Congressman Cline is prepared to shut down the federal government in order to force through a bill making it harder than ever for eligible people to vote.

This is how he’s trying to sell it:

WHSV reported:

Republicans [in Congress] are pushing to include the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE Act, in any measure that would extend federal spending. The legislation would require prospective voters to show proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote.

During a conversation with WHSV, Virginia Sixth District Rep. Ben Cline said the GOP will stick to its guns to save the SAVE Act, even in the shadow of a government shutdown.

“If Democrats want to shut down the government over allowing illegals to vote, that’s on them,” Cline said. “That’s pretty ridiculous that they would do that … We think it’s a reasonable, fairly straightforward piece of legislation that would need to be on a continuing resolution to keep the government running, and also make sure that our elections are secure.”

President Joe Biden has promised to veto the SAVE Act if it reaches his desk, writing that “states already have effective safeguards in place” against voter fraud.

Virginia Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan explained why she and other Democrats oppose the measure.

McClellan noted that the only methods to prove citizenship under the SAVE Act “just happen to be the ones that cost money.”

“You won’t be able to use your state driver’s license,” she said, adding that the easiest option “you could use is a passport. It costs money. A lot of Americans don’t have passports.”

McClellan further noted that it can be difficult for some people to obtain their birth certificates, which can be necessary to prove citizenship, and those who have changed their names — for marriage or other reasons — often struggle to “reconcile that in order to prove their citizenship.”

McClellan said the issue is personal, invoking her family’s history with the poll tax.

“Look, I took my oath of office on the Bible in which my father kept his poll tax receipt,” she said. “I am not voting for a modern poll tax just so that they can say they’ve done something to keep noncitizen voters from doing something that is already illegal, punishable by up to five years in federal prison, and that there’s very little evidence is a widespread problem.”

Despite Cline’s alarm about supposed hordes of illegal immigrants voting, it simply isn’t a serious problem. As the Brennan Center for Justice explains:

Imagine you’re an undocumented person living in the United States. You’ve come to this country seeking a better life for you and your family. Or maybe your parents brought you here seeking the same when you were a child. You spend your life living in very real fear that you might be noticed by the government and be deported — perhaps to a country you’ve never known. There’s an election coming up, the outcome of which will surely impact your life. But you know you can’t vote because you’re not a citizen. Would you risk everything — your freedom, your life in the United States, your ability to be near your family — just to cast a single ballot?

Of course you wouldn’t. It’s a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. It’s also a crime under every state’s laws. In fact, under federal law, you could face up to five years in prison simply for registering to vote. It’s also a deportable offense for noncitizens to register or vote. And sure, people make bad decisions and commit crimes all the time. But this one is different: by committing the crime, you create a government record of your having committed it. In fact, it’s the creation of the government record — the registration form or the ballot cast — that is the crime. So, you’ve not only exposed yourself to prison time and deportation, you’ve put yourself on the government’s radar, and you’ve handed the government the evidence it needs to put you in prison or deport you. All so you could cast one vote. Who would do such a thing?

The answer is: just about no one. Every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare. That includes the Brennan Center’s own study of 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election. We found that election officials in those places, who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes, referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. In other words, even suspected — not proven — noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast.

In other words, the SAVE Act– which Cline believes is so vital that he’s willing to shut down the federal government to pass it– is a “solution” to a non-existent problem that would only prevent voting by the tens of millions of American citizens lacking passports or ready access to their birth certificates.

Like so much of what Cline says and does on immigration and other issues, it’s performative nonsense.

Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, Medicare was able to negotiate substantial reductions in the costs of 10 life-saving expensive drugs on which millions of seniors depend. And there will be more negotiations and price reductions to come.

Of course Congressman Cline can’t claim credit for this. He and every other Republican in Congress voted NO.

What’s amusing about Congressman Cline’s ridiculous call for President Biden to resign immediately due to “mental incapacity” is that Cline has never acknowledged Donald Trump’s long history of unhinged rants and nonsensical babbling such as this:

Fact check: The US-Mexican border is NOT the most dangerous in the world. Kamala Harris’s “pole” numbers are about even with Trump’s. “DONALD J. TRUMP” is not a fine and brilliant young man. He’s old and unstable and dangerous.

Congressman Cline’s concern about preventing peanut allergies in children who depend on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) would be more credible if he hadn’t voted last October to shut down the federal government and cut off funding to WIC and the millions who need it– including four of 10 infants in the US.

The shutdown vote failed.

As Steve Bannon begins serving a four-month prison sentence for defying a Congressional subpoena, it’s worth recalling Congressman Cline’s two appearances last year on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.

As I wrote after his first appearance, Bannon brought up Cline’s role on the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Cline’s friend Jim Jordan, who is purporting to investigate the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the Department of Justice and the intelligence agencies.

Cline explained: “When the DoJ and when our intelligence agencies don’t respond, that’s when they bring me in. I’m the chair of this little rump subcommittee called ‘Responsiveness and Accountability Oversight.’ And so they want me to haul these people up to the Hill, read them the riot act and try and convince them that cooperating with the Judiciary Committee is better than the alternative, which is being held in contempt… [Jordan] needs a bulldog at the subcommittee level to make their lives hell, quite frankly. And so he’s tasked me with that responsibility.”

I noted the irony that Bannon himself had been convicted and sentenced in 2022 for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House of Representatives committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Apparently this wasn’t humiliating enough for Cline, so he appeared on Bannon’s podcast a second time.

(Bannon, former chief strategist for then-President Trump, was indicted in 2020 for collecting donations to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall and using some of the money to enrich himself. Trump pardoned him on his last day in office.)

On Monday, after Bannon ran out of appeals, he entered the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.

Not so strangely, Cline hasn’t said a word about this.

Donald Trump (at left, with purple highlights) was so eager to take credit for his endorsed candidates winning in Tuesday’s primaries that he bragged about some who didn’t even win– like Congressman Cline, who wasn’t on the ballot on Tuesday because he was the only candidate to file for the Republican nomination in the Sixth District.

Congressman Cline joined the overwhelming majority of House Republicans to vote to reinstall a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.

The vote Thursday was on an amendment to the annual defense policy bill that’s seen as a must-pass piece of legislation. It would have required the secretary of the Army to reinstall the memorial in its original location in the nation’s most celebrated military veteran graveyard and not designate it as anything other than a “reconciliation” memorial or monument.

The amendment, though, failed to get a majority, as Democrats voted unanimously against it and were joined by 24 GOP House members. But 192 Republicans, or about 87% of the party in the House, voted in favor…

A defense policy bill that passed over then-President Donald Trump’s veto in the waning days of his administration required the monument’s removal.

The art piece was unveiled in 1914 and sculpted by a Confederate veteran, Moses Jacob Ezekiel. Made of bronze and resting on a 32-foot granite pedestal, it featured a woman symbolizing the South holding a laurel wreath, a plow handle and a pruning hook, a reference to the biblical promise of a time when swords would be turned into plowshares.

Below her was a frieze of 32 figures, which “depict mythical gods alongside Southern soldiers and civilians,” according to the cemetery’s website. Among those figures are a Confederate soldier handing off his infant to an enslaved African American woman for caretaking and an enslaved man in uniform following his owner into battle.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries asked: “What Confederate tradition are you upholding? Is it slavery? Rape? Kidnap? Jim Crow? Lynching? Racial oppression? Or all of the above? What exactly is the Confederate tradition that extreme [Make America Great Again] Republicans in 2024 are upholding?”

In the debate on the amendment, Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-Va.) said the memorial’s dedication in 1914, well after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and its subject matter show it was not meant to be unifying.

“When this monument was placed, the gentleman said it was for reconciliation, but for who? Not for the Black Americans who saw that monument then, and even today, and see the images of a mammy and a loyal slave following his master into battle. They know what that means,” she said.

Ironically the vote came on Flag Day, which Congressman Cline recognized with a post on his Facebook page.

Among those who served under that banner are the forces who defeated the Confederates that the memorial mythologizes.

Instead of honoring those who seceded from and fought against the union represented by that flag, Cline should pay tribute to some of the true heroes: the people of the Shenandoah Valley who dared to oppose and resist the Confederacy and to stand with the union.

Congressman Cline has announced his candidacy to chair the House Republican Study Committee, “the largest conservative caucus in Congress” that “has provided past chairs with a seat at key meetings with leadership.”

• The chairmanship has served as a springboard into high-profile positions within the House GOP, with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) and former Vice President Mike Pence having served in the role.

• The group has played an influential role in shaping the House GOP’s policy agenda, laying out conservative proposals that have been utilized in Republican messaging and pushed legislation to the right.

Cline currently serves as the RSC’s Budget and Spending Task Force chair. In March the RSC released a report (which Cline happily introduced) that included plans to:

• Slash Social Security and Medicare benefits for future retirees.

• Ban universal free school meals.

• Shred the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, which funds local law enforcement and community safety.

• Enact the Life at Conception Act, which would ban abortion at any stage of pregnancy after conception for any reason and make in vitro fertilization impossible.

Of course Cline can’t become RSC chair, and achieve greater GOP glory, if he is defeated for reelection in November.

On Tuesday, Congressman Cline and 45 other House Republicans voted for an amendment sponsored by his bizarre and chronically deranged colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene to slash funding for NATO.

“My amendment strikes funding for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO Security Investment Program. My amendment would strike over $433 million in NATO funding from the bill. America should not be doling out hundreds of millions of dollars to international organizations to help them fight their enemies, especially when they are unwilling to fight for themselves,” Greene began, echoing rhetoric from former President Donald Trump.

Greene concluded her remarks, saying, “But yet, America is beyond our pledge. We are spending in 2023, 3.5% of our GDP. But yet we don’t do anything to defend our own country and our own borders. This is why Americans would love to see Congress take action, action to defund NATO, and stop spending hundreds of millions of their hard earned money to foreign countries to defend these foreign countries, while we don’t defend our own country and our own people.”

 Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz responded: “I think the sponsor of the amendment has shown pretty clear evidence that she has no idea what the NATO Security Investment Program is actually funding.”

“So that we can make sure that we invest properly in infrastructure for a vast array of training facilities, of national security facilities, of hangars that contain our airplanes, military aircraft that cost billions of dollars. So everything about what the amendment does actually makes our own service members who are fighting overseas to defend our national security interests and to defend our country less safe…

“Madam chair, we have a responsibility to make sure that the infrastructure that we fund is in pristine, well-kept, well-kept condition. And what the sponsor of the amendments would do is decimate our ability to do that. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic. And we should not not support this amendment, and members should vote against it.”

Voting to make American service members less safe is, as Wasserman Schultz said, irresponsible and unpatriotic. Yet that’s exactly what Ben Cline did.

The amendment was defeated by a vote of 354 to 46.

Since his election to Congress, Cline has had a history of voting against NATO, an alliance which protects the US as well as other member nations and which is needed now as much as it was during the Cold War to stand up to Russian aggression in Ukraine and threats to other countries.

Someone should ask him why he detests the alliance so much.

The June Rockbridge Advocate reports:

The estimate for repairs to the Glen Maury Park swimming pool came in at $650,000. The money for the repairs will come from the city’s federal American Recovery Act funds. (Congressman Ben Cline voted against the measure.) The Health Department said without the repairs, the city would have to close the pool.