First 100 Hours:
● Repeal Trump and Republicans’ health care cuts: Reverse H.R. 1’s Medicaid cuts and coverage restrictions and permanently restore enhanced ACA premium tax credits to prevent millions from losing coverage or facing higher premiums.
● Restore reproductive freedom nationwide: Reestablish a federal right to abortion care and end restrictions that prevent people covered through federal health programs from receiving abortion coverage.
● Keep medical debt from destroying Americans’ financial futures: Restore protections to keep medical debt off credit reports so getting sick does not prevent Americans from buying a home, financing a car, or accessing credit.
● Put science back in charge of public health and medical research: Protect vaccine recommendations from political interference, restore unlawfully withheld NIH funding, safeguard active research grants, and prevent political appointees from overriding scientific funding decisions.
● Protect free vaccines from political interference: Guarantee continued no-cost coverage of recommended vaccines across private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and the Vaccines for Children program so changes to federal vaccine recommendations cannot suddenly put preventive care out of reach.
● Restore basic protections for health care workers: Reinstate minimum wage and overtime protections for home care workers, reverse H.R. 1 policies that make health professions education less affordable, and remove Trump’s $100,000 H-1B program fee for physicians and other health care workers.
● Protect the immigrant health care workers America depends on: Pass the American Dream and Promise Act to provide permanent protections and a pathway to citizenship for TPS holders and Dreamers, preventing the loss of thousands of health care and care workers who are essential to hospitals, nursing homes, and patients.
● Stop Trump’s attacks on safety-net hospitals and community health centers: Block the Administration’s 340B rebate model from forcing cash-strapped providers to front millions of dollars for discounted medicines they already rely on to serve vulnerable patients.
● Keep private companies and AI from denying care in Traditional Medicare: End the WISeR prior authorization experiment that gives for-profit companies a financial incentive to restrict Traditional Medicare patients’ access to care.
● Protect seniors from another Medicare premium hike: Preserve the Part D Premium Stabilization program so the Administration cannot abruptly end assistance that has helped hold down prescription drug premiums. 3
● Keep ICE out of hospitals and protect immigrants seeking care: Restore and formally codify policies protecting health care facilities and other sensitive locations from immigration enforcement operations and prevent public charge policies from forcing immigrant and mixed status families to choose between getting health care and pursuing immigration relief.
Why this got no publicity is beyond me, other than the fact it’s 84 pages long and nobody reads that much.
It’s not alone. The House set up nine Working Groups each with multiple task forces to lay out this kind of message, a sort of Project 2027 for Congress.
The NDC is a liberal group of more than 100 Dems in the House. The addition of AOC as a co-lead to this task force is a sign that the centrists aren’t going to ignore the progressives, or else a signal that the progressives are going to muscle their way in regardless.
Getting any of these past Trump will be problematic, but most of them will have majority public support.
It’s great to see they’ve done their homework and have come up with specific, popular legislation that they can pass. Of course, in all likelihood the only actual positive result will be that Trump will veto them and his approval ratings will sink even lower than they already are, possibly attaining late-stage GWB numbers. But Trump is already so unpopular I feel like we’re getting diminishing returns there.
I don’t think anyone thinks he isn’t a hard worker. The concern is that he is not going to do enough to combat corruption and hold criminals accountable. I don’t see anything there to assuage those concerns.
Even if it is just healthcare, how are you not looking at the corruption and ineptness of Robert Kennedy? How are you not investigating how measles is a thing again? I don’t think anything on this list is bad but you also can’t ignore the corrupt people in charge if you want to fix problems. Maybe it will come but as a Jeffries skeptic this list doesn’t make me feel better.
Look, I’ve been a Jeffries doubter, but this is a separate thing - this is building out working groups to address topics that don’t have underlying processes in place. Corruption, on the other hand, has the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, and Raskin is already on the record (last night on TV, specifically) saying they’re planning investigations.
They can impeach and convict cabinet members. Even the Republicans know that, since Thomas Massie is planning on introducing articles of impeachment on Hegseth as soon as the House reconvenes.
Not without 67 votes, and the Dems only have 54, maybe 56. Hegseth may be so unpopular they could get 11-13 crossovers, but they would all mark themselves down for revenge.
Technically, they have already been introduced in the current House, and must be voted on by the new House within 48 hours of convening. Interestingly, I just learned that Hegseth being fired or resigning would NOT automatically stop the impeachment process. They could still hold a trial and enter evidence into the record, because they want to make him ineligible to ever hold office again, which can only be done through impeachment. Of course, we’re not actually too worried that this clown will ever be appointed to anything in the future, but it’s handy that we can keep him squirming in the spotlight for as long as we want.
The problem is that Thomas Massie is only one Republican, and he’s soon to be out of a job. And while I can maybe see a few more Republicans willing to buck the emperor after Tuesday night’s drubbing, MAGA retains a stranglehold on the GOP, and let’s face it, few Senate Republicans have proven themselves to be profiles in courage lately.
The numbers problem is real, but possibly not a showstopper.
Trump is already rumored to be dumping Hegseth as the scapegoat for what Trump did. Kennedy has angered the MAHA base and it’s been revealed that inspectors have done only 5% of required inspections resulting in enormous headlines about sicknesses and recalls.
Impeachment just takes a majority so those are inevitable. The hearings in the Senate will be controlled by Democrats. Trump is notorious for backing people just to spite naysayers. Nevertheless, there will be tremendous pressure both on him to clean house and on the worst of the worst to resign. Two years is about as long as any cabinet member stays under Trump anyway. Limited and targeted spotlights on people who are responsible for exactly what people are most angry about should be effective even without flipping Senate Republicans, who will be working behind the scenes to shorten the public agony.
There is also the chance that Trump starts throwing people under the bus too giving Republicans cover to vote for impeachment. He might be happy to blame others for his unpopularity. It is hard to say what will happen, but I feel pretty confident that if Democrats refuse to use the power they are given that they won’t have that power for long.
It’s difficult to keep coming up with fresh-sounding praise for Dear Leader. At some point, invention flags.
As far as Hakeem Jeffries and his possible Speakership are concerned: he’s never thrilled me, but as long as he’s willing to move along the agenda: anti-corruption AND anti-tariffs AND anti-monopolies AND anti-Russian aggression AND anti-Iran-Adventure AND anti-ICE-brutality…
…As long as he’s firing on all those cylinders, I can live with him being Speaker. If he pulls a Merrick Garland, of course, I’ll change my view.
Trump has already floated pre-emptively pardoning them in just the last week. Never say never with Trump, who is more erratic than a starving weasel on crack. But I suspect Musk’s wealth and resources are an effective deterrent to Trump turning on him again, unless Musk has a ketamine fever-dream and gets uppity with Trump again like he did once for half-a-second.
Hegseth, though? As noted, he’s about at his sell-by date anyway. He may end up under the bus sooner rather than later. But again it’s Trump, so who the fucks knows?
Fauci had a full pardon from Biden and that didn’t stop the Republicans from staging a farcocal theatrical performance to demean him as much as possible and to hope that he would say something that would constitute lying under oath, a new crime.
I don’t advocate for Democrats sinking to those depths (although it would be fun to watch Musk try to maintain the equanimity of Fauci), but a mere pardon is irrelevant to most congressional investigations. Getting the truth into the record is.