Medicaid is the new front line of the resistance

Groups are mobilizing to put pressure on vulnerable Republicans

Protesters being wheeled out of House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee kicked off a marathon “markup” session Tuesday afternoon, debating amendments to the section of a Republican budget bill that would slash billions in Medicaid spending.

Those cuts, along with rigid work requirements and changes to the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, would cause upwards of 13.7 million people – 1 in 25 Americans -- to lose their basic health coverage over the next 10 years.

Protests erupted minutes into the hearing. Capitol Police arrested 26 people and removed several protesters in wheelchairs amid chants of “no cuts to Medicaid” and “waste, fraud and abuse my ass,” Politico reported.

Many more protesters lined the hallways in the Rayburn House Office Building.

"People feel very strongly because they know they're losing their healthcare," said Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), the top Democrat on the committee.

Organizations including the ACLU had called on members to “be there in full force.” Julie Farrar, an activist with ADAPT, a disability rights organization, told Politico that members of her group are “fighting literally for our survival right now.”

As of my publication time at noon, the committee hearing was entering its 23rd hour. And not one of the Democratic amendments had been approved.

Targets Acquired

The resistance to the broader Trump agenda continues apace, with many more events planned for the coming weeks, including a massive “No Kings” protest to counter Trump’s planned military parade on June 14.

But for the moment, the focus is on Medicaid – and particularly on pressuring Republicans to vote against the cuts.

If only four out of the 220 Republican House members were to balk on Medicaid cuts, joining the 213 Democrats (there are two vacancies in the House), the measure would fail.

Over 71 million Americans – 1 in 5 – are currently enrolled in Medicaid. The cuts have almost no public support. Republicans are pushing for them simply to help cover the cost of $4.9 trillion in tax breaks.

Moveon, in an email, said its strategy is clear: “Target persuadable Republicans who represent moderate and left-leaning districts. Their constituents depend on these programs. Remember: Many of these cuts would devastate Trump's own supporters, giving us a critical window in which to stop them—but only if we act urgently.”

Moveon distributed a breakdown of constituents in vulnerable districts who are covered by Medicaid or the associated Children's Health Insurance Program:

• Rep. Michael Lawler (NY-17): 189,447 constituents

• Rep. Kenneth Calvert (CA-41): 186,113 constituents

• Rep. Juan Ciscomani (AZ-06): 131,895 constituents

• Rep. Don Bacon (NE-02): 113,416 constituents

• Rep. Jennifer Kiggans (VA-02): 104,225 constituents

• Rep. David Schweikert (AZ-01): 97,979 constituents

The New York Times identified several more vulnerable Republicans, including Representatives Gabe Evans of Colorado, Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, Thomas H. Kean Jr. of New Jersey, Rob Bresnahan Jr. of Pennsylvania, Zach Nunn of Iowa, and Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin.

Pro-Medicaid protests kicked off last week with a 24-hour vigil from mid-day Wednesday to mid-day Thursday on the National Mall. Dozens of speakers, including 15 Democratic members of Congress, shared personal stories about Medicaid, MSNBC reported.

And several Republicans have already been targeted by pro-Medicaid protests.

A “constituent town hall” in Washington, Iowa, last week — in Miller-Meeks’s district — “saw a handful of area activists voice their grievances about federal spending cuts, and encourage attendees to do the same,” the Southeast Iowa Union reported. Organizers gathered handwritten notes to deliver to Miller-Meeks.

LAist reported on three California town halls organized by Fight for Our Health, a coalition of health advocacy groups and unions, targeting Rep. Young Kim in Tustin, Valadao in Bakersfield, and Calvert in Corona.

“Let’s be real. We shouldn’t have to be here tonight,” one attendee at the raucous town hall in Tustin told the crowd. “We should be home, spending time with our loved ones and our families, but we’re here. And we’re here to fight, because when politicians try to take away our healthcare, we don’t have the option to sit back and let it happen.”

A pro-Medicaid rally was held outside California GOP Rep. Vince Fong’s office in Clovis, in the central valley, last week. More than half of Fresno County’s million residents are insured by Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program.

In Washington State, the local Indivisible group is holding a rally at GOP Rep. Dan Newhouse's office in Richland this afternoon.

The Juneau Empire reported on a candlelight vigil in front of the Alaska State Capitol last week.

And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Tuesday urged her social media followers to “🚨HIT THE PHONES TO SAVE MEDICAID - PLEASE AMPLIFY & ACT 🚨”

Standing Up to ICE

Reviewing the first 100 days of resistance, civil rights activist Sherilyn Ifill takes note of how “Ordinary Americans are growing increasingly bold in speaking out, confronting officers, taking videos, and protesting against the violent and frightening arrests and kidnappings by masked ICE agents in cities around the country.”

She writes:

When the Administration took a victory lap by putting out videos showing the inhumane treatment of kidnapped migrants and the breathtakingly dystopian conditions in which they are being held in foreign countries, they didn’t calculate that seeing these exploitative newsreels would activate ordinary, decent Americans to protect their neighbors. But it has.

Now community members are taking their own videos when ICE shows up. Small business and restaurant owners are barring ICE agents from conducting raids in their establishments. Restaurant trade organizations are offering information to owners about their legal rights when faced by ICE. In other words, the Trump Administration’s cruel and lurid videos unwittingly encouraged resistance to ICE raids.

Adrian Carrasquillo, who writes about immigration for the Bulwark, thinks that Trump’s immigration horror stories are finally breaking through to the public thanks to messengers including Joe Rogan and John Oliver.

The biggest news in ICE resistance last week was the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka on Friday after he tried to visit an immigration detention facility in his city that he says lacks the necessary operating licenses.

As New Jersey Advance Media reported, Baraka was allowed beyond the gates of the facility before being asked to leave. Then he was arrested by ICE agents outside the gates and charged with trespassing.

Three members of Congress were also present during the chaotic moments as Baraka was arrested, and briefly tried to protect him.

Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security spokeswoman, told CNN on Saturday that charges against the three lawmakers were “definitely on the table.”

But video compiled by New Jersey Advance Media showed no inappropriate conduct by the members of Congress, who in fact blamed ICE for the escalation. “They made this a violent scene that we were unfortunately all a part of. And it‘s something that should really shock all Americans,” Rep. Rob Menendez of New Jersey told CNN.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, citizens in Worcester, Mass., berated ICE agents and tried to stop them from abducting a local mother. The mother was ultimately taken into custody, while her teenaged daughter was slammed to the ground. The daughter and a local school board candidate were arrested by the local police. Residents captured the scene on video.

Hundreds of protesters in Worcester on Sunday demanded that ICE "stop taking mothers".

One Great Way to Help

Do you live near an ICE detention facility? You very well might.

If so, consider emulating Jeannie Parent, whose volunteer group, KWESI, visits immigrants held in a California detention center,

In an essay for the ACLU, Parent describes how she’s been visiting asylum seekers at the Mesa Verde detention center in Bakersfield ever since it opened in 2015:

Kwesi, the Ghanaian man we decided to name our volunteer group after, was among those detained in Mesa Verde. He had no family anywhere in the United States. Our group began making weekly visits to the center, and over time, began to develop a relationship with Kwesi and those like him. I remember, specifically, Kwesi telling me that because of our visits he felt like he existed. In a moment when no one else in the world knew where he was or that he was being detained, he felt seen.

Since the election, members of the group have started helping immigrants living in their community as well:

We’re a part of a rapid response network that accompanies people who may have check-ins with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or other government appointments that they feel nervous to go to. We also conduct trainings and hand out Know-Your-Rights cards to inform immigrants of their legal protections.

Parent concludes:

I've met so many over the last 10 years who had nothing but hope; no family here, no jobs, no prospects—but they had hope. To me, that hope is an antidote to despair.

Flagging Spirits

As the Guardian reports:

Earlier this year, Utah and Idaho’s Republican-controlled legislatures passed bans on flying the rainbow pride flags and other “unofficial flags” on government property.

Leaders in both states’ capital cities, Salt Lake City and Boise, recently devised an inventive workaround – changing their official flags.

Salt Lake City’s mayor, Erin Mendenhall, proposed the adoption of three new city flags, which were unanimously approved by the city council. All three have the city’s traditional sego lily design, respectively imposed over a pride flag, a trans flag and a Juneteenth commemoration flag.

Boise mayor Lauren McLean issued a proclamation in response, retroactively making the pride flag an official city flag.

The Experts Are Not Impressed

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon asked Harvard University political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of “How Democracies Die”, how they think the resistance is going.

Not great, they said. The professors were fixated on the lackluster opposition to Trump coming from American “civic society,” the phrase scholars use for organizations and prominent people who aren’t in official government roles. Levitsky specifically named JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon as the kind of person who should be consistently criticizing the president but isn’t.

Levitsky and Ziblatt “said sustained opposition by nongovernmental groups has been critical to movements against authoritarian leaders in other countries,” Bacon wrote.

“The first four months, a D-minus response by civil society. Key civil society leaders — CEOs, university presidents, law firms — they acquiesced way too quickly,” Levitsky said. “They’re the ones who should, can and I think will be at the forefront of confronting Trump. … Church leaders, Catholic bishops, where the f--- are they?”

Things are looking up, though, they told Bacon:

They were encouraged by anti-Trump rallies held across the country last month and protests at Tesla dealerships. And they see growing signs of a fighting spirit within civil society, particularly universities starting to organize collectively.

Congressional Pushback?

The Washington Post reports that the Republican-controlled Congress, which had until now consistently failed to defend its institutional prerogatives, is pushing back on Trump’s attempt to install a new leader for the Library of Congress.

Trump last week took the unprecedented and arguably illegal step of firing Carla Hayden, the first woman and first African American to lead the world’s largest library. He then designated Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a white man, as acting librarian.

But congressional leaders said Tuesday that the library’s top career official, Robert R. Newlen, should be considered the library’s acting head instead of Blanche.

“We made it clear that there needs to be a consultation around this,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told the Post.

“It’s the Library of Congress, not the library of the executive branch,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said at a press conference. “The president probably violated the law.”

Lawsuit Watch

• A federal judge in California temporarily blocked the Trump administration's attempt to dismantle the federal government.

• A federal judge in Vermont on Friday ordered the immediate release of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Turkish Tufts University Ph.D. student whose video-recorded abduction drew critical attention to ICE tactics. The government never offered any evidence to support her detention and deportation other than an op-ed she coauthored in her school newspaper that was critical of Israel attack on Gaza.

• A federal judge in Massachusetts on May 7 blocked the imminent removal of Laotian, Vietnamese, and Philippine migrants to Libya.

Les Misérables Are Not Happy With Trump

CNN reports:

When President Donald Trump descends on the Kennedy Performing Arts Center next month for a high-dollar fundraiser and a performance of “Les Misérables,” he won’t be seeing the usual cast performing, sources told CNN.

At least 10 to 12 performers in Les Mis are planning to sit out the show on June 11, the night that Trump attends at the Kennedy Center, the sources said. The cast was given the option to not perform the night Trump will be in the audience, and both major cast members and members of the ensemble are among those sitting out, according to the sources.

Richard Grenell, who Trump appointed as president of the Kennedy Center, told the New York Times there could be consequences. “Any performer who isn’t professional enough to perform for patrons of all backgrounds, regardless of political affiliation, won’t be welcomed,” he said in a statement. “In fact, we think it would be important to out those vapid and intolerant artists to ensure producers know who they shouldn’t hire.”

Odds and Ends

• Newsletter author Brian Beutler wants to see more organized boycotts. He asks: “What if we established a consumer union opposed to fascism, whose purpose was to surface and validate targets through the use of normal watchdog tactics, by mining investigative journalism, and cooperating with worker unions?”

• Common Cause has kicked off its largest-ever mobilization in a non-election year, called “The People’s Promise.” It’s “a declaration from everyday Americans across the country that we will not be governed by greed, chaos, or a handful of unelected billionaires.”

• You only have nine more days to post a comment opposing a proposed federal regulation that would strip many civil servants of their current employment protections, such as they are. The If You Can Keep It blog from Protect Democracy has more here.

• HIAS, a refugee advocacy, is holding a webinar on May 20 about how you can help your local immigrant community. “There are concrete ways to show up, fight back, and make a real difference — especially at the local and state level,” the group says.

• United We Dream is soliciting contributions that will go directly to DACA recipients to pay the increased cost of renewing their status.