Shooting in the Covid Part XII: Fall at Olentangy Trail

I recently joined a local camera club. There are some excellent photographers in this group who I have known about since becoming a photography student. I attended an educational program (via zoom) the club held last week. The presenter is an exceptional photographer. His enthusiasm for photography was wonderful and his knowledge was impressive and humbling. He does remarkable work. As the presentation completed, my initial thoughts were that my photography is so lacking and that I totally suck. And I truly believe that. I’ll also tell you that there couldn’t possibly be anyone who enjoys my photographs more than me. I’m a complicated person.

The Olentangy River is just five minutes from my home. The trail runs adjacent to the river. I’ve been on this trail hundreds of times. There are so many interesting plants and there’s an abundance of wildlife considering it is in the middle of the suburbs with a major freeway running on the other side of the river. I shoot there more than any other location and this fall it was beautiful. I continued to shoot small, in part determined by the covid and feeling safe. Our governor just announced that my age group is eligible for the vaccination starting on February 8th. I need to stay alive for a couple of more months.

I’m a photography student, even though I haven’t taken any classes in a few years. I plan to go back. The teacher I’ve taken the most classes from in my college program was an art teacher for more than 30 years. She became a friend and I think of her as my mentor in photography. No one has offered more critiques of my work than she has and she’s provided me with a language for how I think about my work.

My photographs from this time on the river felt lyrical. I loved the impressionist abstractions from the reflections in the water. And I love the abstract backgrounds in many of my plant portraits. I hope you enjoy these photographs as much as I enjoyed making them. And I hope they give you a sufficient sense of peace and tranquility to offset the chaos I present on the other side of these photographs.

Who could have possibly seen this coming?

Here’s a good list for starters: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, Jim Gilmore, Rick Santorum, George Paraki, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker and Rick Perry.

These are the people who ran against the Orange Emperor in the republican presidential primary. Pull the tape and watch what this cast of characters said about the dangerous, incompetent clown while they were running against him. Ok, that’s a good summary description. They were candid and honest about their assessment of the creature.

A few of them remained true to themselves and were critical of the Orange Emperor over the past four years. A few of them receded into their caves and remained quiet. The rest put their finger up into the political winds, watched the development of the Orange Emperor cult, and attached their lips to his abundant tush. A couple served in his cabinet. Some became his staunchest enablers in congress. If we fail to hold them accountable, it will be to our own and democracy’s peril.

Take stock. A pandemic that is killing thousands of us and making many more thousands of us sick with very little understanding of the long-term impacts of this disease. Many have had their lives destroyed. At it’s worse, many have become so financially imperiled that they are losing their homes and can’t feed their families. Most of the rest of us have become isolated from our family and friends and forced to give up the activities that give meaning to our lives. The economy has tanked and so many small businesses have gone under. Our environment has taken a significant hit from changes the Orange Emperor has made to rules regulating emissions, mining, and development. He’s fomented civil and social unrest at levels that even surpass the upheavals of the 60s and 70s. He’s ruined our status in the world. We’re a laughingstock because he is the clown in chief. We’ve lost our credibility. And the list could go on. He’s been a one-man wrecking ball to our country and society. He ran as a dictator because that is who he is. A conman and a dictator.

It happened because he’s an incompetent, opportunistic, dangerous, evil moron with no values, no conscience, no ethics or morals. They knew. They told us and him during the campaign and the debates. They had the chance to impeach him. Pence could have handled the pandemic more competently than the Orange Emperor. How do I know this? Because I believe an orangutan could have handled the pandemic more competently than the Orange Emperor. They not only didn’t remove him from office when they had the chance, they wouldn’t even allow witnesses in the hearing. If we don’t hold every one of these accomplices accountable, we don’t deserve the democracy we’re watching crumble around us.

He has devastated our country and so many lives. And these silent, cowardly accomplices hold the same responsibility for this mayhem. I call my senator every day to complain about his silence and remind him that he is complicit in this destruction. If he remains in denial and runs for this seat in two years, I’m going to create my own yard sign:

Senator Portman = Trump with much better hair and no spine

As for the Orange Emperor, he needs to be impeached and he needs to be charged with every single crime he has committed. We’re going to be a nation of laws or we’re not. If we are, he’s going to do time. If the supreme court allows him to pardon himself, we’re not a nation of laws. I’ll be watching closely because there are some laws I find particularly irritating.

Every day with this creature has been a new nightmare. Some days have presented us with multiple nightmares.

Wednesday’s nightmare at the Capitol Building – our building – was among the most serious, demoralizing, dangerous and disgusting, in every direction.

I’m going to start with the most observationally disgusting. The way people were treated during the Black Lives Matter demonstration this summer as opposed to how this band of marauding seditionist white people were treated should forever be emblazoned into our brains. Stark. Nauseating. Shameful. For all of us to see. For the entire world to see.

Most of the people who were arrested on Wednesday were arrested way after the coup attempt for curfew violations. Think about that for a minute. The jackasses who were responsible for five deaths, including a capitol police officer who was beat over the head with a fire extinguisher were ushered out of the capital building to go about their merry ways. There were 60 police offers who were hurt and some had to be hospitalized.

Some of the seditionists had guns and rifles and some of them had bombs in their vehicles. The police found two pipe bombs outside. Some stormed in with flag poles, baseball bats and other weapons. Hey, here’s the door, please watch your step on the way out. If this had been Black people, there would have been bloodied and dead bodies all over the neighborhood. We’d have needed to borrow freezer trucks from the local hospital to serve as a temporary morgue.

Outrage over kneeling during the national anthem. Please. Defund the police. Please. The moral outrage over patriotism, the denial of two criminal justice systems, the lack of acceptance and awareness that we have a monumental problem with policing in America. The dramatization of our racism, our sickness, our dysfunction played out before us.

Every single one of these people needs to be found and charged with all the crimes they’ve committed. These people are dangerous terrorists who need to be put away for as long as possible. Guantanamo would be a good destination. These white nationalist thugs are more of a threat to our country than any international terrorist groups our security forces are focused on. I know this because I’ve watched their activities become more public and brazen over the past four years, at the invitation of the Orange Emperor. And I know this because I watched them take over our Capitol Building while it was occupied by the Vice President and most of the members of the house and senate. Find them, catch them, put them away. And then please get figured out that these racist and anti-Semitic thugs pose an existential threat to our country. They need to be placed under the most intense scrutiny and held accountable.

Please ask the NRA if it is okay to take away all their guns, rifles and explosive devices.

We have always been broken. We’ve been in deep denial about the brokenness. No more. We will accept who we are or we will go down in flames.

At the direct incitement of the Orange Emperor, his lawyer, and his son, they stormed the Capitol building to interfere with the formal counting and acceptance of the electoral college votes in the presidential election. They came to effectuate the coup d’état instructed by the Orange Emperor.

The Orange Emperor created the entire mythology of a fraudulent election. If you are confused about the origins of this election myth, please extract your head from your ass. He told you the election was going to be fraudulent well before the election. He undermined the postal service to compromise the mail in balloting process. Hey, we’re in the middle of a pandemic where there is sickness and death all around us. Go stand in line for hours and pack into a polling place where old people are supposed to volunteer to run the polls? And to be clear. I live in the ruby red state of Ohio. We’re so friggen red that our state bird is the cardinal. To my shame and embarrassment, Jim Jordan represents the district just north of where I live. My blood red state has had mail-in balloting for years. No problem. No complaints. No fraud. All the republicans in Ohio just love our mail in balloting, from our governor and secretary of state on down. They also love their gerrymandering in the most undemocratic way. But there’s no fraud. The republicans work diligently at voter suppression, but fraud isn’t a problem. It is a myth. The courts, including the Supreme Court, weren’t buying the myth. Every state in the union counted their votes and they certified their elections. Red states certified. Blue states certified. Even the Orange Emperor’s personal lawyer and media spokesperson, William Barr, explained that there was no fraud. The person in charge of election security at Homeland Security communicated that there was no fraud and that this was a secure election.

No fraud. Period. The Orange Emperor lost. Period.

The people who stormed the capital were composed of a collection of societal misfits that he’s attracted during his presidency. As you heard him say, he just loves these people. He loves the QAnon crazies, he loves his white supremacists, he loves his Nazis. So much love for the worst of our society. Hey, Jared, please ask your father-in-law if he owns Auschwitz Camp and 6MWE t-shirts. If you are a Jew even marginally connected to any of the 613 mitzvot, you are not allowed to believe that Jared and Stephen Miller are acceptable human beings. Loving Israel didn’t make Meyer Lansky okay. Farshtey?

Since Wednesday, we’ve watched the self-righteous performances of Betsy Devos. Elaine Chao, Mik Mulvaney, Lindsey Graham, and others. Beep. Too late. There’s no cleaning up your behavior or your reputations. You are going to have to live with your enabling, complicit sucking up until the end of time. You are going to be described in history books. There will be movies made about you. It is likely that you will be depicted in a wonderful musical. You own the mayhem over the past four years as much as the clown in chief. He couldn’t have done it without you. The republicans in congress who had the chance to end this insanity and his cabinet who encouraged him are required to own the death, the sickness, the economic and social suffering, and our national shame until the end of time. You could have stopped this. You didn’t. Your opportunistic, self-serving lust for power came before your oath to protect and defend the constitution, before your love of country, your respect for our democracy.

And you own the current and future threat to our national security. We no longer have moral high ground to talk about the way people are governed anywhere in the world. What kind of democracy are we when we have a president attempting a coup? And we’re going to have to deal with the reality that 73 million people watched the activities over the past four years and they voted for this creature …. Again! Frightening. I wish it were as simple as asking people to turn the channel. It isn’t.

He’s raised hundreds of millions of dollars from these people. They’ve given him money to fight the election fraud that he made up. What I’ve heard reported on the news is that he is able to use this money for his personal needs and desires. Outside of having to pay whack jobs like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, where else do you think he’s going to put this money. And by the way, Dominion, the voting machine company, just sued Powell for defamation for $1.3 billion, so she might need some financial help. And she won’t get it from the Orange Emperor.

We must stop shooting unarmed black people in the back and treating our indigenous peoples like crap, before we are allowed to get on our high horse about the way the Chinese deal with the Uyghurs.

We are in deep, deep trouble. I have no idea what the Orange Emperor has in his head about our national secrets. He’s spent four years with our national security people trying to get him to pay attention. We’ve heard all the reports about his not reading his security briefs. But the odds are that he’s learned something just from breathing the air in the Whitehouse. It is my greatest hope that he tells all our enemies that the trick to defeating the corona virus is to inject bleach like a cleansing thing. But I’m concerned that he might have heard a few other more important things along the way. Because the spineless enablers in Congress never forced him to reveal his tax returns, we have no idea who he owes the hundreds of millions of dollars of debt. We can easily guess that it is owed to banks or people outside of the US or to other governments, because after all his bankruptcies, there is no legitimate loaning institution in the US who would go near this thief with a ten-foot pole. If he can clear some or all this debt by selling what he’s learned over the past four years, who thinks he wouldn’t start selling? If you don’t believe he would, you are going to have to try much harder at extracting your head from the darkness.

It sure looks like the House is going to impeach him this week based on his incitement of a coup and on his recorded call to the secretary of state in Georgia asking to have that state’s election rigged. Hey, there’s the fraud all of you confused people have been looking for. I suspect that he’ll get impeached again in the House. I heard on the news that McConnel is thinking about putting off holding the impeachment hearings in the Senate until after the Orange Emperor leaves office at noon on January 20th.

As I write this, it is January 9th. McConnel is going to bet that between today and January 20th, the Orange Emperor won’t set flame to the country? Over the past 24 hours, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook have decided that he’s too dangerous to be on social media. And McConnel is thinking he’s not too dangerous to be president of the United States? Really? Let’s just ponder that notion for a minute. Mitch, Mitch, Mitch. You already have a history book, movie and musical problem that you aren’t going to be able to duck. Moscow Mitch is already a thing. The handling of seating the last supreme court justice in the most cynical and hypocritical move imaginable is a thing. Announcing that your actions during President Obama’s term was all about keeping him to a one term president is a thing. You are plumb out of things. And there are so many other things. Do you really want to risk what the mentally ill maniac might do between now and when ServePro and Orkin have to make the white house inhabitable for real humans?

Let’s be clear, if you don’t remove him now, you are going to own everything he does between now and then. And you already own way more than is fair to all your descendants.

Pence doesn’t want to invoke the 25th amendment? McConnel doesn’t want to impeach him? I know, let’s ask Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to save our country.

I don’t envy Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They have a monumental job in front of them. I am so relieved and thrilled that he will at least have a majority in the House and Senate who won’t obstruct every single move he would want to make to improve our lives. Because there is little doubt in my mind that McConnel would block everything decent. And with that, let’s share a moment of reflection on the miracle in Georgia, electing a Black person and a Jewish person to serve as their representatives in the Senate.

The Orange Emperor didn’t break our democracy any more than he invented racism and anti-Semitism. He merely took full advantage of evil opportunities.

Democracy doesn’t work for everyone in America. A free-market economy doesn’t work for everyone. As I’ve written in the past, Americans are first and foremost humans. We’re the same humanity that has existed across the globe since we became hominids. It is always the case that when those in power and with privilege lose their minds with greed, they assume that their lifestyle is somehow ordained. Regardless of the numbers of people who are suffering in a society, their power, wealth, and privilege is thought to be permanent. The more insulated they become from the masses, and they do become insulated, the more they believe that their position in society is immutable. A brief review of history would remind them of the cutting off of heads for those who believe that there’s no price to be paid for ignoring the suffering in society and the unmitigated expression and expansion of their greed. One can never accumulate enough.

No one will tolerate suffering as their way of life forever. The axe handles and the pitch forks will eventually come out and there will be a redefinition of society’s stratification system. It always happens, because people eventually come to the conclusion that they have nothing to lose by creating change. There are a finite number of ways to cause change. One of those in America involves our political system.

If they are told that they can have social and economic opportunity by voting for the right person, that would be the rational thing to do. Everyone who runs tells them that they’re the best hope for that future, for themselves and their children. If those people get into office, ignore them and then do stuff in their personal interest to consolidate wealth and power, people will lose faith in their political system. And then they vote for the Orange Emperor because, as a well-honed con man, he understood the dynamic I just described. Which is amazing because he doesn’t seem to understand much else. He was a television personality that was widely known. He told them he wasn’t a member of the inside political club that ignores them, that he was a successful businessman, that he could grab any woman by her private parts and get away with it, and that he was going to change all their lives for the better. What man covered in furs and face paint wouldn’t yearn for that. The cult is born.

You know all of those armed to the teeth thugs who show up at anti-mask/social distancing rallies in capitol buildings, they’ve turned in their axe handles and pitch forks for military style weapons. While the 73 million people who voted for the Orange Emperor may believe that these guys are your peeps, don’t think for a minute that they won’t turn those guns on you. They look like the descendants of the people who burned down my Bubby and Zadie’s village.

Except for the orthodox Jewish kid from Brooklyn who was sitting in the rotunda wearing furs. He had a very Neanderthal thing going on. My first wonderment was whether he got his animal skins from a kosher butcher. He was clearly in a class all his own. I would urge him to volunteer to be studied by a team of psychologists, social workers, anthropologists and rabbis. I think much could be learned about our society from coming to a better understanding about how this person found himself in the middle of this cult. Can he read English? What did he think the Auschwitz Camp and 6MWE t-shirts were about? Was that patch of fur on his head a Pleistocene version yarmulke?

What we’ve witnessed from our president and from Congress over the past four years has been motivated by the unmitigated lust for power. I’m afraid of power, so it is difficult for me to relate to what lust for power is all about. But clearly it is a thing, and we’ve got an entire array of politicians who are driven by it. Anthropologically speaking, there is a very direct relationship between power, wealth, and prestige. They work together. They come in a set, like your dinner wear.

I’m not a big fan of term limits because I believe there is a very real and important function served by experience and historical knowledge. For the foreseeable future, however, we can’t allow the status quo. None of these people can be trusted. Their lust for power – and wealth and prestige – is like a drug and they can’t control their habit. So, we need to save our democracy by removing their drug of power and money.

This is my proposal.

Term limit everyone. One term for the president, the house and the senate. Term limit every federal judge and the supreme court. Let supreme court justices be selected in a national election. Presidents and Congress can’t be trusted.

Pay the president and congress the federal minimum wage. It would provide them with great motivation to increase it.

Require every federally elected official to acquire health care for themselves and their families on the exchange through the affordable care act. It would serve as a good incentive for them to keep it working properly. Their premiums, co-pays and deductibles should not be subsidized as a benefit. They should be responsible for paying all of their health care costs. It would help them accept the inevitable adoption of a national health care system.

Eliminate their pension and have them pay into social security. It would create great motivate for them to fix it and keep it operating well into the (their) future.

Don’t allow any federally elected official to serve as a lobbyist, ever, and don’t allow them to work for any industry that benefitted in any way from a vote they took or legislation they signed during their tenure.

Take all private money out of elections and don’t allow people to spend their own money on elections. It is imperative that we eliminate any relationship between wealth and the ability to run for office. They will use their political power to increase and consolidate their wealth. That will become their focus. Only allow public money to be used for campaigns and limit the number of weeks that a campaign can go on. Don’t allow television advertising for campaigns.

Our democracy depends on it.

This is the one thing we almost all agree on. You voted for the Orange Emperor because our country doesn’t work for you. Your representatives don’t listen to you and they don’t serve you. Those of us who voted for Biden were motivated in part because we recognized that so many of our institutions are broken. I love America. I love democracy. I want it fixed. I want it to survive.

Changing the constitution will be hard in part because we will need the power-hungry, dysfunctional politicians to behave in opposition to their selfish interests.

I am aware of efforts to get a handle on the lies and dissemination of misinformation over social media sites. There was a compelling story about it on 60 minutes and I have been reading stories about it in the news. I don’t have the answers for this one. We seem to struggle with the freedoms that are enshrined in our constitution. We can’t seem to accept healthy and reasonable limits to those freedoms. To be clear, there wasn’t anyone involved in writing the constitution that thought freedom meant that someone could do whatever they wanted. Limits were defined or implied in everything. That’s how societies operate. Anyone who wants to do whatever they want all the time, is going to have to live in a cabin in the woods in Idaho and self-actualize their brains out all by themselves. For the rest of us, there are going to be limits.

How do we have the right to bear arms while protecting kindergarteners and first graders from being gunned down by a maniac?

How do we have the right to free speech without spreading horrible lies that destroy other people’s lives?

I don’t know how this is going to be repaired, but I do know social media bears a responsibility and if we make them liable (responsible with a criminal and/or financial consequence), they’ll figure out the fix. We’ve created a system where anyone can say anything about anyone with impunity. People have always lied. In fact, presidents and politicians have always lied. But we’ve never lived through a time in which there has been such an overwhelming amount of lying and deception as we have over the past four years. We’ve opened the door to foreign governments to manipulate societal opinions in such a dangerous way. Our own government and leadership, from the attorney general, to the president, to members of his cabinet and congress have made lying and deception into an art form. It’s absolutely frightening. And because a significant number of our citizenry get most of their information from scary news sources run by scary people and classic comic books, we have millions of people running around believing that elections are fake.

A bit of rational reflection. You have the president and a whole bunch of republican senators and more than a bunch of representatives who are foaming at the mouth about corruption in the elections in some states that went for Biden. They want these elections undone in some way to turn those states over to the Orange Emperor. You do not hear a single solitary senator or congressman who won their own election in one of those states exclaim that they want their election undone because the voting was all messed up and/or fraudulent. Did all the dead people or all the fraudulent voters only vote for the presidency? Please people! Close the comic book. Turn the channel. Use your noggin. All this drama is just not credible.

You know the whole power to the people thing we had going on in the 60s and 70s; we need it back. If we’re going to take back power – or get it for the first time – we’re going to have to agree on truth – at least a majority of us, and we’re going to have to stop thinking of ourselves as powerless in the face of the wealthy, privileged and powerful.

We need to start with the whole power thing – one person, one vote and remove the lust for power from our government. Term limits and make them citizen representatives. You can spend your time legislating or running the country. Since you won’t need to spend any time raising money, you can find a second job at Walmart if you need the money.

Even after the Orange Emperor incited the coup on Wednesday, after people died, after capitol police were injured and one died, the Congress reconvened to count the electoral college vote. And the following Congress people still voted in opposition to that count.

If they believed the Orange Emperor’s mythology about a fraudulent election, they’re too gullible or ignorant or uninformed or unaware to serve in the United States Congress.

If they knew the truth about the election, they are too cynical, unpatriotic, power hungry, opportunistic, and unethical and immoral to serve in the United States Congress.

You can’t love this country and cherish freedom and democracy and go along with a dictator to keep his cult following feeling all warm and fuzzy about you. It is immoral, unethical, and unpatriotic.

They all own the death and sickness from the Covid. They own the destruction of our economy. They own the civil and social unrest. They own the racism and anti-Semitism fomented by the creature in chief. They own it as much as he does because they’ve enabled him with their support. If they don’t all pay in their next election because you don’t do the right thing, you deserve them and you also don’t deserve our democracy.

U.S. Senate

Tommy Tuberville, AL

Rick Scott, FL

Roger Marshall, KS

John Kennedy, LA

Cindy Hyde-Smith, MS

Josh Hawley, MO

Ted Cruz, TX

Cynthia Lummis, WY

U.S. House of Representatives

Robert B. Aderholt, AL

Mo Brooks, AL

Jerry Carl, AL

Barry Moore, AL

Gary Palmer, AL

Mike Rogers, AL

Andy Biggs, Ariz.

Paul Gosar, AZ

Debbie Lesko, AZ

David Schweikert, AZ

Rick Crawford, AR

Ken Calvert, CA

Mike Garcia, CA

Darrell Issa, CA

Doug LaMalfa, CA

Kevin McCarthy, CA

Devin Nunes, CA

Jay Obernolte, CA

Lauren Boebert, CO

Doug Lamborn, CO

Kat Cammack, FL

Mario Diaz-Balart, FL

Byron Donalds, FL

Neal Dunn, FL

Scott Franklin, FL

Matt Gaetz, FL

Carlos Gimenez, FL

Brian Mast, FL

Bill Posey, FL

John Rutherford, FL

Greg Steube, FL

Daniel Webster, FL

Rick Allen, GA

Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, GA

Andrew Clyde, GA

Marjorie Taylor Greene, GA

Jody Hice, GA

Barry Loudermilk, GA

Russ Fulcher, ID

Mike Bost, IL

Mary Miller, IL

Jim Baird, IN

Jim Banks, IN

Greg Pence, IN

Jackie Walorski, IN

Ron Estes, KS

Jacob LaTurner, KS

Tracey Mann, KS

Harold Rogers, KY

Garret Graves, LA

Clay Higgins, LA

Mike Johnson, LA

Steve Scalise, LA

Andy Harris, MD

Jack Bergman, MI

Lisa McClain, MI

Tim Walberg, MI

Michelle Fischbach, MN

Jim Hagedorn, MN

Michael Guest, MS

Trent Kelly, MS

Steven Palazzo, MS

Sam Graves, MO

Vicky Hartzler, MO

Billy Long, MO

Blaine Luetkemeyer, MO

Jason Smith, MO

Matt Rosendale, MT

Dan Bishop, NC

Ted Budd, NC

Madison Cawthorn, NC

Virginia Foxx, NC

Richard Hudson, NC

Gregory F. Murphy, NC

David Rouzer, NC

Jeff Van Drew, NJ

Yvette Herrell, NM

Chris Jacobs, NY

Nicole Malliotakis, NY

Elise M. Stefanik, NY

Lee Zeldin, NY

Adrian Smith, NE

Steve Chabot, OH

Warren Davidson, OH

Bob Gibbs, OH

Bill Johnson, OH

Jim Jordan, OH

Stephanie Bice, OK

Tom Cole, OK

Kevin Hern, OK

Frank Lucas, OK

Markwayne Mullin, OK

Cliff Bentz, OR

John Joyce, PA

Fred Keller, PA

Mike Kelly, PA

Daniel Meuser, PA

Scott Perry, PA

Guy Reschenthaler, PA

Lloyd Smucker, PA

Glenn Thompson, PA

Jeff Duncan, SC

Ralph Norman, SC

Tom Rice, SC

William Timmons, SC

Joe Wilson, SC

Tim Burchett, TN

Scott DesJarlais, TN

Chuck Fleischmann, TN

Mark E. Green, TN

Diana Harshbarger, TN

David Kustoff, TN

John Rose, TN

Jodey Arrington, TX

Brian Babin, TX

Michael C. Burgess, TX

John R. Carter, TX

Michael Cloud, TX

Pat Fallon, TX

Louie Gohmert, TX

Lance Gooden, TX

Ronny Jackson, TX

Troy Nehls, TX

August Pfluger, TX

Pete Sessions, TX

Beth Van Duyne, TX

Randy Weber, TX

Roger Williams, TX

Ron Wright, TX

Burgess Owens, UT

Chris Stewart, UT

Ben Cline, VA

Bob Good, VA

Morgan Griffith, VA

Robert J. Wittman, VA

Carol Miller, WV

Alexander X. Mooney, WV

Scott Fitzgerald, WI

Tom Tiffany, WI