From a constituent. Watch.

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:

Roll Call reports:

Attorney General Pamela Bondi during her Senate confirmation bid pitched herself as a leader with a track record of supporting victims, a history some Republican senators pointed to when backing her nomination.

But after her first months in the role, victim service organizations and their supporters say there’s fear and deep uncertainty about the future of Justice Department funding, something they describe as a mainstay in the nation’s response to helping victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking.

The Justice Department wiped from its website a grant opportunity used to assist victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault, only to repost the notice months later. It raised the potential of “consolidating grantmaking work” in certain areas, including the Office on Violence Against Women. And it terminated a swath of grant money directed toward organizations focused on helping crime victims, a decision five groups filed a lawsuit to reverse.

…..

The grant terminations have spurred an uproar from congressional Democrats, while Republicans have largely avoided criticizing the department’s move to terminate the grants.

…..

Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va., who also sits on the subcommittee, said there should be a pullback in government spending.

“We have to prioritize what gets funded and what doesn’t. And at DOJ, law enforcement is our top priority, and Bondi is doing a good job of prioritizing safety and security,” Cline said.

But four years ago Cline posted on Facebook:

So add assistance to victims of rape and domestic violence to the list of programs that Cline is willing to cut in order to provide people earning more than half-a-million dollars a year with $1.1 trillion in tax cuts.

In a Facebook post this morning, Congressman Cline tried to justify his support for Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which passed the House of Representatives by one vote, with all Democrats voting NO.

Cline does his best to obfuscate the simple fact that the bill pays for a $1.1 trillion tax cut for the top one percent of earners by cutting Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act by more than $800 billion and SNAP by $300 billion. (Cline’s claim that the bill will “strengthen Medicaid” is a bad joke.)

In other words, the bill would make millions of people sicker and hungrier to help the rich buy more private planes and yachts.

And even with that, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill with increase the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion over the next decade.

Cline likes to denounce “deficit loving D.C. Democrats.” What (if anything) will he say now?

The Washington Post reports:

Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains area is largely rural and conservative, with Donald Trump carrying all but two counties that checker the central and western part of the state in the 2024 election.

It is also a place where it has become increasingly difficult for people to find enough to eat.

Every free meal counts there, said Michael McKee, the CEO of Blue Ridge Area Food Bank, which is the main provider of food assistance to 25 counties in the region. But after the U.S. Department of Agriculture paused $500 million in funding for programs related to food in March, Blue Ridge and other food banks have been struggling to meet the growing needs of their communities.

“We’ve never before faced a situation like we are in now, where need is well beyond any disaster or financial crisis that we’ve seen, and the government’s response is to take food away,” McKee said. “This isn’t about ideology. It’s about math.”

…..

McKee said Blue Ridge received no warning from USDA that the food it was expecting was no longer coming. Blue Ridge staff members found out by logging into the government portal and seeing that the 300,000 meals they had ordered had been canceled.

…..

For Blue Ridge, any amount of government assistance to fight hunger is critical as the rural Virginia nonprofit continues to meet a demand that has grown since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The end of pandemic-era federal assistance, followed by high inflation and low wages, has only made hunger a more pressing reality for more people.

“At the peak of the pandemic in May 2020, we were serving up to 172,000 people each month. We thought it could never get that bad again,” McKee said. “But in the last six months of 2024, we averaged 172,000 people each month.” In March this year, Blue Ridge saw 181,183 visits. In April, the food bank saw 176,844 visits.

The Blue Ridge Area Food Bank serves a large part of Congressman Cline’s Sixth District, including the counties of Augusta, Bath, Clarke, Frederick, Highland, Page, Rockingham, Rockbridge, Shenandoah and Warren, as well as the cities of Buena Vista, Harrisonburg, Lexington, Staunton, Waynesboro and Winchester.

Last month The Augusta Free Press reported:

Not surprisingly, the USDA is not commenting publicly on the cancellation of previously-approved funding through The Emergency Food Assistance Program, which comes on top of the decision handed down from the Trump/Musk DOGE to cancel two Biden-era programs – the Local Foods for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program – that provided more than $1 billion nationally for schools and food banks to purchase food from local farmers.

Perhaps Congressman Cline can ask his friend Elon about this.

Maybe the congressman can find out why the world’s richest man cut off food to so many of his least wealthy constituents.

But don’t count on it.

In April, both of Virginia’s Democratic senators, all Democratic House members and three out of five Republican House members signed a letter to the Secretary of Agriculture requesting answers about the cutoff and asking if there were alternative plans to provide aid to food banks.

The two non-signers were John McGuire of District Five and (yes) Ben Cline of District Six.

Congressman Cline posted this on his Facebook page:

Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan, whose 4th District constituents are fortunate to be represented by her, wrote:

As a state senator, I helped lead the effort to expand Medicaid and close that gap in Virginia, and today, more than 605,000 Virginians are covered by that expansion. They can get primary care and live their lives without the fear that an accident or emergency will leave them penniless. [As a member of the House of Delegates, Cline was a leading opponent of Medicaid expansion in Virginia.]

Now that fear and uncertainty has returned for many. Under Republicans’ plan [the One Big Beautiful Bill], Medicaid coverage is on the chopping block along with burdensome red-tape requirements and cost sharing that will make it harder for the Medicaid expansion population to keep their insurance.

In other words, the more than 170,000 of Cline’s constituents who depend on Medicaid (including more than 60,000 covered by the expansion that Cline tried to block) have ample reason to worry about how this bill will affect their ability to receive needed medical care.

Congressman Cline: That’s nothing to smile about.