WASHINGTON—Brandishing signs and voicing demands, more than 1,000 people paraded onto Capitol Hill on March 12, demanding the Senate, and specifically its Democrats, save Medicare and Medicaid from the ax of Congress’s ruling Republicans, GOP President Donald Trump and his puppeteer, multibillionaire Elon Musk.
“Health care is a human right! Fight, fight, fight!” was a common chant. The crowd was festooned with signs promoting government-run single-payer Medicare For All, a longtime goal of National Nurses United. NNU sent a large contingent of marchers. It has crusaded for that cause, and led other unions to back it, for more than a decade. “Some cuts don’t heal,” NNU signs read.
“Working people depend on Medicare and Medicaid,” the AFL-CIO tweeted. “Threatening to make cuts to these essential programs would jeopardize the ability of millions of people to get the health care they need. Today, we stood up and let Congress know we won’t let this attack go unanswered.”
George Kerr of the Union of American Physicians and Residents, said his AFSCME sector “represents 140 providers at Unity Health Clinics throughout the D.C. area and 860 medical and dental residents at SUNY Buffalo.” Money to pay those groups, but especially the residents on the Buffalo campus, “is contingent on Medicare and Medicaid” payments to those institutions.
The GOP, Musk and Trump want to obliterate Medicaid—by cutting $880 billion over a decade–and slash Medicare spending, too. That prompted chants of “No health care, no peace!” and a handmade sign that read: “Protect MediCARE, not MediSCARE and MedicAID, not MedicRAID.”
“Cuts would be a disaster in this city and catastrophic in Buffalo,” Kerr elaborated. And all the money cut from the two “goes to the rich” under the GOP’s planned $4.5 trillion eight-to-nine-year tax cut.
That too was a common theme and chant during the march, including an obscene version: “Tax the rich! Tax the mother-f—ing rich!” the crowd declared. “Eliminate oligarchs!” another sign added.
Some marchers got personal against Musk and Trump. One gray-haired retired school counselor dressed herself in prison stripes and wore a front-and-back sign that had Trump’s name and his prisoner number from the Fulton County, Ga., jail in front and read “Lock him up!” on the back.
She also carried a sign reading “RFK Jr.”—Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary—“keep your hands off multiple myeloma research money.” She suffers from that cancer.
Musk is taking a chainsaw against federal programs and workers, with Trump as his handmaiden. So one sign said: “Stop the coup!” Another demanded “Stop Trump’s search and destroy mission.” The woman carrying it was not a veteran. Her father was, in World War II.
Stands in for thousands
“I stand up today for thousands of Alaskans who couldn’t come,” declared Erin Jackson-Hill, a longtime social justice activist who flew in from Anchorage to help emcee the rally at the end of the march. She called the Republican bill “B.S.”
“We are demanding no cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, protection of reproductive rights and sustaining life-saving vaccines,” Jackson-Hill added. Trump HHS Secretary Kennedy has a wide reputation as an anti-vaxxer.
“I was outside” Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s office, Jackson-Hill told the crowd, “and I had a gray-haired grandma crying on my shoulder because her granddaughter needs life-saving vaccines” and would be unable to get them if the GOP legislation passes.
“It’s a genocide, right?” Jackson-Hill asked rhetorically.
The message may have gotten through, for once, to the embattled Senate minority of 45 Democrats and two independents—or through to enough of them to make a difference. Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., at the start and Ed Markey, D-Mass., at the end, vowed to fight the GOP legislation, even if it means a partial government shutdown.
That’s because the Republican House-passed money bill to keep the government going through September 30 needs 60 Senate votes to pass. And, as of late evening March 12, it needed eight Democrats, since one of the 53 GOP senators, Kentuckian Rand Paul, vowed to vote against it.
Besides the $880 billion Medicaid cut, Musk took his chainsaw against the Social Security staff, producing long wait times for people with disability claims and a raid by Musk’s DOGE legion on the sensitive personal information in Social Security’s computer files. Markey told the crowd the GOP wants to cut $230 billion—50%–over a decade from food stamps, too, letting hungry kids starve.
“Seventy percent of the people in nursing homes are on Medicaid and half of them suffer from Alzheimer’s disease,” the senator said. “Medicaid is more than a line in a budget. It is a lifeline to every family.” The Republicans, he reminded the crowd, always opposed Medicare. ”Now they want to make America sick again,” mocking Trump’s campaign “Let’s make America great again!”
So far, the Democrats had suffered only one obvious Senate defection, Pennsylvanian John Fetterman. That’s even though if the GOP bill fails—and a Democratic alternative does too—what’s left of the government would shut down at midnight on March 14.
A definitive command came at the start of the march from Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. He said outside public pressure would force the insiders—the senators—to reject the House Republican bill and its social program slashes and tax cuts for the rich.
“We’ve got to move to the front now,” he implored the crowd “and stop these billionaires from taking health care away from our people.”
The Senate has only two days, and a few ways—a filibuster, not enough Democratic votes or both–to do so, before the clock strikes midnight on a government shutdown on March 14.
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