracy.” The corporation’s statement concluded: “While CPB’s chapter is ending, the mission of public media endures. Local stations, producers, journalists, and educators across the country will continue serving their communities, informing the public, and elevating local voices.”

The news of closure has sparked a variety of responses nationwide. While CPB officials and their supporters are lamenting the loss of what they describe as “trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling,” many others have taken to celebrating. Conservatives, from government officials to everyday citizens, have argued that the closure does not diminish these values but instead advances them by moving away from what they see as an organization that pushed left-wing, government-funded content. And these sentiments echo long-standing criticisms that date back to Republican officials like former President Ronald Reagan and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who attempted similar defunding efforts but were thwarted by Congress.

Fast forward to now, and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins observed how “this is a very significant development. The end of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting signals that real structural change is underway in Washington.” As he further emphasized, “Kudos to the Trump administration. Its defunding strategy is dismantling decades of the Left’s entrenched infrastructure within government. Too often, Republican administrations merely hit the pause button on the Left’s projects — allowing them to resume the moment power changes hands. The Trump administration, by contrast, is hitting the eject button.”

Several members of Congress echoed these remarks, with Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) stating, “The closure of the [CPB] comes on the heels of a tenure dedicated to censorship and leftist ideologies. The organization garnered our tax dollars and made products through NPR and PBS that lacked competitive viewership and undermined American values and free speech.” Similarly, Senator John Kennedy (R-La.) referred to CBS as “the scheme bureaucrats used to funnel taxpayer money to NPR and PBS,” emphasizing how its closure is “great news for every American who doesn’t want their tax dollars funding left-wing opinion journalism EVER again.”

As public media transitions to reliance on private donations and other revenue streams, some fear a fragmented media landscape. Others, however, view it as an opportunity for more trustworthy news and storytelling, with less government influence, to finally take the stage.

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

EXCLUSIVE: Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett Once Rented Car With Convicted Robber — It Didn’t End Well

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Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett co-rented a car in 2006 with a previously convicted robber whose car crash caused her to be sued for damages at the start of her law career, records obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show.

Crockett and Texas resident Soweto Hoilett rented the vehicle from Budget Rent A Car System after Hoilett was convicted of two robberies and possession of a controlled substance, according to court documents obtained via public databases and records requests. Hoilett’s relationship with Crockett, who declared a run for Senate on Dec. 8, is unclear based on the documents, and the two simply noted their use for the car was “personal.” Hoilett’s car wreck then prompted Crockett to defend herself in court, marking one of her earliest cases as a licensed attorney.

Budget Rent A Car sued Crockett in 2007 for refusing to cough up money over an accident involving Hoilett, citing her rental agreement that she claimed was “invalid.” Crockett settled with the company for roughly $10,400 the following year.

The court records show how a repeat offender receiving light punishment sowed chaos in the future congresswoman’s life. In Congress, she later advocated for reducing incarceration and declining to prosecute low-level theft and other offenses people commit “to survive.” She also frames the justice system as prejudiced against black people and the poor, citing her work in the Bowie County Public Defender’s Office from 2007 to 2010. 

Crockett’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and an attorney who assisted her is no longer licensed in Texas.

The DCNF also reached out to an email address listed for Hoilett in public records and the attorney who represented Budget Rent A Car and did not receive responses. Hoilett could not otherwise be reached.

Hoilett pleaded guilty to robbing two people in February and September 1998, with the county dropping a third robbery case against him that year. Hoilett received probation sentences that were later revoked in favor of five years behind bars, the lowest possible sentence for his first-degree felony robbery and slightly above the two-year minimum for the other robbery offense. He was credited with time served.

Oklahoma police later charged Hoilett in June 2005 with drug possession and obstructing an officer after catching him speeding at 91 miles per hour without a valid driver’s license, according to court records. Prosecutors dropped the obstructing charge for a guilty plea on the drug charge, leading to a probation sentence, which a court later accused him of violating.

Hoilett’s attorney in the Oklahoma case told the DCNF he could not recall details.

Eight months later, Crockett rented a Hyundai Sonata with Hoilett as an additional driver in Harris County, a rental agreement shows — setting the stage for her to get wrapped up in his legal troubles.

Crockett called Budget on Nov. 6, 2006, to let them know Hoilett had taken the car to Louisiana and a friend of his ended up finding the vehicle, according to the company’s accident report. Documents from the lawsuit give conflicting dates and scant details for the accident, but Budget said the car was totaled from the damage.

Hoilett was also charged in Harris County with resisting and evading arrest in August 2006, according to police reports. Prosecutors dropped one of the cases over a plea deal, giving him 120 days in jail for a crime that could have brought up to a year.

Budget and Crockett, who became a licensed attorney in November 2006, argued in court filings over whether Crockett should have allowed Hoilett to drive and how much she owed in damages. Crockett accused Budget in court filings of trying to “obtain money by false pretenses and fraudulent representations.”

The company also blasted Crockett for missing multiple filing deadlines in the case, including by not checking her mail.

“Defendant did not intentionally miss the deadline, but instead made a miscalculation of the deadline due to a mistake regarding the Good Friday Holiday,” Crockett’s response to one motion reads.

A judge approved a $10,407.12 settlement in October 2008, forcing Crockett to pay around $4,000 more than what she initially offered, records show.

Hoilett, meanwhile, was arrested in Harris County again in April and November 2007, according to police affidavits. Authorities said he first trespassed into someone’s vehicle and then refused to return a van from Dollar Rent A Car.

The district attorney’s office scrapped the first case after claiming a lack of probable cause to detain Hoilett, while the theft case gave Hoilett seven months behind bars instead of what could have been up to two years.

AUTHOR

Hudson Crozier

DCNF Crime and Extremism Reporter

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Defense Bill Squeaks through House with Wins on Life, DEI, Family Leave

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In a city where nothing seems certain — least of all cooperation between the parties (or in them!) — there’s a certain magic about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The legislation, which is as close to a Christian tradition as Congress gets, is headed to its 65th straight year of passage — a record that should astound anyone in this bitterly divided town. What is it about the troop bill that gets both sides to thaw their icy standoff and work together? And can that reluctant, bipartisan cooperation be replicated?

Unfortunately for Americans, who would love to see the two sides set aside their hostility and at least try to solve the country’s problems, the charm of the NDAA is always short-lived. Imagine if Republicans and Democrats tackled the health care crisis with the same intentionality? That’s not to say there aren’t fireworks, since the parties are more explosive than a boat full of drugs in the Caribbean. But at least in this debate, they seem to have the mutual goal of moving forward, even if they do try to score political points in the process.

On Wednesday, the House did its part to keep history alive, sending the bill to the Senate by an overwhelming bipartisan margin, 312-112. The lopsided tally doesn’t convey the drama that led up to the final vote, when House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had to corral his quarrelsome members, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), and others to flip their “no” votes to yes. But he did it, defying the odds for the millionth time.

What makes the streak even more impressive is that it’s not easy to find a sweet spot on where to spend $901 billion in defense. The current bill, which clocks in at an eye-popping 3,086 pages — longer than most study Bibles — is the product of months of intense debate on everything from Ukraine funding to U.S. investments in China. But this year, the battle that sucked up most of the oxygen in the room was surprisingly extraneous: the taxpayer funding of in vitro fertilization for our men and women in uniform.

In a fight that threatened to overshadow all of the significant wins of the NDAA, Democrats (and some Republicans) continued their crusade to force Americans to foot the bill for fertility treatments that are not only morally controversial but highly ineffective. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s (D-N.Y.) rank-and-file disagreed, demanding that the military’s health care coverage, TRICARE, include a blank check for this kind of “assisted reproductive technology” for every active-duty servicemember.

To understand why this is such a dangerous idea, you first have to know the sinister side of IVF. This is not about “crushing the dreams” of our brave men and women in uniform, as Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) would have people believe. This is about being smart with taxpayer dollars and pushing parents toward alternatives that actually work. Dr. Lauren Rubal, a reproductive endocrinology and infertility specialist, understands parents’ longing for children. She used to offer IVF, she explained to Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Tuesday’s “Washington Watch.” But the more she worked in it, the more concerned she became.

“I think the first thing to say is that these couples are truly suffering,” Rubal emphasized. “And I wanted to help alleviate the suffering, to help them have children.” But things changed on so many levels, she explained. “First of all, medically, I felt more and more like I was putting band-aids over causes, [and] I wasn’t truly addressing the root cause of that person sitting in front of me: body, mind, soul. And in many cases, this is true. We know that IVF is kind of a blanket recommendation for most infertility diagnoses that we have.”

Secondly, Rubal stressed, “there are medical issues with the practice of in vitro fertilization. Of course, part of that, like I said, is not truly addressing the full spectrum of causes that, if we heal, can lead to pregnancies on their own and healthier moms and babies in that process. But,” she paused, “we know there’s an increased risk of complications for moms and babies. And then, finally, the last part of this is really coming to terms with the fact that as I sat there performing my daily work, I began to realize more and more how many embryos were being destroyed in this process of in vitro fertilization.” She thought she was helping life, but as a doctor and Christian, she came to the realization that “if every embryo is a human being that is a unique chromosome complement at his or her earliest stage of development,” they were destroying several tiny humans “to get to that one live birth.”

Probably the most frustrating part of the IVF debate, Rubal insisted, is that people assume that there are no other alternatives. That’s not true. “There is another alternative that, unfortunately, has felt more and more politicized in recent months … called restorative reproductive medicine. And [that’s] identifying those root causes [of infertility] and harnessing the hormone imbalances that may be present, looking at the microbiome, trying to optimize ovulation in that woman, as well as the sperm in that man, and really the timing of intercourse as well, and using medical and surgical procedures to do so.”

In terms of actual results, “this is yielding equivalent rates of live births compared to IVF cycles. The denominators are a little bit different here. And so, it does take more time. But with that being said, there is absolutely hope,” Rubal emphasized. “And it is a moral and … much less financially taxing process for couples.” Sadly, she notes, only 4% of OB-GYNs and family medicine doctors are familiar with how to counsel patients on these options. There’s just not the fertility awareness on these alternatives that there should be.

To be fair, Rubal pointed out, “I think that every single medical professional is trying to do their best with the tools that they’re given. I can speak for myself, and I know that I feel so much more at peace. And this is what I tell patients. Not everything is in our power here, but let’s try to optimize the parts that are, and then we can have a path moving forward in peace.” If people wonder about the effectiveness of her approach, she tells skeptics, “Studies support that we’re having babies based on these restorative reproductive medicine procedures who are healthier, who have less preterm deliveries, less multiples, and are being born at normal birth weight. So really a win-win.”

To her dismay and so many others, this whole conversation has been politicized. If you’re a conservative who believes taxpayers shouldn’t be in the fertility business period, you’re painted as “unbelievably selfish and callous,” as Johnson was for having the courage to keep this dangerous language out of the bill. As it stands, Americans are already footing the bill for IVF for servicemembers whose infertility was the result of an active-duty injury, which is problematic on its own. But opening up the entire force to a pricey IVF free-for-all isn’t the wisest use of American dollars.

And the speaker is to be commended for that stand. “Speaker Johnson took a lot of heat for the removal of the reckless Duckworth language,” FRC’s Quena Gonzalez stressed, “but the reality is that he and others in leadership who took the IVF expansion language out were speaking for a lot of rank-and-file pro-life Republicans who, although they’re just as glad as we are that thousands of babies born through IVF are alive today, cannot ignore the millions more lives lost when unborn children are discard, destroyed, or experimented upon.” Frankly, he said, “An industry that produces only 2.3 live births per 100 children conceived does not deserve public funding, and the military should not be hijacked as a giant social experiment in subsidizing ‘Big IVF’ on the taxpayer’s dime.”

Across the Capitol, Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), who’s also an OB-GYN, applauded the change on “Washington Watch.” “I think [the NDAA] is moving in the conservative direction. And I know you and Family Research Council have had a big emphasis and impact on that in particular. I think the policy is moving toward putting some tighter guardrails around [IVF funding]. And the good news is the technology is improving as well … so I always appreciate your input on it.”

Perkins conceded that there’s “a lot of disagreement about it. But where we start … is the sanctity of human life, that every human being has the thumbprint of God, the fingerprint of God on it, and therefore must be treated with dignity and respect. And I think that part of that issue is how this industry has been unregulated. And I think it requires a little more work before we throw taxpayer dollars into it anymore.”

Thanks to conservatives, that wasn’t the only win in the NDAA compromise. Republicans continue to chip away at the wokeness in the Pentagon left behind by the Biden administration, including language that would:

  • Bar males from participating in athletic programs or activities designated for women or girls at military academies (Sec. 559A).
  • Expand and clarify family leave policies for members of the Coast Guard (would include members of the reserve component), allowing members to take leave when they foster a child, not just when they adopt (Sec. 7225).
  • Stop DEI programs and positions, including a prohibition against developing, implementing, and maintaining an employee resource group or affinity group based on certain characteristics, including SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity) and religion (Sec. 901).

At the end of the day, the NDAA is a win for conservatives and yet another notch in Mike Johnson’s belt as speaker. “This year’s National Defense Authorization Act helps advance President Trump and Republicans’ Peace Through Strength Agenda by codifying 15 of President Trump’s executive orders, ending woke ideology at the Pentagon, securing the border, revitalizing the defense industrial base, and restoring the warrior ethos,” the speaker said proudly. “Under President Trump, the U.S. is rebuilding strength, restoring deterrence, and proving America will not back down. President Trump and Republicans promised peace through strength. The FY26 NDAA delivers it.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

Partner with The Washington Stand to bring news from a biblical worldview to readers nationwide. From now until December 31, every gift will be doubled through our year-end Challenge Match.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

GOP Looks to Reform Obamacare Subsidies, Address Fraud with New Legislation

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With COVID-era Obamacare subsidies set to expire on December 31, Republicans in Congress are considering legislation that would help ease the rising costs of health care for millions of Americans. Meanwhile, experts and some lawmakers are warning that blanket subsidy expansions will only add to ballooning government debt and will not address the underlying reasons behind the continued rise in health care costs or the vast number of fraudulent Obamacare payouts.

As reported by Punchbowl News, several GOP health care proposals are currently circulating on Capitol Hill. One from Senators Bernie Moreno (Ohio) and Susan Collins (Maine) “would cap income eligibility and eliminate zero-premium plans by requiring a $25 minimum monthly payment.” Another plan from Senate HELP Committee Chair Bill Cassidy (R-La.) would “expand HSA options.” Yet another from Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) would divert funds away from insurance companies and “ensure support to Americans is sent to them directly” through “HSA-style Trump Health Freedom Accounts.” Punchbowl reported that Scott’s plan has gained some momentum in the House through Republican Study Committee Chair August Pfluger’s (R-Texas) backing.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) reportedly plans to move a health care bill to the floor at some point this week, but a battle among GOP factions will likely brew over whether or not to extend Obamacare subsidies in the legislation.

Meanwhile, outrage continues to grow over the revelations that enormous amounts of Obamacare application fraud have occurred over the last several years, resulting in billions of dollars in illicit payouts. As reported by The Washington Stand, incomes weren’t verified for tens of thousands of Obamacare enrollees, resulting in over $21 billion in illicit payouts in 2023 alone, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. In addition, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board noted that “6.4 million people this year were improperly enrolled in subsidized ObamaCare plans, costing taxpayers $27 billion.”

“Republicans would be wise to remind voters that Democrats sold ObamaCare on false pretenses — e.g., it would make healthcare “affordable,’” the editors continued. “Extending the subsidies would perpetuate that fraud.”

Lawmakers like Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) agree.

“A clean extension of cost would be $400 billion,” he pointed out during Friday’s “Washington Watch.” “I think our viewers really need to understand that this is a ticking time bomb set forth by Obamacare. … [W]e’ve kept subsidizing during this entire time the health insurance industry, which is where the rise in premiums is primarily coming from. Health care costs have increased, there’s no doubt about that. But what we’re doing here is continuing to subsidize a very, very profitable health insurance industry. I think since Obamacare started, they’ve earned over $360 billion in profit alone. … What we need to do is a scaled-down response, one that’s going to be tapered out, along with other reforms that actually lower the cost of health care.”

Murphy, a former surgeon with over 30 years of experience, went on to argue that federal aid for health care coverage should be provided, but with significant reforms.

“I think there has to be a glide path,” he contended. “I think it’s bad for the American people to just immediately stop these subsidies. Remember, this is only about anywhere from eight to 12 million people. … And so we’re dealing with a fairly small population, but that fairly small population would be left out in the lurch. So what we’re talking about is scaling back the fraud. You’ve had up to six to 12 million individuals who’ve been on these plans that have never filed as claims, so we think that they’ve been fraudulently enrolled. … And the other thing is we’ve had individuals that have been paying nothing. We need individuals to pay something to register in with the system, be it $5 a month [or] 2% of their income to pay something … to be in this.”

Murphy further ticked off a number of GOP priorities that he hopes will be included in future health care reform legislation.

“[W]e have individuals in some places in this country earning $500 [to] $600,000 that are getting subsidies from the government. Those need to go away,” he emphasized. “… [W]e’re going to need to include things that start lowering the cost of care. Now, [with] Obamacare, the insurance companies did not want competition, so they outlawed something called associated insurance plans, where groups of individuals can get together and insure themselves. They didn’t want that competition. Democrats don’t want that, but we’re going to make sure that that gets put in the bill. … [P]harmacy benefit managers (PBM) reform, … site neutrality, CON reform, a lot of different things need to happen, whether they’ll be included this bill or not, but it will be part of a big initiative next year to actually lower the cost of health care.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is repubished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

Partner with The Washington Stand to bring news from a biblical worldview to readers nationwide. From now until December 31, every gift will be doubled through our year-end Challenge Match.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘We Must Act Quickly’: Hill Leaders Push for Immediate Action on Nigeria

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In a country halfway across the world, Agnes remembers the song her dad taught her when she was scared. And that was most of the time. While American children can’t sleep because of invisible monsters, in Nigeria, the nightmares are real life. Would tonight be the night the men attacked, burning, shooting, and killing? “In those moments,” she remembers, “my dad sang to us, ‘God will never forsake us. God will never abandon us. Even when there is suffering and persecution, God will never leave us.’” It is the song of millions of sons and daughters now, passed down through the years of grief — the nation’s unofficial heirloom.

Like so much of Africa, Nigeria’s story is one of constant violence, suffering, and mourning. While the government looks away, tens of thousands of Christians have been massacred, buried in mass graves that have taken over miles of desolate countryside. At the hands of Boko Haram or the Fulani herdsman, armed gangs roam across the country — kidnapping, beheading, and setting on fire anyone in their path. Some are held hostage in terror camps, others are forced into brutal marriages against their wills, raped by so many men they don’t know who their babies’ fathers are.

It is, most people who have been there will tell you, worse than genocide. Fred Williams, a missionary to Nigeria, has pleaded with the West to intervene. “Since [2001], the attacks have been relentless, continuous,” he stressed. “[These are] stories of carnage and killing and horror. … Thousands are being killed,” he insists. “I’m constantly in those villages. I have interviews. I have photos. Most of what is happening is too graphic to show the media. That is how bad it is,” he tells reporters.

Just days ago, a bride and her bridal party were kidnapped in the north, as another pastor and members of his congregation were put in cars and driven away. To where, no one knows. Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, who’s tried to absolve himself of the world’s criticism, arguing he’s done everything he can to protect Christians, declared a national “security emergency” last week, authorizing the police and army to recruit and train additional personnel. “There will be no more hiding places for agents of evil,” Tinubu vowed. But Nigerians have heard that before.

When 300 girls were abducted from a Catholic school last month and Nigerian leaders did nothing, parents started begging America to intervene. “We almost had a heart attack,” Peter Jagaba said emotionally of his daughter Paulina’s capture. Like the thousands of fathers who have walked this dread before him, he’s asking his government to get involved. “I want the Federal Government of Nigeria to bring back my daughter safe and alive,” Jagaba told The Wall Street Journal. “I’m also calling on the American government to help us — we need help from anywhere,” he said desperately.

President Trump, who’s become actively engaged in the crisis across Africa these last several weeks, has been open about his disgust with the country’s leaders. “I’m really angry about it,” Trump said during an interview in late November, arguing the Nigerian government has “done nothing” and that “what’s happening in Nigeria is a disgrace.”

He’s leaned on Congress to find ways that members can help the administration apply more pressure there, especially in stopping the bloodshed that’s claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives. On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee hosted a joint briefing to investigate the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria with Republicans, Democrats, and experts like former Congresswoman and U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom Chair Vicky Hartzler.

Together, they agreed, time is short. “The Nigerian government is trying to run out the clock,” longtime human rights advocate Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) warned. “We cannot allow this to happen. We must act quickly and decisively to save more lives.”

To be a Christian, or even a moderate Muslim living in Nigeria, Smith explained, “means to be living under the constant threat of murder, rape, and torture by radical Islamist groups. … The most brutal and murderous anti-Christian persecution in the world — as well as the systemic targeting and killing of moderate Muslims who speak out against radical Islamists or refuse to conform with their extreme ideals — occurs in Nigeria, the ground zero of religious violence.” And while the Nigerian government has a “fundamental, constitutional obligation to protect its citizens,” he underscored, “the perpetrators of this persecution operate with complete impunity.” The United States, he promised, “is committed to standing firmly with the persecuted, no matter where in the world.”

Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wanted people to understand the severity of what’s taking place 5,500 miles away. “This is not merely ‘inter-communal violence’ or a ‘resource conflict,’ as many claim. This is a targeted campaign of religious cleansing,” he argued. “Whether it is Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province, or radicalized nomadic Fulani militants, the objective is to drive Christians out of their ancestral lands in the Middle Belt and impose a radical Islamist ideology, as has already happened across the northern states, where blasphemy laws are used to oppress.” He paused, adding solemnly, “I firmly stand with President Trump in his decision to redesignate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern. We must demand that the Nigerian government disarm these militias, return displaced families to their homes, and bring the perpetrators to justice.”

Brad Brandon, CEO and founder of Across Nigeria, agrees that putting the spotlight on the terrorism happening across the country is exactly what believers there desperately need. “The attention that’s happening here in the United States is something that many Nigerians have been waiting for and asking for,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Wednesday’s “Washington Watch.” “Their government has been nonresponsive. … So to get the United States government involved, members of Congress involved, to see the media starting to talk about it — from Bill Maher to Nicki Minaj to President Trump, all of these people drawing attention to it — it’s a welcome change for Nigerians who are suffering under this persecution.”

Brandon pointed out the astonishing statistic that 70% of all Christians killed around the world are killed in northern Nigeria. “I’ve stood at the mass graves of friends of mine who’ve been buried, many, many times,” he said somberly. Then he paused, raising the one question that should motivate every leader act: “If the United States does not address this right now globally, who will?”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Trump Admin Takes First Steps To Tackle ‘Religious Cleansing’

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

Partner with The Washington Stand to bring news from a biblical worldview to readers nationwide. From now until December 31, every gift will be doubled through our year-end Challenge Match.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Florida Moves to Redistrict in Congressional Maps Arms Race

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As battles over congressional district maps rage on, the Sunshine State is officially preparing to join the fray. In an interview with The Floridian, Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) announced that the state is “going to redistrict,” anticipating a special legislative session in the first half of 2026 to draw new congressional maps. Florida House Speaker Danny Perez (R) has already assembled a select committee, comprised of eight Republicans and three Democrats, to prepare new congressional district maps.

DeSantis also noted that a pair of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court centered on the Voting Rights Act (VRA) will likely play a role in Florida’s redistricting. “The issue is that there is a Supreme Court decision that we are waiting on — the argument in October about Section 2 of the VRA that impacts Florida’s maps,” he said, adding that the Florida legislature will have to wait for the Supreme Court’s ruling before making changes to congressional maps “next Spring.”

Section 2 of the VRA stipulates, “No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision in a manner which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color…” The provision has proven controversial over the years, as various organizations have accused state legislatures of racial gerrymandering either by breaking up areas with heavy minority populations into different congressional districts or, conversely, not grouping areas with lighter minority populations together. The two cases out of Louisiana, Louisiana v. Phillip Callais and Press Robinson v. Phillip Callais, deal with the issue.

A 2022 congressional map approved by the Bayou State’s legislature left only one majority-black congressional district out of the state’s six districts, despite roughly a third of the state’s population being black. In response to a VRA lawsuit and a federal court’s preliminary injunction, the Louisiana legislature drew new maps, creating two majority-black districts. However, another lawsuit then accused the legislature of racial gerrymandering — this time drawing congressional maps explicitly based upon race.

In comments to The Washington Stand, FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter explained, “Governor DeSantis has been clear for a while now that Florida will redraw their maps. Most of the reports I’ve seen suggest Republicans are looking at targeting three to five Democratic seats.” He continued, “The plan, at the moment, appears to be to use a special session in the spring to redraw districts, which would allow for a decision from the Supreme Court on the Voting Rights Act to potentially be decided, paving the way for new opportunities for the Republican-led government of Florida to draw new maps.”

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump urged red states to redraw congressional district maps in order to net the GOP more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms, prompting a series of political and legal conflicts across the country. Different rules dominate in different states, with some state legislatures being allowed to easily redraw congressional district maps and others requiring constitutional amendments to bypass a bipartisan redistricting committee. Texas was the first state to respond to the president’s petition, drawing new maps that would hand five House seats currently held by Democrats to Republicans. However, Section 2 of the VRA was once again brought into play, with Democrats accusing the Lone Star State GOP of racial gerrymandering, and Republicans defending the new maps as purely political. That case has also been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Justice Samuel Alito granted an administrative stay, effectively allowing the new district maps to remain in effect during litigation.

Indiana’s Republican-controlled legislature has also drawn new congressional district maps, potentially giving Republicans two more seats in the U.S. House. Hoosier State House representatives recently released a draft map, according to Politico, breaking Indianapolis into four districts and fracturing Democrat control over the urban area. Despite pressure from both the president and Indiana Governor Mike Braun (R), Indiana Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray (R) has voiced opposition to redistricting, instead arguing that Republicans should campaign harder in Democrat-held districts. Indiana’s House is slated to vote on the new maps this week, while the state Senate could vote on the House-approved maps as early as next week.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

Partner with The Washington Stand to bring news from a biblical worldview to readers nationwide. From now until December 31, every gift will be doubled through our year-end Challenge Match.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Measure That Reopened Government Also Approved More Than 800 New Earmarks

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An earmark sending $375,000 to a Massachusetts dance festival launched in 1933 as “a kind of early gay utopia” is one of 862 earmarks valued at $2.4 billion included in the measure approved earlier this month by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump to end the record-breaking government shutdown.

Sponsored by Massachusetts Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, the earmark “is for K-12 students in the Berkshires to visit Jacob’s Pillow and learn about Biology, Math and Spanish through ‘choreography, kinesthetic intelligence, and critical and imaginative thinking,’” according to Open the Books, an Illinois-based non-profit government watchdog.

Earmarks are spending provisions inserted in unrelated legislation by individual senators and representatives without a vote on its merits. For many years, earmarks were sources of corruption as members used them to send tax dollars to family members, former staffers, business partners, campaign contributors, special interest groups, and others.

But thanks mainly to the efforts of former Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who exposed the costly, earmark-funded “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska in the early 2000s, Congress abandoned the practice in 2011. Coburn, who was known among his Senate colleagues as “Dr. No,” famously described earmarks as “the gateway drug to ‘Congressional Spending Addiction.” John Hart, who was then Coburn’s communications director, is now president of Open the Books.

The temptation to bring earmarks back proved too strong, however, and in 2022, majorities of both political parties in the Senate and House voted to restore earmarks, rechristened as “congressionally directed spending” and with certain reforms advocates claimed would assure no corruption.

The November 12 shutdown-ending measure only reopened the government at 2025 spending levels. Congress now has until Jan. 30, 2026, to approve a full budget for the year and avoid another costly shutdown. Three of the 12 major appropriation bills have been approved, and the remaining nine include “2,381 Senate earmarks worth another $4.7 billion and 4,408 House earmarks worth $6 billion, for a total of $10.7 billion more taxpayer dollars being considered for pet projects, according to Open the Books.

The Warren-Markey dance studio earmark supports a dance festival started by Ted Shawn and the Dance Men, according to the studio’s website. “The tall and burly Shawn and his athletic dancers were intent on challenging the image of men in dance; they forged a new, boldly muscular style while also raising their own food and constructing buildings still in use today at the Pillow,” the website explains.

The Massachusetts Democrats are not unique in using tax dollars to support controversial art projects. Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) is behind a $100,000 earmark to support the Mixed Magic Theatre in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

“The theatre, a self-proclaimed ‘strong proponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion,’ is perhaps best known for its play Moby Dick: Then and Now, which replaces the white whale in the original novel with cocaine. Other plays include The Spirit Warrior’s Dream,” according to Open the Books. “Set in a future where America has shrunk into a single city because of climate change, the play features a protagonist who ‘believes that the America of the past is a failed idea.’ The play’s author, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, explained, ‘I thought I was writing fiction, but now, this s**t is really happening!’” Democrats are not alone in earmarking. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), together with co-sponsors Maryland Democratic senators Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks, pushed three earmarks worth a total of $1.5 million to support horse-assisted therapy.

“The Senate, to its credit, did manage to remove thousands of earmarks from members’ original requests. Sen. Angus King (I-ME) asked for 241 earmarks worth $936 million, which would have been the largest request from a single Senator since at least 2021 — and likely in all of U.S. history. Only 88 of them made it into the final appropriations bills,” Open the Books reported.

“Other senators had eye-popping requests that were also cut down. It remains unclear just how many because the Senate Appropriations Committee refused to provide members’ original earmark requests in machine-readable format, despite multiple requests from Open the Books,” the watchdog said.

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Bureaucratization Of Everything Hitting Americans Where It Hurts The Most

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Texas Takes Redistricting Battle to SCOTUS as Blue States Prepare to Ax GOP House Seats

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Ahead of next year’s midterm elections, Texas Republicans are moving to redraw their state’s congressional district maps, netting the GOP at least five more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, but federal judges have accused the Lone Star State’s legislature of racial gerrymandering.

“The public perception of this case is that it’s about politics,” wrote Judge Jeffrey Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, in a decision this week barring the use of the new congressional maps. “To be sure, politics played a role in drawing the 2025 Map. But it was much more than just politics. Substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”

Most federal cases are heard first by a district court, then a court of appeals, and finally by the U.S. Supreme Court, if they make it that far in the appeals process. Voting rights cases, however, are heard by a three-judge panel consisting of two federal district court judges and one appellate judge, and are then appealed immediately to the Supreme Court. Brown, appointed by President Donald Trump, was joined in his decision to reject Texas’s new congressional maps by Judge David Guaderrama of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, who was appointed by Barack Obama. Judge Jerry Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, was the sole dissent.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) announced immediately following the decision that he would appeal the case to the Supreme Court. “The radical left is once again trying to undermine the will of the people. The Big Beautiful Map was entirely legal and passed for partisan purposes to better represent the political affiliations of Texas,” Paxton insisted, repudiating the claims of racial gerrymandering. “For years, Democrats have engaged in partisan redistricting intended to eliminate Republican representation. Democratic states across the country, from California to Illinois to New York, have systematically reduced representation of Republican voters in their congressional delegations,” the attorney general continued. “But when Republicans respond in kind, Democrats rely on false accusations of racism to secure a partisan advantage. I will be appealing this decision to the Supreme Court of the United States, and I fully expect the Court to uphold Texas’s sovereign right to engage in partisan redistricting.”

In the court’s injunction blocking the use of the new maps, Brown alleged that Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) and the Republican-led state legislature had been hesitant to redistrict along partisan lines when Trump made the suggestion earlier this year. Instead, Brown charged, Lone Star State officials only moved on the proposal when the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) civil rights division warned that the state may face lawsuits over its current “unconstitutional” congressional maps, which the DOJ argued created illegal racial coalitions favoring Democrats over Republicans and thus diluting what would otherwise be a majority vote for a Republican candidate.

Appearing on Wednesday night’s episode of “Washington Watch,” FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter commented, “The mid-decade redistricting cycle we’re in was always going to be litigated, and it seems like we’ve arrived at that stage now where the courts are going to have to weigh in.” He also anticipated that a number of states “waiting in the wings trying to figure out which way this is headed” before redrawing congressional maps may be encouraged to do so if the Supreme Court backs Texas in its move. “I think whatever comes from the Supreme Court, if they decide to take up this case, is going to have enormous ramifications for some of the states that are making overtures that they’re going to redraw their own districts,” Carpenter suggested. “Florida is looking at redrawing their districts. Indiana is — it’s kind of stalled, but they’re looking at it as well. And you’ve got blue states like Virginia and Maryland that are also looking at redistricting, and there’s potential for even more in the future.”

Trump and Indiana Governor Mike Braun (R) have pressed the Hoosier State’s legislature to draw new district maps favoring Republicans, potentially eliminating two Democrat-held seats in the U.S. House, but Republicans in Indiana’s GOP-dominated senate split over whether or not to push the congressional maps through in a special session next month, ensuring that they would be used in the 2026 midterms, or delay until early next year and risk not redistricting in time to effect the midterms. All 10 Democrats in the state senate voted against participating in a special session, while Republican senators split evenly on the issue: 19 in favor, 19 against.

Carpenter noted that Indiana senate Republicans may not “have the votes to go through with this redistricting push” during a special session. “It looks as though they may take up redistricting when they convene for their regularly scheduled session,” he explained. “So I guess the concern was they were not able to get the votes during a special session, but we’ll see if, maybe with some additional time once they convene in January, perhaps they’ll have the votes needed to look at their maps again.”

Redistricting in Virginia, where Democrats expanded their control over the state legislature and took the governor’s mansion in off-year elections earlier this month, will likely come down to meeting deadlines, Carpenter observed. “Each state has their own sort of labyrinth of constitutional requirements and statutes around redistricting. The situation in Virginia is there’s basically no room for error,” he explained. “They have to pass a constitutional amendment this session with this governor,” Carpenter noted, referring to outgoing Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin. “He won’t have to veto it, but then they have to come back next session and pass an identical constitutional amendment, get it on the ballot before their spring primaries — which I believe are in April — and get it passed,” Carpenter detailed. “So they have a series of events that that they can’t miss any one of those deadlines in order to circumvent their constitutionally-required bipartisan redistricting commission.”

In Maryland, Carpenter anticipated, Governor Wes Moore (D) may not attempt redistricting through the usual legislative means, due to the makeup of the Old Line State’s Supreme Court. “They have a Supreme Court that’s been loaded up from former Republican Governor Larry Hogan. And so I think the political calculus from Democrat Governor Wes Moore in that state and the Democratic leadership in the legislature is that they’re not likely to get new maps past that Republican dominated state Supreme Court,” Carpenter observed. “Nevertheless, Governor Moore is pushing through with a redistricting commission, so he’s trying to circumvent the legislature.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Why Schumer’s Shutdown Could Be the Death of Obamacare

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When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) opted to force the October 1 shutdown of the federal government to protect Biden-era Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax subsidies, he doubtless saw himself as saving the government health care program informally bearing former President Barack Obama’s name.

Instead, when the longest federal shutdown in history wrought coast-to-coast commercial airline service chaos, left federal civil service unpaid for weeks, and jeopardized federal food benefits for legions of poor and lower-middle-class Americans, Schumer’s decision put an unprecedented national spotlight on the reality of Obamacare’s many failures.

Shortly after Senate Democrats defeated the 14th Republican effort in five weeks to end the shutdown, President Donald Trump issued a November 8 Truth Social post laying out his idea for ending the spiraling costs under Obamacare once the government re-opened, saying:

“I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money — sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over. In other words, take from the BIG, BAD Insurance Companies, give it to the people, and terminate, per Dollar spent, the worst Healthcare anywhere in the World, ObamaCare.”

In a stroke of pure MAGA populism, Trump’s post did two things: First, he framed the “Schumer Shutdown” as actually protecting the multi-billions of tax dollars the tax subsidies going annually to health care insurance corporations, and second, he framed the coming reform debate as a choice between either empowering Americans to decide for themselves their health care coverage, or protecting government bureaucrats and corporate insurance executives getting rich on tax dollars.

Trump is far from alone in wanting to put consumers in charge of their health care coverage as the key to reducing costs and improving medical services delivery. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-La.), for example, recently told a New Orleans NBC media outlet that he favors moving to Health Savings Accounts (HASs) that are pre-funded at a certain level by the federal government. The Louisiana Republican is a physician and a key player in any Senate decision-making on health care issues.

And Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Okla.) told The Washington Stand that “Americans hopefully now clearly see the facts proving that Obamacare was never affordable. It’s called the Unaffordable Care Act for a reason, as health care premiums have gone up substantially since Obamacare was fully implemented in 2014, going from around $16,000 for the annual average family of four to now standing around $27,000 for the same family.”

The solution, according to the Oklahoma Republican, is legislative action that “starts moving toward free market principles and away from government involvement.”

How Congress ultimately acts remains to be seen, but congressional and health care experts interviewed by TWS agree the debate and subsequent reforms are all but inevitable because of the Schumer Shutdown.

“Ironically, the Democrats have made a strong case that President Barack Obama’s signature legislation was a major policy failure. Obama said repeatedly that his bill would bend the health cost curve downward and even made the claim that the typical family would save $2,500 annually. Fifteen years later, these claims appear even more absurd than when Obama uttered them,” said Dr. Robert Moffit, senior research fellow for the Heritage Foundation’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing.

Moffit served as deputy assistant secretary for Legislation at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under President Ronald Reagan, as well as Assistant Director for Congressional Relations at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

As a result, according to Moffit, “congressional Republicans have a golden opportunity to change the trajectory of the health care debate. They should adopt a policy of addition, not subtraction. Let those who like Obamacare plans keep their Obamacare plans. But provide innovative alternatives for those who want more affordable coverage with broader access to doctors, hospitals, and specialists than available under most Obamacare plans.”

Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) Executive Vice-President Brittany Madni, who worked on the Hill for a decade as a senior legislative aide, declared that “the shutdown orchestrated by congressional Democrats in a bid to extract $1.5 trillion in radical demands paid for by taxpayers has exposed a key fault line: Obamacare’s ongoing unaffordability.”

The shutdown debate over the Obamacare tax subsidies exposed the fact that, according to Madni, “If Obamacare offered truly affordable or quality care, we wouldn’t even be talking about subsidies. But we are. Now, congressional Republicans are seeing this as an opportunity to consider broader reforms that would actually drive down costs, unlike throwing more money into a broken system. They would be wise to advance a pro-freedom health care policy agenda that actually puts patients and taxpayers first instead of big insurance companies.”

A congressional relations veteran who is working on health care issues and who asked not to be named told The Washington Stand that genuine health care reforms are a real possibility because there is even support for such progress among some Democratic lawmakers.

“There is some hope in addressing health care costs. Some rank-and-file Democrats have expressed an interest in addressing distortive federal policies that drive up system-wide health care costs and thus increase premiums, but their leadership has blocked them from truly engaging,” the congressional relations expert explained.

Even before the Schumer Shutdown, he said, Democrats presented a solid wall of opposition to any changes in Obamacare. But that attitude is fading.

“Since passage of the ACA, Democrats have not been open to any changes to the law, even as networks narrowed, consolidation accelerated, and premiums soared. The regulatory and tax credit structure of the ACA are inherently inflationary. Even when Republicans appropriated cost-sharing reduction subsidies in the reconciliation bill that would have reduced premiums by 10-20 percent, Democrats objected and got that provision removed in the Senate,” the expert continued.

“Real reforms to the ACA to increase competition and lower premiums, like the nice-sounding but poorly constructed Medical Loss Ratio (MLR) requirement, require 60 votes in the Senate, and Democrats have not once shown any interest in tackling these problems they created. So, Republicans have and should continue to push for people to have more affordable options,” the expert added.

The MLR is a provision requiring health care insurers to spend at least 80% of a coverage premium on medical care and health improvement. But the MLR is irrelevant in the millions of cases in which the policyholder doesn’t file a claim. In such cases, which account for nearly all Obamacare policyholders, the health care insurer keeps all of the Obamacare tax subsidies that may apply.

As for Schumer, a survey of Democratic voters highlighted by CNN shows the New York Democrat, who has been in Congress since former President Ronald Reagan was inaugurated for his first term, to be four points underwater. And prominent members of his party like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) are openly calling for his resignation.

A spokesman for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who is widely expected to challenge Schumer, if he seeks another Senate term, did not respond to TWS’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

Mark Tapscott

Mark Tapscott is senior congressional analyst at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Dems Cave after Gaining Nothing for Weeks-Long Shutdown

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Who was responsible for the longest government shutdown in history? Look no further than those enraged at the news it may soon end. “The Democratic base is seething,” reports Politico. Liberal social media is on fire Monday, with activists, pressure groups, and wannabe Democratic senators and presidents falling over one another to condemn the deal in ever-louder terms.

On Monday night, the Senate passed legislation by a 60-40 vote that would fund the government through January 30. The House is expected to take the measure up as soon as Wednesday.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and House Progressive Caucus leader Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) both promised to vote against the bill in the House, and even Democratic senators are slamming their eight colleagues who voted to reopen the government.

Their basic contention is that their Democratic colleagues effectively caved by flipping their votes for nothing more than a promised future vote on extending Obamacare subsidies — a Santa’s pack full of leftist sweets. Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) is expected to schedule a vote on an Obamacare bill prepared by Democrats sometime in mid-December.

But progressives are furious at failing to obtain their objective in the shutdown, which was to force the Republican majority to vote for the $1.5 trillion in new health care spending, which Republicans have never voted on before. If the Democrats’ gambit had succeeded, it “would have been the first time a minority party, Democrat or Republican, successfully extracted policy concessions by shutting down the government. That’s never happened before, and it ain’t happening now,” said Quena González, senior director of Government Affairs at Family Research Council, in comments provided to The Washington Stand.

Still, progressives know that they didn’t win anything out of the shutdown. As DNC Vice Chair Malcolm Kenyatta complained, “Any ‘deal’ that ends with Dems just getting a pinky promise in return is a mistake.” There was “no direct policy concession,” González explained. In fact, the deal that Democrats eventually took was one Leader Thune had offered weeks ago: keep the government funded now, to vote on Obamacare subsidies later.

This was a fair deal for Democrats, since House Republicans had passed a “clear” continuing resolution (CR), which kept the government funded at Biden-era spending levels. But Democrats rejected the deal for weeks, voting 14 times to reject that “clean CR.” “The hardcore Democrat base is set on extending the subsidies and shutting down the government pretty much indefinitely until they get their way,” observed González.

However, “the realistic wing of the party was already beginning to see what was never going to happen,” he added. The fact that Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the number two-ranking Democrat in the Senate, was one of the eight who crossed the aisle to fund the government shows that, “privately, Democrats knew that this day was coming,” González continued. “They knew that, if Republicans held together, they were going to have to compromise on this and that they were going to have to yield.”

To give cover for Democrats facing competitive elections to vote for reopening the government, they had to “have a sacrificial lamb in leadership to take a vote that everybody knew was going to have to be taken,” González explained. After Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was roasted by his party for taking a similar vote this spring, the uncomfortable duty fell to his second-in-command (not that Schumer has avoided criticism this time). The 80-year-old Durbin doesn’t plan to run for reelection again anyway.

As a further sign supporting this theory, González pointed to the fact that “they got exactly enough Democrats” to advance cloture. “No Democrat who didn’t absolutely have to vote for it, did,” he said. “The vote tally was clearly very calculated. … And so, obviously, although Schumer was a big public ‘no’ on this, he was obviously whipping behind the scenes to make sure this thing passed.”

Ironically, even parts of the Democratic base had recognized the inevitability of this outcome. Weeks ago, government employee unions were already calling for Congress to pass a clean CR to reopen the government — exactly the plan Republicans had advanced.

The deal struck in the Senate does vary from the CR the House passed in September, which would have kept the government open until November 18. Thune plans to replace that text with one that keeps the government funded until January 30.

The new deadline is “a win all the way around for conservatives … really one of the best-case scenarios that we could have hoped for,” González argued. “Appropriators had wanted something that would end around Christmas time, so we’d be right back here over Christmas, and appropriators would have the upper hand to lard this thing up with earmarks and kill conservative provisions.”

The Senate deal also includes the three appropriations bills that have passed through committee in the Senate. “There’s a lot to be left to be desired in the Senate version of those, because those were designed on a bipartisan basis,” González conceded. “They left out a lot of the great stuff that was in the House version of those bills.”

In the end, though, the longest government shutdown in history ended up being “a futile attempt by Democrats to achieve something that they had to have known all along was improbable and probably impossible: winning policy concessions by shutting down the government,” González summarized.

Conventional wisdom holds that no one ever wins a shutdown. But oftentimes it’s more important in Congress to stop bad ideas than advance good ones. By sticking together, Republicans achieve that here.

Now that some Democrats have broken ranks to reopen the government, the media narrative that Republicans were responsible is exposed as the farce that it always was. “People who voted against reopening the government denounced the vote, and vow to fight on were never against the shutdown,” argued National Review’s Dan McLaughlin. “There is no way to reconcile the furious response with the wholly false claim that it was Republicans, not Democrats, who shut down the government. It was always a lie, and they always knew it was a lie.”

On MSNBC, former Harris aide Symone Sanders Townsend criticized the Democrats who caved. “If they don’t get anything but a promise to vote later, then how do Senate Democrats explain the last 40 days to the people who have suffered?”

That’s a good question, but the proper time to ask it was before Democrats caused the suffering.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Killing the Filibuster Hands All the Power to Liberal Republicans

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Donald Trump ratcheted up the pressure on Senate Republicans on Wednesday in the aftermath of a dismal night for the GOP brand. And while the election defeats were contained to blue states — where most experts would predict an off-year, off night for the president’s party — the hand-wringing over what this could mean for the majority a year from now has the White House reaching for the panic button. “Terminate the filibuster,” Trump demanded — without bothering to consider if the desperate suggestion would even work.

There’s this misconception swirling in the Republican Party that if we could just end the 60-vote threshold, conservatives could enact everything on their wish list. Even the president has fallen for this legislative fairy tale, painting a pie-in-the-sky picture of Congress doing “our own bills.” “We should start tonight, with ‘the country’s’ open, congratulations!’ Then we should pass voter ID, we should pass no mail-in voting, we should pass all the things we want to pass to make our elections fair and safe, because California’s a disaster, many of the states are disasters.’”

It sounds great, as a Republican majority accomplishing America’s agenda always does. There’s just one gaping problem: who actually believes the GOP would stick together long enough to accomplish it? We’ve just come off a tumultuous few years where the House speaker was ousted by his own party, and his replacement, Mike Johnson (R-La.), has had to ride out intra-party storms that rival Hurricane Melissa. The tougher-than-he-looks Louisianan has had to hold his wafer-thin majority together with diplomatic duct tape — through months of floor tantrums, overnighters, back-stabbing, X wars, threats to his gavel, defections, outrageous demands, and betrayal. And that was just for one bill!

Abolishing the filibuster isn’t like waving a magic wand and everything conservatives want suddenly passes. Remember, we had a 51-vote threshold for Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, and it was anything but an easy lift. It means — as the reconciliation process did — that Republicans have to find a simple (a misnomer in Mike Johnson’s case) majority in both chambers to get something to Donald Trump’s desk. If you’ve paid even scant attention to Washington in the last 10 years, you understand what a herculean task that is for this party. Unlike Democrats, who have supernatural powers to keep their party in line when they need to, the GOP is full of personalities, grandstanders, and people with competing ideas and priorities. Suggesting, after recent history, that they’ll suddenly stick together like good soldiers and vote the way Trump wants is pure folly.

If Johnson can survive the bitter infighting that drags on for weeks and manage to send a bill on, say, election reform to the Senate, it doesn’t get easier. Remember, Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has his own cross to bear in the form of liberal Republicans like Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine), and other mavericks who like to make a stink on their personal soapboxes. There’s absolutely no guarantee that these rogue senators would get on board with any priority of Thune’s. Worse, they’d have all the bargaining power as leadership desperately tries to sweeten the pot (or weaken the legislation) to get them on board. And if they don’t? Republicans would have destroyed the one tool they’ll have in the minority for nothing.

As Family Research Council’s Quena González warned, “Killing the filibuster would be a disaster. It’s a RINO’s dream.” He’s watched in dismay as liberal Republicans have fought, diluted, or killed bills that include even the mildest pro-life protections like the Hyde Amendment. With a lower threshold, blue-state Republicans and liberal senators would have that much more leverage to hold out for concessions on core values if leadership is desperate to pass something that everyone else in the caucus supports.

And at this point, what has Trump even promised to do with his 51-vote threshold? Has he vowed to pass federal legislation ending late-term abortions? Or crack down on chemical abortion and gender transition procedures? Protect girls’ sports? Expand religious freedom? Reinforce parental rights in education? No. So far, all Americans seem to be getting in this trade for overhauling the entire institution of Congress is “no more mail-in balloting.” And while securing our elections is important, is that enough? What guarantee do voters have that this president, who’s wandered a bit from the social conservatism of his first term, will move from election integrity to the big-ticket items on their to-do list?

“If conservatives, who are never a majority in the Senate, want to retain their ability curb some of the worst excesses of the Democratic Party in the future,” González told The Washington Stand, “even when a few of their liberal fellow Republicans (predictably) want to fold under pressure, they would be wise to follow the lead of those Democrats who, when their party was in the majority two years ago and wanted to obliterate the filibuster, instead looked down-range and thought strategically about the consequences.”

That’s why it’s incredibly disturbing to see senators willing to take this leap, based solely on speculation of what Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) might do if Democrats retake the Senate. The mentality taking hold in the GOP seems to be, “Oh, Democrats will kill the filibuster, so we should kill it first.” But remember, in 2022, when Schumer had control, it was his own members who stopped him. When he and Joe Biden wanted to ram an abortion-on-demand through all nine months of pregnancy at taxpayer expense law through the Senate by setting fire to the filibuster, Senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema stopped him. Is there anyone in the Democratic ranks with enough courage to do that now? We don’t know. But John Fetterman (D-Pa.) is looking more sane by the day.

Regardless, making such a profoundly dangerous decision based on the GOP’s best guess of what might happen is a horrible idea for tearing down a 200-year-old rule. And yet, Senators like John Cornyn (R-Texas), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) seem to be wobbling on a principle that would have been ironclad if they were in the minority.

Americans of all persuasions should be grateful for Leader Thune, who continues to push back against this Trump onslaught by insisting, “There are not the votes there.” It would take, somewhat ironically, 51 senators to set fire to the one wall remaining between the Senate and any hope of cooperation, civility, and bipartisanship. Without it, the upper chamber is just another House — tossed to and fro with the temporary passions and whims of the people and unwilling (and unable) to give the voters who lost any given election a voice.

On “Washington Watch” Wednesday, even a stalwart conservative like Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) seemed tempted by the fool’s gold of bulldozing the last line of defense between America and the tyranny of the majority. “I wish the filibuster was in the Constitution,” the senator admitted to FRC President Tony Perkins, “then it would be next to impossible for the Senate to change it. … I mean, I know people talk about praying for decisions, but I wake up every morning that I would do justice [to these issues]. And truly, I’m torn a little bit trying to decide what the right thing is. If you could guarantee me that the Democrats aren’t going to get rid of the filibuster the next time they’re in control, [then okay],” he said. “… I would prefer to keep the filibuster in place. But if they’re going to change it anyway, should we proceed?” Marshall paused, “If we got rid of the filibuster, then we could make our election secure again. We could basically outlaw mail-in ballots, and we could demand voter ID. So there’s good things. There’s bad things, and I’m truly wrestling with it.”

Then, as if being pulled back from the brink by an imaginary force, the doctor reeled it back in. “I’ve got to, again, admit, a lot of the laws that we pass are bad ones. And what the filibuster does [is] it keeps us from passing even more bad ones. It saves us from ourselves. Other senators have said that the House is like the coffee cup, and the Senate is supposed to be the saucer. We’re supposed to measure twice, cut once. And that’s what the filibuster makes us do. It keeps us from jumping [around on policies] every two years. … So I can think of 100 reasons to defend it.”

As for the Republicans leaning into Trump’s short-sightedness on the issue, Thune was careful. “I don’t doubt that he could have some sway with members,” the leader conceded. “But I know where the math is on this issue in the Senate, and … it’s just not happening.”

In Trump’s defense, he was never in the Senate. He wasn’t even in politics until he ran for president. So maybe he doesn’t understand the long-term implications of what he’s suggesting. For him, nothing matters beyond his term and getting key priorities of the American people over the finish line. That’s an admirable goal — but in a Congress as closely divided as ours, a next-to-impossible one. And not because of the filibuster — but because we haven’t learned to unite around core ideals as a movement, let alone as a people.

Changing the Senate rules won’t unlock the door to every backlogged GOP policy, as some seem to think. Instead, it will build taller and more formidable walls inside parties — and between them. The flames of division will become an inferno that no minority can put out. So, if you like hyper-partisanship, if you dream of a day when there’s not a single thing Republicans can do to stop the runaway train of radical leftist socialism, then by all means, destroy the filibuster.

But if the goal is to move forward as a country, finding ways to work and talk through issues facing our nation together, this isn’t the solution.

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Dems Feel the Squeeze as Schumer’s Shutdown Approaches Historic Levels

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When Democrats flipped off the lights of the government, no one was quite sure how long the tantrum would last. Now, more than a month later, it seems almost ironic that the record-tying day of the shutdown falls on November 4, when tens of millions of voters head to the polls to make a rare, off-year statement. But this time around, that statement won’t just include how Americans feel about dozens of ballot initiatives and candidates — but Republicans’ leadership and Democrats’ defiance.

To a lot of observers, Election Day might finally be the break federal workers have been waiting for. “They’re setting everything up for next week,” Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) told Politico Friday. “If they [agree to open the government] before Tuesday, then their base may not show up because it looks like they caved. … That’s why they’re setting everything up to open next week. We’ll be open next Wednesday, or Wednesday night, or Thursday.”

RealClearPolitics’ White House Correspondent Phil Wegmann agrees. Maybe, he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “This Week on Capitol Hill,” “if Democrats are able to put a few points on the scoreboard” by winning a few big races in New Jersey or Virginia, “they’ll be more eager to come to the table here in D.C.” Even so, Wegmann insisted, “It’s been remarkable. We have seen Republicans, for the most part, stay in lockstep — both in the House and the Senate. And I think that’s because they’re taking their cues not just from President Trump, but also from Majority Leader [John] Thune (R-S.D.) [and] Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). The only reason I want to point that out is because we began the year with a lot of consternation in the Republican ranks, but as of right now, they’re standing pat.”

Unfortunately for Johnson and Thune’s party, so are Democrats. The difference is, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) party is feeling the squeeze. After 14 votes to reopen the government by Republicans, America’s business and union leaders have publicly turned on Democrats. Airlines like Delta and United are calling on Congress to pass a clean continuing resolution (CR), which is what the GOP has lobbied for from the beginning. Then, adding to the Democrats’ PR nightmare, a “broad coalition of business associations” — including banking, real estate, retail, manufacturing, technology, wholesalers, and even the Chamber of Commerce — piled on. The groups, which represent corporate behemoths like Walmart and Apple, didn’t mince words when they warned that every day, “the larger and more durable the economic damage becomes — and some of it might never be recovered.”

In what may be the Democrats’ most surprising critics, five unions — including the American Federation of Government Employees and Teamsters—broke with Schumer’s party, demanding they pass a clear CR.

Even the media, Schumer’s most reliable cheerleaders, have tired of the party’s rebellion for individual gain. “Schumer has allowed the shutdown to drag on because he’s worried about fending off a primary challenger in 2028, and he’s still smarting from blowback he got from angry liberals after he agreed to fund the government this spring,” The Washington Post’s editorial board declared. As for the grand façade that Democrats are fighting to keep health care costs low, the Post argued, “Keeping the government open should be separated from policy disputes about how to spend taxpayer money. It is wrong that Democrats have held the government hostage for a month in hopes of extending costly Obamacare subsidies, just as it was for Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to shut down the government in 2013 for 16 days in a bid to defund the Affordable Care Act altogether.” The answer, they contended, “is to reopen the government with a clean funding bill.”

Speaking of the Obamacare tax credits, which is apparently the political hill Democrats are willing to die on, Wegmann reminds people that what we’re talking about here “is the extension of former President Biden’s expansion of Obamacare, which was designed to be temporary. It was a COVID-era measure, and it made a lot more individuals eligible for coverage.” As even Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) insisted, Democrats are the ones who, in 2022, wrote the legislation to end these subsidies in 2025.

And the reality is, Paragon Health Institute emphasized in damning research, health care costs wouldn’t really be rising because these tax credits end. By their calculations, sunsetting these subsidies “accounts for only 4 percent of the expected 20 percent average premium increase next year.” In other words, their experts wrote, Democrats can’t blame the “sharp jump in premiums” on the end of these subsidies. “The real drivers are the same structural flaws that have plagued Obamacare since 2014 and rising health care costs,” Paragon’s Gabrielle Kalisz explained.

The real problem, many stress, is “the premium increase to higher medical utilization, inflation, health care consolidation (which the ACA contributed to), and surging costs for expensive drugs — especially GLP-1 weight-loss and diabetes medications, specialty drugs, and biologics (including new gene therapies). Insurers also cite workforce shortages, price transparency measures, and tariffs as nominal contributors to increasing premiums.”

Under these pandemic credits, Kalisz says, “the federal government has been paying 93 percent of the premium for the typical enrollee. Even after the COVID Credits expire, the federal government will still cover more than 80 percent of the typical enrollee’s premium through the regular subsidy. Taxpayers, not consumers, will remain the overwhelming source of revenue for insurers selling ACA exchange plans.”

No wonder Republicans have never voted for these subsidies, FRC’s Perkins shook his head before raising some of the major problems with Obamacare. “First off, many of them see these subsidies as propping up a program that doesn’t work because it is anything but affordable as its name, Affordable Health Care Act, [implies].” In a slap to taxpayers, Obamacare isn’t subject to the Hyde Amendment. “So it funds abortion and now funds these transgender surgeries in particular for minors.”

If the White House wants to negotiate with Democrats on this issue as a condition of ending the shutdown, they do so at their own peril, Wegmann cautions. “They’re going to [face] a lot of heat from Republicans and the pro-life lobby. … Hyde has never applied to Obamacare. There’s nothing in the statute that prevents these dollars from going to abortion,” he reiterated. “… Just this summer, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, you had Maryland dip into a $24 million Obamacare fund to provide abortion services for women coming from outside of that state. So for conservatives and pro-life lobby, this is a bright line. This is their brick wall.”

That may be why, when Perkins asked Speaker Johnson what he’d like people to pray about, the Louisianan said, “For God’s wisdom and guidance. We do live in a great nation. We can’t take it for granted,” he emphasized. “… And we need to get past all the bitter partisanship. We need to get the government open and do the basic responsibility that we’re given by God. I think we will. I’m optimistic.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

States Go Head-to-Head to Redraw House Seats before Next Year’s Competitive Midterms

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If there’s a breakthrough on the horizon of the government shutdown, you wouldn’t know it from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s (D-N.Y.) whereabouts. The Democratic leader left D.C. — and its partisan messaging wars — for a Monday jaunt in Illinois, where he hoped to make a dent in another nationwide clash: redistricting. The jaunt, which underscored the urgency both parties feel to redraw their congressional maps, is the latest push in a see-saw battle to shake up the House’s slim majority.

As most people watched with interest this past August, the furious arms race between red states and blue states for House seats kicked off in Texas, where the Trump Justice Department gently reminded leaders that it was in violation of a recent court order on how congressional lines were drawn. When Lone Star State leaders moved to correct the problem, introducing legislation to rewrite district lines, Democrats revolted, leaving the state in dramatic style to try to grind the debate to a stop. Ultimately, their stunt failed, and GOP officials chased the lawmakers back home, where the proposal soon passed.

What most Americans didn’t know — and the media was careful to ignore — is that Texas was responding to a Fifth Circuit Court decision months earlier that upended a controversial provision in the Voting Rights Act. In the late 1980s, legislators amended the law to mandate certain majority-minority districts. The point was to ensure that black votes weren’t diluted in majority-white areas.

Now, six decades after the Act was passed (and four since this radical modification to the law), there’s widespread concern that the legislation has actually sparked the discrimination it was designed to prevent. After all, Politico explains, “The districts created as a result of the tweak to the law are almost entirely represented by Democrats, something that Republicans have long claimed gives the party an unfair advantage.”

As the National Review editors point out, “More than a dozen congressional districts as well as many state legislative districts are drawn along openly racial lines for the explicit purpose of separating voters into racial enclaves. We do not need racial gerrymandering to target a problem that recedes ever further into our past. Nothing in the Constitution,” they argue, “requires this. To the contrary, as the Court has warned for decades, using race as the predominant factor in drawing district lines violates the 14th and 15th Amendments’ guarantees of equal protection and freedom from race discrimination in voting rights.”

The Supreme Court has a chance to radically overhaul the Voting Rights Act this term, and states across both political spectrums are scrambling to reshape their congressional maps in the hopes of swaying what will be a furiously competitive midterm election.

In Texas, North Carolina, Missouri, and Utah, conservatives got off to a fast start, revising their districts to be more competitive for Republican candidates. Some estimates put the GOP pick-up at about seven seats in the U.S. House. But that was before New York, Illinois, Virginia, and California clapped back, moving aggressively to respond and, in Golden State Governor Gavin Newsom’s (D) case, bypassing the state constitution to do so.

As Time magazine Senior Correspondent Phillip Elliot explains, “California actually has one of the better — and consistent — non-partisan systems for creating fair political maps based on the results of the U.S. Census conducted at the top of each decade.” And yet with Proposition 50, slated to come before voters on November 4, the independent system for drawing the congressional lines would be replaced by the Democrat-controlled legislature, effectively rigging the process for decades to come.

But in Democratic circles, there’s a growing pushback to the idea. In places like Illinois, Jeffries met a surprising amount of resistance to his crusade to reimagine House races from black leaders, who fear that they’ll be drawn out of their seats in the party’s quest for more power. In bright bold lines, the caucus’s chair, state Senator Willie Preston (D),“issued a public warning to Jeffries that it won’t support a map that dilutes Black voting population in historically Black districts,” Punchbowl reported. To squeeze another Democratic seat out of the Land of Lincoln, Jeffries would have to elbow out a black lawmaker.

“It’s pretty incredible that state legislators can summon the House minority leader to Chicago to extract political promises in return for diluting racially-gerrymandered seats,” Family Research Council’s Quena Gonzalez emphasized, “and Washington pretty much yawns.” He added, “When intersectional race preferences collide with mathematical reality, I guess something’s gotta give.”

In Maryland, the internal tension over redistricting is roiling local politics. The Hill described a new line drawn in the sand by state Senate President Bill Ferguson (D), who distributed a Dear Colleague letter Tuesday killing the party’s redistricting dreams because the effects would be, in his words, “catastrophic.”

“Despite deeply shared frustrations about the state of our country, mid-cycle redistricting for Maryland presents a reality where the legal risks are too high, the timeline for action is dangerous, the downside risk to Democrats is catastrophic, and the certainty of our existing map would be undermined,” he wrote. Besides, like so many blue states, the reality is there isn’t much to be gained. Democrats have already eked out as many gerrymandered areas as possible. In Maryland, there are eight congressional seats, and just one is held by a Republican.

In Virginia, the headwinds are strong for a different reason. After Speaker of the House Don Scott (D) announced a special session to consider new district lines. “In my legal opinion,” Minority Leader Terry Kilgore (R) fired back, “the election has already started, and it’s too late constitutionally to have such a vote. So we are going to use everything, legally, everything that we can do, to stop this power grab.”

Kilgore’s analysis was backed up by the state’s Republican attorney general, Jason Miyares, who issued a four-page opinion on Tuesday dashing the Democrats’ hopes of changing anything soon. “Under Virginia law, the entire membership of Virginia House of Delegates is elected every two years, in odd-numbered years, for terms beginning in the following even-numbered year,” the opinion read in part, “In accordance with law, Virginia voters are currently casting their ballots for the candidates they prefer to represent them as delegates for the term that begins in 2026 — and have been doing so for weeks.”

Regardless of the flurry of activity in the states, no one will shape America’s elections as much as the Supreme Court. If the justices strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act that demanded majority-minority districts, then a lot of the Democrats’ scheming will be moot. Even now, The New York Times concedes, “Despite all the gerrymandering by both political parties in recent years, neither has been able to obtain a significant structural advantage in the House so far this decade. In two very close elections, the party that won the most votes won the most seats. That’s partly because each side’s gerrymanders canceled the other’s out.” But, the Times stresses, “if Section 2 falls, and Republicans redraw districts across the South, Democrats will be at enough of a structural disadvantage that even with a five-point victory, their chances might depend on upsets in a few heavily Republican districts.”

FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter agreed. “While it looks as though we’re still early in the mid-decade redistricting fight,” he told The Washington Stand, “it is clear the GOP has the simplest path to gaining more districts. Democrat-led states typically have to devise some clever workaround for their independent redistricting commission, which, in most cases, has already just about maxed out the gerrymandering potential in their state. Republican states typically do not have these restrictions, have more room to maximize the impact of Republican voters in their states, and with the potential of the Supreme Court overturning portions of the Voting Rights Act, could free up as many as 19 additional seats for red states to go after.”

Sure, he admitted, “Blue states will do their best to cancel out as many of these new seats as possible, but it’s hard to see how they can possibly come out on top at the end, with their voters so centralized in so few locations and the hurdles they have to clear before they can even look at redrawing maps in their states.”

That said, this is definitely a battle for the ages. “It’s happened two other times in American history,” Carpenter underscored. “Normally, when you get this mid-decade redistricting, it’s because of a court order, [a law changes] … or there’s a legal challenge to an existing map, and suddenly the state legislature is coming in for a special session to redraw districts. This is the third time in American history where you’ve got a voluntary mid-decade redistricting that’s happening before a census. … So we are in sort of an unprecedented time in American history right now.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Democrats Skip Town after Nixing a Bill to Pay Federal Workers during Shutdown

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It’s an ironic day to celebrate the “spirit of bipartisanship” in the Senate, but 23 days into a government shutdown, that’s exactly what both parties sat down to do. When Senators Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Gary Peters (D-Mich.) decided to host a special chamber-wide lunch (complete with fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and blueberry crumble), no one could’ve dreamed that the two sides would be hunkered down on opposite sides of a funding war with no signs of budging. But at least for a couple of hours on Thursday, Democrats and Republicans broke bread — even if they couldn’t break through their differences.

Humble pie obviously wasn’t on the menu, as leaders retreated from the delicious spread to their separate corners, voting down bills that would’ve broken the logjam — or at least made the ordeal easier on cash-strapped staffers, who are working around the clock (thanks in large part to grandstanding filibusters) without paychecks. Asked if Democrats could possibly be talked into realistic negotiations, Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Wednesday’s “Washington Watch.”

Looking ahead to Thursday’s votes, he worried Democrats would, in fact, shoot down the push to compensate some federal workers. After all, Marshall pointed out, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has already rejected the idea of paying our military. “We have Capitol Police up here,” the senator reminded everyone. “My staff is working without paychecks as well.” And yet, Democrats refuse to even make those exceptions. “I don’t know what their off-ramp looks like right now,” Marshall admitted. “It’s a dire predicament for them right now.”

Marshall’s prediction was right. On Thursday, all but three Democrats — Senators Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), and John Fetterman (D-Pa.) — voted to leave federal workers in a lurch. The outcome surprised even House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who had hoped Congress would “do something that makes sense around here for once.” Instead, Schumer’s party was left scrambling to explain why they thought our troops and other government employees should work for free. “I’m fine to support it,” Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said before, ironically, voting no. “I think we need to pay our military, but I want to define and limit it in a way that provides pay to essential workers who serve our public safety and our national defense.”

Ossoff, meanwhile, a surprising outlier in his party (who also happens to be facing a tough reelection next year), explained his break with Democrats by telling reporters, “Military servicemembers, TSA workers, and air traffic controllers are among those who simply must come to work, and they should be paid for that work.”

For now, Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), whose bill failed to find the magical 60 votes it needed to start signing paychecks for certain workers, stood outside the only thing the chamber can agree on — Paul and Peter’s bipartisan lunch — and insisted, “I’m going to work over the weekend, our staffs, figure out how to take my bill, make it acceptable to Democrats. Hopefully, we can pass it early next week. That’s my game plan. Wish me luck.”

But it’ll take a lot more than luck this time around. And although Democrats are publicly stoic, the optics certainly aren’t helping Schumer’s party. While he’s being showered with praise by the fringe Left for rebuffing Republicans’ attempts to sit down and find a solution, Americans are feeling the squeeze. And instead of seeing Democrats spring into action to help them, they see leadership content to sit back and try to score political points. “Every day gets better for us,” the New Yorker bragged to the press. This, while everyday people work without pay, offices are understaffed, and routine benefits trickle out at half speed. November 1 is rapidly approaching, The Daily Signal’s Elizabeth Mitchell told Perkins on “This Week on Capitol Hill,” “which is when SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] funding will run out.” That’s food for low-income people, moms and kids. Surely, that’s “another thing that’s putting pressure on Democrats,” she underscored.

But if families are hurting, Schumer’s party says, that’s just too bad. Democrats have their upcoming elections to think about. “Shutdowns are terrible, and of course, there will be families that are going to suffer,” House Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) said, while claiming they take that problem “very seriously.” “But it is one of the few leverage times we have,” the number two House Democrat explained to Fox News.

“So there you have it,” Breitbart’s John Nolte wrote. “Even though Republicans have made clear that they are willing to negotiate with Democrats on the health care issue… Even though President Trump has said this is a priority… Democrats refuse to open the government. They are openly admitting here [that] they are willing to make American families suffer just to gain leverage.”

And exactly what leverage have they gained? While Democrats have a slight edge among voters in the blame game, it’s nothing compared to the shellacking Republicans took for turning off the government’s lights in 2018. And Donald Trump’s approval rating has actually climbed as a result. According to Reuters/Ipsos, Trump’s approval is at 42% — up two from a couple of weeks ago.

Speaking of the president, he knows exactly what’s fueling this shutdown: Schumer’s insecurity. “He’s shot,” Trump stressed Wednesday. “This poor guy. I feel sorry for him. I’ve known him for a long time, but I think he’s mentally gone. He’s been beat[en] up by young radical lunatics. And I think that Chuck Schumer is — he’s gonzo. I really do.” Referring to the threats from his extreme flank, the president predicted that the minority leader wouldn’t run again. “It shows that he’s losing in every poll. … I’m just giving you the facts. I think Chuck is probably finished.”

The New Yorker’s colleague, Senator Jon Husted (R-Ohio), can’t help but notice that Schumer’s grip on power is slipping. “I think we all know that Chuck Schumer is feeling the pressure of younger Democrats who think he’s a failure as a leader. And so, he’s trying to prove to his political left base that he can fight back against President Trump,” the Ohioan noticed. “But fighting back against President Trump is at the expense of what’s best for the American people in this case,” he told Perkins on Thursday’s “Washington Watch.” “And I think ultimately, this is a terrible thing for everyone. But it just proves that they’re not interested in being serious about trying to serve the American people.”

“Remember,” Husted paused, “this is a clean CR that we’re asking them to vote for — meaning that there [are] no politics in it, no games. We’re spending at Biden-era levels in these agencies. So why should they be against that? And it would only create funding through November the 21st, at which time we will have to go through this again. So even if you vote for the CR and you get people funded, then do that, and then we’ll keep negotiating about whatever you want.” Until then, Husted said, “Chuck Schumer is going to have to decide that he cares about the American people and not just his own political fortunes.”

In the meantime, senators are headed home without a solution — again. Obviously, it’ll take a lot more prayers like Senate Chaplain Barry Black’s to bring Democrats to the table. “We continue our importunity for the ending of this shutdown,” he prayed, “particularly praying for our Capitol Police and the many others who are serving without monetary compensation. We pray also for those who are not considered essential workers. Lord, reward them all.”

If God needs a shortcut, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said, “I have great news. The clean CR would pay everyone. We just need five more Democrats to support it.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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