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For Immediate Release
September, 06 2017, 11:45am EDT
Contact:
Scott McLarty, Media Director, 202-904-7614, scott@gp.org
Green Party To "Draft Bernie" Organizers Hoping To Launch A New Party: Go Green
"Why reinvent the wheel? Come home to the Green Party" say Greens as the People's Convergence conference begins in Washington, D.C.
WASHINGTON
Green Party leaders are challenging organizers and voters convening in Washington, D.C., to discuss founding a new progressive party centered around Bernie Sanders to recognize that such a party already exists and to "Go Green."
The "People's Convergence" is meeting from September 8 through 10 at American University and will present a "Draft Bernie" petition to Sen. Bernie Sanders that asks him to lead a new People's Party.
"The Draft Bernie movement is right when they say that the two ruling parties have failed the American people and that 'We the People' need an alternative party. The new party must be committed to social and economic justice, peace, and the health of our planet. It must be a working people's party that rejects corporate money and influence. Greens have already established that party," said Darryl! L.C. Moch, co-chair of the Green Party of the United States.
"We invite the People's Convergence to come home to the Green Party," said Mr. Moch.
Greens plan to attend the People's Convergence and let participants know that the Green Party has FEC recognition, ballot status in most states, a grassroots base of voters and elected officials, and a strong platform.
"48,000 signatures on the Draft Bernie petition is a great display of support. Greens gathered far more and got them notarized for ballot access in 2016. Illinois Greens collected 53,000 signatures on paper petitions within 90 days. 110,000 people signed Jill Stein's online petition for Open Debates," said Michael Dennis, co-chair of the Green Party. Dr. Stein was the Green nominee in 2016.
"Bernie has said he's unwilling to be a 'spoiler'. Deadlines are approaching for ballot status in 2018, which is essential for preparing a party for participation in the 2020 national election. Saddled with these challenges -- and with a prospective candidate who'd probably withdraw rather than interfere with the next Democratic nominee's ability to win the White House -- it might be too late for a new People's Party to compete effectively in 2020," said Mr. Dennis.
Greens urged the People's Convergence to consider the following three points:
(1) Bernie Sanders isn't interested. He has said so repeatedly.
Mr. Sanders has ignored attempts by the Green Party to communicate with him over the years, including inquiries about his interest in running for president as a Green. His continuing rebuff of both the Green Party and the Draft Bernie movement indicate that he has no interest in overturning the two-party status quo.
If Mr. Sanders changes his mind in 2018 or 2019, it'll be too late for the Draft Bernie timeline's plan for a campaign with 50-state ballot access.
(2) Why reinvent the wheel? The Green Party already exists, has a strong progressive platform and FEC recognition, has experience and expertise in party organizing, and is established in most states. Greens have won hundreds of local elected races and hold "campaign schools" to help Green candidates win elections.
"It takes years to win ballot access across the country and it's equally difficult to maintain ballot status in many states. Greens have already accomplished the hard groundwork. It's naive to believe that a new party will avoid the internal and external obstacles, including the inevitable controversies and temporary setbacks that are part of organizing, that the Green Party has already weathered," said Jody Grage, secretary of the Green Party and co-chair of the party's Ballot Access Committee.
(3) New parties centered around a single national figure are short-lived, as the history of third parties from Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party to H. Ross Perot's Reform Party has shown.
"You don't sustain a national party on charismatic leaders who run for the White House," said Adrian Boutureira, who serves as national political organizer for the Green Party. "You build a party's foundation at the grassroots level, with state and local parties that run candidates for state and local office and with local political activism. Presidential campaigns are a necessary part of that effort, but any party that makes involvement in the presidential election spectacle the measure of its success is doomed to fail."
The Green Party's presidential candidates help state Green Parties achieve and maintain ballot access, which is necessary for down-ticket candidates to compete with Democrats and Republicans. Some states require national candidates on the ballot for a party to be recognized. Green presidential candidates also promote Green ideas and solutions in front of a national audience.
Greens have won races for local office even when Green presidential contenders have drawn very small percentages on Election Day, assuring permanence for the party as it grows nationally. At least 136 Greens currently hold elected office in 18 states. In 2016, Jill Stein and running mate Ajamu Baraka were on the ballot in 45 states, with three more states giving them write-in status.
"A new party's presidential candidate will face all the same barriers that our Green nominees have dealt with, beginning with ballot access laws designed by Democratic and Republican state legislators to hinder alternative parties. The Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the two major parties, will bar Bernie Sanders from the post-convention debates," said Green Party co-chair Gloria Mattera.
"If he runs a well-organized campaign, Bernie will face the Democrats' penchant for smearing anyone who doesn't back their frontrunner. Jill Stein has been the target of evidence-free McCarthyite allegations by some Dems who want to link her campaign with Vladimir Putin. Bernie himself came under fire merely for competing with Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic nomination -- which turned out to be rigged against him by the DNC," said Ms. Mattera.
"Here in Colorado, many former Sanders supporters are now enthusiastically involved in our state Green Party, holding leadership roles and building locals. They've moved beyond the need to draft Bernie," said Andrea Merida Cuellar, co-chair of the Green Party of Colorado and co-chair of the national party.
Greens are also wondering how a new Sanders-based party would handle their leader's retreats from progressivism, especially on foreign policy and military spending. Mr. Sanders has faced criticism recently for incorporating copays into his Single-Payer national health care legislation.
See also:
"Thoughts on why a stand-alone DraftBernie strategy doesn't make sense even if one really did want to DraftBernie"
Michael Dennis, Green Party steering committee member
The People's Convergence Conference
Green Party: Hurricane Harvey is the latest alarm bell on climate change
Press release: Green Party of the United States, August 31, 2017
Videos from the Green Party's 2017 Annual National Meeting in Newark, N.J., July 13-16:
Press conferences, plenary speeches, and more
The Green Party of the United States is a grassroots national party. We're the party for "We The People," the health of our planet, and future generations instead of the One Percent.
(202) 319-7191LATEST NEWS
Progressives, Democrats Vow Fight as Senate GOP Aims to Claw Back Billions in Federal Funding
Republicans plan to utilize a rare process called "rescission" to skirt Congress' power of the purse and illegally allow Trump to withhold hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding to critical programs.
Jul 10, 2025
The U.S. Senate will soon vote on whether President Donald Trump can claw back billions of dollars that have already been appropriated by Congress.
Last month, the House narrowly voted to allow Trump to rescind $9.4 billion in funds that were meant to fund global health initiatives—including AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis prevention—and public broadcasters like PBS and NPR.
It's far from the first time that this Republican-controlled Congress has voted on massive budget cuts, but progressive groups and some Democratic lawmakers say this vote has another frightening dimension to it.
These funds were among the more than $420 billion appropriated by Congress that Trump illegally impounded, or refused to spend, at the start of his term.
In a letter sent Wednesday to members of Congress, a coalition of more than 100 groups—including Public Citizen, the AFL-CIO, and Greenpeace—warned that by voting to approve these rescissions of federal funds, they would be giving Trump tacit approval to unconstitutionally take away Congress' authority to spend money.
"This rescissions proposal does not ask Congress, as required by the Impoundment Control Act, to approve the entirety of the federal spending that has been illegally frozen by the Trump administration," the letter notes. "The administration is merely trying to establish a veil of legitimacy while it continues unconstitutional actions that it began more than 100 days ago."
The groups went on to warn that allowing the president to unilaterally cut funding that he doesn't approve of "risks irreparable damage to the regular bipartisan appropriations process."
"Despite the political back-and-forth, Congress eventually reaches a bipartisan agreement on government funding every year, one way or another," they said. "The basis for that bipartisan agreement is that both parties must agree to compromises to achieve any of their goals. If a party with a political trifecta can simply rescind funding for the parts of appropriations bills they compromised on, they undermine congressional checks and balances and the basis for future bipartisan dealmaking on an already politically fraught process."
Under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, presidents are forbidden from unilaterally refusing to spend funds. However, Congress is allowed to pass a "rescission" bill within 45 days of canceling them if the president requests it.
Trump would be the first president since Bill Clinton in 1999 to successfully have funds rescinded by Congress, and it would be the largest rescission in four decades.
But as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities points out, there is a key difference: "The administration illegally impounded the funds at issue for months before proposing the [rescission] package" and that it is "unlawfully withholding much larger amounts of funding that it has not proposed for rescission."
According to a tracker created by the office of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who sit on the House and Senate appropriations committees, respectively, the Trump administration is blocking congressionally appropriated funds for programs including:
- Research into Alzheimer's disease, women's health, cancer, diabetes, and other illnesses;
- Natural disaster relief;
- School lunch assistance for children;
- Early childhood education through the Head Start Program; and
- Birth control and cancer screenings for over 800,000 patients
Russell Vought, the head of the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has openly indicated a desire to use rescission to cut all of this spending "without having to get an affirmative vote" from Congress.
According to The New York Times, Vought is planning to use an even more arcane and illegal maneuver known as "pocket rescission" to avoid spending the funds. As Tony Romm reported in June:
Under the emerging plan, the Trump administration would wait until closer to Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, to formally ask lawmakers to claw back a set of funds it has targeted for cuts. Even if Congress fails to vote on the request, the president’s timing would trigger a law that freezes the money until it ultimately expires.
Some Senate Democrats have indicated they'd be willing to risk a government shutdown to prevent the rescission bill from passing.
In a letter published Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote that the prospect of the rescissions bill passing had "grave implications."
"[I]t is absurd for [Republicans] to expect Democrats to act as business as usual and engage in a bipartisan appropriations process to fund the government, while they concurrently plot to pass a purely partisan rescissions bill to defund those same programs negotiated on a bipartisan basis behind the scenes," Schumer wrote.
Murray called out Vought directly on Wednesday at a markup session on the next round of bills in the Senate Appropriations Committee.
"For us to be able to work in a bipartisan way effectively, that requires us to work with each other. To not just write bipartisan funding bills—but to defend them from partisan cuts sought by the president and the OMB director," she said during her opening remarks. "We cannot allow bipartisan funding bills with partisan rescission packages. It will not work."
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Brazilians Rally Around Lula After Trump Tariff Threat
"True Brazlians... do not let yourselves be the dogs of an American president who shames the ideas of democracy," wrote the editors of a major Brazilian newspaper.
Jul 10, 2025
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva may have gotten a political boost thanks to the intervention of U.S. President Donald Trump.
On Wednesday, Trump announced he was slapping all Brazilian imports with a 50% tariff to protest the criminal trial of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a longtime Trump ally who was indicted on charges related to an alleged coup plot to illegally remain in power after he lost the 2022 general election.
However, it does not appear that Trump's intervention into Brazil's domestic politics is helping Bolsonaro in the court of public opinion and Brazilian publication Globo reports that Brazilians have been swarming the U.S. president's Instagram account and leaving messages telling him to "leave Brazil in peace" while insisting their country is "not a lawless land."
In an analysis piece published by the São Paulo-based Folha, journalist Igor Gielow declared that Bolsonaro was an "immediate loser" of Trump's decision, as in the past he has declared Trump to be his political idol and the two are generally seen as joined at the hip. What's more, Gielow argues that the Trump tariffs are most likely to hurt Brazil's agribusiness sector, which is where the core of Bolsonaro's political support lies.
Lorrena Rodrigues, a columnist at the more conservative newspaper Estadão, argued that Trump had given a "gift" to Lula by giving his party the opportunity to focus public attention away from domestic problems and "to exploit a patriotism that used to be the monopoly" of the country's right-wing opposition party.
Rodrigues also said that Trump's tariffs against Brazil had no economic justification given that the United States runs a trade surplus with the country, which makes it seem as though Trump "wants to interfere in the internal politics and the justice system of Brazil through international commerce," which is not something likely to be popular in the country.
A leading editorial published in Estadão delivered even harsher criticism of the American president, whom it likened to a member of the mafia.
"Trump is using the threat of import tariffs on Brazil to obligate the country to surrender to his absurd demands," wrote the editors, who further said that Trump "lied shamelessly in his letter to justify the drastic measure" he imposed on Brazil. The editorial concluded by imploring "true Brazilians" to "not let yourselves be the dogs of an American president who shames the ideas of democracy."
Globo also reports that members of the conservative opposition party held an emergency meeting to discuss how to respond politically to Trump's tariffs. One unnamed Senate leader who spoke with the publication described Trump's surprise announcement as "a shot in the foot."
"Who's going to be in favor of this?" the Senate leader wondered. "Who's going to go against their own country?"
Brazilians have for decades been suspicious of the United States' intentions toward their national sovereignty since the U.S. backed a military coup in 1964 that ousted its democratically elected left-wing government and replaced it with a dictatorship that lasted for more than two decades.
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Trump Admin Kicks Undocumented Kids Out of Head Start, Community Health Programs
"Head Start programs strive to make every child feel welcome, safe, and supported, and reject the characterization of any child as 'illegal,'" said one critic of the move.
Jul 10, 2025
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday that undocumented immigrant children will no longer qualify for Head Start and other federally funded programs that the Trump administration argues are meant to serve American citizens.
HHS formally rescinded a 1998 interpretation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), the cornerstone of congressional Republicans' so-called "Contract With America" and the fulfillment of then-Democratic President Bill Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we know it."
That long-standing interpretation, HHS said, "improperly extended certain federal public benefits to illegal aliens," thus "undercutting the law by allowing illegal aliens to access programs Congress intended only for the American people."
"For too long, the government has diverted hardworking Americans' tax dollars to incentivize illegal immigration," HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in statement. "Today's action changes that—it restores integrity to federal social programs, enforces the rule of law, and protects vital resources for the American people."
The HHS rule change follows a February executive order from President Donald Trump ordering federal agencies to increase restrictions on undocumented immigrants' access to taxpayer-funded services.
In addition to Head Start—the federally funded preschool program that Trump unsuccessfully sought to eliminate from the budget reconciliation legislation he recently signed—the new HHS interpretation applies to all programs classified as "federal public benefits" under PRWORA. These include health clinics, mental health services block grants, homelessness transition block grants, substance abuse treatment, and other programs.
Critics condemned the HHS move.
"Head Start programs strive to make every child feel welcome, safe, and supported, and reject the characterization of any child as 'illegal,'" said Yasmina Vinci, executive director of the advocacy group National Head Start Association.
"The Head Start Act has never required documentation of immigration status as a condition for enrollment over the last 60 years," Vinci added. "Attempts to impose such a requirement threaten to create fear and confusion among all families who are focused on raising healthy children, ready to succeed in school and life."
The HHS policy change is part of the Trump administration's wider anti-immigrant agenda. The president has launched a mass deportation drive, opened the "Alligator Alcatraz" concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, stripped temporary protected status from numerous nationalities, pushed to end birthright citizenship, and arrested and jailed green-card holders for peacefully protesting genocide—among other xenophobic and racist policies and practices.
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