Pay special attention to all the donations from corporations and special interests that Congressman Cline won’t dare to call out no matter what they do.

What else can you say after he posts this on his campaign Facebook page?

Gov. Spanberger is not trying to take away firearms from anyone who legally possesses them. (Details here.)

If the redistricting amendment is approved, nobody will be denied “representation in Congress.” Every Virginian will be represented by a member of Congress.

What money is Spanberger trying to take away? If Cline is referring to taxes, she hasn’t added any.

And Cline is deliberately confusing federal Congressional representation with state government.

In another post, Cline invokes the Right’s demon-of-choice, George Soros.

Motivated by the fear of losing his seat in Congress due to redistricting, Cline has been frantically crossing Virginia to rally opposition to the amendment.

If only he would put as much time and effort into facing his Sixth District constituents in open town hall meetings as he is putting into saving his job.

The latest desperate Facebook post by Congressman Cline:

If Cline is so eager to stand up for rural Virginians against their alleged enemies– “Northern Virginia elitists” or others– maybe he will find the courage to denounce this proposal by the extremely non-rural Donald J. Trump.

Congressman Cline is desperate to keep his seat in Congress. This will be a lot harder if the VOTE YES campaign– to redistrict Virginia to fight back against Trump-ordered redistricting in other states– succeeds.

Cardinal News reported last month that Cline has formed an anti-redistricting group:

Cline, who represents the current 6th District, announced Wednesday that he’s formed a group called Stop the Gerrymander that intends to rally a get-out-the-vote-campaign against that amendment and has seeded it with an undisclosed amount of his own campaign funds.

And he’s trying to guilt-trip his supporters by telling them that if they don’t donate NOW to his “Vote No” campaign, it will be 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 fault if the referendum passes and he and other Republicans lose their seats to Democrats.

Instead of using the current Congressional recess to hold open town hall meetings and connect with his constituents, Cline is traveling across Virginia with Republican operative Scott Presler to rally opposition to the redistricting amendment on the April 21 ballot. (Early voting began March 6 and is ongoing.)

Cline has been posting about the tour on his campaign Facebook page. For example:

Presler is a dubious character, but a lot of Republicans– including Cline– think he is an effective organizer.

Presler’s pose as an opponent of partisan gerrymandering in Virginia is laughable. He was a leading proponent of the unsuccessful effort to gerrymander Indiana to add more Congressional seats for Republicans.

Cline has never criticized Republicans legislators in Texas and other states, who meekly submitted to Donald Trump’s demand that they create new GOP Congressional districts– which triggered the Democratic effort in Virginia to level the playing field. Does anyone believe that if Cline happened to be a member of the Texas legislature, he would have been the only Republican to vote NO?

If Cline was serious about preventing partisan gerrymandering, he could have supported the For the People Act, which would have restricted it nationwide. Of course he opposed it.

Of all the phony arguments against the Virginia redistricting amendment, the most ridiculous is that it will force rural Virginians into Congressional districts represented by out-of-touch urban Democrats who will ignore their needs and interests.

In an op-ed at Cardinal News, Cline wrote:

Fairfax is cut into five pieces and attached to districts that reach into rural Virginia, thereby guaranteeing that those rural folks will almost always be represented by someone from the D.C. suburbs.

There would be no connection — geographic, economic or cultural — that would bind these groups of people together, even though they’d be thrown into the same congressional districts to build clout for one political party. So, in addition to a lobster, also think of an octopus, because Fairfax County would have its tentacles running everywhere.

Now let’s look at the example of Congressman Cline.

Recently in Congress, Cline has mis-represented his rural constituents by:

• Voting to double or triple the cost of health insurance for 33,000 of his constituents– including small business owners and farmers– under the Affordable Care Act.

• Voting to slash Medicaid and food assistance for tens of thousands of his constituents while cutting taxes for the ultra-wealthy under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. One immediate result was the closure last year of three primary care facilities in Cline’s Sixth District.

• Supporting a raise in the age of eligibility for Social Security– a special hardship for rural constituents working physically demanding jobs.

• Opposing a law to protect pregnant workers. (How is this “pro-life”?) 

• Backing Donald Trump’s tariffs and misbegotten war in Iran, which have driven up costs for all of us.

Many more examples are included on this website.

Let’s ditch the false narrative that corporate-backed Republicans like Cline– a sycophant for the extremely non-rural Donald Trump– care more about rural Americans than anyone else does. Their voting records tell a different story.

As you may recall, shortly after Congressman Cline joined other Republicans to pass Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Augusta Medical Group closed three primary care facilities in Cline’s 6th District.

Augusta Medical cited huge cuts to Medicaid funding in the bill as the reason for the closures.

In August The Rockbridge Advocate reported:

Goshen Vice-Mayor Steve Binkley reported that the Rockbridge Area Health Center, citing anticipated Medicaid cuts, abandoned plans to open a branch in the town’s new Community Center.

Cline was asked about this in a recent interview with Cville Right Now

Cline said concerns about the viability of rural healthcare clinics, including those in his district, since the passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, are valid but the blame is being misplaced.

When Augusta Health announced it would close clinics in Buena Vista, Churchville and Weyers Cave, it cited the impact from Trump’s budget bill. But Cline said that should actually be blamed on former Pres. Barack Obama and the Affordable Healthcare Act.

“We definitely have a healthcare problem in this country,” Cline said. “The ACA, also known as Obamacare, really had a negative impact on healthcare in this country. And we need to fix it from a broader perspective. But on a day-to-day basis, we need to make sure that federal funds flow to rural hospitals. That’s why I was so proud to make sure that $50 billion was included in the One Big Beautiful Bill to go to rural hospitals to make sure that our rural healthcare needs are met.”

In fact the Affordable Care Act– which included Medicaid expansion which Cline opposed for Virginia as a state delegate– has provided health insurance for the first time to tens of millions of Americans.

If he ever holds another town hall , perhaps Cline can explain the “negative impact” of more Americans and more Virginians having access to decent health care– and not having to depend on uncompensated treatment, which drives up costs for everyone.

As for the $50 billion for rural hospitals, KFF reports, it is “a little over one third (37%) of the estimated loss of federal Medicaid funding in rural areas.” Further, those funds “will be temporary, while many of the cuts in health spending are not time limited,” among other problems.

As I posted in November:

Cline bitterly opposed the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) which sets minimum standards for the plans it offers. He thinks the solution to rising health care costs is to offer cheap policies that can leave people with staggering out-of-pocket costs.

This is no solution at all.

Congressman Cline claims to be concerned that Congressional Democrats, by supposedly holding up funding for the Department of Homeland Security, are forcing cuts to the staff of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

In an effort to force stricter oversight of immigration enforcement and bring ICE operations under control, Democrats in Congress are refusing to support a Republican plan to fund DHS. And as The New York Times reports:

Democrats offered their own proposal to fund the department except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and the office of Kristi Noem, who led the department until Mr. Trump removed her on Thursday. Democrats asked to quickly take up their proposal and pass it unanimously, without debate, but Republicans objected.

In other words, it’s Republicans who are blocking funding for CISA and other DHS functions– including the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.

But here’s the real irony in Cline’s predictable Democrat-bashing. In March 2025 TechCrunch reported:

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has fired more than a hundred employees working for the U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency CISA, including “red team” staffers, two people affected by the layoffs told TechCrunch. 

The people, who asked not to be named, said affected employees were axed immediately when their network access was revoked with no prior warning.

The layoffs, which happened in late February and early March, are the latest round of staff cuts to hit the federal cybersecurity agency since the start of the Trump administration. 

CISA spokesperson Tess Hyre declined to comment on the latest round of job cuts affecting the agency and wouldn’t say how many employees had been affected. Hyre told TechCrunch that CISA’s red team “remains operational” but said the agency is “reviewing all contracts to ensure that they align with the priorities of the new administration.”

One of the people affected told TechCrunch that CISA red team employees, who simulate real-world attacks to identify security weaknesses in networks before attackers do, were affected by the DOGE-enforced cuts.

 Did Cline protest this danger to national security? Of course not.

Instead he was one of DOGE’s most enthusiastic backers. He actually believed DOGE could save the government more than $2 trillion— which of course turned out to be a fantasy.

But hey– let’s remember the good times.

Cardinal News reports:

U.S. Rep. Ben Cline, R-Botetourt County, has launched the latest redistricting salvo, saying his campaign will “spend what it takes” to defeat the proposed constitutional amendment that would allow the Democratic-controlled General Assembly to redraw the state’s congressional lines before this fall’s midterms.

Cline, who represents the current 6th District, announced Wednesday that he’s formed a group called Stop the Gerrymander that intends to rally a get-out-the-vote-campaign against that amendment and has seeded it with an undisclosed amount of his own campaign funds.

There are already two other groups in the field urging a “no” vote, but they both seem focused on advertising campaigns. Cline said his group would be different because “ours is exclusively focused on ground game GOTV.” In campaign parlance, that stands for get out the vote — the operational details of identifying likely supporters and then getting them to the polls.

…..

To run the campaign, Stop the Gerrymander has hired John Pudner, a Wisconsin-based political operative who was active with surrogate groups for the Donald Trump campaign in that state in 2024 (Wisconsin voted for Trump that year).

Helping Trump to carry Wisconsin in 2024 by less than 1 percent of the vote was a far different task than winning in Virginia in 2026– less than a year after Democrat Abigail Spanberger was elected governor by a 15-point margin.

Some important background: If voters approve the redistricting amendment on April 21, Virginia’s 6th District, which Cline currently represents, will be redrawn to make it more likely that a Democratic candidate can win in this year’s election. In addition, Cline’s home county of Botetourt would move from the 6th District to the 9th District, currently represented by his fellow Republican Morgan Griffith. (Virginia law allows candidates to run in districts where they don’t live. If Cline wants to run in the 6th District without moving, he could do so.)

On his campaign Facebook page, Cline posted a link to the Cardinal’s article, along with this:

Cline has never objected to the mid-decade gerrymandering that Donald Trump told Republicans in Texas and other states to undertake in an effort to win more seats in Congress and prevent a Democratic majority. Why didn’t he consider that to be an unconstitutional effort to steal Congressional seats and disenfranchise voters?

I think we know the answer.

If Cline was serious about preventing partisan gerrymandering, he could have supported the For the People Act, which would have restricted it nationwide. Of course he opposed it.

Sorry, Congressman. Once again, your outrage at Democrats is nakedly partisan and selective.

You and your fellow Republicans don’t get to play by one set of rules and demand that Democrats play by another.

Who am I to disagree?

From Congressman Cline’s February 23 newsletter to constituents:

In a recent interview with WFIR Radio, Congressman Cline said a lot of ridiculous things– about the Virginia redistricting referendum, about the activities of ICE, about requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, about health insurance.

But on the topic of energy, his comments stood out for their self-defeating stupidity.

Cline: “What we’re seeing right now is the greenification [!] of our energy grid, and it’s making costs skyrocket. Everybody’s seeing the impact of Democrats in Virginia putting a Green New Deal on our energy companies, Dominion, and then what’s happening at the federal level, what the Biden administration did. Trump is taking that off. But the Virginia legacy is still there. In fact, they’re doubling down in Richmond on making energy costs higher and making our energy bills worse. So we need to take more action in Washington to address that.”

Question: “But real quickly, is it part of the problem that the energy companies are putting too much of these green energy initiatives on the back of rate payers?”

Cline: “Well, they are the ones being ordered by the state government to shift to solar, to shift to wind, these inefficient means of producing electricity. And then they should be trying to make it as efficient as possible for ratepayers. But at the end of the day, when solar and wind are your sources of power, it’s going to cost a lot of money.”

Contrary to Cline’s assertion, solar and wind are cheaper in the long run than electricity from fossil fuel plants.

Aside from that: Although there is not a single oil well, natural gas well or coal mine in all of Cline’s Sixth District, there are at least 18 companies providing solar supply and installation. They include:

• Cenvar Solar

• Eco Sun Solar

• SolShine Energy Alternatives

• Main Street Solar Energy

• Solutions Solar and Roofing

• Virginia Energy Solutions

• Advanced Roofing & Solar

• Tiger Solar

• EcoGen America

• JD Solar Power

• DFH Solar

• Vesta Home Energy

• JK Renewables Virginia

• Absolute Energy

•Paradise Energy Solutions

• Green Hill Solar

• Solarsimple

• Hurricane Wind Power (solar and wind power)

I’m sure the owners and employees of these companies will be interested to know that the congressman who purports to represent them considers their products and services too inefficient and too expensive.

On Thursday I posted about Congressman Cline’s support for the “SAVE America Act,” based on the ridiculous premise that hordes of noncitizens are illegally voting in US elections despite massive evidence to the contrary.

But that’s not the only imaginary danger that Cline is purporting to fight.

Cline has joined other rightwing Congressional Republicans as a member of the “Sharia Free America Caucus.” (Seriously.) In fact there are no communities in the US where Sharia law is enforced and no serious efforts to impose Sharia law anywhere in the US. But Cline and the other Republicans apparently see political advantage in this anti-Muslim scaremongering.

The caucus is led by two Texas representatives, Chip Roy and Keith Self. Anti-Sharia hysteria has emerged in the 2026 Texas Republican primary campaign.

As Cline surely knows, any attempt to legally impose Sharia law (or Christian law or Jewish law) in the US would violate the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Meanwhile Cline ignores (or even supports) the real threats to Americans’ health, safety, well-being and freedom imposed daily by the Trump regime.