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February 2023
Marc Molinaro, who ran as a moderate, has been anything but with his first votes. Since taking office, he has voted with Republicans on anti-abortion bills and pro-fossil fuel bills. He joined with the Republican election deniers with his vote to establish a Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. His first vote before he was even sworn in was to put Kevin McCarthy in charge. Soon after, he voted to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics. We must remain vigilant and hold Molinaro accountable.
March 2023
Marc Molinaro continues to show his true colors—bright red MAGA, not a trace of purple moderate. He voted with all but three Republicans to remove Representative Ilhan Omar from the Committee on Foreign Affairs but has not condemned Marjorie Taylor Greene for her call for a “national divorce” between red and blue states. Additionally, he joined Republicans in voting to end the national emergency concerning Covid, which President Biden had already announced would end on May 11. Prematurely rescinding the national emergency would end the flexibility to waive or modify Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and private insurance to address the pandemic. Molinaro continues to rubberstamp all proposed GOP legislation. He has yet to schedule an Ulster County town hall meeting. We’re waiting.
April 2023
Despite Marc Molinaro’s evasive answers at his March 15th Saugerties Town Hall (other than stating he was against taxing billionaires), on the floor of Congress, Molinaro continues to show his true MAGA colors. Among his many egregious votes was co-sponsoring and voting for the misnomer “Parents Bill of Rights Act.” More accurately, this is the “banning books, censoring history and discriminating against minorities act.” He is pandering to extremists rather than addressing the real issues that most parents care about—plummeting math and reading skills since the pandemic and school shootings. Molinaro also voted to overturn the Clean Water Act and revert to the Trump-era regulations that a court previously threw out.
May 2023
In a recent tweet, Molinaro emphasized that he broke with his party on a particular solar power vote. Voting 99% of the time with Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert does not make Molinaro bipartisan. Despite his word at the Saugerties Town Hall, Molinaro voted for the McCarthy debt ceiling bill. This bill would include cutting veterans benefits; removing 200,000 children from Head Start and another 100,000 from child care assistance; decreasing higher education aid to 6.6 million Pell grant recipients and eliminating the grant for 80,000 students; reducing rental assistance to millions of poor and disabled; cutting funding for research on cancer and other life-threatening diseases; blocking student loan debt relief; adding further work requirements for federal food assistance; and more draconian measures. The irony is that Molinaro is bragging about breaking with his party over solar energy initiatives. Yet he joined Republicans in a bill to boost investment in fossil fuel by increasing domestic oil production, natural gas, and coal, and easing restrictions on the development of pipelines and refineries. Beware of Molinaro’s slick messaging. He distorts his votes with benign language that hides the true policies behind his words. For instance, he claims to be protecting parents’ rights by banning books and whitewashing history. He claims to champion women’s rights by voting to bar a handful of trans girls from playing sports while voting to take away millions of women’s reproductive choice. Oh, Mendacious Molinaro!
June 2023
Continuing to align himself with corporations and billionaires rather than average Americans, Marc Molinaro voted to repeal the student-loan forgiveness policy, where the Biden administration would have forgiven up to $20,000 for low-income recipients of Pell Grants and up to $10,000 for low- and middle-income individuals with other federal government student loans. Additionally, Molinaro voted to nullify an Environmental Protection Agency rule that placed stricter emission standards on buses and heavy-duty trucks. And despite his initial demand that Representative George Santos resign, Molinaro voted against allowing Congress to vote on expulsion of the disgraced congressman. Molinaro also voted the wrong way on two separate gun bills—both allowing federal law enforcement officers to purchase for their civilian use handguns and AR 15-style assault weapons that have been retired from federal agencies’ arsenals. Mendacious Molinaro calls himself a moderate while voting like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
July 2023
Marc Molinaro continues his push to the extreme right. Joining MAGA Republicans, Molinaro voted to “condemn and censure” Adam Schiff for his role on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol. In essence, Molinaro and company punished Schiff for doing his job of holding Trump and the insurrectionists accountable for attempting to destroy our democracy. Molinaro took the side of the Trump apologists who still see the attack on the Capitol as a benign tourist visit.
Additionally, Molinaro again joined climate change deniers by voting to stop “limits on energy conservation standards for kitchen appliances.” Molinaro showed his bright red colors with his vote for the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act (REINS), which Public Citizen has called “one of the most radical threats in generations to our government’s ability to protect the public from harm.”
Unlike 2022, when Molinaro ran as a moderate, he now has a record. His votes align with the values of extremists and not the vast majority of his constituents. Remember that in 2024.