Saturday, August 30, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.
Step one. We won against Trump Tariffs.
How sticky this ruling will be next depends on the Supreme Court.
In its 7-4 ruling, issued late Friday, a majority on the court determined for a second time that the breadth of the tariffs the president had imposed was illegal. Both “Conservatives” and “liberals” have opposed the tariffs. Democratic Senators Patty Murray and Tim Kaine have led the fight against tariffs and Maine Senator, Susan Collins, whose state has been badly hurt by Trump tariffs against Canada has even sometimes joined the bipartisan fight.
Stay tuned.
Click to read the appeals court ruling on Trump’s tariffs
The Governor of California, of course, didn’t let Trump get away with his belly aching.
One more thing.
Democratic governors- not just Newsom, but Pritzker (Illinois), Shapiro (Pennsylvania) and Others - are fighting back on other issues too, notably against RFK Jr. and his mad rule over the nation’s health.
Bernie Sanders: Kennedy Must Resign.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign.
Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.
This week, Mr. Kennedy pushed out the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after less than one month on the job because she refused to act as a rubber stamp for his dangerous policies. Four leading officials at C.D.C. resigned the same week. One of those officials said Mr. Kennedy’s team asked him to “change studies that have been settled in the past” apparently to fit Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views. This is not Making America Healthy Again.
Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, Secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts.
It is absurd to have to say this in 2025, but vaccines are safe and effective. That, of course, is not just my view. Far more important, it is the overwhelming consensus of the medical and scientific communities.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the country’s largest professional association of pediatricians, representing over 67,000 doctors who treat our children every day, calls immunizations “one of the greatest public health achievements,” which prevents tens of thousands of deaths and millions of cases of disease.
The American Medical Association, the largest professional association of physicians and medical students, representing over 270,000 doctors along with 79 leading medical societies, recently said that vaccines for flu, R.S.V. and Covid-19 are “the best tools to protect the public against these illnesses and their potentially serious complications.”
The World Health Organization, an agency with some of the most prominent medical experts around the globe, recently noted that over the past 50 years, vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives and reduced the infant deaths by 40 percent.
Against the overwhelming body of evidence within the medicine and science, what are Secretary Kennedy’s views? He has claimed that autism is caused by vaccines, despite more than a dozen rigorous scientific studies involving hundreds of thousands of children that have found no connection between vaccines and autism.
He has called the Covid-19 vaccines the “deadliest” ever made despite findings cited by the W.H.O. that Covid shots saved over 14 million lives throughout the world in 2021 alone.
He has ridiculously questioned whether the polio vaccine has killed more people than polio itself did even though scientists have found that the vaccine has saved 1.5 million lives and prevented around 20 million people from becoming paralyzed since 1988.
He has absurdly claimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”
Who supports Secretary Kennedy’s views? Not credible scientists and doctors. One of his leading “experts” that he cites to back up his bogus claims on autism and vaccines had his medical license revoked and his study retracted from the medical journal that published it.
Many of his supporters are from Children’s Health Defense — the anti-vaccine group he founded and profited from — and a small circle of loyalists that have spread misinformation and dangerous conspiracy theories on vaccines for years.
The reality is that Secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of H.H.S., he is using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public health and on truth itself.
What will this mean for the health and well-being of the American people?
Short term, it will be harder for Americans to get lifesaving vaccines. Already, the Trump administration has effectively taken away Covid vaccines from many healthy younger adults and kids, unless they fight their way through our broken health care system. This means more doctor’s visits, more bureaucracy and more people paying higher out-of-pocket costs — if they can manage to get a vaccine at all.
Covid is just the beginning. Mr. Kennedy’s next target may be the childhood immunization schedule, the list of recommended vaccines that children receive to protect them from diseases like measles, chickenpox and polio. The danger here is that diseases that have been virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will resurface and cause enormous harm.
Two years ago, when I was the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, I held a hearing with the major government officials responsible for protecting us from a new pandemic, including the head of the C.D.C. Without exception, every one of these agency heads said that, while they could not predict the exact date, there will be a future pandemic and we must be much better prepared for it than we are today.
Unfortunately, Secretary Kennedy’s actions are making a worrisome situation even worse by defunding the research that could help us prepare for the next pandemic. This month, he canceled nearly $500 million in research for the kinds of vaccines that helped us stop the Covid pandemic. At the same time, Mr. Kennedy is cutting funding to states to prepare and respond to future outbreaks of infectious diseases. This is unacceptable.
America’s health care system is already dysfunctional and wildly expensive, and yet the Trump administration will be throwing an estimated 15 million people off their health insurance through a cut of over $1 trillion to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. This cut is also expected to result in the closing of or the decline in services at hundreds of nursing homes, hospitals and community health centers. As a result of cuts to the Affordable Care Act, health insurance costs will soar for millions of Americans. That is not Making America Healthy Again.
Secretary Kennedy is putting Americans’ lives in danger, and he must resign. In his place, President Trump must listen to doctors and scientists and nominate a health secretary and a C.D.C. director who will protect the health and well-being of the American people, not carry out dangerous policies based on conspiracy theories. (Senator Sanders, VT, Op-Ed, New York Times)
The new head of the CDC Jim O’Neill also has no training in medicine and, according to CNN, was part of meetings where officials pressed Susan Monarez on vaccines. RFK Jr. led those meetings.
But health is not the only area of rebellion.
Once again, Stay Tuned.
Vance is in the spotlight.
It is not clear why but Vance announced he is ready to be president.
Big news in Iowa.
Joni Ernst is out. We can turn this red seat blue.
Remember on Tuesday, for the second time this year, a Democrat flipped in a red-leaning district in the Iowa Senate. Catelin Drey won by 11 percentage points, or nearly 800 votes. The Senate seat in the Sioux City area had been held by a Republican. It would be the second time this year that Iowa Democrats had flipped a legislative district.
One more thing.
We need 4 seats to flip the Senate.
Iowa can be one.
The Senate Seat in North Carolina is in play. Thom Tillis is not running. Popular Democratic former Governor Roy Cooper can win it.
The Senate Seat in Maine is in play. Hey, that is Susan Collins’ seat. Can we win it? Maine is blue and angry about Trump’s tariffs against Canada.
Ohio. Can Sherrod Brown running once again do his magic against an appointed red Jon Husted?
Election Day is November 3rd, 2026.
Let’s revisit this on November 4th.
For now, don’t expect to hear from me until post Labor Day when I hope to be well again. Enjoy the weekend. Support our unions.