By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Steve Hobbs
Several Democratic senators and their guests, including Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, spoke out against President Donald Trump’s policies and Republicans’ pending legislative actions in advance of Trump’s State of the Union address at a press conference in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 24.
Hobbs joined Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell as her guest. Both Hobbs and Cantwell highlighted the damage the SAVE America Act—a bill that would create sweeping changes to voting and hobble voter eligibility—would do to voting rights in the United States. The act allegedly targets illegal voting by non-citizens, but voter fraud is rare.
The U.S. House of Representatives’ version of the act, which narrowly passed last year, creates significant hurdles to voter eligibility and rights, including requiring citizenship and residency documentation that many may not have or may have trouble accessing, prohibiting mail-in voting, and requires purging voter rolls every 30 days. The U.S. Senate version introduces additional obstacles.
Sen. Maria Cantwell
“Millions of Americans will have to pay to prove their citizenship, if they want to vote under Donald Trump’s proposal,” Cantwell said. “A passport can cost $165. In Washington, a replacement of a birth certificate is somewhere between $28 and $51. And voters will have to travel to do more paperwork and stand in longer lines. He is basically threatening to nationalize the elections. This is unconstitutional.”
Hobbs said that the administration is “tilting at windmills,” and that if the government truly was concerned about election safety, they would restore “the funding and support, which they cut. They cut last year to programs that defend our elections from constant cyber attack and disinformation campaigns from overseas actors.”
The Trump administration last year cut funding that supported election security and defense from overseas actors. Trump has continued to falsely claim that he won the 2020 election, and that China infiltrated the U.S. election infrastructure. A U.S. intelligence report showed that Russia meddled in the 2020 election, spreading lies about 2020’s presidential victor, President Joe Biden, while seeding support for Trump.
“I guarantee you that nation-state adversaries like Russia … they’re not going to let up on their cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns,” Hobbs said. “The SAVE America Act addresses none of these real documented threats to our elections.”
Sen. Tammy Duckworth
Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois highlighted the number of people who now no longer have health insurance or who may have to drop health insurance altogether, because it is now too expensive, thanks to last year’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill.
“With his big, ugly, sharpie signature last summer, he happily stripped away the tax credits that millions of Americans relied on to afford health care. Thanks to his bill, thanks to his apathy, thanks to his antipathy for his own citizens, countless folks’ premiums for their health care are skyrocketing,” Duckworth said. “This has forced too many to make the choice of whose care in their own family they can afford or whether they meet the rate to ration their child’s insulin even further or whether that lump on their chest is really worth the price tag that comes with a trip to the doctor’s office.”
The bill, which Trump signed into law on July 4, gutted funding for Medicaid, leaving between 10 million—17 million people, including at least 250,000 Washingtonians, without healthcare coverage by 2034. The bill also placed restrictions on healthcare, including abortions, and cut funding for the food aid program SNAP. The money supporting Medicaid and associated programs now goes towards permanent tax cuts for the wealthy.
Jeremy Schumacher, Duckworth’s guest at the event, has diabetes, and is his family’s sole breadwinner. Following the passage of the bill, Schumacher’s family’s healthcare costs have increased by more than $11,000, going from a $5,000 deductible to a $16,400 deductible. He now has to put his own healthcare needs on the back burner, instead taking care of his wife, who is disabled and trying to make his mortgage payments.
“I just went to the doctor for the first time this week and found out I have diabetes. I’m afraid that because of that, the testing, the x-rays that I got, I will never be able to pay for them,” Schumacher said, tearing up. “I already cannot pay for them and I won’t be able to. I’m going to be at the mercy of whatever service I can find to help me take down these bills and there’s not many of those left.”
Schumacher said that he checks the mail daily, afraid of what he will find. When he goes home to Illinois, “I’ll check the mail again and I will be terrified once again that that’s the next bill that we can’t afford.”
“And if it was just health care, it’d be one thing, but everything has gone up. Our electricity bill has gone up 30%. Our food bill has gone up over 50%. We just cannot afford to live anymore,” Schumacher continued. “You don’t feel like you’re a part of society anymore and that puts people in a dark spot when you are constantly afraid that the next day is going to be the one that kicks you out of your own home that you own. So that’s just what we live with every single day and so many of us suffer in silence.”
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