22jul26 — D13Raven
Silas Corvin reporting
I have been doing this a long time. Long enough to know the difference between a bad week and a pattern.
This is a pattern.
Twelve counties. Here’s what moved, and here’s what it costs you.
The Trojan Horse Has a Bill Number
The House votes today on something called the Stop Insider Trading Act.
Read the name twice, because the name is the entire product.
Bolted to that bill is the text of H.R. 9368, requiring voters in federal elections to present government-issued photo identification — including for mail-in ballots. A member from New York said it plain: they tell you it’s an insider trading bill, but SAVE Act-style voter suppression got snuck inside, and the object is to sabotage mail-in voting. The Congressional Black Caucus came out against it. Another member called it a terrible bill that doesn’t ban stock trading in Congress or anywhere else. GovInfo + 3
He’s right about that. The trading half lets every member keep every share he already owns. It blocks new purchases and asks for a week or two of notice before a sale. NBC Montana
That is not a ban. That is a courtesy. You and I get investigated for a bad deduction. They get a heads-up window.
Now the half nobody’s advertising. And I’m not going to characterize it, because I don’t have to. It’s in Congress’s own paperwork.
The committee report on this bill states that the identification regime in H.R. 9368 would be more restrictive than any system currently in use anywhere in this country — including Texas, including Florida. Like the SAVE America Act, it makes voters mail a copy of a narrow list of photo IDs along with the ballot. The Republican Lieutenant Governor of Utah warned that could violate the constitutional right to a secret ballot. The Republican Governor of Ohio vetoed the same mechanism at the state level and said flatly it would not discourage fraud. Ballotpedia
Sit with that a minute.
Republicans in Utah and Ohio looked at this thing and stepped back from it. Congress is stapling it to an ethics bill and voting today.
And understand what it does here. Not in the abstract. Here.
Pennsylvania votes by mail. No excuse required. That’s how a rural district votes, because a rural district is spread across mountains and two-lane roads. The farmer in Adams County in the middle of harvest. The night nurse coming off shift at Conemaugh. The veteran who can’t stand in a line for an hour. The eighty-year-old widow in Bedford County who lives forty minutes from her polling place and doesn’t drive after dark anymore.
Every one of them would have to photocopy a government ID and mail it in with the ballot.
That stops zero fraudulent votes. Zero. It stops votes. That is not a side effect. That is the specification.
The SAVE Act itself already passed this House on February 11, 218-213, and has been sitting in the Senate ever since. The Voter ID Act came out of House Administration on June 24 and got attached to the trading bill as an amendment. Same chairman authored both halves. The President has demanded Republicans fight for it. Congress.gov + 2
So here is the play, laid flat on the table.
Take a thing the public actually wants. Water it down until it’s a notification form. Then use the shell to move federal control over how the states run their elections. Anybody who votes no gets a glossy mailer in October saying he voted to protect insider trading. The mailer will not mention the rider. The mailer will never mention the rider.
And the Senate hasn’t scheduled a thing. NBC Montana
Which tells you it was never meant to become law. It was a trap with a bill number, built for a midterm.
As for the man who holds this district’s seat: he has campaigned on the SAVE Act. He votes with the Speaker ninety-eight times out of a hundred. The roll call this afternoon is a formality and everybody in Washington knows it.
There is a word for reaching in to rewrite the rules of the election that decides whether you keep your job.
It is not reform.
Your Power Bill Is Cooling Somebody Else’s Server
PJM — the grid that keeps the lights on from here to Chicago — released auction results last week adding $6.3 billion to household and business bills across thirteen states within three years. The driver is data centers. E&E News
That’s not a projection. That’s a cleared price. It’s already done.
Two years back, generators took $28.92 per megawatt-day to keep the region lit. The last two auctions hit the ceiling above $329. Wholesale power ran $136.53 a megawatt-hour in the first quarter of this year against $77.78 a year prior — the biggest single-year jump in the grid’s history. The independent monitor put sixty-three percent of it on data center demand. The Center SquareSubstack
Meanwhile the state Public Utility Commission has approved over $1.2 billion in distribution rate increases in eighteen months. IEEFA
Somebody is teaching a machine to write poetry in a windowless shed in Virginia, and a retired car-shop man in Portage is paying to keep it cool. Nobody asked him. Nobody’s going to.
The man who represents these twelve counties sits on Energy and Commerce. Not a committee. The committee — the one with jurisdiction over the grid.
Go find what he’s introduced to protect ratepayers. I’ll wait. I’ve got nothing but time and a bad temper.
The Orchards Froze and Washington Sent a Loan Form
April 8th and April 21st. Low twenties with the trees in full bloom. Penn State Extension called it the worst in forty years, maybe longer — dire, running downstream through every packing house and processor in the region. Statewide specialty crop losses ran an estimated $150 to $200 million. Some varieties, total loss. Farm Service AgencyPennsylvania Capital-Star
USDA declared disaster in seventeen counties — Adams, Franklin, Perry, Cumberland among them. Growers have until January 26, 2027 to apply. WITF
Apply for what, exactly.
Emergency loans.
A man loses a full year of apples and the federal government’s answer is permission to borrow against next year’s. That is not relief. That is a credit line with a sympathy card stapled to the front.
The follow-up measures for apple growers were announced this month in Biglerville — Adams County, this district — by a USDA undersecretary and the congressman from the 15th. USDA
The 15th.
Biglerville sits in the 13th. Somebody drove past this district’s own congressman to hold that press conference, and this district’s own congressman did not show up to it.
I’ve covered a lot of politicians. Some are crooked, some are lazy, some are just in over their heads. But there’s one thing that separates the ones who last from the ones who don’t, and it isn’t ideology.
It’s whether they show up when the crop dies.
The Grocery Bill Moves to Harrisburg
Pennsylvania posted a SNAP error rate of 9.21 percent for fiscal 2025 — better than the national average, and cut nearly in half over two years. AEI
Doesn’t matter. Under the rules written into last year’s budget law, the state still has to cover a tenth of the food assistance issued to its own people. Roughly $410 million a year, shifted onto the commonwealth. The clock starts October 2027. Bucks County Beacon
Around 144,000 Pennsylvanians were already staring at benefit cuts this year. yahoo
Watch the mechanism, because the mechanism is the story. Washington passed a tax cut. Washington wrote the cost into the states. Washington set the timer to go off after the election.
Harrisburg gets handed an invoice it never voted for and cannot pay. And then a man in a good suit goes on television and blames Harrisburg.
The state agriculture secretary made the other half of the point: about twenty-five cents of every grocery dollar goes straight back to the farm. Cut food assistance in Cambria County and you’ve torn up a check that was on its way to a dairy operation in Somerset. DSG Global
The Hospital Arithmetic Hasn’t Moved
Pennsylvania loses an estimated $20 billion in federal Medicaid money over ten years starting in 2028. Analysts say the $50 billion national rural health fund does not cover it. Roughly 25 rural Pennsylvania hospitals are considered at risk of closing. The Pennsylvania IndependentFrlawpa
The state hospital association’s word was “devastate.” Their other word was “destabilize.” And they added the part that ought to keep somebody awake: once a service ends or a hospital closes, it almost never comes back. City & State Pennsylvania
On the insurance side: Pennie enrollees are carrying an average net premium increase of 102 percent for 2026, and the enrollment window gets shorter this fall. Congress has had a year to extend the credits. Congress has not. WESA
All of it — the Medicaid cut, the SNAP shift, the hospital math — traces to one bill and one roll call. It passed this House 215 to 214.
One vote.
Every yes was the deciding yes. There is no hiding in a margin of one. This district’s congressman voted yes, and he is a physician, and he knew exactly what a Medicaid reimbursement rate does to a rural hospital, because that is his profession.
In this district the hospital is often the biggest employer in the county and the emergency room can be forty-five minutes down a road that ices over in November.
That’s not policy. That’s a woman doing arithmetic in a parking lot with her husband in the passenger seat.
Credit Where It’s Owed
The new state budget carved out a first-of-its-kind Residential Revitalization Keystone Opportunity Zone for Cambria County and Johnstown — 300 acres countywide, 50 inside the city, eligible for state tax exemptions, abatements and credits. And $1.9 million in state grants landed for three Cambria projects: $750,000 to turn an industrial building into a fire station on the East Side, $650,000 for a Miracle League field at Roxbury Park, and money for the Women’s Help Center. Altoona MirrorTribdem
Note the return address on all of it.
Harrisburg. Not Washington.
I’m not asking you to be angry. Anger’s cheap and it’s mostly useless.
I’m asking you to be precise. Learn the vote counts. Learn who showed up in Biglerville and who didn’t. Learn what a capacity auction is and whose bill it lands on. Keep the receipts.
Because they are counting on the fact that you won’t.
Every source link for every story above is posted on the District 13 Raven page. Go read the originals. Don’t take the word of a bird with a deadline and a grudge.
Twelve counties, every day, no appointment necessary.
— Silas Corvin
ADD TO 22JUL26 — SET AS POSTSCRIPT, RUN AFTER THE SIGN-OFF
Ray — hold the page. One more.
I was reading the actual text while you were laying this out, which I grant you is backwards, and I found something.
The bill stops them from buying.
That’s the word. Purchase. Members, spouses, dependent children — barred from purchasing. And before a sale, they file notice a week or two ahead.
Buying. Selling. That’s the whole list.
Nobody wrote a word about shorting.
Now, for anybody who’s never had cause to learn this: you don’t have to own a thing to make money on it. You can bet against it. You borrow shares you don’t have, sell them high, and buy them back cheap after the floor falls out. Buy a put and you’re doing the same in different clothes. And you never made a purchase of anything the way this bill defines one.
Here’s why that matters more than the rest of it put together.
The surest money in this world isn’t guessing what goes up. It’s knowing what’s about to go down. And a member of Congress doesn’t have to guess, because Congress is the thing that makes it go down. A subcommittee marks up a bill on a Tuesday and by Friday an industry has lost a third of its value. A rule gets rewritten in a room with no cameras and a company’s stock opens forty points lighter.
Ask how a congressman would know a law is about to gut a sector.
He’d know because he’s writing it.
That’s not a loophole they missed, Ray. Loopholes get missed by accident. This one is the shape of the door.
They banned the slow way to get rich and left the fast one alone, and then they named the bill after the thing it doesn’t do.
Run it. — S.C.
