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.