Tracking Virginia's Sixth District Congressman
Can we get some of our Harrisonburg readers to attend this event?
According to Congressman Cline: “I look forward to seeing you there and answering your questions!” There’s no shortage of questions. Make sure to record his answers.
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1087223878889?aff=oddtdtcreator
Axios reports:
Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas) was elected to serve as the next chairman of the Republican Study Committee on Friday, edging out Rep. Ben Cline (R-Va.) in an 80-57 vote.
Why it matters: The position has served as a springboard to bigger roles for numerous House Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), former Vice President Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and Sen.-elect Jim Banks (R-Ind.).
May this be a precedent for the 2026 election in the Sixth District of Virginia.
I’m pleased Congressman Cline got some attention for this:
Incoming Department of Government Efficiency head and world’s richest man Elon Musk has proposed cutting $2 trillion in government spending—more than Congress’s entire discretionary budget. But some of Donald Trump’s key allies don’t see anything wrong with that picture.
In an interview with Fox Business on Friday, Virginia Representative Ben Cline claimed that it “absolutely is” possible to slash that much cash from the budget.
“We can do it, and make sure that we focus funding toward the American people and not toward bureaucracy in Washington,” Cline said.
Just a reminder: Congress’s discretionary budget funds practically the entire executive branch, doling out funding for the military, national security, and federal agencies.
The key to this impossible feat, Cline suggests, is to cut “bureaucracy.”
“Give me one idea in terms of what’s significant that you think, ‘That’s got to go right away?’” asked Fox’s Maria Bartiromo. [Yes, her again.]
“Well let’s just look at the Department of Education and how billions of dollars stay in Washington, funding bureaucrats whose simple goal is to interfere in the decisions about educational choice at local and state levels,” Cline responded.
But that’s not an accurate picture of the DOE. The federal government provides 13.6 percent of funding for public K-12 education across the nation. In Virginia specifically, it spends $2,020 per pupil per year, providing approximately 12 percent of the state’s education funding, according to the Education Data Initiative.
How much of this is Cline prepared to cut from schools in the Sixth District? Or does he really believe that the bulk of federal spending on education goes to out-of-touch Washington bureaucrats?
This is one of many topics about which Cline needs to be asked, but somehow never is asked.
Earlier this month Congressman Cline posted glowingly on Instagram about the new Melrose Plaza in Roanoke, scheduled to open soon.
It will include a grocery run by Goodwill Industries of the Valleys.
The Roanoke Times reported:
The project will cost $30 million. The city has set aside $10 million in federal pandemic relief money to make Melrose Plaza happen and Goodwill has pledged $8 million in in-kind contributions.
The $10 million in federal pandemic relief was provided through the American Rescue Plan Act. What Cline unsurprisingly didn’t mention is that when ARPA was up for a vote in Congress, he and every other Republican member voted NO.
In other words, if the vote on ARPA has gone Cline’s way, Melrose Plaza likely would never have happened.
(Hat tip: Abby Schweber)
Allison Gil became pregnant as a result of a violent rape while serving in the US military. She was able to get an abortion in Florida. But since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, the Biden administration has adopted a policy enabling servicewomen who are stationed in states that outlaw or severely restrict abortion to travel to other states that allow the procedure.
Congressman Cline is one of Donald Trump’s “Republican lapdogs in Congress” to which Ms. Gil refers.
Last year Cline endangered national security by joining an effort to overturn the Biden administration rule– and prevent servicewomen from obtaining abortion care even under the most horrible circumstances.
Read about it here.
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.
Cline Watch 