Congressman Jared Huffman visits Sebastopol, Part 1

The congressman discussed what he can and cannot do to stop the Trump agenda, plus his thoughts on Medicaid cuts, HUD and whether we can depend on the Supreme Court to hold the line

Congressman Jared Huffman speaking at Burbank Heights on Friday evening.

This is Part 1 of two-part article.

Congressman Jared Huffman has been making a swing through the 2nd District for the past week, holding a large public event in Petaluma last week and doing a district-wide Zoom Town Hall. Yesterday evening, Feb. 28, he spoke at a gathering at Burbank Heights, a low-income senior living complex. He spent the majority of the meeting taking questions from the audience, all of whom seemed to be Huffman supporters. Interestingly, I was sitting next to an elderly woman, who whispered to me that she was probably the only Trump supporter in the room. “It’s like parallel worlds,” she said.

HUFFMAN: I’m glad to be out of Washington right now for a short time. Let me just say that the first five weeks of the second Trump presidency have been the longest five years of my life. I don’t know about you, but this fire hose of executive orders and things that were unthinkable at any other time in our history, just one after another after another, including today—this disgraceful meltdown in the Oval Office with President Zelensky of Ukraine. It is a tough time that we are all going through together, and so I know that you are concerned about it, angry about it, worried about it. I want you to know that I feel all of those same things. The difference, maybe, is that I’ve got to kind of keep my stuff together and get back in the ring and do my job, because I’m no good to any of you if I just melt down and start running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

So I will do my very best to feel all of this outrage and all of the urgency that this moment demands, because I get it. I know what’s going on here, and I will never sugar coat it for you, but don’t think for a minute that this is business as usual. Just because my head is not exploding, this is not normal. There is nothing normal about what we are living through. In fact, this is a lot closer to 1939 Germany than normal.

So that’s the main thing. I just want you to know that I think I understand the moment and what’s going on. I’m going to do my very best to try to meet it in every way I can. I probably can’t make you feel totally better about what’s happening in our country, but the one thing I can assure you of is that your congressman and the incredible team of staffers that work for me every single day are in the arena, doing our best for you, and that counts for something.

I think it’s probably best if we just get right to your questions, and we can go wherever the conversation goes. You can ask me about anything you want, and let’s start right here in the front row.

[A woman holds up her hand.]

HUFFMAN: All right, and she was holding her hand up. She was not doing the Elon Musk salute. She was just holding her hand out.

[Audience cracks up]

QUESTION: [There wasn’t really a question here. The person expressed a desire to get Donald Trump out of office now, tonight, and rambled on about Trump’s crimes until the audience revolted and started yelling “Ask a question!”]

HUFFMAN: All right, so I think I got it. I feel the same way. Donald Trump has messed up a lot of my plans. Believe me, I had hoped to be in the majority right now. I’m the ranking Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee. Is’s nice to be the ranking member, to be the top Democrat on what I consider a really important committee and a great committee for our district, given our environmental values and our coast and our forests and our parks and the fisheries. It’s just such a perfect fit, and it’s a bunch of issues that I’ve worked on for my whole career. But when you’re the ranking member, you are not the chairman, and there’s a big difference. As ranking member, I am kind of organizing the defense on natural resources, and we’re doing our best. We’re doing okay. But as chairman, you set the agenda, and you can actually deliver legislation and do all kinds of things that I can’t when I’m in the minority.

So everything from the way your retirement has been messed up to the way my being chairman has been messed up, there are so many consequences to not winning that 2024 election. In the midterm, I think Democrats will have an opportunity to step in and, by taking the house majority, at least provide a really important check and balance on Donald Trump. But we gotta make sure that they allow us to have a fair and free election in 2026.

We’re at a frontier where laws are being ignored, precedents are being shredded, norms are being thrown out the window. And I think what we really need most of all is just a super high level of engagement. We have got to make sure everybody is tuning in and showing up and finding their voice.

We’ll all have different ways that we can do that. I’ve got to do it from inside the arena, but all of you can—you’re doing it right here—you’re showing up for a town hall with your congressman. That matters. You’re doing it in your local community. You’ve got these great leaders [he gestures toward the mayor and councilmembers in attendance] that are trying to take care of foster youth and housing and all of these other pressing issues here in this community. All of it matters. And being together matters too, because the worst thing you can do in this moment is let them isolate us, let them overwhelm and intimidate us. And there’s strength in numbers. So I’m glad to be with you today.

QUESTION: Are the Democrats in the House and Senate actually working behind the scenes to do something real to enforce the court rulings—which have not been enforced—and get that information back from DOGE? And can he actually use the military to enforce what this 2025 plan has dictated?

HUFFMAN: First question, absolutely. I can promise you that my Democratic…I am one member of Congress and I’m a member in the minority of the House, so there are some tools I don’t have. It’s important that people understand that I don’t have the ability, for example, to issue subpoenas or to impeach the president. We can’t get that. I would love to, believe me, because he crossed the line of impeachable offenses in the first 20 minutes, I think, of his presidency. But there are just certain tools that I don’t have.

Even litigation. These court cases are hugely important. I mean, there are, I think, over 90 cases right now pending against this administration, just in the last five weeks, and we’re approaching close to two dozen court orders that are declaring things illegal, ordering them to stop, restraining orders of various types, injunctions of various types. So we are winning in court—the groups that have standing to sue are—but I don’t even have standing to sue most of the time.

I can file what we call amicus briefs to tell the court that the Democrats in the House of Representatives, you know, feel this way and that way—and we’re doing that—but the one thing that we’re really doing, and you just you won’t see it on the news or anything like that, is we’re working closely with all the groups that are lawyered up and going to court and winning. We are helping them build records that will be successful, and we’re helping them with the enforcement of the court orders, which is also what you asked about. It’s a hugely important part of this, because, you know, having a headline that a court ruled that Elon Musk has to stop having access to this data, that’s great, but if he continues doing it, we’ve got a problem. We’ve got an enforcement problem, and so we’re trying to track compliance with court orders, while we work with these groups.

At this point, I’m not ready to say that the Trump administration will just ignore court orders. That’s not an easy thing for them to do. No president has ever done that openly. There is a little bit of historic mythology that Andrew Jackson, once upon a time, ignored a Supreme Court order when he marched the Seminole Indians on the Trail of Tears. That’s actually not historically correct. The Supreme Court’s order was against the state of Florida, not against the United States. And so President Andrew Jackson wasn’t violating any—no president has ever openly violated a court order. There’s no precedent for it. We may see it. I think we’ve got to be ready for that possibility, but it would be a leap into dictatorship, like even more than everything we’ve seen so far. And it’s just one of many things that we’re watching out for, that we’re tracking, and it’s a long-winded way of saying, Yes, I do believe my Democratic colleagues and I are completely engaged and doing everything we can. It’s not the toolbox we wish we had, but we’re making the most of it.

Now, you asked about the military. Can Donald Trump use the military to do all the mass deportation, all these other things? Technically, no. You’re not supposed to use the military for domestic law enforcement. That is, they call that Posse Comitatus. There’s a law that says you’re not supposed to do that under the Constitution, but that’s why one of his first executive orders was to declare a national emergency at the border—even though the border was quiet at that time—so it was a fake emergency declaration. But he is counting on invoking all of these emergency authorities and having that hold up in court if he does deploy the military to start rounding people up and deporting them. So far, he hasn’t done it, but he’s given every indication that he will and Project 2025 calls for that. So you’re absolutely right to ask that question. It’s something that we’re going to need to keep an eye on.

There’s another way in which he could deploy the military and that is using an authority called the Insurrection Act. And it will not surprise me at all if the first time we have huge bunch of people in the street protesting in a Democratic city somewhere, if he doesn’t invoke the insurrection act and send in the military. That’s going to be another real test of sort of where we are and where we’re going in this country. And it’s why I really try to emphasize this whenever I’m asked, ‘What should we do? Should we take to the streets?’—you should absolutely if you can take to the streets, but be peaceful about it, be nonviolent about it, because anything that we do that Donald Trump can use to justify the Insurrection Act and the military will play into their hands. And I hope that Democrats—and all of the activists and everybody that are waking up around this country and getting ready to show up—will have the discipline and the fortitude to do it the right way, to be smart about it.

QUESTION: My primary concern—which might affect many people here—is that he has talked about gutting Medicaid. The House just voted to gut Medicaid. That would really affect everything about my life here. Do you have any comments on whether this is really going to happen?

HUFFMAN: It’s a very timely question and a good question. So you know what they’re trying to do, right? The centerpiece of their agenda, in addition to ending democracy, is passing a $4.5 trillion tax cut. Basically taking the 2017 tax cut for billionaires and going even further, lowering the corporate tax rate, even further ending taxation on tip incomes and other things Donald Trump promised he would do on the campaign trail in order to win the state of Nevada, and to make it all permanent. And there’s only two ways that you can get to four and a half trillion dollars in the federal budget. You have to cut deeply into Medicaid or Medicare and Social Security, because that’s where the money is.

All this DOGE stuff that they’re doing, you know, saying that they’re finding all of these savings in different agencies. None of that—even if Elon Musk is telling the truth and he’s not—none of it comes anywhere close to the four and a half trillion dollars they need for their tax cut.

And that is why we have been making the case very loudly that what they’re really doing is setting up deep cuts to Medicaid. Now they’re lying about it. They passed a budget resolution; they called for little over $4 trillion in cuts, but they didn’t specify where, and they are counting on people not being smart enough to figure out that you can’t get to those numbers without going right through Medicaid, which would be devastating. A third of all Americans depend on Medicaid for health care.

Some one in the audience suggested that he ask how many people in the audience depend on Medicaid.

HUFFMAN: Raise your hand if you depend on Medicaid.

A significant number of hands went up.

“And SNAP” [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program], someone else yelled out.

HUFFMAN: Yeah, and SNAP—that’s another one. I’m glad you asked me to raise hands, because we’re roughly tracking the numbers in America. About a third of Americans depend on Medicaid. If you have any kind of disability—100% of people with disabilities depend on Medicaid. It’s just the lifeblood for nursing homes and so many other things that vulnerable people depend on. And that’s why it’s politically quite popular.

Here’s the good news on this issue. They’re absolutely coming for Medicaid, but most people didn’t really understand Medicaid until pretty recently, and we’ve been talking about it so much, the media is starting to educate people about the importance of Medicaid. And I just saw a poll like two days ago that says that the popularity, the favorability of Medicaid is now up, like almost as high as Social Security and Medicare. People are starting to figure out, ‘Wow, Medicaid is very important. We need that.’ And that is encouraging for the fight that we are going to have about Medicaid. So that’s all I can tell you. They’re coming for it. We’re going to fight back. And it’s popular enough out there that a lot of Republicans are feeling pretty darn nervous about following through on those cuts.

QUESTION: I’m among the many people who, if they do anything to Medicaid or SNAP or any of these other services, I will be destitute. [This question went on for awhile but basically came down to: ‘What can we do and what can you do?”]

HUFFMAN: First of all, you have my ironclad commitment: I will never support cuts to Medicaid. Ever, ever, ever. And I will oppose them in every way that I can. The thing that I can assure you of is that the politics of cutting Medicaid, much less dramatically cutting Medicaid, which I think is what they would have to do to get to these tax cuts, will be career-ending for a bunch of Republicans.

And we’re going to make them own it. We’re going to make them feel it. And hopefully that political pressure will be enough to back them down. And in the House of Representatives, you know, we only need three of them. That’s the good news. That’s a pretty get-able number, you know. So maximum pressure from groups like this in towns and states and communities all over America aimed at a handful of Republicans—I think we’ve got a fighting chance here.

QUESTION: Before the midterms, there are three House seats that are being vacated by the Republicans. What are the Democrats doing to win those seats?

HUFFMAN: I would love to answer that question in a very political way. I am on the clock officially as your Congressman. I’m not supposed to talk about campaign stuff, all right, so I apologize for that. Unlike the Republicans, I follow the rules of ethics. You know, I try to keep myself out of jail. What can we do? You can find people to support in those races that you like. And I won’t tell you what party, but..

QUESTION: All they want is money and donations, and what if we can’t afford to do it?

Money is not the only way to engage and make a difference.

QUESTION: What’s that going to do? Get us shot? Some of us can’t even physically get down to the corner and protest.

HUFFMAN: I think these are great questions.

QUESTION: But are we being heard?

HUFFMAN: You’re heard right now with your congressman, and I will, believe me, be taking this energy and this conversation in everything that I do—so that’s not nothing. All right? That’s not nothing.

QUESTION: One of the questions I’ve been hearing a lot around here—and I’ve been asking and no one seems to know, is what’s going on with HUD?

HUFFMAN: Ok, what’s happening with HUD. Like every other federal agency you’ve got, DOGE is running through firing probationary personnel; telling people that if they have worked there for less than two years, they’re going to lose their job; dangling these buyout offers that are that are unauthorized may not even be enforceable; urging people to write emails that justify their jobs. And then Elon Musk says he’s going to take those emails and feed them into his artificial intelligence (AI) engine that he calls Grok, and ask Grok to figure out if those jobs should be kept or eliminated. Which is absurd on its face, right?

But it’s actually much more sinister than that, because Elon Musk wants all of this unprecedented access he has to this data he is going to use to train his AI model so that he can have a competitive advantage over the other AI models out there, ChatGPT and whatever the other one is. And he wants to get the government contract to have his AI replace all these federal employees that he’s firing. And that’s absolutely what’s going on here. That is the play, and it’s happening right in front of our eyes. They’re not subtle about it, and my Republican colleagues are just along for the ride. So it is very distressing. I think we get to keep calling it out in every way we can.

But back to housing and HUD, which you asked about, I think we have reason for concern. We need more funding for Section 8 housing. We need more vouchers. We need more public housing—everything HUD does. We need more financing for affordable housing. And I’m afraid that, at least under their watch, we’re going to be going in the wrong direction. I’ll obviously vote to protect it in every way I can.

QUESTION: What I keep hearing is instead of being supported by HUD, they’re trying to bring in privatized—and what does that mean? That means that rental people making big bucks are trying to take over renting our apartments. How close are they to doing that?

HUFFMAN: In the case of HUD specifically, I don’t know what their privatization scheme is, but I think you’re probably right. I mean, Project 2025 is basically, look across government, anything that can be spun out and privatized and monetized, whether it’s the National Weather Service or public lands or any number of other things, including the Postal Service, that’s what they want to try to do. So I’ll try to keep an eye on whatever atrocity they try to pull off with HUD, but it probably won’t be good, and we’re going to have to fight it and hopefully stop it.

QUESTION: What steps can be taken if the Supreme Court supports Trump in the majority of these lawsuits?

HUFFMAN: Yeah, so look, the Supreme Court is the final word on our legal challenges. So if the Supreme Court sides with Trump, we’re going to have to try another way. We’re going to have to go win elections. We’re going to have to pass constitutional amendments and none of that is easy. So I am hoping that we will, even with this Supreme Court, we will get some rulings that push back on Trump, I promise you.

And I’ll give you an example of that: one of his executive orders was purporting to rewrite the 14th Amendment and eliminate birthright citizenship. There’s just no question he cannot do that. Even this Supreme Court will rule against him on birthright citizenship. He will lose that. Now what does he do? Does he comply with the court order or take us into some dark place we’ve never been? We will find out. But I’m sure that we will get a good ruling on that.

Now whether we’ll get a good ruling on this impoundment stuff and any number of other actions and these emergency authorities using the military at the border—I don’t know. We’re going to take each one of these as they come. I think we will probably get some good court rulings that help us out. We just can’t put all our eggs in that basket.

Read Part 2 of this article.