Morning all. As the House advances Trumps “big, ugly bill” I sat down with Rep. Laura Gillen (NY-4) to get a view from the frontlines during this very consequential week in the House. A recording and a rough transcript of our discussion is above. A few things stood out to me from our discussion:
1- Democratic Members of Congress are doing much more to engage and educate their constituents about our current moment than is widely understood (and this is good).
2- As the prices hikes from Trump’s tariffs start to kick in, and the reconciliation bill gets debated all summer as it winds its way through Congress, the coming months are going to give us an extraordinary opportunity to tell our story about their ruinous economic agenda and ongoing betrayal of the American people. We won the 2018 midterms in 2017, as the debate over the repeal of the ACA that summer and fall did enormous damage to the GOP’s brand, damage they could never recover from. We are going to have a similar opportunity this summer. Let’s work together to make sure we seize it.
Get to my conversation with Rep. Laura Gillen when you have the time. It’s a great window into what has been very consequential week in Washington. Rep. Gillen is one of our Hopium House 7, the 7 newly-elected House Members this community backed in 2024 and helped get here. We’ve begun a campaign to raise money for them to ensure they return as protecting our newly-elected battleground House Members is the first step in flipping the chamber next year. I hope you will consider donating to these intrepid 7 today.
The Boss Stands Up, Powerfully, For All Of Us - Just watch. It’s incredible, inspiring, necessary. Please share as widely as you can. They cut this video themselves and have released it widely. He is leaning in, hard. The circle of defiance just got a lot bigger today all.
On The Greatness Of America, Their Attempt To Sabotage It All, And Why We Need To Keep Fighting As Hard As We Can - Let us marvel at this story in the NYT this morning (gift link):
Something was very wrong with Kyle and Nicole Muldoon’s baby.
The doctors speculated. Maybe it was meningitis? Maybe sepsis?
They got an answer when KJ was only a week old. He had a rare genetic disorder, CPS1 deficiency, that affects just one in 1.3 million babies. If he survived, he would have severe mental and developmental delays and would eventually need a liver transplant. But half of all babies with the disorder die in the first week of life.
Doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia offered the Muldoons comfort care for their baby, a chance to forgo aggressive treatments in the face of a grim prognosis.
“We loved him, and we didn’t want him to be suffering,” Ms. Muldoon said. But she and her husband decided to give KJ a chance.
Instead, KJ has made medical history. The baby, now 9 ½ months old, became the first patient of any age to have a custom gene-editing treatment, according to his doctors. He received an infusion made just for him and designed to fix his precise mutation.
The investigators who led the effort to save KJ are presenting their work on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy, and are also publishing it in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The implications of the treatment go far beyond treating KJ, said Dr. Peter Marks, who was the Food and Drug Administration official overseeing gene-therapy regulation until he recently resigned over disagreements with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services. More than 30 million people in the United States have one of more than 7,000 rare genetic diseases. Most are so rare that no company is willing to spend years developing a gene therapy that so few people would need.
But KJ’s treatment — which built on decades of federally funded research — offers a new path for companies to develop personalized treatments without going through years of expensive development and testing.
……
While KJ’s treatment was customized so CRISPR found just his mutation, the same sort of method could be adapted and used over and over again to fix mutations in other places on a person’s DNA. Only the CRISPR instructions leading the editor to the spot on the DNA with the mutation would need to be changed. Treatments would be cheaper, “by an order of magnitude at least,” Dr. Marks said.
The method, said Dr. Marks, who wrote an editorial accompanying the research paper, “is, to me, one of the most potentially transformational technologies out there.”
It eventually could also be used for more common genetic disorders like sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease and muscular dystrophy.
And, he said, it “could really transform health care.”
I encourage you to read the whole story via the gift link. It will lift you up in this dark time. But it us also reminds us why we have to keep fighting so hard right now. This miraculous treatment was developed over decades by federally-funded research, research that is currently being vaporized - illegally, unconstitutionally - by the Trump Administration. The FDA scientist who oversaw this inspiring development was forced out of his position six weeks ago due to disagreements with Robert Kennedy and his band of extremists who have seized control of our public health systems. Here is how the NYT covered Dr. Marks’ departure from HHS:
The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, resigned under pressure Friday and said that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s aggressive stance on vaccines was irresponsible and posed a danger to the public.
“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks wrote to Sara Brenner, the agency’s acting commissioner. He reiterated the sentiments in an interview, saying: “This man doesn’t care about the truth. He cares about what is making him followers.”
Dr. Marks resigned after he was summoned to the Department of Health and Human Services Friday afternoon and told that he could either quit or be fired, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Dr. Marks led the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which authorized and monitored the safety of vaccines and a wide array of other treatments, including cell and gene therapies. He was viewed as a steady hand by many during the Covid pandemic
Kennedy’s attempt to dismantle our public health and medical research infrastructure in the US, coupled with the Republican’s plan to cut Medicaid, is an extraordinary and shocking assault on the health of the American people and will make medical breakthroughs like the one above something that happens in other nations, not here, in America. As we like to say this all feels far more like sabotage than a strategy; and we need to use these ongoing attempts to turn America into a global backwater and Banana Republic to spur us to action.
But that’s not all everyone. The news is overflowing with Trumpian sabotage and idiocy this morning…..
Turns out Qatar has been trying to get rid of Trump’s $400m plane since 2020, and experts believe there is no possibility it can be retrofitted to act as Air Force One. Trump just wants the plane for himself and his family for his life after the Presidency, and our idiot-in-chief took it off the Qatari’s hands.
A new NYT investigation found that due to Trump’s firings and forced retirements only 2 of the nation’s 313 air traffic control facilities in the US are operating at recommended levels right now. Note that we had a significant and dangerous outage in Denver yesterday.
Two weeks before Hurricane season begins the new acting head of FEMA is growing worried about his capacity to manage all that is about to come at him. From The WSJ:
WASHINGTON—The newly appointed head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency acknowledged in private meetings that with two weeks to go until hurricane season, the agency doesn’t yet have a fully formed disaster-response plan.
David Richardson, who previously served as a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security and doesn’t have a background in emergency management, told staff he would share a hurricane plan with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem after he completes it late next week. He said Thursday he’s 80% to 85% done with the plan. The agency is already months behind schedule in its preparations for the hurricane season starting June 1, which is expected to have above-normal activity, according to FEMA employees.
Richardson said in a recent meeting with FEMA staff that “clarifying the intent of the president,” who has called for terminating the agency, was a challenge in preparing a strategy for hurricane season, according to a video recording of the meeting viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
He also seemed to express surprise at the vast range of FEMA’s responsibilities, raising concerns among career officials about his ability to run the nation’s disaster-management agency. Richardson, who leads FEMA in an acting capacity, took over the complex agency last week.
“I feel a little bit like Bubba from ‘Forrest Gump,’ ” Richardson said, according to the video. “We’ve got hurricanes, we’ve got fires, we’ve got mudslides, we’ve got flash floods, we’ve got tornadoes, we’ve got droughts, we’ve got heat waves and now we’ve got volcanoes to worry about.”
FEMA has been struggling with a steep decline in its workforce, turmoil in its upper ranks and no clear direction about the future of the agency, according to more than a half dozen current FEMA employees and documents reviewed by the Journal. Trump signed an executive order in January that established a FEMA review council to overhaul the agency.
While on his God do I love petro-dictators tour today our leader admitted that he can’t actually renegotiate trade deals with hundreds of nations simultaneously and he is just going to impose - illegally, unconstitutionally, recklessly, capriciously, comically - new tariff levels on everyone in the next few weeks:
President Trump said his administration would soon send letters to many countries dictating the terms of U.S. trade with them. Speaking in the United Arab Emirates, Trump said there were “150 countries that want to make a deal, but you’re not able to see that many countries.” Instead, he said, in the next two to three weeks the administration will send out letters “telling people what they’ll be paying to do business in the United States.”
Administration officials talked last month about negotiating 90 trade deals during the 90-day pause in Trump’s most punishing tariffs. The president has announced just two so far, with Britain and China, and details of both are still in flux.
New consumer confidence data is !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Enjoy this warm, loving sentiment:
Here’s the current home page of Politico (LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!!!!!)
Now, let’s use their ongoing betrayal of the country to power our work today and in the days ahead. We have a country to save and futures to reclaim for our kids and grandkids….
Due to how terrible the GOP reconciliation bill has become this week, I am asking this community to go into full battle mode now. We need to contact our Congressional offices with everything we got. Call both House and Senate offices. Tell them that you want to work against this reconciliation bill and to keep working on rolling back Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional “taxation without representation” tax increase (tariffs).
Everyone on the Hill in both parties need to hear from us today. Our anger, our sense of betrayal needs to become a very loud roar today and in the days to come until this terrible bill is defeated and these ruinous tariffs are rolled back.
For those of you with Republican Reps and Senators you need to be particularly loud now.
A proposed script. Use whatever works for you:
I am calling to urge you to vote against the reconciliation bill and to roll back Trump’s terrible and illegal tariffs. Together these actions have raised taxes on all of us and will explode the deficit - things Republicans have always told us they did not believe in.
But your agenda is also causing all of us to “pay more and get less” for every day things including our health care; people to loses their jobs; and the economy to slow - all so you can give your rich donors a huge tax break. Your plans will weaken this great country and are an extraordinary betrayal of everything you promised during the campaign - which was to help people like me, not Elon Musk, get ahead.
Your plans are ones of sabotage, surrender and betrayal and I urge you to abandon them and to work with Democrats to find a better way.
Please self-report on your actions today. I know folks have been working hard and these reports of our gritty fight helps lift all of us up every day.
In addition to making our calls and contacting these offices, we have two more projects I hope you will consider supporting:
1 - Help Abigail Spanberger Win Virginia - Simply, the Virginia elections are the most important elections we have this year, and we must win them. We have narrow majorities in both legislative chambers and while our candidate Abigail Spanberger has a modest lead in current polling, this is going to be a close election where our money and volunteer time can make a real difference. If you are to give to only one candidate or election this year it should be this one. Here’s a link to do so today……
To learn more about Abigail check out my new discussion with her, released yesterday. We have now raised over $100,000 towards our June 30th goal of $200,000 - thank you all. If you want to volunteer for her race head over to her campaign website today. We can do this people!
2 - Support The Hopium House 7 - We’ve begun our work to help flip the House next year by supporting and shoring up the 7 newly-elected battleground House Dems we helped elect last year. Catch our interviews with Reps Derek Tran, Janelle Bynum, Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen (above) and give to all 7 through a single donation on our ActBlue page. Learn more about this important effort here.
We’ve already raised over $78,000 towards our $200,000 June 30th goal - thank you all!
Keep working hard all.
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