Welcome, Thom, to the Senate ‘Oops’ Caucus

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) has a book to promote. In it, he revealed this week, he delves into his greatest regret: voting to confirm Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“The president referred to Pete Hegseth as right out of Central Casting — and I agree with that: He’s an actor. He’s not a manager,” Tillis told MS NOW’s Morning Joe.

This confession comes with a hint of déjà vu. An outgoing senator with a brand as a moderate — at least within the spectrum of today’s Republican Party — regrets a pivotal confirmation vote. Perhaps it brings to mind Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the doctor-turned-legislator who, despite his reservations, confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead Health and Human Services. Kennedy then immediately broke promises Cassidy said he had made to him, and began acting on his life’s work to undercut the vaccine regimen in America. Who could have seen it coming?

Emine Yücel has a piece out at TPM this morning about another potential member of the “Oops” Caucus in the making: Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) who, now that she is locked in a tight reelection fight, is outspokenly critical of White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought. Vought’s manifold creative ways to impound congressionally appropriated funds — seen by many experts as indicative of a veritable constitutional crisis — is, of course, a slap in the face of the Senate Appropriations Committee Chair, Collins.

But Collins voted to confirm Vought. Vought was confirmed by all 53 Republican senators. All Democrats voted against him.

As Emine details, Vought’s views, at the time of that vote, were clear. During Trump’s 2024 campaign, Vought, now famously, was caught on tape saying of government agencies, “we want their funding to be shut down.” “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said.

He did not hide these views during his confirmation hearing, during which he said he believed the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, passed to rein in the Nixon administration’s refusal to spend congressionally appropriated funds, was unconstitutional. Collins voted for him after all this was public. Collins’ office did not answer Emine when asked whether the senator regrets her vote.

These “Oops” Caucus stories share a few factors: a senator viewed by much of the media as more reasonable or centrist than their colleagues, and a Trump administration figure taking actions that are exactly in line with who they were publicly known to be. Is it believable that Kennedy, America’s leading vaccine skeptic, would choose not to act on those beliefs once in government? Is it believable that Vought, who declared his intent to starve the government of funds, would then not do so once confirmed? Is it reasonable to believe that a weekend Fox News host, known for his extreme Christian views and lack of personal control, would undergo a total transformation once given authority over the most powerful military in the world?

Tillis’ support for Hegseth was particularly egregious given that he initially urged key witnesses to come forward against the nominee, suggesting that, if they did, the nomination would fail. As the Wall Street Journal reported in January 2025:

Tillis personally assured Danielle Hegseth in a call on Jan. 19, witnessed by two other people, that if she signed the statement testifying that she believed her former brother-in-law Pete Hegseth has an alcohol-abuse problem and was abusive to his second wife, it would carry weight, and potentially move three votes—his own, along with the votes of Sens. Susan Collins (R., Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska), those people said.

Danielle Hegseth did as Tillis asked. Tillis nonetheless cast the deciding vote to confirm Hegseth.

It takes 51 votes to confirm a member of the administration in the Senate, and in many cases, a two-thirds majority — 67 votes — to remove one. Once these people are in, they are in. The time to examine their records closely is before they are confirmed, not after. The “Oops” Caucus is made up of veterans of the Senate who know how this works. Keep that in mind when assessing their second thoughts.

To his (limited) credit, Tillis goes some way toward capturing the situation in his book, confessing that his and similar senators’ failure to do the job they were elected to do came from the fear of losing it.

“I know for a fact that there are others like me,” he writes, “Republicans who agreed to go along with the early demands of the Trump team no matter how ridiculous they were, believing that failing to do so would mean the end of their political career, and who now see that things have gone way too far.”

Trump Says He’ll Pay for Those ‘Government-Funded’ Campaign Ads After All

A rare climb-down from the commander in chief.

• The news came in a Truth Social post: “The Radical Left is upset with the fact that I am taking Ads, which I consider to be a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A., and paying for them with U.S.A. money.” He claimed (falsely) that this is “a rather standard thing to do” but said he would now “pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc.,” a Super PAC.
• The U.S. government has spent more than $10 million on these ads, the New York Times reports. The money came from funding appropriated for the Department of Homeland Security.
• The ads appear to violate a provision of the 2026 appropriations law saying money can’t be used for “propaganda.” The new arrangement likely violates the law as well: The Campaign Legal Center, a good government group, has filed a complaint with the FEC over Trump’s claims to control MAGA Inc.’s money — Super PACs are supposed to be independent of the politicians they support. But the FEC is nonfunctional, with four of six commissioner seats vacant, and nothing is likely to happen.

‘Nearly Every Claim Uttered in These Ads Is False’

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has joined other Democrats this week in demanding answers about President Trump’s midterms campaign ads — which promote nothing but himself — and the apparent use of taxpayer dollars to finance them.

I wrote earlier this week about the top Democratic appropriators in Congress calling for investigations into the ads and confirming reports that the White House moved some $20 million in taxpayer funds out of the Department of Homeland Security to bankroll the vanity project. Raskin and Rep. George Whitesides (D-CA) sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) on Tuesday to look into the reported shuffling of funds.

“Accordingly, we are writing to formally request that the GAO investigate the source, accounts, and total amount of taxpayer funds used by the Executive Office of the President to produce and distribute this advertisement across major television markets and official White House social media channels,” Raskin and Whitesides wrote in the letter to acting Comptroller General Orice Brown and special counsel Charles Baldis.

The two are asking for a formal investigation into how much the advertisements cost, how they have been paid for and whether any federal laws were broken in either the creation of the ads or the use of tax dollars to fund them. Raskin and Whitesides asked both agencies to look into whether the ads are a violation of the Hatch Act, the Anti-Deficiency Act, the Consolidated Appropriations Act or other federal criminal statutes.

“The Trump Administration knows what they are doing is unlawful, as evidenced by their halfhearted attempts to defend their actions. An anonymous White House spokesperson called the ads ‘educational,’ and suggested that they are ‘clearly not political’ because the ‘president is not on the ballot,’” the lawmakers wrote. “Yet just a few short weeks ago, at his poorly-rated Republican National Convention, President Trump pleaded for his rapidly dwindling ranks of supporters to vote, begging them to ‘pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.’ The White House can’t have it both ways.”

The lawmakers also, amusingly, fact check many of the claims Trump makes in the ads to argue that they could not possibly serve as “public service announcements” — like those made during the COVID-19 pandemic — as the White House has claimed.

“President Trump is obviously desperate for the American people to ‘love’ him, a problem that goes beyond your jurisdiction,” they wrote. “But stealing taxpayer dollars to pay for Mr. Trump’s narcissistic ego trips is plainly illegal. Your agencies have an important responsibility to hold accountable members of his Administration who violate the laws and policies under your purview.”

Raskin and Whitesides join their colleagues Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Henry Cuellar (D-TX) as well as Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) in asking questions about what exactly is going on with the egregious shuffling of funds for the ad campaign, seemingly designed to help Republicans win races next month (even though many vulnerable Republicans are trying to put a 10 foot pole between themselves and Trump’s political toxicity at the moment). The top Democratic appropriators are concerned about this because it appears as though the money was moved and used for something outside of its congressionally appropriated purpose — taxpayer dollars that were allocated for Customs and Border Protection in Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” last year.

The ads have run on major airwaves in recent weeks including Fox, Newsmax, MS NOW, and CBS, and also during NFL games over the weekend.

Obviously, Democrats are concerned about the corruption and violation of federal law. But this trend of Trump inserting himself into the midterms because he’s worried Republicans are going to lose a chamber of Congress simply because he is not on the ballot — and Republican stumbling as they alternately embrace the administration’s failing policies and distance themselves dramatically from the unpopular president — has been a rare moment of levity in our current hellscape.

‘A Toaster Is a Wedding Gift’

A Republican member of the Senate broke party ranks on Monday in a letter to the chair and ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asking that the panel subpoena Donald Trump Jr. and gather more facts about his “active promotion of family-backed cryptocurrency ventures, his continued pursuit of international real estate deals involving direct meetings with foreign heads of state, and his reported investments in defense contracting.”

In his letter, Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) argued that his colleagues were being hypocritical in their singular focus on President Biden’s son Hunter Biden throughout the former president’s entire term while turning a blind eye to Don Jr. and the “questions” that have “arisen about the relationships of President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., with foreign business figures and the acceptance of significant gifts. These include a lavish wedding afterparty, on a private island, provided by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, who reportedly traveled to China as part of a delegation accompanying Vladimir Putin shortly before giving the gift.”

“A toaster is a wedding gift. A private-island party paid for by a Putin-connected oligarch is something else,” Curtis continued. “Republicans nearly wore out the subpoena machine investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships. We should not unplug it now.”

In his letter to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Dick Durbin (R-IL), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, respectively, Curtis also argued that Hunter Biden should be dragged back before the panel as well, and urged the committee to “launch an investigation into the use of presidential family relationships for private financial benefit, preferential treatment, or access by domestic and foreign interests.”

“The country should not have to accept one standard for the family of a Republican president and another for the family of a Democratic president. Nor should congressional oversight begin and end when control of the White House changes hands,” Curtis wrote.

Curtis is not up for reelection until 2030, so he does not fit neatly within the (minor) trend of Republicans gently bucking the president ahead of what polls say could be a dismal midterm election for the GOP. A handful of Republican members of Congress up for reelection have called out Trump on his immigration policies or the war in Iran or on data centers — an issue that is becoming a major flashpoint for Republicans this cycle, even in red states, as Trump refuses to allow for any nuanced position on the matter (due to his whole being in bed with Big Tech thing).

Curtis had previously described reports of Don Jr.’s lavish wedding gift from a Russian oligarch as “corruption.” ProPublica uncovered the cartoonishly venal episode, which involved Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev funding the post-wedding festivities for Don Jr. and his new wife on exclusive islands in the Bahamas. Kremlev has close ties to President Vladimir Putin. President Trump has claimed that his son paid Kremlev back for the extravagant vacation. Don Jr.’s wife is, apparently, still confused about what the issue is.

Grassley has not yet responded to the letter from Curtis, but Durbin posted a statement on Tuesday. He mildly countered Curtis’ claims about Hunter Biden, arguing the former president’s son has “already given Congress a sworn deposition on this issue” but said he supports Curtis’ request for transparency.

“Corruption must never be tolerated. @SenJohnCurtis has made a good faith request that the Senate Judiciary Committee investigate the lavish gift of a Russian oligarch to President Trump’s son as well as any wrongdoing by the son of former President Biden,” Durbin wrote in a post on X. “In fairness, Hunter Biden has already given Congress a sworn deposition on this issue. Donald Trump Jr. has not. To ignore this is to run the risk of being complicit. I will join in supporting Senator Curtis’ request of the Judiciary Committee.”

Corruption must never be tolerated. @SenJohnCurtis has made a good faith request that the Senate Judiciary Committee investigate the lavish gift of a Russian oligarch to President Trump’s son as well as any wrongdoing by the son of former President Biden.

In fairness, Hunter… https://t.co/Gd6qMhySRk

— Senator Dick Durbin (@SenatorDurbin) September 22, 2026

This story was originally published by ProPublica,  a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.

For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.

Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.