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. 

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“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.

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

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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.”

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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.

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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.

Another reminder why Congressman Cline dreads holding in-person town halls open to all his constituents.

An account of a meeting with Cline by Rodney Grandon in The Winchester Star.

My spouse, daughter-in-law, and I recently met with Congressman Ben Cline at his Winchester office. We appreciate the opportunity to share our concerns with Cline, and to hear directly from the congressman.

We were left, however, with the solid impression that as a “conservative in a conservative district” (paraphrasing Cline) he is indifferent to the current chaos unleashed by the Trump administration and to the adverse impact Republican budget plans will have on the 6th Congressional District.

Given limited time with Congressman Cline, we focused on three issues: (1) the adverse impact of Trump’s executive actions and the current defunding plans floated by the White House and Congressional Republicans; (2) the specific impact of Republican spending plans on vulnerable women and children (proposed cuts to Medicaid being among the most hurtful); and (3) Trump’s attack on the Rule of Law.

Among our takeaways: Mr. Cline supports the terror campaign launched by the Trump administration against the federal workforce. He noted that the speed of the cuts was more important than having a merit-based, strategic focus for resizing the federal workforce. While he seemed willing to offer constituent services to those who have lost or may lose their jobs, he is not going to do anything to protect his constituents from Trump’s whims. The question remains whether Cline will step up when the lack of talent crashes the functioning of critical government services.

Cline remains committed to gutting expanded access to health care through Medicaid, a successful initiative under the Affordable Care Act. His position seems particularly callous, noting a recent report from VPM that “one-third of Virginia’s rural hospitals are operating in the red.” That report further explained that these rural hospitals “serve populations that are older, with higher rates of chronic illness and poverty. Many of their patients have a greater reliance on government-funded health insurance programs like Medicaid and Medicare . . . .” Moreover, he seems uninterested in the health care challenges specific to women and children (e.g., access to maternity care and nutrition programs).

Concerning the Rule of Law, Cline trumpets the Trump line: “activist” judges are inappropriately halting Trump’s assaults on our Constitution. Cline ignores the fact that those judges were appointed by, among others, Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Trump himself. The reality is, as many courts have concluded, Trump’s assault on the personal freedoms of our citizens, law firms, universities, federal agencies, federal contractors and grant recipients, and on non-citizens (to name but a few of his targets), are unconstitutional or otherwise unlawful, frequently lacking any factual or legal foundation for the attack. (For example, using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people in the complete absence of any war or falsely claiming “national emergencies.”)

Trump’s goal is to accumulate executive power at the expense of our nation’s people and institutions. No president, whether Republican or Democrat, should have such unfettered power. If Cline really supports the Rule of Law, he needs to turn his sights on the dangerous excesses of the Trump administration.

As Republicans in Congress move toward slashing Medicaid, I want to focus on Congressman Cline’s attitude toward the program which provides vital health insurance for more than 170,000 of his Sixth District constituents.

Cline has said that cuts to “traditional Medicaid” are off the table.

On Monday I called Cline’s Washington office and asked the following questions:

• What does he mean when he talks about “traditional Medicaid”?

• Does he mean Medicaid before the expansion that made more people eligible under the Affordable Care Act– which he staunchly opposed as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates?

• Does he want to take away Medicaid from the hundreds of thousands of Virginians who have been able to get health insurance for the first time when Medicaid was expanded– including more than 60,000 of his constituents?

The staffer who answered the phone promised to pass on my questions to the congressman. I await his response.

Cline has also joined the Republican demand for “work requirements” for “able-bodied” adult Medicaid recipients.

In fact, nearly two-thirds of adult Medicaid recipients are working full- or part-time. Others are not working due to caregiving, illness or disability, school attendance or inability to find work. So while there may be a tiny fraction of recipients who can work but don’t want to, the bureaucratic effort involved in trying to track them down would probably cost more than any savings by removing them from the rolls.

As with school meals, Cline– the self-styled opponent of “burdensome regulations”– is pleased to impose them on low-income people who just might be trying to get away with something.

Shortly after Trump’s latest election in November, The New Republic reported:

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.

Whether Cline believed Musk could accomplish this obviously impossible feat, or if he was just sucking up to Trump and his people as usual, we may never know.

But six months later, we have a clearer idea of the alleged savings that DOGE accomplished.

That is to say, DOGE savings will amount to less than 8 percent of the original $2 trillion target at most— the target that Cline said was “absolutely” possible. Perhaps Cline was overly dazzled by what he considers Musk’s superior brain.

Meanwhile the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service estimates that DOGE’s actions will actually cost taxpayers $135 billion this fiscal year.

PSP’s estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE’s actions, from paid leave to productivity hits. The $135 billion cost to taxpayers doesn’t include the expense of defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE’s actions, nor the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS. 

So it’s entirely possible that DOGE will end up costing us more than it saves— not just in cuts to public services on which millions of Americans depend, but in actual dollars.

And then what will Cline have to say? That is, if we can find him to ask.