Afternoon all. Sat down a few minutes ago with our good friend Rep. Janelle Bynum, freshman Member of the House from Oregon’s 5th District, a district that includes parts of Portland. As Portland and Oregonians have become a very important part of our resistance I wanted to get her take on what she was seeing on the ground in Oregon. It’s a timely and really interesting conversation. A video recording and transcript are above.
We talked about Senator Merkley’s inspiring Senate speech; the targeting of Portland and Oregon by Trump and his regime; her recent visit to the well known ICE detention facility in Portland, the birth place of the frogs and inflatables; the importance of ridicule and mockery in challenging strongmen; and her profound disappointment in the cowardly Speaker keeping the House in recess for much of the last three months. Here is what she told me:
“I always said that if this job ever became about me, it was time for me to go. And I think Mike Johnson should take that advice as well. He’s apparently trying to save himself at the expense of the American people.”
Yep.
I thought the most interesting part of our talk was her reflections on her own evolution from someone who was known as a workhorse in the state legislature in Oregon to now being a public leader of the resistance to Trump’s escalating authoritarianism. Here is a piece of that part of our conversation:
“Here in Congress people are looking to us for hope and a sense of fight, a sense of backbone. Which is way different from the role of a lawmaker in the legislature. And so what [Senator Merkley] is doing is giving everybody in Oregon and everybody in this country a sense that we are standing up… even though it’s with words… people need the visual, and they need to be galvanized, need to have some sense that somebody is not just going to roll over and continue to let this guy use the military and our national resources for his own political gain.”
Rep. Bynum is one of our Hopium House 7, those 7 newly elected House Members who our community helped elect in 2024 who we are now working to re-elect this cycle. You can learn more about this program, see our interviews with her colleagues, and make a donation to all 7 here.
Enjoy this interview with a wonderful emerging leader of our party and keep working hard all - Simon
