Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin

Trump will leave office with a Boeing 747, courtesy of Qatar, upgraded courtesy of you. A foreign government gave the President a $400 million jet. American taxpayers spent millions more making it one of the most sophisticated aircraft on the planet. But when Trump leaves office, the plane doesn’t stay with the government. It goes with him. The Constitution is clear: a president cannot accept a gift from a foreign government without the consent of Congress. We never consented to this.

Trump Jr. bought into a startup. The White House then personally intervened to hand that startup $620 million from the Pentagon, and the company’s valuation jumped from $200 million to $2 billion. You tell me if that sounds suspicious. Today, I introduced an amendment demanding an independent investigation into how this company won this deal without seemingly any competition and with potential conflicts of interest. The American people deserve a straight answer. I’m doing everything possible to make sure we get one.

The White House just sent Congress an $87.6 billion supplemental request, most of it for the Pentagon, and as an appropriator, I have serious problems with it. Start with the obvious question. The administration already asked for a record defense budget for next year, the largest single-year request since World War II, a huge jump over current levels. The Pentagon is also sitting on more than $100 billion in unspent funds from last year’s reconciliation bill. So no, another $67 billion is not necessary. Pete Hegseth does not have a money problem. He has a problem accounting for what Congress already funded. Then there’s $11 billion for farmers. While I’m all for our farmers, this is just taxpayers bailing out the damage from this administration’s own tariffs. Trump started a trade war, China stopped buying our soybeans, prices crashed, and now the same families paying more at the checkout are being asked to cover the cost of a self-inflicted wound. End the bad policy, and you would not need the bailout. Out of this massive request, there is NO FUNDING to support LA wildfire recovery. We have been asking this Administration for a year and a half to help our communities, and they have yet again failed us. We have a regular appropriations process for a reason. If these priorities are worth funding, make the case through regular order.

Update on the $14.7 million Reflecting Pool renovation: it turned green, the paint is peeling, a 67-year-old Olympic canoeist has been arrested, and the whole thing needs to be drained and redone. Seems like Trump’s really cracking down on waste, fraud, and abuse these days. washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/…

Four years ago today, the Supreme Court took a right away from half of this country. Not a privilege. Not a benefit. A right. One that had been settled law for nearly 50 years. The Court didn’t find a constitutional problem with abortion access. It decided the people who wrote the Constitution didn’t mention it. Since that decision, women have been forced to travel hundreds of miles to receive care their doctors recommended. Women have died because hospitals were afraid to treat them. Doctors have faced criminal prosecution for practicing medicine. Every woman deserves the right to make her own healthcare decisions, with her doctor, without a politician in the room. I believed that four years ago, and I still believe it today. I will keep fighting until it is once again the law of the land.

Congress just passed a once-in-a-generation bipartisan housing bill that would bring down costs for families across this country, and now Donald Trump is refusing to sign it. He is holding housing relief hostage to try to force Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a bill that has nothing to do with helping American families and everything to do with preventing people from voting and keeping him and his allies in power. Families struggling to afford a home deserve better than a president who walks away from the one bill that would actually help them.

Housing costs are crushing families across California. Rents keep climbing, starter homes keep vanishing, and a whole generation is starting to wonder if owning a home is just something their parents got to do. Last night, I was proud to vote for the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. It is the most significant federal housing bill in more than thirty years, and it passed with strong support from both parties. In a Congress that agrees on almost nothing, that alone is worth noticing. One of the most important provisions takes on Wall Street directly. It bars the biggest institutional investors, the firms sitting on 350 or more single-family homes, from buying up even more of them. For years these giants have outbid young families with all-cash offers and turned neighborhood starter homes into rental portfolios. This bill says enough. And that is just one piece. Here is how it helps get more homes built. It trims the federal regulations that add to the cost of a new home. It streamlines federal and local housing processes that can stall a project for years, and gives local governments room to speed up approvals instead of drowning builders in paperwork. It rewards communities that actually build with new grants and pilot programs. It makes it easier to turn empty offices and vacant buildings into homes. It modernizes the rules for manufactured housing, one of the most affordable options families have. And it includes legislation I championed to permanently ensure that veterans' disability benefits don't disqualify them for housing assistance. This bill will not fix everything. So much of the work on supply and zoning still runs through Sacramento and city hall, and prices here are still far too high. But it is a real, positive step, built by people who chose to work across the aisle instead of past each other. That is how this job is supposed to work. I will keep fighting to bring down costs and open the door to homeownership for families across our district.

When a reporter asked Trump whether he was worried about rising prices, here’s what he said: “No, I love it. You know what I really love? I love the inflation.” That’s the President of the United States, talking about your grocery bill and your energy costs. He has no plan to fix it. I do. My Energy Bills Relief Act expands access to affordable power, modernizes our aging electric grid, and makes Big Tech pay for its own electricity instead of pushing those costs onto you.

You can watch Trump say “taxpayer-free” as many times as you want. The documents say otherwise: you’re paying over $300 million for a ballroom you’ll never set foot in. Telling a lie over and over again doesn’t make it true.

Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_

a week ago

Here’s a compilation of Donald Trump repeatedly lying about the ballroom not costing US taxpayers any money after it was revealed today that the cost had ballooned to $600M with taxpayers covering $300M of that

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$2.5 BILLION. That’s how much the Trump Administration has now spent paying companies to cancel offshore wind projects that would have lowered your electric bill. Yes, you heard that right, they are PAYING to keep your energy bills high. The latest deal hands a company $765 million to walk away, with the money going straight into new gas plants instead. Last time he pulled this scam, he paid one company nearly $1 billion to invest in gas projects, and it turned out the company was already planning to make those investments anyway. Trump got nothing for you in return. This isn’t energy policy. It’s a very expensive grudge, and you’re the one footing the bill. nytimes.com/2026/06/17/cli…

BREAKING: The Senate has joined the House in directing Trump to end his unauthorized war in Iran or seek congressional authorization to continue it. The President does not have the power to wage war alone, and it's long past time my Republican colleagues stood up and said so. nytimes.com/2026/06/23/us/…

For 26 years, Oceanside has been asking the federal government for one thing: a real plan to bring back the sand our coastline keeps losing. This month, we finally have it. When I got to Congress, the study meant to fix this was dead. I passed a provision into federal law requiring the Army Corps to finish it and secured more than $4 million to make sure they had the resources to do the work. That investment paid off. The Army Corps has delivered its draft plan, and it’s the right one. But the plan is still a draft, and the public comment period closes June 30th. Every resident who cares about this coastline has an opportunity right now to tell the Army Corps you want this done. We have the plan. Now we have to make them build it, and I will not let up until we do. open.substack.com/pub/repmikelev…

Every veteran in this country was promised that if you serve, you earn your retirement. And if you’re injured serving, you earn your disability. But that’s not the reality today. Veterans medically retired for combat injuries before serving 20 years are forced to forfeit part of their earned military retirement pay just to receive their VA disability compensation. Two separate promises, and we’re keeping only one. The Major Richard Star Act ends that offset and pays both in full. This isn’t a partisan bill. It has 334 cosponsors in the House and 79 in the Senate. I recently signed a discharge petition to force a floor vote and finally get it done. Now Mike Johnson and House Republicans have taken a bill that should unite us and ruined it. Their “Take Care of America’s Veterans” package, which includes the Star Act, pays for it by cutting future benefits for other veterans. It’s a change the Disabled American Veterans estimates would cost 1.5 million veterans roughly $57 billion over the next decade. Robbing one wounded warrior to pay another is a lousy deal. Bring the clean bill to the floor. Keep the promises we made to our veterans. militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-…

Ross Ulbricht built one of the largest anonymous drug marketplaces in internet history, where people bought fentanyl, heroin, and cocaine. People died using drugs purchased through it, and federal prosecutors called it the most sophisticated criminal marketplace the internet had ever seen. He was serving two life sentences for it. On day two of his presidency, Trump pardoned him. Then he went online and called the prosecutors who put him there scum. Welcome to Episode 8 of the Pardon Powers. The presidential pardon was designed as a last resort, a tool of mercy for when the justice system genuinely gets something wrong. It was never meant for this. That’s why I'm pushing for a constitutional amendment to put real limits on this power, for this president and everyone that follows.

What do YOU call it when a mob arms themselves with weapons, breaks into our nation’s Capitol, forces hundreds of people into hiding, attempts to hang people in gallows, injures nearly 140 officers, and leads to the deaths of five more, all to overturn a free and fair election? I call that an attack. On the American people. On democracy. On the truth. On America itself. A nominee to be the Justice Department’s Inspector General couldn’t call it that. He called it “protest activity.” The job of an Inspector General is to tell the truth, especially when it’s inconvenient. This man couldn’t do that about something we all watched happen, either on television or in person. Our job is to do absolutely everything in our power to ensure this can never happen again. Refusing to even admit what it was is its own kind of betrayal of everything this country stands for.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

a week ago

BLUMENTHAL: Was the Capitol attacked on January 6? BERTHIAUME: Uh. We had activity outside the Capitol, protests and such BLUMENTHAL: Was the Capitol attacked? You're supposed to be the inspector general BERTHIAUME: There was protest activity

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Disabled students in this country are about to get bounced between three different federal agencies just to get the education they’re legally entitled to. The Trump Administration just moved special education services to RFK Jr.’s Health Department and civil rights enforcement in schools to the Justice Department, without a single vote in Congress. Disability rights advocates are warning that families who once could call one agency for help may now have to file a lawsuit just to get their child the support they need. These are kids with disabilities who are simply trying to get the education the law promises them. They deserve a government that makes that easier, not harder. nytimes.com/2026/06/16/us/…

Remember when Trump said that he would cut your electricity bills in half?    Instead, power prices are rising at roughly twice the rate of inflation, data centers have strained power grids across the country, and you’ve paid the price for all of it.    It’s not enough to oppose the chaos and nonsense of this Administration. We must stand FOR something.     We need a real fix, and that’s exactly what my Energy Bills Relief Act delivers: clean energy deployment to bring your electricity bills down, restored tax credits for clean energy and EVs, a requirement that massive tech companies pay their own way instead of passing data center costs onto you, and flipped incentives to reward energy companies for saving you money.     It’s common sense, and Congress needs to make it the law of the land.