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congressional progressive caucus
'This Fight Is Not Over': Progressives Launch Last-Ditch Push Against GOP Budget Monstrosity
"This country deserves better than this dumpster fire of greed, cruelty, and cowardice."
Jul 02, 2025
Progressives within and outside of Congress are mobilizing and working to rally public opposition on Wednesday as House Republicans moved to put the final stamp of approval on a budget package that includes unprecedented cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance—alongside trillions of dollars in tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
"This fight isn't over, and we're not backing down," Andrew O'Neil, national advocacy director of Indivisible, said following the Republican-controlled Senate's narrow passage of the budget reconciliation bill on Tuesday, a vote so close that Vice President JD Vance was forced to intervene to push the measure over the finish line.
The GOP's margins are similarly thin in the House, with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) only able to lose three Republican members amid unanimous Democratic opposition.
Indivisible and other advocacy organizations are driving calls and emails to House Republicans on Wednesday urging them to vote down the Senate-passed legislation, which is significantly more expensive and contains more aggressive Medicaid cuts than the bill the House approved in May. Medicaid cuts are highly unpopular with the U.S. public, including among Republican voters.
The phone number for the U.S. House switchboard is (202) 224-3121.
"Your Republican representative could be the deciding vote," Ezra Levin, Indivisible's co-executive director, said in an appearance on MSNBC late Tuesday. "We've got about 26 Republican targets. We need four of them—we just need four. And this is not a done deal."
While a House vote on the legislation could come as soon as Wednesday, far-right hardliners in the Republican caucus are threatening to prevent a quick advance of the bill, pointing to projections that it would add trillions of dollars to the nation's deficit over the next decade.
Reps. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) and Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) reportedly headed to the White House on Wednesday to meet with Trump administration officials, who have urged Republican holdovers to drop their objections and help pass the budget legislation.
Progressive lawmakers in the House, meanwhile, are united in firm opposition to the bill, which they warn would have catastrophic impacts on vulnerable Americans nationwide.
"No way will I allow [President Donald] Trump and the GOP to rip healthcare and food away from millions of Americans just so he, [Elon] Musk, and their billionaire buddies can get a tax break," Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said Wednesday, declaring that he will vote "hell no" on the Republican bill.
Today the Senate passed the biggest betrayal of working people in modern history.
It rips health care from 17 million, slashes food aid, and showers billionaires with tax breaks.
Next stop: the House. Progressives will be voting HELL NO. https://t.co/qd4Q13YiNa
— Progressive Caucus (@USProgressives) July 1, 2025
House Republican leaders are hoping to get the bill to President Donald Trump's desk for his signature before the July 4 holiday on Friday.
If passed, experts say the GOP legislation would spark the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in a single law in U.S. history.
Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, said Tuesday that the Republican bill "steals from the poor to give massive tax cuts to the wealthy."
"If the Republicans wanted to add $4 trillion to the national debt, they could have instead written a $12,000 check to each and every adult and child in the United States," said Shierholz. "However, this grotesque bill would cause the bottom 40% of households to lose income on average. This country deserves better than this dumpster fire of greed, cruelty, and cowardice."
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After The National Day of Action for Single Payer, the Best Defense Is a Good Offense
To eliminate impending Medicaid cuts and other threats to coverage, enact a national, single-payer healthcare system free from all profit, including in the provisioning of care.
Jun 24, 2025
In January, 2025, following the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, National Single Payer and single-payer activists across the country responded to the righteous anger of the people rising against the health insurance industry by writing a “Manifesto,” which included these four demands:
- The recognition by our government that healthcare is a human right.
- The elimination of private health insurance and the banning of for-profit delivery of care.
- The enactment of a publicly financed, national single-payer program that would provide comprehensive coverage to everyone.
- The transformation of care delivery from profit-seeking ventures into services organized to serve the people of our country, a system in which all caregivers are freed from corporate control.
We called for people across the country to join us in the street on May 31 to raise the demand and put single payer on the nation’s agenda, a reference to the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ 2025 Proposition Agenda released last year which conspicuously omitted a national single-payer program from its agenda (or support for a cease-fire in Gaza).
Over 140 local, state, and national organizations, from central labor councils to social justice organizations, from political parties to physicians’ groups, endorsed the four demands, and more than 30 cities in 17 states held actions demanding that single payer be put on the nation’s agenda.
Endorsing organizations representing 28 states plus the District of Columbia were predominately social justice organizations, whose primary mission is not healthcare. Down Home North Carolina, an organization that mobilizes rural communities in North Carolina to improve the lives of working families, endorsed. So did EX-Incarcerated People Organizing in Wisconsin, which works to end mass incarceration. As did the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, founded to mobilize people of color and whites to take action against racism in their community. Large organizations such as the California Alliance of Retired Americans, representing 1 million members in California, and small ones such as Pride on the Patio, a community that creates safe and welcoming spaces for LGBTQ+ individuals in Frederick, Maryland, endorsed. The call to put single payer on the nation’s agenda is popular beyond single-payer activists.
Together, let’s build a movement as massive as “No Kings Day,” so formidable that it cannot be denied or ignored.
More than 30 actions were held across the country, including in “Trump country” states such North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Kentucky, West Virginia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Missouri. Whether from red or blue states, people organized to demand that a single-payer healthcare program free from profit be put on the nation’s agenda.
Notably missing from the list of endorsers were faith groups (only two), “big” labor (aside from the Kentucky State AFL-CIO), and “big” national single-payer organizations.
They still need to be convinced that making a demand of the Democratic Party is acceptable and has broad support.
If the demonstrations on “No Kings Day” are any indication, people are furious with the current administration, but they are no less tired of the Democratic playbook. “No Kings Day” rallies, while enthusiastic and well attended, lacked a central bold demand.
In contrast, activists on May 31 made bold demands, refusing to believe the wealthiest country should have a separate healthcare system for the poor, or that we should wait until we are 65 to access a public healthcare system into which we pay all our working lives. On May 31, activists demanded an end to a system where health insurance CEOs, who worry more about “disappointing investors” than patients, control our health. On May 31, we demanded the end of a system where insurance companies get to make trillions of dollars in earnings and spend millions on federal lobbying to influence government officials who write the laws to benefit the owners and not the people who suffer under it.
In times like these, the best defense is a good offense. To eliminate impending Medicaid cuts; to stop imposing work requirements; to end overpayments to Medicare Advantage and the privatization of Medicare; to prohibit narrow networks, prior authorizations, and delays and denials of care; to end deductibles, medical debt, and bankruptcy, and to negotiate at the bargaining table for higher wages: enact a national, single-payer healthcare system free from all profit, including in the provisioning of care.
National Single Payer and other organizations are going on the offensive, working with labor unions to fight for single payer and mobilizing members of Congress, especially those who have endorsed Medicare for All legislation, to make national single payer a publicly visible fight by asking them to commit to:
- Speak out about national single payer free from profit in “Special Order” speeches on the floor of Congress.
- Support the issue on their website.
- Discuss it at Town Halls.
- Write about it in emails and newsletters.
- Talk about it in hearings, media, and at all public opportunities.
- Improve the current Medicare for All legislation by removing all profit from the provisioning of care.
On May 31 activists from local organizations gathered to demand the healthcare system this nation deserves.
Moving forward, let’s demand our elected officials speak out, support, discuss, write, talk, and improve current Medicare for All legislation. Together, let’s build a movement as massive as “No Kings Day,” so formidable that it cannot be denied or ignored, a movement of millions in the street and in the workplace to put single payer on the nation’s agenda and heal this country once and for all.
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The Mythical Rich Suburban Republican (White) Ladies Who The Democrats Chase But Can Never Find
Considering the origins of this destructive neoliberal mythology may help those who want to challenge it.
Jun 20, 2025
Clintonite Democrats are cooking yet another version of their long-running fantasy of the rich, suburbanite (white) ladies who are more committed to good government and rule of law than to their tax cuts and pissing on poor people as the anchor of the coalition that will defeat Trump and Trumpism.
This fantasy has been their go-to in nearly every presidential election since 1996. No doubt many readers recall what should have been its last stand—the 2016 election when both Senate leader Chuck Schumer and former Philadelphia mayor and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell boasted that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”
Now it has taken the form of lauding reactionary Lynne Cheney as an icon of principle, to an extent that it should not surprise if her name is floated at least as the vice-presidential candidate on a 2028 Democratic ticket. But it also appeared in Rep. Ro Khanna’s reaction to Elon Musk’s apparent break with Trump. California's Khanna, a leader within the Democrats’ Congressional Progressive Caucus, urged reaching out to Musk possibly to win him back, despite the fact that he is, well... Elon Musk and that his break with the cosplay Il Duce was provoked by his outrage that Trump’s proposed budget wasn’t draconian enough.
[The mythology] does the ideological work these Democrats want without explicitly acknowledging their investor class allegiances.
Commitment to the fantasy showed up as well in the choice of conservative Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) to rebut Trump’s speech to Congress. Slotkin rose to the occasion by praising Ronald Reagan—the person most singly responsible for putting our national politics on the road to Trumpism—four different times. Now Democratic sages like James Carville and Hillary Clinton have floated the likes of Rahm Emanuel, whose approach to building a Democratic congressional majority as Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair centered on recruiting Republicans to run as Democrats, as the party’s and country’s savior in 2028.
Even more recently, flamboyant Dallas Mavericks owner and Ayn Rand fan Mark Cuban has popped up as a possible contender in a telling “it takes a billionaire” line of argument. And now it seems to have found itself a simulacrum of a social theory/manifesto to rally around in the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson 300-page beacon to the future, Abundance, which the publisher describes as a “once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty.”
Klein has been anointed by such paragons of middle-brow ponderousness as David Brooks and Fareed Zakaria, who moreover predicts that “People will recruit [him and Thompson] to run the Democratic Party.” (Must be the little glasses.) The argument, as one might suspect from those authors and endorsers, is warmed over neoliberal bromides and bullshit—just the sort of intervention that would appeal to Clintonite Democrats whose politics has always come down to trying to sell right-wing policies as the limits of a reasonable left.
The Democrats are going to do what they are going to do. One takeaway from Trumpism’s victory—and I know this is a point I’ve made over and over for quite some time—should be that there is no organized left in the United States capable of having any impact on shaping national political debate and, therefore, the primary commitment of leftists as such should be doing the deep organizing work necessary to begin generating such an embedded left. So whether and how the Clintonites can be challenged in the struggle to define the terms of opposition to Trumpism is a matter for liberals to work out within the Democratic Party itself. It may be helpful for that struggle, though, to consider the origins of the fantasy that has for three decades justified dragging the party’s efforts to appeal to a popular constituency away from working-class concerns. (For example, in 2004, John Kerry’s feckless campaign called them “national security moms.”) We know that objective is why the fantasy persists among Democratic neoliberals; it does the ideological work they want without explicitly acknowledging their investor class allegiances and enables them to hide behind catering to a bourgeois feminism. Considering its origins, however, may help those who want to challenge it.
The mythical rich suburban (white) moderate Republican woman has a very specific source. It emerged out of the concatenation of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing in the fall of 1991 and the1992 national election. Its root is in the election for the U.S. Senate in Illinois that year. The Democratic incumbent, Alan Dixon, was also on the Senate Judiciary Committee that presided over the Thomas hearing. Dixon promised the George H. W. Bush administration his vote for Thomas in exchange for the administration’s guarantee that it would run only a weak Republican challenger against him. The Republicans kept their end of the bargain. Dixon’s GOP challenger was a relative non-entity, Rich Williamson, who had been an official in the Reagan administration and was from Kenilworth, an especially wealthy enclave within the wealthy Northshore suburbs of Chicago.
But the Democratic primary turned out to be a wild card. In addition to Carol Mosely Braun’s candidacy, Dixon was challenged as well by Al Hofeld, a maverick, self-financing multimillionaire who targeted Dixon and garnered 27% of the vote in the primary. Dixon and Mosely Braun split the remaining vote, and Mosely Braun won the primary with 38% of the total vote. In both the primary and the general election, she benefited from bourgeois feminist backlash against Thomas and Dixon, and she ran well among suburban Republican women against the relative non-entity, Williamson. That was a fluke, the product of very particular circumstances in a very particular moment. It has not been repeated, not even in Mosely Braun’s re-election bid in 1998, which she lost to Republican Peter Fitzgerald.
It has never materialized as an electoral reality. So that’s that.
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