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As you may have heard, Representative Mike Flood (R-Neb.) showed up at a town hall meeting. Kudos to him. Here in North Dakota, we haven’t experienced an in-person town hall with our representative. It would probably go about as well for Representative Julie Fedorchak as it did for Rep. Flood. There’s just something about being careless and inattentive on the job that makes performance reviews rather painful.
At his town hall meeting, Flood claimed that he didn’t know that the House reconciliation bill he voted for contained a provision that would hamstring federal courts’ ability to enforce contempt [ [link removed] ] penalties. The bill passed by one vote. Mike Flood and Julie Fedorchak approved that bill. Marjorie Taylor Greene helped as well, but she claims that she didn’t know about the provision prohibiting state and local governments from regulating artificial intelligence (AI).
Maybe—just maybe—when you name something the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” you ought to read that magnificent piece of literature before you give it a big, beautiful thumbs-up. “I didn’t read that part” wasn’t an acceptable answer in seventh-grade English, and it is an even worse excuse in Congress, where there are many opportunities to become enlightened on what is in a bill.
In order for a representative to remain blissfully unaware of the contempt or AI language in the bill until after voting for it, that representative’s entire staff had to miss it. The representative and his or her staff also had to miss committee reports [ [link removed] ] and floor debates and whip briefings.
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The dog did not eat their homework. Either they were careless or they are lying. Or maybe they have become so used to ceding their authority to the executive branch and reflexively voting for anything Trump wants that they just figured someone else was taking care of it and all they had to do was show up and vote the way Trump and Mike Johnson wanted them to. This is a distinct—or even highly likely—possibility.
The bill’s name should have set off alarm bells for these Republican representatives. Any piece of legislation named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act should either be signed into law by President Hillary Clinton or be about saving the pelicans or honoring an offensive lineman in Buffalo, New York.
The AI provision was plainly worded enough that even Marjorie Taylor Greene should have caught it, unless she is unsure what a “state or political subdivision thereof” means. I’m afraid that is also a distinct possibility. Here is the language in the final bill:
(1) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in paragraph (2), no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce, during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act, any law or regulation limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems entered into interstate commerce.
The section of the bill torpedoing the courts’ ability to effectively hold government officials in contempt is slightly more convoluted, probably so the lawyers could understand it:
No court of the United States may enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.
I mentioned this, in an exasperated way, out on the cement patio that my wife has turned into a cozy backyard oasis. I mentioned the bill and its contempt provision as a way to change the subject from how I had feigned electrocution while removing the old electric meter, galvanized metal conduit, and electric wire from the exterior wall at the back of the patio. My distraction worked in the same way that my International Relations 201 professor’s monotone reading of the text worked to cure my insomnia. My wife’s eye’s glazed over. She might have drooled a little. I felt like she may have needed an analogy to make the authoritarian-friendly language clearer.
Since my wife grew up in Indiana and refers to herself as a Hoosier and believes, as most Hoosiers do, that this makes her somewhat of an expert on basketball (and John Mellencamp), I explained it in those terms.
Think of Congress as a state high-school activities or athletic association that makes rules for sports like basketball, I said, and imagine that federal courts are the referees. Your very talented son or daughter’s scrappy high school team has to play a very snobby and un-Hoosier-like team (federal government officials) on their way to the state championship. That Hoosiers-in-name-only team rarely bothers to dribble and regularly pulls opposing players’ shorts down to their ankles in the lane.
Your state high-school activities association (Congress) has passed a rule saying that the referees (federal courts) are not allowed to penalize players for traveling or pantsing unless those referees have first collected a significant fee from the players before the game started. If that doesn’t happen, the players on that other team can break the rules without worrying about being penalized, thus weakening the referees’ power to keep the game fair.
Also imagine, I said, that the other team’s coach is a fat, orange blowhard who feels entitled to win every time and thinks that the entire system, and life in general, is very unfair to—
“I get it,” my wife said. “Donald Trump could just ignore the courts and do whatever he wanted.” She’s smarter that the average Hoosier. (I am not insinuating that the average Hoosier is less smart that the average citizen of any state not named Indiana.)
It seems that Americans in Mike Flood’s Nebraska are not fond of handcuffing and gagging the refs. Neither are folks in Indiana or Texas or Oregon. That’s one reason why so many Republicans continue to shun in-person town halls. Their constituents shouldn’t have to read every bill or be aware of significant clauses. That’s what they hired their representatives in Congress to do. Mike Flood and Julie Fedorchak and Marjorie Taylor Greene and the rest are supposed to stay on top of things for their constituents, not for themselves or Donald Trump.
The Hoosier-heavy discussion with my wife took place right after I completed a short radio interview about the closing of the Quentin N. Burdick Job Corps Center here in Minot. That was what I planned to write about today, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. There is a common thread, though: taking care of Trump and justifying every Trump administration action instead of looking out for constituents. That can take the fun out of a town hall meeting. Better to phone it in.

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