Lawfare · What Congress can do · September 21, 2026

Six bills. One is
ready for a vote.
Ask for it.

Congress has spent two years debating litigation-funding disclosure and produced exactly one bill that has cleared a committee: the Protecting Our Courts from Foreign Manipulation Act, H.R. 2675, reported 15–11 and sitting on the House Union Calendar since June 15, 2026. It needs floor time. Below: every bill we track, its exact status, the strongest argument against each, and a two-minute script.

Ready for a vote · The tracker · The gaps · The script · For coalition partners

15–11 House Judiciary vote to report H.R. 2675, November 18, 2025 Union Calendar No. 608 Placed June 15, 2026. Awaiting floor scheduling. Ask your Representative →

Ready for a vote

H.R. 2675 — Protecting Our Courts from Foreign Manipulation Act

What it does

Bans sovereign money. Discloses foreign money. Dismisses concealment.

Prohibits foreign states and sovereign wealth funds from funding civil litigation in U.S. courts.
Requires disclosure of any other foreign person or entity with a right to payment contingent on the outcome — to the court, the parties, and the Attorney General.
Sanction: dismissal with prejudice for suits funded in violation.
Sponsor: Rep. Ben Cline (R-VA). Introduced April 7, 2025. Reported by House Judiciary 15–11 on November 18, 2025; H. Rept. 119-700 filed and bill placed on the Union Calendar June 15, 2026.

Congress.gov ↗ · CBO ↗ · Senate companion: Sen. Kennedy, Nov. 2025 ↗

Why this coalition backs it

Because the foreign-forum problem has a domestic mirror.

The due-process case study shows American speech being cited in a foreign proceeding. H.R. 2675 addresses the reverse flow: foreign state money financing American proceedings against American speakers, invisibly.
Since 2024, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund has held a majority stake in one of the largest U.S. litigation funders. Nothing today requires a plaintiff funded through that structure to say so.
It is the narrowest of the six bills, which is why it moved. It does not touch domestic funders, nonprofits, or the ordinary funding market.
The best argument against it: that “foreign” is overbroad and could sweep in allied pension funds or ordinary multinational investors. The bill’s prohibition is limited to states and sovereign funds; the rest is disclosure. We think that line is right.

Restore the First’s position was adopted with the launch of this section, September 21, 2026.

The tracker · every bill, exact status

Where each bill stands, and why it stopped there.

Bill	What it does	Status (Sept. 21, 2026)	Why it stalled / the opposing argument
H.R. 2675 Protecting Our Courts from Foreign Manipulation Act Cline (R-VA) · Apr. 7, 2025	Bans foreign-state/SWF funding; requires disclosure of foreign funders; dismissal with prejudice.	Reported 15–11 · Union Calendar Awaiting floor.	Not stalled — unscheduled. Needs leadership to give it floor time. Congress.gov ↗
H.R. 1109 Litigation Transparency Act of 2025 Issa (R-CA) · Feb. 7, 2025	Disclosure of any third party with a right to payment contingent on outcome, in all federal civil cases.	Marked up Nov. 19, 2025 · not reported	Scope. Applies to every civil case; opposed by funders (ILFA) as exposing litigants’ strategy and by some conservatives as burdening nonprofit plaintiffs. Congress.gov ↗ · ILFA ↗
H.R. 7015 Protecting TPLF From Abuse Act Issa (R-CA) · Jan. 12, 2026	Narrower successor disclosure bill for federal civil cases.	Debated Jan. 13, 2026 · no vote	Reps. Massie (“overly broad … deter investments in legitimate claims”), Roy, and Kiley (“will not have the votes”) objected; markup ended without a vote. Reuters ↗
S. 3826 Litigation Funding Transparency Act of 2026 Grassley (R-IA), Tillis, Kennedy, Cornyn · Feb. 11, 2026	Disclosure of funding agreements in class actions, mass torts, and MDLs; nonprofit carve-out.	In Senate Judiciary	Carve-out added after America First Legal warned disclosure could unmask nonprofit donors. Limited to aggregate litigation, so it would not reach a funded defamation suit against an individual speaker. Congress.gov ↗ · Reuters ↗
S. 1821 Tackling Predatory Litigation Funding Act Tillis (R-NC) · May 20, 2025	Excise tax on funder profits at the top individual rate plus 3.8 points (40.8% today); 50% withholding on payments to funders.	In Senate Finance · stripped from 2025 reconciliation	A revenue measure, not a transparency one. Restore the First takes no position. Congress.gov ↗ · Bill text ↗
H.R. 10174 GRANITE Act Introduced Aug. 27, 2026	Bars U.S. recognition or enforcement of foreign censorship judgments, fines, and orders.	Referred to House Judiciary · 0 cosponsors	New, and unknown. No cosponsors means no hearing. Full treatment on the Foreign Censorship page.
Federal anti-SLAPP Free Speech Protection Act Raskin (D-MD), Kiley (R-CA), Wyden (D-OR) · Dec. 2024 (118th)	Early dismissal, discovery stay, and fee-shifting for suits targeting protected speech in federal court.	Not identified as reintroduced in the 119th	Forty states have anti-SLAPP laws; federal court has none, and the circuits split on whether state laws apply there. Supported in 2024 by ACLU, EFF, CPJ, RCFP, and publishers’ groups. Raskin release ↗ · IFS state count ↗

Also on the books: the SPEECH Act (Pub. L. 111-223, Aug. 10, 2010), which bars enforcement of foreign defamation judgments inconsistent with the First Amendment — the working model for GRANITE. CRS ↗ Outside Congress: the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules’ TPLF Subcommittee (formed Oct. 2024) meets again this fall with a 214-company letter ↗ in front of it.

The gaps no bill fills

Three things a speaker still cannot get, even if every bill above passed.

Gap 1

Disclosure in the case that matters

S. 3826 covers class actions and MDLs. H.R. 2675 covers foreign funders. Neither reaches the most common lawfare case: a single domestic plaintiff, quietly funded, suing a single speaker for defamation in federal court. Only H.R. 1109 did, and it did not move. The fix: disclosure to the court in every civil action, with the judge deciding what the parties see. That answers the funders’ strategy objection and the nonprofits’ donor objection at once.

Gap 2

Notice before coercion, when the predicate is speech

No bill addresses the pattern in the case study: a coercive application — arrest, seizure, restraint — grounded in lawful speech, made without notice to the speaker. Congress cannot legislate for foreign courts. It can direct that U.S. agencies not assist such process where the predicate is speech protected here, and can require the State Department to count and report such requests. Model text is on the First Amendment Remedies Act page.

Gap 3

A courthouse door that opens

Murthy and Finn were not lawfare; they were the absence of a remedy. A speaker who can show a government actor pressured a platform to remove them still may not have standing to say so in court. The JAWBONE Act and a state private right of action are the coalition’s answers. Lawfare reform and jawboning reform are two halves of one project: making the court a place where speech is defended rather than a weapon with which it is attacked.

The script · two minutes

Call your Representative. Ask for a floor vote on H.R. 2675.

Find your Representative: house.gov ↗ · U.S. Capitol switchboard: (202) 224-3121

“Hi, my name is ____ and I’m a constituent in ____. I’m calling to ask the Representative to urge leadership to schedule a floor vote on H.R. 2675, the Protecting Our Courts from Foreign Manipulation Act.

It was reported out of the Judiciary Committee 15 to 11 last November and has been on the Union Calendar since June. It bans foreign governments and sovereign wealth funds from secretly financing lawsuits in American courts and requires disclosure of other foreign funders. Right now there is no federal rule requiring anyone to tell a judge who is paying for a lawsuit — including lawsuits against journalists and ordinary Americans over their speech.

I’d also ask the Representative to cosponsor H.R. 10174, the GRANITE Act, which would stop foreign censorship orders from being enforced against Americans here. It has no cosponsors yet.

Can I get the Representative’s position on both? Thank you.”

If they ask “why now?”

“Because on September 14, more than 200 American companies asked the federal rules committee for funder disclosure, and the committee has been studying it since 2014. Congress can act faster than the rules process, and this bill is already on the calendar.”

For coalition partners

Three things an organization can do this month.

Endorse the five asks.

Sunlight, sovereignty, speed, notice, shield. The five-ask statement is written to be signed by organizations that disagree about everything else. Use the endorsement kit; we will list you.

Endorsement kit →

Send us a case.

If your organization or a member has been sued, investigated, or made the subject of a coercive application over speech, and you can document it, the docket is open. The intake is end-to-end encrypted.

Secure intake →

Republish this section.

Every page here is written to be excerpted. Attribution and the source links are all we ask. Share cards and the illustration set are in the press kit.

Press kit →

Accuracy

Bill statuses are from Congress.gov and the linked reporting as of September 21, 2026, and will change. Cosponsor counts are not shown for most bills because they move weekly; check the Congress.gov link. Positions attributed to Members are quoted from the linked Reuters and IPWatchdog reports of the January 13, 2026 markup. Nothing here is legal advice. This page tells you what the bills do and how to reach the people who vote on them.