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bryan steil
The 'Iron Stache' Is Back: Wisconsin Ironworker Randy Bryce Announces 2026 House Run
"With what Trump and Musk have been doing, it's more important than ever to get union people, working people, into Congress."
May 20, 2025
As congressional Republicans and the administration of President Donald Trump set their sites on slashing vital social services, former union ironworker-turned-progressive Democratic U.S. House candidate Randy Bryce announced Tuesday that he will seek to oust the incumbent Trump ally in 2026 and help save Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.
Bryce—also known as the "Iron Stache" due to his prominent moustache—is a disabled veteran who launched his 2018 campaign with a viral video skewering then-House Speaker Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) attacks on healthcare. Bryce, who raised over $7 million with donations averaging around $25, won the Democratic primary but lost to Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) in the 2018 general election.He aims to face Steil in the next cycle.
"Every great story begins with a spark. Ours began in 2018, when one man stood up to Washington," Bryce said in an ad released Tuesday announcing his new campaign for Wisconsin's 1st Congressional District seat. "Now, as old enemies come out of the shadows, we need him one more time."
"Trump promised to bring manufacturing back," Bryce continued. "Eight years later, we're still waiting. We can't afford to wait any longer—not for jobs, or healthcare, or a damn living wage."
"This isn't about left versus right," he added. "This about the billionaires versus the rest of us, and we've got the numbers!"
As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelreported Tuesday:
At the time, Bryce ran on supporting "Medicare for All" legislation, raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, and boosting unions. He remains a member of the Ironworkers Local 853 and in the years since his first campaign, he said, has served as a union representative, worked with Social Security Works, an advocacy group seeking to expand Social Security, and more recently has helped people with disabilities find work.
Like his ally Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Bryce believes that Democrats lack a coherent vision for defeating Trumpism and the oligarchy that's enriching itself at the expense of working-class Americans.
The solution? "With what Trump and Musk have been doing, it's more important than ever to get union people, working people, into Congress," Bryce toldCapital Times associate editor and Nation national affairs correspondent John Nichols on Tuesday, referring to de facto Department of Government Efficiency chief and world's richest person, Elon Musk.
Working-class Dem Randy Bryce Takes On Trump Ally Bryan Steil For Key Wisconsin House Seat. — Bryce is the union Ironworker whose 2018 challenge to Speaker Paul Ryan went viral and, ultimately, saw Ryan decide to quit. Bryce says he’s running in 2026 to save Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.
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— John Nichols (@nicholsuprising.bsky.social) May 20, 2025 at 8:20 AM
"What Trump's doing, and what Bryan Steil is helping him do, is really scaring people," Bryce told Nichols. "I'm talking to veterans, to people who rely on Medicaid, to families that can't keep up with rising prices, to workers. They're all angry."
"You've got an administration that is strangling the Social Security system, laying off people, cutting services," he added. "The Republicans in Washington are pulling what's left of the rug out from under us. I just think this is a going to be an election where people in the 1st District say, Enough!"
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GOP Trifecta to Feature Legislative Attacks on Voting Rights
"The GOP wants these 'changes' to spread disinformation, justify election denialism, and gain partisan advantage," one lawyer warned.
Dec 26, 2024
A key GOP lawmaker made clear in an interview published Thursday that Republicans plan to push for a pair of their voting-related bills when they take control of both chambers of Congress and the White House next month.
Congressman Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), who campaigned for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), chairs the Committee on House Administration. He shared the GOP's plans for the American Confidence in Elections (ACE) Act and the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act in comments to The Associated Press.
"As we look to the new year with unified Republican government, we have a real opportunity to move these pieces of legislation not only out of committee, but across the House floor and into law," he said. "We need to improve Americans' confidence in elections."
The AP pointed out that "Republicans are likely to face opposition from Democrats and have little wiggle room with their narrow majorities in both the House and Senate. Steil said he expects there will be 'some reforms and tweaks' to the original proposals and hopes Democrats will work with Republicans to refine and ultimately support them."
Steil's ACE Act, which "includes nearly 50 standalone bills sponsored by members of the House Republican Conference," is "the most conservative election integrity bill to be seriously considered in the House in over 20 years," according to his committee.
Dozens of organizations wrote to Steil and Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.), the panel's ranking Democrat, last year that "we believe Congress has an important role to play in safeguarding free and fair elections and ensuring all Americans have the freedom to vote. Rather than furthering this goal, the ACE Act would be a substantial step backwards."
"The act would nationalize harmful and unnecessary restrictions on voting rights and roll back many of Washington, D.C.'s current pro-voter laws," the coalition explained. "Instead of proceeding with this legislation, Congress should take actions that will help voters and promote democracy such as passing legislation that will strengthen protections against discrimination in voting and expand access to the ballot for all communities."
While that bill didn't get a floor vote in the House this session, Rep. Chip Roy's (R-Texas) SAVE Act did—it was passed by the House 221-198 in July. Every Republican present voted for the bill and all but five House Democrats rejected it.
However, Democrats narrowly controlled the Senate, so the SAVE Act—which would require proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in federal elections—never went further in Congress, despite GOP attempts to tie it to government funding.
Morelle suggested to the AP there could be bipartisan support for some voting policies—such as federal funding for election offices, restricting foreign money in U.S. races, and possibly even identification requirements with certain protections for voters—but he also called out Republicans for spreading conspiracy theories about widespread voting by noncitizens in November.
"You haven't heard a word about this since Election Day," he noted. "It's an Election Day miracle that suddenly the thing that they had spent an inordinate amount of time describing as a rampant problem, epidemic problem, didn't exist at all."
Speaking broadly about voting bills, Morelle told the AP that "our view and the Republicans' view is very different on this point."
"They have spent most of the time in the last two years and beyond really restricting the rights of people to get to ballots—and that's at the state level and the federal level," he added. "And the SAVE Act and the ACE Act both do that—make it harder for people to vote."
Responding to the reporting on social media Thursday, lawyer and Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias said that "Trump is an autocrat. The GOP wants these 'changes' to spread disinformation, justify election denialism, and gain partisan advantage."
"Democrats need to oppose this effort," he warned. "If the GOP enacts new voter suppression laws, I can promise we will sue and win."
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Voting Rights Groups Raise Alarm About House GOP Introducing 'Big Lie Bill'
One critic warned the legislation would "increase the influence of billionaires, corporations, and secret money in our elections while putting up barriers for eligible voters to vote."
Jul 10, 2023
Voting rights advocates across the United States on Monday responded with alarm to Republicans introducing what its backers called "the most conservative election integrity bill to be seriously considered" in the U.S. House of Representatives in decades.
Dubbed the "Big Lie Bill" by critics, the American Confidence in Elections (ACE) Act is spearheaded by Committee on House Administration Chair Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) and includes nearly 50 standalone bills from the chamber's GOP members.
The Declaration for American Democracy (DFAD), a coalition of over 260 groups, said in a statement it was "deeply concerned" about the bill, warning that "the benign-sounding name of this legislation cloaks an extremist, anti-voter effort to increase the role of megadonors in our elections and encourage deliberate barriers to make it harder for eligible voters to cast their ballot."
"This bill would amplify the influence of corporations and billionaires by raising contribution limits and reducing reporting and transparency requirements, opening the floodgates to even more secret money in our elections," DFAD said. "Increasing the role of big money donors in our politics prevents Congress from taking action on the issues that matter most to Americans, such as healthcare, reproductive rights, gun safety, and the environment."
"The ACE Act would disenfranchise millions of voters by encouraging restrictive anti-voter policies that have a disproportionate impact on Black, Indigenous, young, and new American voters," the coalition continued, stressing that widespread U.S. voter fraud doesn't exist. "The bill would be a huge federal government overstep into the governance of Washington D.C., overturning laws that have been enacted to expand and strengthen democracy in the district."
The leftist think tank Dēmos tweeted that "the anti-voter ACE Act is an extremist power grab that would overturn laws that strengthen democracy in D.C. and open the floodgates to secret money. District residents deserve self-determination. The only people cheering this bill are billionaires and corporations."
Fellow coalition members—including Indivisible, NextGen America, and Public Citizen—and other critics also took aim at the GOP bill.
Steil introduced the bill during a field hearing for the committee he leads in Atlanta. During that event and in an opinion piece for the Washington Examiner, the panel chair heralded the Georgia GOP's Senate Bill 202—a sweeping measure passed in 2021 that led to a "staggering" increase in voter suppression, according to a Mother Jones analysis.
"Many of the bill's requirements would replicate Georgia's laws, which already ban outside election funding, require voter ID, and prohibit noncitizen voting," The Atlanta Journal-Constitutionreported Monday, noting that the state's Republicans enacted S.B. 202 in response to right-wing complaints about former President Donald Trump's loss in 2020.
The federal proposal comes as the twice-impeached, twice-indicted former president leads the crowded field of candidates for the GOP's 2024 presidential nomination—despite arguments that Trump's "Bie Lie" that the 2020 election was stolen from him incited the January 6, 2021 insurrection, so under the 14th Amendment, he is barred from holding public office again.
The Republican nominee is widely expected to face President Joe Biden, who is seeking reelection. The AJC pointed out that "the bill's rollout in Georgia, a swing state that... Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020, creates a contrast between the two political parties ahead of another presidential election year."
When Democrats narrowly controlled both chambers of Congress early last year, right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) joined with then-Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.)—who has since become an Independent—to help the GOP block the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, a package designed to boost federal protections, limit dark money in politics, and restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Now, the Republicans have a divided majority in the House, while Democrats still have a slim advantage in the Senate, making it highly unlikely that any election-related legislation will make it to Biden's desk for the rest of this congressional session. Still, opponents of the ACE Act urged federal lawmakers to come out against it.
"Congress must reject these efforts to disenfranchise voters and worsen the problem of big money in politics," DFAD said. "To truly increase confidence in our elections, Congress should pass popular, common-sense reforms like those in the Freedom to Vote Act in order to reduce the influence of big money out of politics, ensure our freedom to vote, and guarantee that congressional districts are drawn to give fair representation for all."
"No matter our color, party, or ZIP code," the coalition added, "we all deserve to live in a democracy that represents, reflects, and responds to all of us."
Some Democrats in Congress are speaking out, including U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, who represents Georgia's 5th District, which includes much of Atlanta.
"Extreme MAGA Republicans are at it again: this time attempting to obstruct voting rights to appease extremist election deniers," she tweeted. "S.B. 202 led to the biggest racial turnout gap in decades and they want to Copy+Paste at the federal level."
Democratic members of the Committee on House Administration declared Monday that "today's hearing is an attempt to appease election deniers."
"President Biden won the 2020 election. The election was secure. The results were accurate. It is undisputable," the panel's Democrats added. "No anti-voting, pro-corruption, #BigLieBill can change that."
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