A Sit-In to Head off More Drastic Cuts

Early this morning, Senator Corey Booker (D-NJ) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) began a sit-in on the Capitol steps to call attention to tomorrow morning’s vote by Congress on the GOP Budget Reconciliation Bill for 2025 that would eliminate more than $1.5 billion in federal expenditures. As word spread of their action, a crowd soon began to grow and by early afternoon the sit-in was being broadcast live to more than 25,000 viewers.

Among those present were fellow legislators, program heads, a former Social Security Commissioner and regular citizens who are being adversely impacted by Elon Musk and DOGE.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” cuts programs and services whose savings in turn will fund tax breaks for billionaires paid for on the backs of the working class and at the expense of those in need.

At stake is the very essence of what benefits and support that government provides to education, public health, food safety, school nutrition programs, programs for special needs students, environment, Social Security, veterans benefits, Medicare, Meals on Wheels, and winter heating assistance for impoverished families and seniors, among many others.

Booker said that as the wealthiest nation in the world “We shouldn’t have to beg for programs every four years that are fundamental for a nation that is great.” He went on to say, too, that the poverty which most threatens our nation is “the poverty of empathy” while Elon Musk has been quoted as saying that the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Their differences in opinion couldn’t be more stark while Musk’s have been manifest his in the works of DOGE.

One such program that serves 49 million Americans is the US Dept of Agriculture SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) food program that the bill calls for a reduction of the per person per day allocation of $6.29 to $5 per day making the burden for struggling families, the disabled and seniors even more insurmountable. Booker promised to fight for the programs and services saying, “We are all Americans, and we will fight to protect these services. We stand for each other…and we will continue to work together.”

Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) reminded everyone to fight the fight because “that is how you win. Politics is not a spectator sport, democracy is not what we have, it’s what we do.” He reminded everyone, too, that this is a movement for a pluralistic, fair democracy and we need to understand we will have to take some risks. “This is no longer a partisan question this is a question of who we are as a country. Are we really going to rob families that are struggling and shovel all that money to the wealthy? This is the kickoff for one of the most important policy fights we are going to see for many, many decades.”

Hakeem Jefferies reflected on the first time he met Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) when he gave the then young Congressman some advice. He told him that “Washington DC can be a tough place. So, I don’t want you to get into any trouble, unless it’s good trouble.”

He went on to tell of an estimated 50 million Americans who are hungry or food insecure including millions of children. “That’s a stain on our society. We are going in exactly the opposite direction we should be headed.”

Rep. Gil Cisneros (D-CA), a Navy veteran, thanked both Jefferies and Booker for starting this good trouble in bringing people out and lamented what “This administration’s chaos and uncertainty have caused…they just don’t know what the hell is going on. They don’t know anything, it’s all chaos.” He reflected on the shuttering of DEI programs by Trump saying that in his own experience just out of high school after joining the Navy, his inclusion in an affirmative action program allowed him to succeed through educational opportunities based on his merit. “They don’t want to allow people to succeed; they don’t want to allow people to educate themselves. We cannot let them do that and we can’t allow them to do that.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), having just returned from a 19-county town hall tour in her state, related that those in attendance have finally realized what was happening to farmers in rural areas and how the federal food programs, school lunch programs and SNAP they depend on are now affecting them adversely as they “are hanging on an edge” due to the cuts.

She pointed out, too, how Trump’s tariffs have made this a social justice and economic issue and that the “quite voices of the past are rising up right now and they are showing up. Costs are up, chaos is up, corruption is up under this administration. All it takes is four Republican senators to stand up and say No” to doom the pending Budget Reconciliation Bill.

Former Social Security Commissioner and two-term Governor of Maryland Martin O’Malley debunked many of Musk’s lies in calling the program a “Ponzi scheme” and that dead people and illegal immigrants are receiving benefits. He lamented that all the forward improvements made in the past are now moving in the wrong direction, because Elon Musk and Donlad Trump “came in with a chainsaw and gutted Social Security.”

They took information and opened the database to the DOGE people “while committing numerous federal crimes by putting information on the federal Social Security records they know to be false.”

“They are marking people as dead when they know they are not,” claiming they were trying to “clean up” the data base. As such, they have issued directives for how to deal with someone who shows up alive at a field office after they have been marked dead.

Elon Musk believes that “People who are disabled and can’t work or people who are elderly and can’t work are by their nature useless, wasteful inefficiencies.”

He described the present circumstances as a “pivotal moment” in the history of Social Security that cuts across all party lines. “Eighty percent of Americans believe that Social Security should be strengthened and made better and not dismantled.”

Donald Trump’s claim that “20 million dead people are receiving benefit payments and that illegal immigrants are milking the system” are both lies according to O’Malley as he said that frequent automatic alerts are reviewed from death data bases in removing the deceased. Illegal immigrants are in fact “prohibited from receiving any benefits from the system and instead pay in $25 billion to all the rest of us.”

He illustrated the economic unfairness of the system in saying that the average worker pays Social Security all through the calendar year on earnings up to the first $170,000 of income, “which means that Elon Musk and Warren Buffet stop paying two seconds after the ball drops on Times Square. So, most Americans think it would be fair to have those high earners kick in more of their income.”

Report and photos by Phil Pasquini

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