This was a vote on H.R. 6201, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act emergency legislation, responding to the coronavirus outbreak by creating a paid sick leave entitlement mandate, providing for free coronavirus testing, expanding food assistance and unemployment welfare benefits, and putting new regulations on employers to provide additional protections for health care workers.

In times of crisis, it may be appropriate for governments to take extraordinary action to protect the people. The purpose of government, as articulated in the U.S. Constitution, is to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Providing for the safety of the American people during this outbreak of the Wuhan coronavirus and taking reasonable steps to avert economic catastrophe is a legitimate role for the government.

However, a crisis is not an excuse to hurriedly enact bad policy, abandoning critical thought about the unintended consequences of government action. But that is precisely what happened here, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told his fellow Republicans to “gag and vote” for this coronavirus response law. The actions called for in this legislation are bad policy that will have the unintended effect of harming small businesses struggling to survive the current pandemic and economic downturn while borrowing billions of dollars from China to pay for what America cannot afford.

The $105 billion worth of paid sick leave provisions enacted into law by this bill is ill-conceived. Private employers with fewer than 500 employees are required to provide up to 14 total weeks of leave, 12 weeks of which must be paid leave for employees who are necessarily absent from work because of the coronavirus, whether they are sick themselves or caring for someone else who is sick. Big businesses with more than 500 employees are exempt. In principle, any response to the coronavirus must be universal, but this policy is a mandate targeted at small businesses, many of whom will be incentivized to lay people off instead of paying for sick leave they cannot afford. The House of Representatives added tax credits for employers intended to defray the costs of this new entitlement, but small business groups opposed these provisions, arguing the mandates “presume liquidity and a tolerance for debt that simply does not exist at this time.” Businesses with fewer than 50 employees may apply for hardship waivers, but this will impose an additional bureaucratic cost on employers already struggling to meet their overhead costs.

The expansion of welfare policies, including billions of dollars of increased spending on food stamps and unemployment benefits, while intended to help those who cannot work during this crisis, may have the adverse effect of encouraging people not to work. Paying people to stay home will incentivize them to do just that, exacerbating the economic slowdown caused by preventive measures taken against the coronavirus instead of encouraging Americans to get back to work once the panic over this pandemic has ended.

Additionally, offsets to these new record levels of government spending offered by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., were rejected by the Senate, ensuring that this bill will be unpaid for and requiring that the United States go further in debt to China, a tyrannical regime whose demonstrated incompetence and dishonesty failed to contain the coronavirus outbreak and caused our present crisis.

Conservatives understand that the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the coronavirus outbreak may require extraordinary measures from the government in response, including policies many conservatives would typically object to. But there is no reason to abandon reason when thinking about which policies will actually help Americans and which will harm us in the long run. This legislation will harm Americans in the long run, and the “gag and vote for it” mentality offered from Senate Republicans is the height of irresponsibility and failed leadership.

The House of Representatives passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act on March 14, 2020 at 12:51 a.m. ET in a roll call vote of 363 – 40.

The Senate passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act on March 18, 2020 at 3:32 p.m. ET in a roll call vote of 90 – 8.

To see how your elected officials stack up or other votes that compose the Liberty Score, view our full scorecard here.

CR position: NO

This was a vote on a 1,773-page “minibus” spending bill to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year. The bill funds the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, the Department of Energy, the Interior Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the State Department, the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Legislative Branch.

This legislation is a cornucopia of government waste and funding for progressive priorities, while President Trump’s campaign promises once again are neglected by Congress.

To summarize:

• The minibus bill spends $555 billion, increasing the deficit by another $390 billion on top of the increases from previous years, placing spending levels well above Trump’s budget proposals in every year.
• While it dramatically increases spending for bureaucracies like the Department of Education, Congress did not increase spending for the most needed function – immigration enforcement. ICE badly needs more detention space and agents for deportations.
• Major policy changes in the bill benefit special interests. The corporate welfare Export-Import Bank, which subsidizes countries like Saudi Arabia to purchase Boeing products, is reauthorized for seven years.
• Congress added new tax extenders for special interests at taxpayer expense.
• Congress repealed the Obamacare tax increases, which might sound like a good thing, but it’s actually going to make Obamacare worse because the bill contains a host of reauthorizations and expansions for all of the subsidy programs under Obamacare and Medicaid expansion. Congress also barred some of the recent regulatory reforms Trump imposed on Obamacare. While the core of Obamacare is codified and expanded, the taxes that paid for Obamacare were repealed. The effect is bigger deficits while the health care industry gets free handouts.
• Additionally, taxpayers are still paying for abortions through Obamacare insurance plans.
• Congress also expanded the federal Medicaid matching funds for U.S. territories by roughly 50 percent, incentivizing our territories to bust their budgets expanding Medicaid with the hope that the federal government will bail them out in the future.
• Congress bafflingly raised the age to purchase tobacco products to 21. While Congress has shown no will to fight back against states violating federal immigration law, it has now seized a state issue and nationalized it. While 18-year-old American soldiers continue to fight and die in Afghanistan in a war that began before they were born, they won’t even have the freedom to choose whether or not to smoke.
• Congress once again extended the broken and insolvent National Flood Insurance Program, which is now nearly $25 billion in debt.
• Congress is requiring the CDC and the National Institutes of Health to spend $25 million each to study gun violence.

This summary only scratches the surface of the bad policies conservatives do not support that are hidden in this bill. Immorally, the minibus was handed to lawmakers just days before they were expected to vote on the bill to avoid a government shutdown. No one read the bill, save for the lobbyists who wrote it. How can lawmakers represent the people’s interests if they have not read and cannot understand what they are voting for? How can the people understand and follow the law when it is too voluminous to read?

This minibus bill spends taxpayer money irresponsibly, funds policies that conservatives cannot support, fails to fund policies conservatives do support, and in execution, it is simply bad government.

The House of Representatives passed the 1,773-page minibus on December 17, 2019, at 2:05 pm ET in a roll call vote of 297 – 120.

The Senate passed the minibus bill on December 19, 2019, at 12:48 pm ET in a roll call vote of 71 – 23.

To see how your elected officials stack up or other votes that compose the Liberty Score, view our full scorecard here.

Conservative position: NO

This House resolution allowed the House to consider and vote on articles of impeachment against President Donald J. Trump. This procedural vote set the terms of debate on the articles of impeachment, divided the impeachment resolution between its two articles, required a vote on each article after debate, and cleared the way for the House to appoint impeachment managers to transfer the articles of impeachment to the U.S. Senate after they were passed by the House. Blocking this resolution would have prevented the House from impeaching the president.

Impeachment of a sitting U.S. president is serious. The charges brought against President Trump in the articles of impeachment allege that the president abused his power by soliciting the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, in the 2020 election and that the president obstructed Congress by defying subpoenas issued by the House impeachment inquiry. These charges do not withstand scrutiny and are far from evidence that President Trump should be removed from office.

Article I of the impeachment resolution accuses the president of corruptly “soliciting the Government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations that would benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States Presidential election to his advantage.” President Trump is accused of pressuring Ukraine into investigating his 2020 rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, by withholding $391 million in foreign aid appropriated by Congress. Additionally the president is accused of asking Ukraine to investigate a “discredited theory promoted by Russia alleging that Ukraine—rather than Russia—interfered in the 2016 United States Presidential election.” Article I concludes by alleging, “President Trump abused the powers of the Presidency by ignoring and injuring national security and other vital national interests to obtain an improper personal political benefit.”

These allegations fail on several counts. 1) President Trump and Ukraine President Zelensky both deny that any pressure was applied on Ukraine to investigate Biden or 2016 election interference, and a record of their phone call shows no evidence of Trump making demands of Ukraine. 2) It is within a president’s powers to add conditions to foreign aid, and past presidents have done so. Regardless, Ukraine was not aware that any aid was delayed or aware of any conditions for its release. 3) The aid was released after 84 days without any of Trump’s alleged demands fulfilled. 4) There are legitimate questions surrounding the Biden family’s relationships with Ukraine and possible corruption on an even larger scale, and it is in the national interest, not President Trump’s personal political interest, to uproot corruption involving public figures and especially potential presidential candidates. It ought to be clear that President Trump did not abuse his power with regard to Ukraine for his own personal interest.

Article II of the impeachment resolution accuses President Trump of obstructing Congress by directing “the unprecedented, categorical, and indiscriminate defiance of subpoenas issued by the House of Representatives pursuant to its ‘sole Power of Impeachment’.” The House makes a separation of powers claim against the president, alleging that he unconstitutionally “assumed to himself functions and judgments necessary to the exercise of the ‘sole Power of Impeachment’ vested by the Constitution in the House of Representatives.” The president allegedly abused his powers by directing the White House and executive branch agencies and offices to defy lawful subpoenas by withholding documents and records and directing executive branch officials to defy subpoenas to appear to testify.

The charge of “obstructing Congress” in Article II is absurd on its face. Our constitutional republic is established on a framework that creates three separate but equal branches of government that are designed to conflict with each other’s powers and interests. President Trump challenged Congress’ subpoena authority by refusing to answer the subpoenas and by taking his case to court. The Supreme Court has decided to hear all three of the president’s subpoena challenges and issue a judgment resolving the dispute. This impeachment charge essentially says that a U.S. president is not permitted to challenge congressional subpoenas in court. In accusing President Trump of assuming legislative power over impeachment, Congress essentially assumes judicial power denying the president’s right to challenge Congress and declaring its own subpoenas to be unquestionable. How can Congress demand the president be removed from office for assuming another branch’s constitutional powers and then do the very same thing itself? That is nonsensical and is certainly not a basis to remove the president from office.

The charges against President Trump in the two articles of impeachment do not withstand fact-based scrutiny or the constitutional requirement of “high crimes or misdemeanors” for impeaching a president and removing him from office. This resolution that brought the articles of impeachment to the House floor should have been rejected by the House so that the matter of impeaching the president under these insufficient and ridiculous charges could be laid to rest and members of Congress could return to the serious business of governing the country.

The House of Representatives voted to approve the resolution and advance the articles of impeachment on December 18, 2019, at 11:55 a.m. ET in a roll call vote of 228 – 197.

To see how your elected officials stack up or other votes that compose the Liberty Score, view our full scorecard here.

CR position: NO

This was a vote on H.R. 5038, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, a bill that would grant amnesty to millions of illegal alien workers in the United States without securing the border or reforming the nation’s immigration system.

This bill creates a new class of immigration titled “Certified Agricultural Worker” (CAW) available to any illegal alien who has worked in agriculture for at least 180 days in the past two years. Once accepted into the program, these illegal aliens can obtain renewable five-year work visas as long as they remain in the agriculture industry. After a two-year period, “Certified Agricultural Worker” aliens will be protected from deportation. Additionally, the bill would suspend active removal proceedings against illegal aliens who are eligible for the program, even those who did not apply for it.

There is a pathway to citizenship in this bill. Illegal aliens who have worked in agriculture in the U.S. for at least 10 years before obtaining CAW status may apply for green cards after working for at least four additional years. Illegal aliens who have lived and worked in the U.S. for fewer than 10 years must work for at least eight years before being eligible for a green card. The Federation for American Immigration Reform has described this program as “an archaic system that resembles indentured servitude.”

Proponents of the legislation argue that there are provisions that strengthen immigration law enforcement. The bill would establish mandatory E-Verify for all agricultural employment, but the program is limited to the agriculture industry and would be implemented over time.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, there are an estimated 2.4 million farmworkers in the U.S, and at least 47 percent of them are illegal aliens, which is likely a low estimate. This bill provides amnesty and a path to citizenship for these illegal workers without needed reforms to the nation’s immigration process or appropriated measures to strengthen border security. Amnesty will attract more foreigners to enter the United States illegally seeking work, undermining the rule of law, empowering violent drug cartels that deal in human trafficking, and worsen the crisis along the southern border. Limited E-Verify implementation is not worth the trade-offs in this bill.

The House of Representatives voted to pass the Farm Workforce Modernization Act on December 6, 2019, at 12:39 p.m. ET in a roll call vote of 228 – 187.

To see how your elected officials stack up or other votes that compose the Liberty Score, view our full scorecard here.

CR position: NO

This vote was to legitimize the impeachment proceedings led by the Democratic House majority against President Donald Trump. The resolution directs the House Intelligence, Financial Services, Foreign Affairs, Judiciary, Oversight and Reform, and Ways and Means committees to “continue their ongoing investigations as part of the existing House of Representatives inquiry into whether sufficient grounds exist” to impeach the president.

House Democrats are pursuing impeachment against Trump alleging that the president abused the powers of his office by withholding congressionally appropriated aid for Ukraine to pressure that country into conducting improper investigations against his political rival Joe Biden to benefit himself. These allegations fail on two counts: 1) It is within a president’s powers to add conditions to foreign aid and past presidents have done so; 2) There are legitimate questions surrounding the Biden family’s relationships with Ukraine and possible corruption on an even larger scale, and it is in the national interest to uproot corruption involving public figures and especially potential presidential candidates.

From the beginning, the impeachment inquiry organized by Democrats has violated the norms of past impeachment proceedings. It has largely been conducted behind closed doors and in an overtly partisan manner, with Democrats wielding unprecedented power to limit the ability of the minority to issue subpoenas to call witnesses. The White House has been shut out of the process, and Trump’s lawyers don’t have access to the closed-door depositions and hearings led by the Democrats. This resolution was offered by Democrats to answer criticisms of this process and correct claims from Republicans that the House violated norms by beginning an impeachment inquiry without a full House vote.

This resolution does not address any of the process concerns. It does not authorize an impeachment investigation, but rather refers to “the existing House of Representatives inquiry” that was never authorized by a House vote. It directs the six aforementioned committees to continue their illegitimate investigations while only authorizing the House Intelligence Committee to conduct open impeachment hearings. It sets parameters for the House Judiciary Committee to proceed with impeachment after receiving findings and recommendations from the Intelligence Committee. The rules permit Intelligence Committee Republicans to subpoena witnesses for testimony, but only after giving 72 hours’ notice to Chairman Schiff, who is permitted to reject the requests. If a request is rejected, the minority has a right to refer the request to the full Democrat-majority committee, which then will vote on the request.

Impeachment of a sitting U.S. president is serious. The American people deserve a transparent, bipartisan, and fair process when the removal of a duly elected president is within the realm of possibility. This impeachment resolution does not give the American people that fair process.

The House of Representatives voted to approve this impeachment resolution on October 31, 2019, at 11:27 a.m. ET in a roll call vote of 232 – 196.

To see how your elected officials stack up or other votes that compose the Liberty Score, view our full scorecard here.

CR position: NO