Ben Cline

The Beth Macy congressional campaign is telling us that MAGA Congressman Ben Cline apparently decided to spend the weekend in Napa Valley, which is in California, and the tony part at that, “dining with lobbyists from Google and Nvidia at an $800-a-night winery resort.”

Gotta say, I think Macy, who spent the day on Saturday campaigning literally from tip to tip in the expansive Sixth District, Front Royal to Roanoke, 173 miles one-way down I-81, is just being unfair, and borderline mean, to ol’ Bennie on this.

Congress is on another recess; why shouldn’t Ben Cline fly across the country to be wined and dined by the money people, if he wants to?

Is there some law against hanging out with corporate lobbyists at an expensive winery resort in liberal California that I don’t know about?

If Cline actually spent the weekend on the Left Coast with center-left liberals from Silicon Valley, I say, more power to him.

“Congress is on recess, a time when Ben could be talking to his constituents about what he’s going to do to bring down gas prices, end the war in Iran, release the Epstein files, regulate a tech world gone out of control. Instead, he’s on a Cali junket with the people bringing you unregulated data centers and AI. Can you believe it?” Macy said, in a statement from a release issued by her campaign on Sunday.

I mean, OK, she may have a point there.

We can only presume that the Google lobbyists might have wanted to bend Cline’s ear on what it’s doing with the data center that it’s having built in Botetourt County, not far from Cline’s house, actually.

If they didn’t, seriously, they wasted their money.

The junket in question was reportedly organized by House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., with a list of invitees that we’re told also included UnitedHealth Group, CVS Health and Storm Services LLC, which, per reporting from Texas Monthly, got money from the state of Texas to “build and maintain temporary base camps” for Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border surge.

To be fair to the folks at Storm Services LLC, somebody was going to get the big bucks to build those immigrant gulags.

I keep getting emails from people saying we need to try harder to be fair and balanced.

That’s the best I can do.

“Who does Ben Cline keep company with? Is he really against data centers, or does this junket show he’s all about staying in perfect step with Trump’s illegal and immoral actions against Americans?” Macy said.