F#!k You for Your Service: The Ballcap Caucus

One senator. One objection. 54,000 combat-wounded veterans denied a floor vote. This is the documented record.

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THE GIST

• Five members of Congress wear veterans as a costume. Ballcaps at VFW halls. Flight jackets at air bases. Floor speeches soaked in sacrifice. Their voting records tell a different story.

• Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) cosponsored the Major Richard Star Act in 2021 — publicly, in a Memorial Day column. In October 2025, as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he single-handedly killed it on the Senate floor.

• He blocked it twice in one day. First the bill. Then a guaranteed single vote.

• Three months before the block, he voted to strip funding protections for the PACT Act he’d reluctantly voted for in 2022.

• His office later acknowledged “inequities” the bill was designed to fix. Tonya Star, widow of the veteran the bill was named after, died in 2024 — in tears, Blumenthal told the Senate, because another Congress …