A Round-up of Political Pushbacks and Explainers
"Diversity in Politics" coverage is made possible by Women Winning and Vote Run Lead.
We understand how tiring and depressing it is to see what the White House and Republican legislators are doing to our economy and infrastructure. As part of our occasional coverage — balanced with coverage intended for self-care as well as optimism that more community-minded heads will eventually prevail — we are offering this wrap-up of the latest news on the federal budget and its impact, as well as some pushback. We are reporting some of this in our Changemakers Alliance newsletter on Tuesdays.
Commentary
Writes The Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi on March 15: “Palestinian rights, trans rights, women’s rights: these are not separate issues. Unless you are a Maga supporter at the top of the food chain, the Trump administration will be coming for you too. This crackdown on free speech and political activism is not going to end with [the arrest of U.S. protestor Mahmoud] Khalil, or with pro-Palestine activism.”
She shared stories of other countries who have arrested people for speaking out. Saudi Arabia’s Salma al-Shehab, who was imprisoned four years for posting tweets in support of women’s rights and spent almost 300 days in solitary confinement. Israel took 23-year-old Layan Nasir from her parents’ home in the West Bank with no arrest warrant or charges, and no information to her family of where she was held. Russia took 18-year-old Daria Kozyreva for criticizing the Ukraine war.
Writes Mahdawi, “We are sliding towards an authoritarian future at alarming speed and … we can’t fight for our rights in isolation. All of our freedoms are intertwined.”
Ralph Nader (March 14): “Don’t self-censoring people know that they are helping the Trumpian dread, threat and fear machine get worse? Study Germany and Italy in the 1930s.”
seen on social media
Pushbacks
U.S. Rep Betty McCollum (MN-04), ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, released the following statement after President Trump and Vice President Vance publicly denigrated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office: “President Trump and Vice President Vance’s conduct in this Oval Office meeting was a disgrace.”
Heather Cox Richardson explainer of what was said based on the transcript and video.
Minnesota Bill Restricting Trans Girl Athletes Does Not Pass in Legislature
Although he has not been uniformly supportive of transgender identities, the Utah governor wrote a veto decision against a bill that was essentially focused on 1 transgender student in the state playing girls sports.
On Monday, HF12 was rejected along party lines and did not receive the needed 68 votes in a legislature that currently has 67 Democrats and 66 Republicans.
The bill authored by Rep. Peggy Scott (R-Andover), states: “only female students may participate in an elementary or secondary school level athletic team or sport that an educational institution has restricted to women and girls” and that “female means a female as biologically determined by genetics and defined with respect to an individual’s reproductive system.”
In defense of the bill, Rep. Marion Rarick (R-Maple Lake) said, “We have women and girls around the world that are so afraid of competing with biological men that they are dropping out of sports.”
Opponents said the bill would allow trans discrimination. Members of the Minnesota Queer Legislators Caucus called it “political theater” at a news conference.
Rep. Leigh Finke (DFL-St. Paul) said the trans athlete problem is manufactured and does not exist in the United States. “Minnesota has been inclusive for 10 years. We’ve had zero problems. [This is being done] for political reasons. When you lie about a community for long enough, people will believe it.”
City of Saint Paul has joined the City of San Francisco in litigation against President Trump, filed in the United States District Court, Northern District of California. The President’s Executive Order titled “Protecting The American People Against Invasion,” threatens to withhold over $200 million in federal funding in the City of Saint Paul alone, as they contend a City ordinance interferes with federal government immigration enforcements.
You might have heard of the choice words Minnesota’s U.S. Sen. Tina Smith used to describe Elon Musk after he asked federal employees to write an email over the weekend in order to save their jobs.
Maine Governor Janet Mills was confronted by Trump for allowing transgender students to compete despite an executive order against it. He threatened twice, “You’d better comply because otherwise you’re not going to get any federal funding.” She responded: “We’ll see you in court.”
As the New York Times noted: “Something happened at the White House Friday afternoon that almost never happens these days. Somebody defied President Trump. Right to his face.”
Hours later, the Trump administration launched an investigation into Maine’s Department of Education. (Minnesota and California also are defying the order.)
Excerpt from Jane Fonda’s Lifetime Achievement Award speech at Screen Actor’s Guild event Sunday night: “Empathy is not weak or woke — and by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people. A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way. And even if they’re of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy and not judge but listen from our hearts and welcome them into our tent because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what’s coming at us.”
Explainer: The Federal Budget in the House (Part 1)
Rep. Ilhan Omar speaking against federal budget resolution (courtesy photo)
After the U.S. House Republicans passed a federal budget resolution on February 25, one of the public dissensions came from Minnesota’s U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, who said: “House Republicans are using their majority to serve their wealthy donors at the expense of working families. The budget they passed tonight cuts Medicaid by $880 billion, cuts SNAP by $230 billion, and balloons the deficit by $4 trillion to extend tax breaks for giant corporations and billionaires like Elon Musk. The so-called ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ does nothing for Minnesota families looking for help with the rising cost of living. In fact, it adds more burden for middle-class families. Nearly 1.3 million Minnesotans — about one quarter of our state — rely on Medicaid. A cut of this magnitude would have severe consequences for our entire population. Here in the Fourth District, 54,000 Minnesotans rely on SNAP to put food on the table. 172,000 rely on Medicaid for healthcare access, including nearly 90,000 children on CHIP. The health and well-being of our communities are under attack by this Republican majority. I will continue to oppose all Republican efforts to take away food, healthcare, and basic government services that Minnesotans rely on.”
Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar spoke on the House Floor during the debate to oppose the Republican budget plan. She sits on the House Budget Committee and offered four amendments to alter the legislative text. She said: “I rise in strong opposition to this Republican budget resolution. Because it isn’t a budget – it’s a blueprint for American decline. Let’s be clear: They want to exploit your labor, take your tax dollars, and gut your earned benefits — all to bankroll tax cuts for their wealthy friends and donors. They want to increase your healthcare costs —while Elon Musk and his friends hoard even more wealth. And they have the audacity to call it ‘fiscal responsibility.’
“This proposal will only deepen the constitutional crisis we are already in: A President trying to rule like a dictator; an unelected billionaire using hate and fear to expand his control over our country; and Congressional Republicans pretending this chaos is normal, even as their own constituents call them out for their cowardice. Our government is being hollowed out. Our institutions are falling apart. And today, House Republicans are slashing programs that people rely on to enact massive tax giveaways to the rich.
“So, I ask my Republican colleagues: Who will you serve? The people who sent you here? Or the billionaires trying to buy our democracy?”
Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman says the Trump-Republican plan to slash health care will make Minnesota less healthy and result in a devastating state budget shortfall. “The Minnesota Legislature’s most important job this year is to balance the state budget, but the chaos, cruelty, and incompetence we’re seeing from the Trump/Musk administration and a Republican Congress is putting that work in serious jeopardy. Republicans’ extreme policies will break Minnesota’s budget and the impacts will be felt by every single person in the state. Minnesota Democrats have a better plan: let’s build an economy where all Minnesotans have opportunities to succeed, not just the wealthy and a powerful few.”
Even Minnesota Republicans are sounding the alarm about the impact of Medicaid cuts to the state budget and health of Minnesotans, saying in a February 25 letter to President Trump and Minnesota’s GOP congressional delegation: “Drastic reductions to Medicaid funding have the potential to impact the 1.4 million people we serve and place incredible pressure on our overall state budget. There are no other sources to make up the lost federal share beyond severely impacting the seniors and those with disabilities who we serve.”
According to Minnesota Reformer reporter 217-215, which sends the budget to the Senate, where Republicans in that chamber need to vote to adopt it. Kentucky’s Thomas Massie was the only Republican to vote against the budget resolution, which was opposed by every Democrat voting. Tennessee’s Tim Burchett, Ohio’s Warren Davidson and Indiana’s Victoria Spartz, who opposed approval earlier in the day, voted with their fellow GOP colleagues in support. Massie said following a closed-door Republican Conference meeting Tuesday morning that he had gone from leaning against the budget resolution to being a solid no vote.
“If the Republican plan passes, under the rosiest assumptions, which aren’t even true, we’re going to add $328 billion to the deficit this year, we’re going to add $295 billion to the deficit the year after that, $242 billion to the deficit after that,” Massie said. “Why would I vote for that?”
House Budget Committee ranking member Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., said during floor debate on the budget resolution that its reconciliation instructions call on committees that oversee Medicaid, nutrition assistance and education programs to cut hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for a portion of the tax cuts.
Boyle argued that the proposed reductions in spending would cut more than $1 trillion, but not enough to cover the $4.5 trillion in new deficits that the budget resolution allows Congress to implement on tax cuts. “A massive increase to our national debt from the same crowd that for the last four years has done nothing but shed crocodile tears about the size of our national debt,” Boyle said.
The House budget resolution proposes that Congress raise the nation’s debt limit by $4 trillion in the reconciliation process that will take place later this year.
Tennessee’s Burchett said before voting yes: “We promised the people we’re going to have cuts, and then we are just going to turn right around and spend the money up at the Pentagon. The war pimps will get theirs no matter what, anyway. … They talk about all this DOGE cuts, which are great, America loves. But what they don’t realize is they’re just going to attack them right back on the money we save.”
The Senate voted last week to approve its budget resolution following a marathon amendment voting session, but House GOP leaders decided to move forward with their own version.
Heather Cox Richardson’s February 25 commentary, in part, said:
Generally, Democrats believe that the government should raise money by levying taxes according to people’s ability to pay them, and that the government should use the money raised to provide services to make sure that everyone has a minimum standard of living, the protection of the laws, and equal access to resources like education and healthcare. They think the government has a role to play in regulating business; making sure the elderly, disabled, poor, and children have food, shelter and education; maintaining roads and airports; and making sure the law treats everyone equally.
Generally, Republicans think individuals should be able to manage their money to make the best use of markets, thus creating economic growth more efficiently than the government can, and that the ensuing economic growth will help everyone to prosper. They tend to think the government should not regulate business and should impose few if any taxes, both of which hamper a person’s ability to run their enterprises as they wish. They tend to think churches or private philanthropy should provide a basic social safety net and that infrastructure projects are best left up to private companies. Civil rights protections, they think, are largely unnecessary.
But the Republicans are facing a crisis in their approach to the American economy. The tax cuts that were supposed to create extraordinarily high economic growth, which would in turn produce tax revenue equal to higher taxes on lower economic growth, never materialized. Since the 1990s, when the government ran surpluses under Democratic president Bill Clinton, tax cuts under Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, along with unfunded wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have produced massive budget deficits that, in turn, have added trillions to the national debt.
Now the party is torn between those members whose top priority is more tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, and those who want more tax cuts but also recognize that further cuts to popular programs will hurt their chances of reelection.
That struggle is playing out very publicly right now in the Republicans’ attempt to pass a budget resolution, which is not a law but sets the party’s spending priorities, sometimes for as much as a decade, and is the first step toward passing a budget reconciliation bill which can pass the Senate without threat of a filibuster.
… President Donald Trump’s top priority is extending his 2017 tax cuts for the next ten years, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates would add $4.6 trillion to the deficit. If he actually enacted the other tax cuts he promised on the campaign trail — including on tips, overtime, and Social Security payments — that deficit jumps closer to $11 trillion. During the campaign, he insisted that the tariffs he promised to levy would make foreign countries make up the money lost by the tax cuts. In addition to being wildly wishful thinking, Trump’s claim ignores the fact that tariffs are actually paid by U.S. consumers.
So Trump and the Republicans have a math problem. It was always incorrect to say it was the Democrats who were irresponsibly running up the debt, but it was a powerful myth, and Republicans have relied on it for at least 25 years. Now, though, there is a mechanical issue that belies that rhetoric: the debt ceiling, which requires Congress to raise the ceiling on the amount the Treasury can borrow.
…Other Republicans realize that the cuts they are demanding will be enormously unpopular, not least because for all their rhetoric, it is actually Republican-dominated districts that receive the bulk of federal monies.
This is the mess that sits behind unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) that is claiming to slash federal spending, although its claims have been so thoroughly debunked that early this morning it quietly deleted all five of the five-biggest ticket items it had touted on its “wall of receipts.”
As Democrats keep pointing out, Republicans have control of the government and could make any cuts they wanted through the normal course of legislation, but they are not doing so because they know those programs are popular. Instead, they are turning the project over to Musk.
… In an interview with NPR, the U.S. ambassador to Hungary under President Joe Biden, David Pressman, explained that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán turned Hungary’s democracy into “a system that’s designed to enrich a clique of elites to take public assets and put them in private pockets while talking about standing up for conservative values” in what became “a massive transfer of public assets to an oligarch class.” Trump and MAGAs see Orbán as a model, and it is notable that today the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency that manages civilian aviation and that Trump and DOGE gutted, announced it has agreed to use Musk’s Starlink internet system for its information technology networks.
But even if Musk is only providing the illusion of savings, Congress still has to figure out the budget. On Friday, the Senate voted 52–48 to advance a budget resolution that called for $175 billion in new funding for border security and immigration enforcement and told committees, including the committee that oversees Medicaid, to find at least $4 billion in spending cuts. All Democrats and Independents, along with Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted not to advance that resolution.
… For their part, the Democrats rejected the proposal, concerned about the concentration of wealth in the U.S.: on Sunday, economist Robert Reich noted that “[t]he top 0.1% of Americans control $22 trillion in wealth,” while “[t]he bottom 50% control $3.8 trillion in wealth.”
… Earlier this year, Republicans killed a bipartisan push to enable representatives to vote remotely while on maternity leave, so Representative Brittany Pettersen (D-CO) flew across the country with her one-month-old son to “vote NO on this disastrous budget proposal.”
For 2025 coverage, Minnesota Women’s Press earned a community leadership award, three photography awards, and four editorial awards, including for coverage of social issues and for our Spring 2025 “Know Your Rights” special section supported by Unidos MN. Our publisher was named Journalist of the Year by Violence Free Minnesota for gender-based violence coverage.
