Greetings all. Sending along a new conversation I just completed with a Member of Congress who has been very much in the news - Rep. Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania. A video recording of our discussion is above and a transcript is below.
Rep. Houlahan is one of the six Congressional Democrats in that courageous video that urged members of the armed services and intelligence communities to stand up for our laws and our Constitution. As a refresher here is that extraordinary video:
We learned this week that the Trump regime had tried to indict all six - 2 Senators and 4 House Members - for a variety of crimes, but thankfully a grand jury failed to return an indictment.
Here are Rep. Houlahan’s reflections on this tragic series of events:
what was surprising to me is that the grand jury process is secretive. We didn’t know that they were going in front of the grand jury and accusing us of various crimes under which we could be indicted. So we really only heard after the fact that this had happened, and thankfully, the twelve regular everyday Americans who sit on that grand jury dismissed the charges and did not indict us for anything. And that is, I think, a real win for the American people and a win for the Constitution.
In the midst of this tumultuous week Rep. Houlahan dropped by to talk about a project she has been chairing for the House New Democrat Coalition - the crafting of a new Affordability Agenda that seeks to “restore the American dream.” This new agenda, which launched yesterday, has five key pillars:
Here is how she summed up the project in our conversation today:
this particular agenda, the affordability agenda that we’re putting forward, is an answer to the fact that this administration… while they promised one thing, which was to address inflation on day one and to get rid of the pricing problems of all that all of us are experiencing… the reality is instead they are terrorizing us. And so the answer it should be [is] that we should be able as Democrats to do both things at one time. One is to address our basic human needs in the form of the affordability agenda. And the other is to fight back against the incursions into our democracy and our republic.
This new Affordability Agenda is the tenth “policy framework” the New Democrat Coalition has released since Trump returned to the White House. For those of you who have asked “what are Dems for?” be sure to check out these ten working agendas to see what the largest ideological caucus in the House has been focused on this past year.
Enjoy this timely discussion with one of our most courageous, impressive, and diligent Members of the House, and keep working hard all - Simon
Biography - Rep. Chrissy Houlahan
U.S. Representative Chrissy Houlahan is an Air Force veteran, engineer, entrepreneur, and educator who is continuing her career of service as the first woman ever to represent Pennsylvania’s 6th District in Congress (2019-present).
Chrissy is the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who came to America with nothing. She grew up in a military family; her parents met when her father and grandfather flew P3s in the same Navy squadron. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford with an ROTC scholarship that launched her service in the U.S. Air Force and Air Force Reserves, and later earned her M.S. in Technology and Policy from MIT.
Chrissy has helped lead several thriving southeastern Pennsylvania companies, including AND1, a basketball apparel company headquartered in Paoli, and B Lab, the organization that launched the B Corporation movement. She went on to serve in Teach for America as a chemistry teacher at Simon Gratz High School in North Philadelphia and then led and scaled a nonprofit helping thousands of underserved students all across America build their literacy skills.
These experiences helped shape her political vision of a great nation united by shared values that leaves no one behind. She is committed to fighting for access to quality, affordable health care, common sense gun safety, government accountability and transparency, and working to build a strong, stable economy with good jobs and good benefits for everyone. While on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, she worked to promote peace and stability abroad, leading bipartisan legislation to address global malnutrition that was signed into law in October 2022.
Since serving her community in Congress, she has been awarded the Abraham Lincoln Leadership for America Award and three Congressional Management Foundation Democracy Awards. The Leadership for America award is presented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to honor lawmakers for their work supporting a free enterprise system. The Democracy Awards recognized her outstanding achievement in the categories of Transparency and Accountability, Constituent Services, and Workplace Environment. Chrissy is the first member of Congress in history to win two categories in a single congressional term.
Chrissy is a leader driven by a spirit of service. She’s a mom, a longtime resident of southeastern Pennsylvania, and a congressional representative working to solve real problems for the people and communities of Berks and Chester Counties.
Transcript - Simon Rosenberg And U.S. Representative Chrissy Houlahan (2/12/26)
Simon Rosenberg:
Welcome everyone, Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles, back with another great event today. Joining me is Congresswoman Chrissy Houlahan from Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania’s Sixth District, who has been in the news a little bit in recent weeks. She was one of the six Democrats who made this remarkable video challenging members of our armed services to follow the law even if there were illegal orders. And so welcome Congresswoman, thank you for being here.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan:
Thank you for having me.
Simon Rosenberg:
Well listen, you had some news on this front this week. The administration has pursued all of you, illicitly and shamefully, and a grand jury rendered a decision. Can you talk a little bit about what happened this week?
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan:
Of course. And what's really interesting to me, having never been through this, nor should I ever have expected to, and not being a lawyer…many of my colleagues are….what was surprising to me is that the grand jury process is secretive. We didn't know that they were going in front of the grand jury and accusing us of various crimes under which we could be indicted. So we really only heard after the fact that this had happened, and thankfully, the twelve regular everyday Americans who sit on that grand jury dismissed the charges and did not indict us for anything. And that is, I think, a real win for the American people and a win for the Constitution. Unfortunately, one of the things that worries me is that I don't know that it necessarily means that it's over. This president has found that is uniquely vindictive. And my understanding is that you can sort of jury shop this around to other places and see if it might work somewhere else or stick somewhere else. So I don't believe this is over, nor do I think that I'm done with this. I think it's important to continue to speak the truth and to continue to follow the law and do my job.
Simon Rosenberg:
Were you surprised at the reaction when all of you got together to make the video in the first place? I assume you anticipated some blowback, but I can't imagine you anticipated this.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan:
I don't think that any of us would have ever written down that we thought that the president of the United States would call for our execution and call us seditious for literally stating the law. So that was definitely not within my imagination. But certainly, we wanted to make sure that we were telling a population, the population of those who wear the uniform currently, that a bunch of us here in Congress have their backs and that we all know the law. And the law is to follow the law and to not obey illegal orders. And so, surprised, but not stunned, I guess.
Simon Rosenberg:
It's been a remarkable episode. And I think that like the people of Minnesota, the six of you have given us an example of the kind of courage and bravery, frankly, that we need to have in this moment. So just as a fellow patriot, I want to say thanks and sorry for what has happened. And in the aftermath… it is amazing to find out about a grand jury after the fact, in essence, right? Knowing that they had really taken it that far. So big news this week.
The second thing I wanted to get to — because I know we're going to talk about your affordability agenda in a second, which is this important project — the other thing that's newsy right now and sort of on people's minds is this fight to rein in ICE. And it looks like the House and Senate Democrats came together and said they wouldn't fund DHS going forward unless there were significant reforms. We did see Tom Homan today backing down, or at least we think, you know, they've done head fakes before, but saying they're going to end the surge in Minnesota. What's your sense of this fight that seems to be deeply consequential for our liberties and our freedoms here in America?
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan:
So again, this is, I think, not the end of anything, but rather potentially the end of a chapter in this fight. I'm hopeful that when he says that they are leaving Minnesota, that it is indeed the truth. But what is certainly the truth is that there are tens of billions of dollars still unspent that are able to be aimed at will at any other place in the country, including back at Minnesota and Minneapolis. In fact, last week on Friday, I think of last week, one of my towns in my district, Phoenixville, experienced an ICE raid that was certainly on a smaller scale, but terrorizing and terrifying as well.
And so, the fight is still on in terms of making sure that we figure out how to rein in ICE, how to I think appropriately ask that they are held to the same standard as our other federal and local and state law enforcement are, and that doesn't seem to be terribly extreme. But for whatever reason, here in Washington, my Republican colleagues are resisting this like crazy… simple as like wearing a camera or having to have a warrant or not having a face mask on would seem to be common sense. But for whatever reason, they seem to be a red line that they are very worried about.
Simon Rosenberg:
It is remarkable…if you look at the polling, I've worked on immigration and border issues for two decades. The polling in the last few weeks on things like cameras and masks, we're seeing 70s, 80s. You're seeing polling that is the most lopsided polling of an issue almost that I've ever seen in my three decades of working in Washington. And it's amazing how much they're digging in on something that has become important to the country and where they're so clearly on the wrong side.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan:
It just feels wrong. You know, it’s just your intuition, your psychic feeling of how does it feel when somebody approaches you with a mask on with no identification. And largely, in fatigues or some sort of other uniform. These are the things that we learned about that we read about in school… and also in my case, my dad's a survivor of the Holocaust and so these are the things that my father warned me about. And they are happening on our streets. And I think that that's something that I'm grateful that the vast majority of the American people are paying attention to, and I hope holding their elected officials to account because this is a very worrisome time in our history.
Simon Rosenberg:
Well, listen, you're here today in part to talk about a big new project that you've been leading that addresses what is the number one issue in our politics today, affordability. Economic opportunity in this new age. You are a leader of the New Democrat Coalition's Economic Growth Task Force. And if you could just talk a little bit about, for those who don't know about the New Democrats, which is the largest ideological caucus in the House, talk a little bit about the New Dems and then your project. And I'd love to get more details about what you guys have put out because I think it's going to be helpful for everyone who's running across the country this cycle.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan:
Sure, of course. So the new Dems are a caucus, or a group of members of Congress, and usually caucuses are ideologically aligned, meaning that they have something in common that they are all unified in working towards. The New Dems are the largest ideological caucus in Congress right now, to my knowledge, and it's 115 members, all Democrats. And what we caucus about, why we meet is about opportunity, about good business, about making sure that all of those effectively basic human needs are met with pragmatism and practical solutions. So, New Dems tend to be somewhere in the moderate pragmatic middle. And so the kinds of solutions that we produce are super wonky and they're kind of really intentionally thought out rather than knee jerk reactions to what's happening.
And, you know, we started the conversation with what's happening to our democracy and to the republic. But first, there are the basic human needs. First, housing is important. First, health is important. First, food is important. The family is important. All of those basic things are what New Dems are focused on all of the time.
But this particular agenda, the affordability agenda that we're putting forward, is an answer to the fact that this administration… while they promised one thing, which was to address inflation on day one and to get rid of the pricing problems of all that all of us are experiencing… the reality is instead they are terrorizing us. And so the answer it should be [is] that we should be able as Democrats to do both things at one time. One is to address our basic human needs in the form of the affordability agenda. And the other is to fight back against the incursions into our democracy and our republic.
Simon Rosenberg:
You're singing our song here at Hopium. The way that we talk about it is that we can be both warriors for the middle class and proud patriots who are defending our democracy and freedom. So I'm with you a hundred percent in the way that you've talked about that. What I found interesting was the number one recommendation in the first of the five sections was about rolling back the tariffs. We call them Trump's terrible tariffs here. Our term for it. But we actually had progress in that regard this week, right? Surprising perhaps. I mean, talk a little bit about that because this was sort of a big, unexpected development and a welcome one.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan:
Yeah, this has been a really interesting week because there's been a few really good wins, so to speak, on the side of justice and sanity.
One of them of course was the grand jury ruling that we just talked about, but another was this vote that was taken, for those who haven't been following along, [Mike Johnson] has tried to play a game with time, and tried to freeze time here on the floor, tried to prevent his members from having to vote about tariffs at all, but time was unfrozen. And as a result, we were able to take a vote about tariffs. And the first vote that we took collectively was about Canada. Three Republican members of Congress joined all of the Democratic members of Congress in saying that we should stop the tariffing process that the administration has started in Canada, specifically because the rationale that the administration is using is unsound. That, unfortunately, will probably not actually result in anything because there's not enough of us to override a veto, assuming it went to the Senate. But at least it's a good glimmer of hope that the Republicans are paying attention. I think if you really ask people down deep in their heart, there’s dozens of Republicans who should have voted the other way, but didn't. But it is a beginning of the Congress not only pushing back on tariffs, but also taking back their Article I responsibility as well.
Simon Rosenberg:
Yeah, we have been big proponents of rolling back the tariffs from Liberation Day, and we've seen the Senate now vote successfully — the Republican-led Senate had taken several votes to roll back the tariffs. And now the House has done it too. And it's remarkable that in this kind of control that Trump has over his party, that you just saw this level of rebuke and repudiation on his number one economic policy. And so it is a welcome development. I think from what I read, Greg Meeks, Congressman Meeks, who's been spearheading this, is going to bring up every few weeks these privileged resolutions to get Congress on record on different aspects of the tariffs. And the challenge the Republicans have now is that if you don't vote with us on this, then you're voting to increase prices on people in their districts. Mike Johnson tried very hard to prevent these votes from happening. But now, we have virtually every Republican in a vulnerable position, in a contested race, just voted to increase prices for people in their districts… it was a remarkable thing.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan:
Yes, it is. And I think there will be subsequent votes. And the reason why the speaker did what he did was exactly for this reason. He didn't want to have to put any of his caucus on record on this vote. But that's our job. Not only is it our job to vote and be put into uncomfortable positions with uncomfortable votes, but it is literally our job… tariffing is the job of Congress, not the job of the executive branch. And so it's like voting to say, I'm not going to do my job. And that was an intriguing twist of the rules that Mr. Johnson was able to pull off. But luckily enough, it expired.
Simon Rosenberg:
We don't have all the time in the world today, but are there other parts of the agenda that you're proud of that you are going to be championing? Obviously everything in it is great, right? It's got five pieces, we'll be sharing it in the links when we release this video today. But is there anything else that you think really sticks out?
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan:
Yeah, and as you mentioned, there are the five pillars and they include things like groceries and household items. They are tariff related, but that's part of the groceries and household items area. It also has to do with housing, and housing affordability, where tariffs also are playing a pretty significant role in elevating the price of new housing as well. It includes healthcare and that's something that we saw it was so important to the American people — that the government shut down for the longest period in history over this issue. And so there's some good and sound suggestions on how to make health care more affordable and more accessible for more people and that's a big issue in all of our districts, I think.
It talks about energy. And I am proud of this particular area because I've spent a lot of time in the bipartisan space on energy. I was one of the leaders of the bipartisan climate solutions caucus. And so talking about permitting reform and making sure that we're addressing and all of the above strategy and not eliminating things that we think are weird — according to the president — like wind energy or solar energy.
So there's that, and then the last component, another one that I'm very very proud of is families… it's a big bucket… my daughter has a one year old. Her child care is twenty two thousand dollars a year which is bananas. And I think that should she have another child, you can assume that it would be doubled or at least close to doubled. That's impossible, an impossible burden for people to manage. And so the child care or family aspect, which includes family leave and medical leave, is I think a really big part of the puzzle of making sure that people can afford to just exist with their families, and to be able to have families, and take care of them. Because it's not enough to care about when they're born… you actually have to worry about when children actually grow up. And so those are the pillars of the agenda. It's kind of a common sense set of ideas. And as I rattled them off, I hope people kind of heard a pretty pragmatic approach to those solutions. All of the stuff is kind of in the bipartisan space and in reality in terms of the solutions. And so this is why I think that people like me are so enormously frustrated that instead of focusing on these practical, pragmatic things that we can do to really affect the everyday lives of the middle class and everyone else, we see Pam Bondi doing Pam Bondi, you know, and it's disappointing. It's enormously disappointing that this is what the American people are seeing about what their government is doing on their behalf right now.
Simon Rosenberg:
It is remarkable to me, as somebody who's been doing this a long time, with how unconcerned Trump and the Republicans are really about the everyday concerns of the American people. I mean, not only did Trump betray his promise to lower prices by immediately putting tariffs in place which raise prices on just about everything, you know, they have cut healthcare and food assistance. I mean, it's been, you know, an agenda very much for oligarchs and not for everybody else, you know, in a way that's shocking. It's been shocking, frankly, how they're not even really trying to pretend otherwise any longer.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan:
Exactly. But we're all catching on. And some of the things that we've been talking about just in this conversation — the glimmers of light that we're seeing — are I believe because enough people are catching on to what's going on. And enough people have watched more than a year go by of the administration, to your point, having nothing to show for reducing prices or taking care of us in the middle class. And instead, the elevated blood pressure that we're all experiencing is what our reality is. And people are smart. They understand who really is trying to get the work done. And I would argue that the New Dem Affordability Agenda is where that work can really make a difference for us all.
Simon Rosenberg:
Well, and I'll say two last things to wrap up. One is that people often ask, well, what are Democrats for? We have to be more than just against Trump. The New Dems have put out a whole bunch of really thoughtful proposals across a whole wide variety of issues over the last year. I'll do my best to try to highlight as much of them in my write up today of this…for people who want to understand that there is a group in congress putting forward pragmatic thoughtful solutions to the challenges that we face. And that there are people working on the for part, not just the against part.
The other thing I want you to know… I know you're in your office, so you don't necessarily have to respond, but on politics and elections, our community has endorsed two of the candidates in Pennsylvania, Janelle Stelson and Paige Cognetti, tremendous candidates. In the last few months we raised over forty thousand dollars for each of them so far, and we're excited to be supporting them. You don't need to say anything because I know you're in the official part of the building [laughs], but we're excited about your future colleagues who are running in Pennsylvania. They're tremendous candidates and it's been great to get to know both of them. So it's exciting, too, you not only are doing the hard intellectual and policy work, but you're going to have important political work to do at home too this year.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan:
A hundred percent. There's a reason why Pennsylvania is always something that people are watching every election night. And there's a reason why those parts of Pennsylvania, mine included, are right where the rubber meets the road on these kinds of conversations.
Simon Rosenberg:
Listen, thank you Congresswoman, thank you for this great work, and again congratulations, or let me say it differently, thank you. For your courage and your bravery in taking on with your five colleagues… I really do believe when we look back at this period, there are going to be these moments… the people of Minnesota standing up, right? The government shutdown when Democrats decided to really fight against Trump. And what the six of you did, which was I think really sort of outside the box. You stood up for our values and our country in a powerful way. And as you said, it's not over. You've got more to go here. But thank you for your leadership.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan:
Thank you. It's not over. And I appreciate the thank you. I always say that about people running for office. A lot of times people say congratulations. To me, it's a service. And so thanking candidates is just as important. So thank you very much.
Simon Rosenberg:
Okay, thank you, Congresswoman. Listen, everybody, there's going to be a link that gets you to the affordability agenda. Let us know what you think, if you think it's helpful and good, share this with others, hit like so more people will see this and keep working hard everybody. Thanks for being here with us today.
