In his latest report to constituents, Congressman Cline wrote that he is co-sponsoring a number of bills.

One of these bills, the Death Tax Repeal Act, is a bill which would benefit farmers and ranchers across the Sixth Congressional District. The men and women who raise our cattle, plant our crops, and feed America know how harmful the death tax has been to families in the agriculture industry. A repeal of this tax allows our working farm families to maintain their small businesses across generations.

“Death tax” is what Republicans like Cline call the federal estate tax. It’s an invented phrase designed to make it sound especially awful. But according to the Tax Policy Center:

[O]nly about 80 small farms and closely held businesses—estates with farm and business assets totaling no more than $5 million and making up at least half of the gross estate—paid any estate tax in 2017. Small farms and businesses will not be subject to the estate tax in 2018 because of the $11.2 million effective exemption under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The higher exemption amount expires after 2025.

The chances that this tax would affect any family farmers, ranchers or small business owners in the Sixth Congressional District of Virginia are next to nil.

Congressman Cline should devote his legislative efforts to issues of more direct concern to the people he represents.

Congressman Cline on Thursday joined most Republicans in the House of Representatives to vote against an expanded version of the Violence Against Women Act.

The legislation passed easily, 263 to 158, but the divided vote came on what was once a broadly bipartisan measure first passed in 1994. In recent years, partisan rancor over efforts to expand the protections of the legislation have clouded efforts to renew it, and this year, the divide was over gun control.

The provisions would close the so-called boyfriend loophole and bar those under a restraining order or who were convicted of abusing, assaulting or stalking a domestic partner from buying guns. The [National Rifle Association] seized on the new measures and warned Congress that it would track and publish how lawmakers voted, hoping to intimidate Republicans and Democrats in Republican-leaning districts.

[The boyfriend loophole means stalkers and current or former boyfriends or dating partners can still buy and own a gun, even if they’ve been convicted of a domestic violence crime.]

“Do not let the N.R.A. bully you,” Representative Debbie Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, urged her colleagues before the vote, noting that her recently deceased husband, former Representative John Dingell Jr., also a Democrat, was a member of the organization.
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Republicans had advocated a clean one-year extension of the current law, which expired in February, arguing that new elements of the legislation were controversial and overreached — in particular, the gun restrictions and language offering additional protections to transgender people.

Cline issued a statement trying to explain his vote against the measure:

H.R. 1585 preconditions grant funding on policies that revictimize women and would curtail the vital tools used by prosecutors and law enforcement to protect victims from harm. It rolls back existing trafficking protections under a grant program intended to help child victims, and it fails to provide religious hiring exemptions for faith-based grant recipients.

These are just a few of the reasons I cannot support this bill, which includes provisions which could actually undermine women’s safety.

Cline provided no evidence to support these claims. I have contacted him asking for the evidence, and will post any response I get.

Cline, who dutifully supports the NRA’s position on every issue, has in turn been generously supported by the the NRA as a candidate for House of Delegates and for Congress.

 

On Wednesday Congressman Cline joined almost all Republicans in the House of Representatives to oppose a resolution calling on the Trump administration to halt its legal attempt to overturn the entire Affordable Care Act.

If successful, the administration’s effort would nullify provisions of the law that protect people with preexisting conditions and allow individuals to remain on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26.

In an interview last week with CBS News, Cline made the dubious claim that “this administration has made health care a priority,” drawing a skeptical reaction from news anchor Anne-Marie Green.

He talked vaguely about “providing more options and more affordability to consumers.”

In fact the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans haven’t come up with a new plan to replace the ACA and won’t even try until after the November 2020 elections– when, Trump believes, he will be reelected and the Republicans will have majorities in both houses of Congress.

Some “priority,” Congressman.

Cline added: “Health care is a priority in my district. It’s rural, the average age is higher. So folks do need health care in my district.” And yet as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, Cline was a leading opponent of the legislation that expanded Medicaid under the ACA, making it possible for hundreds of thousands of low-income working Virginians to obtain health insurance.

 

Although Congressman Cline (like the rest of us) hasn’t seen more than a few sentences from the nearly 400-page Mueller Report, he seems to know what is and isn’t in it.

Interviewed by CBS News, Cline said, “This was very, very disturbing that so much was investigated, that so much was spent and, you know, they didn’t find a thing.”

(If they didn’t find a thing, it will be especially interesting to see what’s on those 400 pages.)

Nevertheless, Cline joined a unanimous vote by the House of Representatives that “calls for the public release of any report Special Counsel Mueller provides to the attorney general, except to the extent the public disclosure of any portion thereof is expressly prohibited by law.”

On Wednesday Cline joined his fellow Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee to unsuccessfully oppose a subpoena for the full report and the underlying documents.

Committee chair Jerrold Nadler stressed that “some material will have to be redacted before it is released to the public,” but “the committee is entitled and must see all of the material,” as happened in previous special investigations.

Meanwhile The New York Times reports:

Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.

 

After Attorney General William Barr released what he claimed were the “principal conclusions” of the Mueller Report, Congressman Cline was quick to suggest that President Trump was in the clear.

Cline says “all Americans should be pleased with the Mueller Report’s conclusions.” But neither he nor anyone else outside of a handful of people knows what those conclusions are in their entirety.

Cline has said the full report should be released. I hope he stands by that position and that he and the rest of us soon get to see the entire document of more than 300 pages. That means we have yet to see approximately 99.99 percent of the report. Perhaps Cline should reserve judgment– both on its conclusions and on whether it was a waste of money– until we do.

From a report in The Northern Virginia Daily about Congressman Cline’s recent town hall meeting in Front Royal.

Cline was also asked if there is any scenario that he would not support President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. He responded that he swore an oath to support the Constitution and he was not elected to “follow any one person.” He added that Trump is “definitely stirring things up in Washington,” has “challenged the status quo” and asked questions on how the federal government became “broken.”

Cline added that he was elected to represent the 6th District as a whole and he is doing his best to that “each and every day.”

“I will continue to do that with your input. If you disagree with something the president is doing, tell me…I don’t agree with anyone 100 percent of the time,” he said.

If you live in the Sixth District and want to tell Congressman Cline that you disagree with something the president is doing, you can contact him via his website or by phone at (202) 225-5431.

 

Now can you find the political courage to say something about this?

Or this (in the wake of Charleston, Charlottesville, Pittsburgh and more)?

If not, your pious words mean nothing.

In his final days in Congress, Bob Goodlatte distinguished himself– but not in a good way.

As chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Goodlatte single-handedly blocked Congressional approval of Savanna’s Act, a bill to protect Native American women from violence. The bill had been passed in the Senate by unanimous consent.

Now it seems Ben Cline, Goodlatte’s successor as representative for Virginia’s Sixth Congressional District, has decided to follow Goodlatte’s shamefully insensitive example when it comes to the violence that Native American women suffer.

House Republicans on Wednesday quietly tried to repeal a major provision in the Violence Against Women Act that helps tribes respond to horrific levels of violence directed at Native American women by non-Native men on tribal lands.

During a House Judiciary Committee markup on the 2019 bill to reauthorize the law, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) offered an amendment to repeal provisions in the 2013 law that give tribes jurisdiction over non-Native people who commit crimes of domestic violence, dating violence or who violate a protection order against a victim on tribal land.

He claimed that non-Native domestic abusers’ constitutional rights might not be upheld if they harm a Native woman on tribal land and have to go before a tribal court. His amendment would have also stripped out new language in the 2019 bill to expand tribes’ jurisdiction over non-Native abusers who commit crimes of sex trafficking, stalking and violence against law enforcement officers on tribal land.

Tribes fought hard to add this provision to the Violence Against Women Act ― they nearly lost ― because, prior to 2013, jurisdiction over non-Native abusers on tribal land fell to federal or state law enforcement, who are often hours away from reservations and lack the resources to respond. That meant non-Native abusers on tribal lands were essentially immune from punishment and could keep being violent. Thanks to the provision, tribal law enforcement now has the ability to intervene.

Native women on reservations experience violence at appallingly high rates. More than 84 percent of indigenous women experience violence in their lifetime, and the vast majority of Native victims of violence ― 96 percent of women and 89 percent of men ― report being victimized by a non-Native person. Native women are also mysteriously going missing and being murdered.

The Judiciary Committee defeated Sensenbrenner’s amendment along party lines; among the nine Republicans voting for it was Congressman Cline.

Richard Sneed, principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, said he’s happy to talk to any lawmakers about why the tribal provision in the Violence Against Women Act is vital.

“We are very concerned that members of the House Judiciary Committee tried to take away our sovereign right to prosecute domestic and dating violence perpetrators in the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act,” Sneed said in a statement. “Leaders from Tribes have fought for years to protect our Native women and children through strengthening our Tribal courts. VAWA was an integral component of exercising our tribal sovereignty to protect the most vulnerable amongst us.”

Perhaps Cline should have a word with Mr. Sneed. He might learn something.

Congressman Cline joined all but a few principled Republicans to oppose a resolution nullifying President Trump’s declaration of a “national emergency” on the southern border.

Nevertheless a majority of the House of Representatives approved the resolution and sent it to the Senate.

After Congress refused to appropriate all the money Trump wanted for a border wall, the president declared the emergency in an effort divert other funds for the project without Congressional approval.

Cline told Roanoke Times columnist Dan Casey of his plans last week:

“I support [Trump’s] declaration of an emergency,” he said. “My reading of the statute is that [Trump] has a very limited authority to redirect the money to construction projects [provided] those projects are a military activity.”

As Senator Tim Kaine noted in a letter to Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, Trump wants to use his emergency declaration to reallocate $3.5 billion from the military construction budget already approved by Congress. Kaine asked from which projects the Department of Defense plans to divert funds. There has been no answer to Kaine’s question.

And when Trump said “I didn’t need to do this,” he admitted it was not an emergency.

When he was running for Congress in 2018, Cline declared:

I am sick and tired of our elected officials and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. trampling all over our Constitution and the Republic it set forth.

There is a reason I actually carry around a Constitution wherever I go.
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Going forward, Congress must reestablish the supremacy of the Constitution and protect our Constitutional rights. The status quo, perpetuated by the special interests and swamp monsters that have invaded Washington, must be upended.

We must elect a Congressman who will fight to ensure neither the Judicial nor Executive branches take over powers from the Legislative branch…

Cline might want to pull that Constitution out of his pocket and look up Article I, Section 9.

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law”

Before the House vote, conservative columnist George Will wrote:

Every Republican who supports the president in this trashing of the Constitution… thereby violates his or her sworn oath to defend it and to “bear true faith and allegiance” to it. Voters should expel all of them from public life.

Congressman Cline: What is your breaking point? What will it take for you to put the interests of your constituents and the nation ahead of the interests of your party and the president?

Congressman Cline’s accusation that the “progressive left” embraces “infanticide” is as ridiculous as President Trump’s claim that the “Democrat position on abortion is now so extreme that they don’t mind executing babies AFTER birth….”

But this is not just harmless political grandstanding; it’s dangerous. Events in recent decades have taught us that inflammatory language about “baby killing” can move some people to act in criminal and even murderous ways.

Cline and Trump reacted after Senate Democrats blocked a Republican-backed measure called the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.

Virginia’s Democratic Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine were among the Senators opposing the bill. As Warner posted on Twitter:

And Kaine noted: