WASHINGTON—As senators opened debate on what unions call Trump’s “big bad money bill” they had to deal with a swarm, not of actual bees, but of women with Mom’s Rising who fanned out through the halls of Congress to demand they kill the legislation when it comes up for a vote as soon as June 27.
They spread out in groups as large as 10 to lobby each of the 100 senators, aiming to detach four or five of the Republicans from the party’s 53-vote majority. They received a boost from the labor movement in the form of backing and participation from the AFT/Teachers and the Service Employees.
The key feature of the measure they sought to kill is the $4.5 trillion 10-year tax cut for corporations and the wealthiest 1%, with tax hikes for everyone else below the top 5%. The tax cut would be partially paid for by cuts in Medicaid of up to $800 billion and $330 billion in food stamps. There would also be a $300 billion cut in Affordable Care Act money—and reduced eligibility for it, too.
“This bill is a piggy bank for the rich,” Teachers/AFT President Randi Weingarten told the crowd.
The cuts sent the Moms Rising members fanning out through congressional corridors bearing coloring books showing the bad impact of the measure upon kids, and upon oldsters, too. They lobbied senators and their staffers to reject the House-passed measure, officially a “reconciliation” bill affecting only taxes and spending.
They were revved up beforehand by Weingarten and moms speaking about how the “big bad bill” would impact moms and their kids, if it becomes law. It will harm millions of children in coming years, speakers warned.
The moms and their allies faced the strong-arm tactics of Trump and Republicans determined to stamp out any dissent. “Security” seemed to be everywhere. Weingarten, who spoke before the moms began swarming through the halls of Congress, said, “I’ve never seen this level of security in all my years of talking to lawmakers.”
The Senate’s ruling Republicans also banned reporters from the inside session. Two, a reporter from Peoples World and an intern from Ms. Magazine got in anyway. Commenting on that, Weingarten said, “They (the GOP) are afraid of what we’re going to say.”
Other speakers noted the police put strict limits not just on the time allotted for the pre-walk rally, but for peaceful civil disobedience that afternoon. “If they didn’t fear us, they wouldn’t have these rules,” the AFT leader commented.
The police even brought “zip ties” sized to handcuff little children, said Moms Rising. Several moms brought their children. “Do you really think they’ll arrest moms and little kids?” Weingarten asked. U.S. Capitol police later answered that by arresting 34 people, including several in wheelchairs.
Jeanne Wynn, of Olney, Md., brought her three kids, 8-year-old Natalie, 6-year-old Katie, and Andrew, 3, in a stroller. “I’m horrified the Senate will be voting on a budget that cuts Medicaid,” she said.
Wynn said that when she was 22 weeks pregnant with Andrew, she went to her ob-gyn for what was supposed to be a routine sonogram. It wasn’t. She had already entered “painless labor” and had to be on hospital bed rest until he was prematurely born two weeks later.
When Wynn and Andrew returned home, “we still needed Medicaid” to pay for specialized caregiving. “The ACA and Medicaid gave us peace of mind,” Wynn said, along with “access to life-saving care, including feeding tubes, and oxygenators,” and paying specialists who could figure out how infant Andrew “could eat without vomiting everything up.”
“For the past seven years, I’ve stepped up as a ‘sandwich generation’ caregiver” for her disabled brother and her now 90-year-old ailing mother, said Cindy Camp of Baltimore. “For a while, we had to rely on SNAP to buy groceries for three growing kids. I don’t know how we’d make it if they slash it.”
Even with the benefits, “we often didn’t make it to the end of the month,” Camp said. The GOP wants to cut SNAP by $300 billion and make it harder to qualify. It also wants states, already strapped for cash, to pick up part of the SNAP tab.
“Our kids’ basic needs should matter more than whether Elon (Musk) can buy another private jet,” added Camp. She had a reason for that linkage.
Until recently, multibillionaire and anti-union Musk was Trump’s partner and the head of his own “Department of Government Efficiency,” slashing and smashing programs. He’d also be a big beneficiary of the “reconciliation” bill’s $4.5 trillion tax cut for the superrich.
Reveals another tactic
Gloria Pan revealed another little-noticed provision of the reconciliation bill: Repeal of anti-gun legislation going all the way back to 1934, when Tommy Guns were outlawed in the wake of shooting sprees involving mobsters working for notorious Chicago gangland leader Al Capone.
That includes a ban on assault rifles and another on silencers, Pan said. “Just think of what would happen if there were a mass shooter with a silencer? How would people know to run?”
Repealing anti-gun rules, as the reconciliation bill would mandate, is also a simple violation of people’s rights, Pan told Peoples World afterwards. “People would be scared to leave their homes. People would be scared to go to the grocery store. People would be scared to go to church.”
Weingarten, given her union’s position on the issue, criticized a “super, super, super giveaway,” a $25 billion plan in the bill to set up taxpayer-paid vouchers for all parents of private school kids. Teachers’ unions, including AFT and the National Education Association, view vouchers as a right-wing way of undermining public schools by siphoning off money.
Many private schools are for-profit enterprises. So are charter school companies, who’d benefit, too.
As Moms Rising and its allies lobbied the lawmakers, they were preceded by some good news. Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, whose rulings are rarely, if ever, overturned, tossed out a dozen provisions of the “reconciliation” bill because they had nothing to do with spending or taxes and thus broke the Senate’s reconciliation bill rules.
One would have restricted federal judges’ rulings to the defendants involved in a case, or the judicial district or circuit that the court covers. Right now, judges can—and have—issued nationwide court injunctions against executive rules and actions the jurists deemed unconstitutional.
The latest win, on June 24, went to federal workers’ unions, led by the Government Employees (AFGE). They challenged Trump’s diktat ending contracts covering a million federal workers.
“President Trump revoked our members’ union rights in retaliation for our advocacy on behalf of federal workers and the American people, and we are grateful” that U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco “saw through his disingenuous ‘national security’ justification and ordered the immediate restoration of their rights,” said AFGE President Everett Kelley.
“Federal employees have had the right to join a union and bargain collectively for decades, including during President Trump’s first term, and at no time have employees’ union rights caused concern for our nation’s national security. Revoking these rights was clearly a retaliatory attempt to bust federal unions and wreak havoc on our nation’s workforce and the services they provide to the American people.”
A second provision MacDonough tossed gave AFGE another “win.” Senate Republicans inserted a provision into “reconciliation” raising federal workers’ yearly pension contributions from their current 8% of pay to 9.5%. MacDonough kept that because it increases revenue. But the GOP also decided any federal worker who wanted to unionize would have to pay an extra 5%. MacDonough nixed it. She called it extraneous.
Also chopped: Language letting states do their own enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border, as right-wing Trumpite Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, has implemented. Immigration enforcement is a federal role, MacDonough ruled.
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