Based on his voting record, Congressman Cline has never been a champion of clean and safe drinking water or any other environmental protections.

So it was interesting to learn that there is one issue on which he purports to be a staunch environmentalist. Cline joined Republican colleagues in Congress “urging the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate the environmental and public health risks of the abortion drug mifepristone, warning that its chemical byproducts may be contaminating the nation’s water supply.”

In January, Politico reported:

A cadre of red and purple states is introducing bills this week to impose restrictions on abortion pills over claims that the drugs could be contaminating drinking water.

The new legislation in Arizona, Idaho, Maine, West Virginia and Wyoming — which would require doctors who prescribe abortion pills to make their patients collect and return their expelled fetuses in medical waste bags for disposal — is the latest development in anti-abortion groups’ yearslong campaign to wield environmental laws to cut off access to the drugs.

…..

“This is not because the environment was my first weapon of choice — it’s because it’s the one we have now,” Kristi Hamrick, the vice president of Students for Life of America, said at the group’s annual conference on Saturday. She added that after decades of pushing for new restrictions on abortion by approaching state and federal lawmakers saying, “Please, please pass this law to help us. Pretty please with sugar on top?” she and her fellow abortion opponents landed on this strategy.

“Environmental law has teeth. It already exists,” she stressed. “And, frankly, I’m for using the devil’s own tools against them.”

…..

Multiple environmental health experts, including toxicologists and experts in emerging water contaminants, say there is no evidence that mifepristone is present in the nation’s waterways at concerning levels. And, in the last week of the Biden administration, the FDA’s experts rejected a citizen petition from Students for Life that demanded the agency roll back access to the pills while the government studies their environmental impact.

“The petition offers only conjecture that remnants of mifepristone in the nation’s water system are ‘causing unknown harm to citizens and animals alike,’” the FDA found earlier this month, noting that Students for Life’s 2023 petition itself “provides no evidence showing that bodily fluid from patients who have used mifepristone (a one-time, single-dose product) is causing harm to the nation’s aquatic environment.”

So Cline is latching onto a phony “concern” about mifepristone to try and advance his pro-forced birth agenda, while voting NO on the PFAS Action Act, which would crack down on the use of a class of chemicals known as PFAS found in drinking water.

The Keck School of Medicine reported in January:

Communities exposed to drinking water contaminated with manufactured chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) experience up to a 33% higher incidence of certain cancers, according to new research from the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and just published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, is the first to examine cancer and PFAS contamination of drinking water in the U.S.

Given the Trump administration’s wrecking-ball approach to medical research, I can’t help wondering how many more such studies it will continue to fund.

Congressman Cline: Your boundless hypocrisy is showing again.

Here are photos of a town hall meeting that Senator Warner held Friday with Sixth District constituents of Congressman Cline in Winchester.

Here are photos from all of the town hall meetings that Cline has held with his Sixth District constituents since November.

Notice the difference?

Congressman Cline fully backs Donald Trump’s illegal order to send National Guard and Marine troops into Los Angeles.

Trump acted without the request or consent of California’s governor or Los Angeles’s mayor. The city’s police chief said the deployment was unnecessary.

Fortunately we are also represented in Congress by people who are capable of thinking and acting for themselves and don’t feel the need to suck up to a lawless and dangerous President– or worse, agree with what he is doing.

As Kaine, the father of a Marine, said: “People don’t join the military to face off against their fellow Americans.”

And if Cline doesn’t care what Democrats say, he should take notice of this:

Florida state Sen. Ileana Garcia, who co-founded the group Latinas for Trump, criticized President Donald Trump’s recent immigration enforcement actions as “unacceptable and inhumane” in a social media post. 

…..

“I understand the importance of deporting criminal aliens,” Garcia, who served as the deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term, wrote in a tweet on June 7.

“But what we are witnessing are arbitrary measures to hunt down people who are complying with their immigration hearings – in many cases, with credible fear of persecution claims – all driven by a Miller-like desire to satisfy a self-fabricated deportation goal,” she said, referring to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. “This undermines the sense of fairness and justice that the American people value.”

It was, after all, these arbitrary measures which touched off the Los Angeles protests in the first place.

Senator Mark Warner isn’t afraid to hold an open meeting with his constituents living in Congressman Cline’s district.

Why is Cline too much of a coward to do the same?

In an interview with Mike Schikman on WSVA radio, Congressman Cline was asked about the Republicans’ tax and spending bill (AKA “The One Big Beautiful Bill”) which passed the House of Representatives by one vote.

Schikman: “Let’s talk about the cost of this bill. It’s going to add to our deficit, isn’t it?”

Cline: “We hope not. We hope that this bill, which is going to keep taxes low, and create enormous growth in our private sector and our in our small business communities, we’re going to see growth to the level we saw before COVID and that is going to keep the deficit down. When we combine that with the revenues that are coming in from tariffs and the revenues that are going to come in from the savings from DOGE and other things, we think we’ll be able to keep this revenue neutral, or close to it.”

Not a whole lot of certainty here. But last January CNN reported:

Conservatives in Congress say they will insist that the full package — including any extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts — are fully paid for, unlike the first time around.

“Republicans want to return to fiscal responsibility that has been lost over the last several years under leadership from both parties,” said Rep. Ben Cline, a member of the Freedom Caucus and GOP budget committee.

Can we expect the “enormous growth” that Cline is counting on? Not based on the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed by Republicans in Congress during Donald Trump’s first term.

Proponents of the corporate tax cut argued that businesses would invest amounts saved in new equipment, facilities, and their workforce, thereby fueling economic growth. Yet this promised investment boom failed to occur. Although investment rose following enactment, it initially did so at a lower rate than proponents’ claims implied and then slowed before turning around in the wake of substantial public investments made to stem the impact of the pandemic-induced recession.

Despite Republican promises, wages for low-paid workers did not increase. However the deficit did increase.

The Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office have published several estimates of TCJA’s expected budget impact. These estimates all show TCJA substantially reducing revenues and increasing deficits over its first decade. The specific amount varies—from about $1 trillion to $2 trillion…

As for revenues from tariffs, which will come largely from US consumers paying higher prices, that depends on Trump’s mood from day to day. In other words, they are nothing to depend on.

As I noted in a previous post, DOGE savings turned out to be far short of Elon Musk’s and Ben Cline’s expectations. And DOGE may end up costing taxpayers more than it saves.

Speaking of DOGE, Elon Musk– for whom Cline has had nothing but praise and to whose brain he has compared his brain unfavorably— had something to get off his chest today:

He added:

Those who voted for it, of course, include Ben Cline and all but two other House Republicans.

When Cline posted a photo of him and Musk on Facebook last December, one commenter may have been prescient: