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Posted on 03/17/2026 7:21:37 AM PDT by Twotone
The SAVE America Act, if passed, will require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. That seems like common sense. Not only because it is, but because it’s common.
Pew Research Center found 83% of Americans support it. Gallup found 84—including 98% of Republicans, 84% of independents, and 67% of Democrats. The House passed it. By any measure, it is one of the most broadly popular pieces of legislation in recent memory.
But in late February 2026, a reporter for Punchbowl News named Andrew Desiderio published a piece declaring the bill had “almost no chance of becoming law.” His source was Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the one man in Washington who decides what reaches the Senate floor and what disappears. Two weeks later, Desiderio posted on social media that Sen. Mike Lee and other conservatives had “primed the GOP base to believe” a procedural path existed. Thune, by contrast, had “declared” there was no viable way forward. Thune had “enough.” The bill, this framing made clear, was finished.
That’s the visible story. Let me tell you about the reality behind it—it will blow your mind and make you sick.
Punchbowl News launched on January 3, 2021, founded by three reporters who had all come from Politico’s Playbook franchise: Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer, and John Bresnahan. They named it after the Secret Service code name for the Capitol. Their pitch to Washington went like so: Punchbowl would become the most essential newsletter for the people who actually run the place.
They’ll tell you they have 240,000 subscribers—every congressional office, nine out of ten Hill staffers, every Fortune 100 company. That number is real. But it hides something, as these stories usually do—the actual paying audience is around only 7,500 people. The premium subscription—the one that delivers the Midday and PM newsletters, the real-time legislative intelligence—reaches 7,500 insiders. That’s it. Everyone else gets the free morning edition.
If journalism were the business, readers would be the customers. But co-founder Jake Sherman went on The Rebooting Show podcast in January 2022 and said nearly 90% of Punchbowl’s $10 million in first-year revenue came from corporate sponsorships, not subscriptions. The 7,500 paying subscribers, at roughly $300 a year, account for at most $2 million of that. The rest are corporations.
Put plainly, the 7,500 insiders are not the customers; they’re the bait.
The real customers are corporations paying to put their name in front of those 7,500 people—a room Punchbowl describes as "lobbyists, policy and private sector professionals," 100 percent of Senate and House offices, and nine out of ten Hill staffers. The room where your laws get made. Their sales deck lays out exactly what access costs—$225,000 for one week of the AM newsletter, $205,000 a week for a six-to-eight-week commitment, $75,000 to $100,000 a month to sponsor “Fly Out Day”, their weekly video show featuring a sitting lawmaker taped in their Capitol Hill townhouse. A two-lawmaker editorial event runs $380,000. Custom content built around a topic “mutually agreed upon” between the sponsor and Punchbowl runs $300,000.
That last item deserves a moment. “Mutually agreed upon” content between a corporation paying $300,000 and an outlet that covers Congress. Under a congressional press gallery credential—the same credential whose rules explicitly prohibit promotional or lobbying work. The credential also gives Punchbowl something no lobbyist can buy outright—free access to the hallways outside every senator’s office. A K Street lobbyist needs a scheduled appointment to walk those halls. A Punchbowl reporter walks them freely.
Sponsors are buying the room, not merely advertising to it. Now, follow the money into the room.
On September 5, 2025, Punchbowl launched Fly Out Day with Speaker Mike Johnson as its inaugural guest, taped at the Capitol Hill townhouse. The episode was presented by Meta. Six days later, on September 11, Senate Majority Leader John Thune was Episode 2.
Thune is from South Dakota. He won his 2022 reelection with 69.6% of the vote, a margin of more than 43 points. He faces no meaningful political threat. He is not a national celebrity. He is, however, the single most powerful person in Washington for one specific purpose—he controls what comes to the Senate floor. A bill can have 51 co-sponsors and 83% public support and still die without ever getting a vote because the Majority Leader decided the floor was needed elsewhere.
According to OpenSecrets, Thune’s top career contributors through 2024 are dominated by institutions with active interests in federal regulation—Blackstone Group at $121,649, Wells Fargo at $100,295, Goldman Sachs at $95,572, Comcast at $75,750. These are not South Dakota companies. They are Wall Street and Big Finance, sectors that have spent decades lobbying the Senate Finance Committee that Thune now chairs.
Cross-reference that list with Punchbowl’s sponsor history; Goldman Sachs has partnered with Punchbowl since the outlet launched in 2021. The 2026 sales deck dedicates a full case study to the relationship—eight D.C. events, travel events across six states, newsletter sponsorships running from 2023 through 2025. Goldman is Thune’s twelfth-largest career donor and Punchbowl’s longest-tenured financial sector partner. That one overlap is confirmed by the deck. The other names on Thune’s donor list—Blackstone, Comcast, Wells Fargo—are also sponsors of Punchbowl.
The corporations funding Thune’s career overlap Punchbowl’s core sponsor base. Punchbowl’s reporter Andrew Desiderio—credentialed, townhouse-seated, border-traveling, one-year-anniversary-profiling—became Thune’s most consistent media platform at the precise moment Thune became the most important person in the Senate.
When Desiderio published his piece in late February 2026, the key framing was consistent throughout—the SAVE America Act had “captivated Trump’s base but has almost no chance of becoming law.” Sen. Mike Lee, who had been pushing for a talking filibuster to force a vote, had “primed” the base. Thune had “declared” there was no path. The piece closed with the Senate’s direction treated as settled fact, not contested politics.
That framing hit 7,500 Hill staffers, lobbyists, and government affairs directors before 6 AM. Staffers who brief senators every morning read it. Lobbyists advising corporate clients on what’s legislatively “achievable” read it. Legislative directors deciding whether to schedule meetings on a given bill read it. Once Punchbowl’s conventional wisdom says something is dead, the 7,500 people who execute Washington’s daily agenda stop working to keep it alive.
Here is what the whole picture explains. Punchbowl’s pricing is designed specifically to attract corporations with active government affairs operations — you don’t spend $225,000 a week to reach general readers. Those corporations need something from the Senate Majority Leader. He controls their legislative priorities: what comes to the floor, what gets a committee hearing, what gets quietly deferred indefinitely. Punchbowl gives those sponsors proximity to the 7,500 people who shape the Majority Leader’s daily environment. It gives them events where lawmakers appear alongside their brand. It gives them content built around their agreed-upon themes. And it gives the Majority Leader a platform that reaches every relevant person in his professional world — which means every piece of reporting that frames his positioning as pragmatic, his skeptics as base-pandering, lands with maximum amplification across exactly the audience that matters.
Nobody is corrupt. Nobody needs to be. Your senator isn’t taking orders. He’s surrounded by an information environment built and funded by the same institutions that built and funded his career. The conventional wisdom he absorbs every morning was authored by a publication that earns 90% of its revenue from those same institutions. By the time he walks into his first meeting, the Overton window for what’s “realistic” has already been set — by people whose financial interests and editorial interests have been aligned since 2021.
It’s a business model. And a business model is more durable than a conspiracy, because nothing has to go wrong for it to run perfectly.
Between 2021 and 2024, congressional offices paid Punchbowl News over $1.5 million from taxpayer-funded House operating accounts, documented in the House Statement of Disbursements. Your representatives subscribed, with your money, to a publication earning 90% of its revenue from the corporations those representatives vote on.
The journalism is real. The access is genuine. What they sell is the room.
You paid $1.5 million for the subscription. You’re not on the list.
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Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
Thune has accelerated to near the top of my list of people I hate.
Looney Thunes is only the most powerful casper in the ghetto called DC cuz there’s lots of us out here who elected his gang...even though we hold our noses when we do.
He can either get on our side or move home to Norway.
what? can someone with a brain cell intact please explain this
Read the last line of the article. I’ll translate it to George Carlin’s terms for you: it’s a small club and you ain’t in it. Alternatively, you’re on the bus but you aren’t driving or deciding where to go.
....it means Thune, our gay Senate leader works for GoldmanSucks! And he is ChinaMitch’s bitch... ymmv
Is there a short summary?
Beck is saying that if you want access to Senate or House members, if you want them to pass bills that favor your company, you have to go through Punchbowl.
What I don't understand is why Senators or reps would go along with this.
There is so much money being had by so many people they will never get rid of illegal immigration or illegal voting.
Like is always said in politics; follow the money.
Good repeat of all that Data Republican has ALREADY uncovered on all of this Punchbowl nonsense.
We need to start collecting the income data of ALL politicians at all levels and demanding the source of every penny beyond their salary and benefits. This $hi+ has to cease.
There is a way to counter this. Have Trump prosecute Congress by requesting the members of Congress from states that did not return voter rosters when legally requested; making their election returns of 2020 illegal. So stop paying them, eject them from Congress instead.
Interesting details about the GROPElite access to the the “repubbie” Congressional staffs.
But.
Who is paying for the Globalist-Chinese COmmunist-Soros-Islamic control of today’s democrat party-liners controlling the “other half” of Congress and all of their mainstream massed media in ABCNNBCBS?
Jake Sherman, Anna Palmer, and John Bresnahan should be arrested for illegally lobbying congress. They’re going around as reporters, when they are essentially shills for the corporations paying Punchbowl News.
I’ll put this short Bongino vid here since it deals with voter fraud:
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1648007459843707
Really important post.
Thank you.
sounds like trading on insider information to me. Maybe SEC should look into it, though perhaps not on this topic(voterID, unless you’re betting on polymarkets) , I’m sure there are others with a pay to play aspect.
Deep State RINOS on full display for everyone to see...remember who they are on election day in November
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