Bernie Sanders swooped onto a crowed-filled East Los Angeles baseball field in Lincoln Park Monday, where he made his usual pitch for free college tuition, hit hard at his critics and assailed joblessness and corporate greed.
“A great nation is not judged by the number of billionaires it has or the number of nuclear weapons it has,” Sanders said. “It is judged by how it treats the weakest and most vulnerable among us.”
The Vermont senator has been hopscotching across Southern California over the past few days, adding rallies the way a musician might keep adding concert dates - National City, Vista, Irvine - Monday morning in East Los Angeles, then hours later in Santa Monica Sanders has been canvassing California ahead of the June 7 primary.
He’ll get to San Bernardino, Riverside and Anaheim on Tuesday.
The nearly hour-long speech before a crowd of about 2,000 started with a bold prediction and a plan.
“We are going to win the state of California,” he said. “And we are going to win the state of California because by the end of this campaign, we are going to have rallies all over this state and speak personally in a grassroots way to over 200,000 people in California.”
He said he estimated that 5 million people would be voting in the Democratic primary and that he’ll need at least 2.5 million voters to cast ballots for him. The 200,000 direct contacts through rallies, he said, is an “unprecedented” effort in California primary politics.
A woman clamoring for a glimpse of Bernie Sanders stood behind temporary bleachers on the football field at Santa Monica High School, wondering how to get closer to the candidate as he spoke to thousands of supporters Monday night.
“We have to push through,” she told her companion. “That’s the only way.” It was a sentiment that would have resonated with the U.S. senator, who was stumping in Santa Monica about two weeks before the state’s primary election June 7.
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During an impassioned speech at Samohi that lasted about 70 minutes, Sanders challenged the status quo on a wide variety of issues, including campaign finance, climate change, health care and higher education.
He spoke of a “rigged economy” that has produced poverty and dramatic income inequality, advocating for a higher minimum wage and for the elimination of the gender pay gap.
“I’m tired of seeing the middle class shrinking, shrinking and shrinking,” he said.
He decried aggressive police tactics and questioned the country’s criminal justice system, saying too many people are incarcerated. He called for an improved approach to mental health, arguing that more can be done to help needy citizens.
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Sanders was introduced by Dick Van Dyke, who suggested that Sanders’ age shouldn’t be a barrier for his candidacy.
“I’m 90,” the award-winning entertainer said, “and I like to give young politicians like Bernie a chance.”
Young and old, Hispanics and white, blacks and Asians -- they were all gathered at Santa Monica High School on Monday evening to see Bernie Sanders. That’s the kind of cross-cultural and cross-generational support Sanders attract.
For two hours in the chilly Santa Monica evening, the Democratic presidential hopeful talked about his ideas for the country, ideas that resonate with people who have “felt the Bern.” People like Andrea Stern, 60, of Venice who sees a opportunity for change. Stern said she supports Sanders because he’s a Social Democrat.
“The cornerstone of his platform is we pay more in taxes and we get more,” she said. “That’s the most exciting thing to me -- that healthcare benefits are more accessible.”
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His supporters don't just like because he’s affable, they like him because of his platform and the issues he stood for.
“Bernie is probably the first political figure in a long time where my views align with every thing he said,” said Jesse Figueroa, 26, of Santa Monica. “This is the case where I will be voting with my heart.”
At the rally, Sanders singled out each community, such as gay, black, Hispanics, poor, etc, that have been marginalized and ignored by the Republican party and the American political landscape at-large.
“I think this is who is and how he cares about everyone, not just a certain group of people,” Takahashi said.
In a move meant to cool down tensions between his campaign and the Democratic establishment, the Democratic Party will give Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) a greater role to play in establishing its platform at this summer’s Democratic National Convention.
Under an agreement the party reached with Sanders and opponent Hillary Clinton, Sanders can select five people to serve on the party’s platform committee, a third of the committee’s members. Clinton will name six members, and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), the party chair, will name four, according to the Washington Post.
Typically, the chair names all 15 members to the committee, which sets the party’s agenda and guiding principles at the convention in July. This year’s change is a concession to the Sanders campaign, which has accused the party of rigging the nominating rules against him and is concerned the party will ignore Sanders’ progressive policy proposals with Clinton as the nominee.
Though Clinton leads Sanders in the delegate count and is expected to clinch the nomination when the primaries wrap up next month, the Vermont senator and his supporters hope his influence on the party will continue and he’ll bring the progressive movement he has built to the general election.
“We believe that we will have the representation on the platform drafting committee to create a Democratic platform that reflects the views of millions of our supporters who want the party to address the needs of working families in this country and not just Wall Street, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry and other powerful special interests,” Sanders said in a statement.
Among the five members Sanders is expected to name to the committee are environmental activist Bill McKibben; Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus; and James Zogby, a DNC member and pro-Palestine activist.
Bernie Sanders predicted Monday that the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia could be “messy” as he pushed the party to adopt his progressive agenda, but added: “Democracy is not always nice and quiet and gentle.”
The Democratic presidential candidate said in an interview with The Associated Press that his supporters hoped to see a platform at the July convention that reflects the needs of working families, the poor and young people as opposed to one that represents Wall Street and corporate America.
The Vermont senator said he will “condemn any and all forms of violence” but his campaign was bringing in newcomers to the process and first-time attendees of political conventions. He said the Democratic party could choose to be more inclusive.
“I think if they make the right choice and open the doors to working class people and young people and create the kind of dynamism that the Democratic party needs, it’s going to be messy,” Sanders said. “Democracy is not always nice and quiet and gentle but that is where the Democratic party should go.”
Asked if the convention could be messy, Sanders said, “So what! Democracy is messy. Everyday my life is messy. But if you want everything to be quiet and orderly and allow, you know, just things to proceed without vigorous debate, that is not what democracy is about.”
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The senator spoke after the Democratic National Commciittee announced a 15-member platform drafting committee, which write the first draft of platform and will include allies of both candidates.
Sanders said the drafting of the platform would be an “excellent time to educate the American people. There are two sides to every issue and I’m sure that Secretary Clinton will have very vigorous proponents of her point of view as we will have.”
Hillary Clinton will not debate Bernie Sanders in California, her top campaign spokeswoman said Monday.
Declining to participate in the Fox News debate -- which Sanders had agreed to -- is another clear sign that Clinton and her top aides are fully focused on the general election against Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
"As we have said previously, we plan to compete hard in the remaining primary states, particularly California, while turning our attention to the threat a Donald Trump presidency poses," Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton's spokeswoman, said. "We believe that Hillary Clinton's time is best spent campaigning and meeting directly with voters across California and preparing for a general election campaign that will ensure the White House remains in Democratic hands."
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Clinton and Sanders, however, agreed in February to add four more debate to the calendar, including a debate in May. So far, the two candidates have had three of the four debates the agreed to, the last being in New York on CNN.
Sanders, behind in the popular vote and in delegates, agreed to an invite from Fox News late last week. A statement from the Sanders campaign Monday night said Clinton "reneged" on her prior debate agreement. "I am disappointed but not surprised by Secretary Clinton's unwillingness to debate before the largest and most important primary in the presidential nominating process," Sanders said.
"I also would suggest that Secretary Clinton may want to be not quite so presumptuous about thinking that she is a certain winner," Sanders added. "In the last several weeks, the people of Indiana, West Virginia and Oregon have suggested otherwise."
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visited to the U.S.-Mexico border wall in California over the weekend — and met with deported U.S. veteran Hector Barajas, who may not have been sent back to Mexico under Sanders’ policies.
Speaking through the slotted steel border wall division, Sanders thanked Barajas for his service and said that deported individuals should have a chance to come back to the United States.
“I would like you on this side of the border,” Sanders told Barajas.
After he served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne, Barajas fired a weapon in an incident with someone — an event that he previously told ThinkProgress was induced by PTSD. That incident led to his arrest, which gave him a 20-year reentry ban. Barajas then received a lifetime ban after he was caught coming back to the United States to see his young daughter.
Now, Barajas runs the advocacy organization Banished Veterans, which helps deported veterans settle into countries that some of them haven’t seen since they were children.
It’s unclear whether Sanders knew about Barajas’ lifetime ban. However, Sanders has indicated in his immigration policy platform that he would “expand the use of humanitarian parole to ensure the return of unjustly deported immigrants.”
The House is poised this week to finally begin considering legislation that would give Puerto Rico new tools to deal with its $72 billion public debt, and after weeks when it seemed as though conservative opposition might tank any rescue bill, it is liberal critics who are now making their voices heard.
Foremost among them is Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has taken aim at financiers such as those who now hold much of the debt issued by the U.S. territory. Sanders criticized the latest version of the rescue bill in a statement Friday, saying the federal oversight board created under the legislation would undercut the elected government of Puerto Rico and could allow bondholders to remain whole as islanders bear the brunt of fiscal austerity.
“The billionaire hedge fund managers on Wall Street cannot get a 100 percent return on their bonds while workers, senior citizens and children are punished,” said Sanders, who campaigned in Puerto Rico last week. “Wall Street vulture capitalists must not be allowed to get it all.”
Sanders followed up Monday with a letter to his Senate colleagues framing the bill in stark terms: “We have an important choice to make: do we stand with the working people of Puerto Rico or do we stand with Wall Street and the Tea Party? The choice could not be clearer.”
The House rescue bill — known as the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, or PROMESA — sets out a bargain for the troubled territorial government: In return for access to an orderly debt process akin to bankruptcy, a federally appointed oversight board would be granted broad powers to get the island’s fiscal house in order. Those powers include modifying budgets, forcing the sale of territorial assets and even firing government employees.
In a plea to "stand with the working people of Puerto Rico" and not "with Wall Street and the Tea Party, " Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has asked fellow senators to oppose a bill that would strip Puerto Rico of control over its debt.
In a letter to his Democratic colleagues, Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, urged opposition to a bill in the US House of Representatives that would ultimately require an unelected board appointed by congressional Republicans to compose a fiscal plan to address Puerto Rico's debt.
The seven-person committee would have free rein to restructure the island territory's debt by any means necessary, including budget and pension cuts, privatization of public assets, and exempting Puerto Rico from US Department of Labor rules that would allow the US territory to lower its minimum wage to $4.25 per hour, according to a statement from Sanders' office.
“We have an important choice to make: do we stand with the working people of Puerto Rico or do we stand with Wall Street and the Tea Party? The choice could not be clearer," Sanders wrote in the letter.
House Resolution 5278 ‒ also known as the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act ‒ demands a restructuring plan that "must be 'in the best interest of creditors,' not in the best interest of the 3.5 million US citizens living in Puerto Rico," Sanders said, adding that "this legislation looks out for the needs of Wall Street vulture funds first and foremost. That is unacceptable."
The Vermont senator noted that HR 5278, an updated version of which was introduced in the House last week, is "strongly opposed" by major labor unions like the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) while it is supported by financial industry titans such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America, as well as conservative groups like Tea Party Forward and Americans for Tax Reform.
"In my view, we must never give an unelected board the power to make life and death decisions for the people of Puerto Rico without any meaningful input from them at all," Sanders wrote. "We must not balance Puerto Rico's budget on the back of children, senior citizens, the sick and the most vulnerable people in Puerto Rico."
Bernie Sanders will host a campaign rally at Big League Dreams in Cathedral City on Wednesday.
Sanders, who is competing for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, is in the midst of an Inland Empire swing that includes Tuesday stops in Riverside and San Bernardino.
The senator's campaign said the rally will start at 10 a.m. Wednesday at Big League Dreams, a local baseball stadium next to Cathedral City High School. The rally is free, and admission is first come, first serve. The campaign encourages interested rally-goers to RVSP online.
"I think that says a lot for our city and our demographics. We are a working-class community, unlike our adjoining neighbors. I think that's an important statement from the Sanders campaign," said city councilmember and California Democratic delegate Greg Pettis. He said he has not decided which candidate to support at the Democratic National Convention in August.
Pettis said he could not remember the last time a presidential candidate visited the Coachella Valley for a campaign rally, since California's primary is so late on the calendar and the state's electoral college votes tend to go to the Democratic candidates.
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Campaign spokesman Michael Briggs told The Desert Sun that Sanders and his wife, Jane, thought the desert had a "really nice vibe."
Wednesday's Cathedral City rally is the only official event the campaign has announced for that day. On Thursday, the Sanders campaign says he will speak at a rally in Ventura.
In some ways, Sanders’s career calls to mind the four-term Oregon senator Wayne Lyman Morse, whose fierce opinions and commitment to something he called “constitutional liberalism” annoyed both major parties. Morse, like Sanders, never let party labels fence him in. He won his first Senate term—his first public office—in 1944, as a Republican, and then, in the early fifties, was quick to condemn the demagogic excesses of a fellow-Republican, Senator Joseph McCarthy. He supported President Harry Truman on civil rights while pointing out Truman’s past with the corrupt Pendergast machine, of Kansas City, and left the G.O.P. after the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1952; among other things, he didn’t like Ike’s choice of the California senator Richard Nixon as a running mate. He then became an independent (not having an assigned seat, he once took a folding chair to the Senate floor), and, three years later, switched parties again, calling himself a Democrat. In August, 1964, Morse was one of only two senators, along with Alaska’s Ernest Gruening, to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution—a “pre-dated declaration of war,” Morse said—which gave Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic President, carte blanche to widen the Vietnam War, much as the Iraq War resolution of October, 2002 (opposed by Sanders, then a congressman, and favored by Clinton, then a senator), made it easier for President George W. Bush to launch the disastrous conflict in the Mideast.
Morse, who was reared in Wisconsin, was a perpetual dissenter, influenced by the progressive, populist Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette. Like Sanders, he worried about American overreach in foreign policy, and, like Sanders, he was a lonely legislator. Independents usually are—even those who switch in order to survive, like Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman, who became an independent Democrat in 2006, after losing his Senate reëlection bid in a Democratic primary. Morse, in 1960, also ran for President as a Democrat, though not with Sanders’s success, no doubt because of the robust competition he faced. He quit the race after he lost the Oregon primary to John F. Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator and eventual nominee. He lost his Senate seat, in 1968, to a liberal Republican, Robert Packwood; when he died, six years later, at the age of seventy-three, he was attempting to win it back.
This year’s Republican primary contests ended with the curious obsession of the distant runner-up, the Texas senator Ted Cruz, with transgender people’s access to public bathrooms. Cruz incited crowds, and television viewers, by saying, repeatedly, “It doesn’t make sense for grown adult men, strangers, to be alone in a restroom with a little girl,” and, in a demonstration of Cruzian wit, “If Donald Trump dresses as Hillary Clinton, he still can’t use the little girls’ restroom.” Meanwhile, Sanders, for months the only player on the Democrats’ impoverished bench, keeps tormenting Clinton, and perhaps Wasserman Schultz. He’s forcing Democrats, and the nation, to keep listening to his arguments and dissents; apart from his fixations—breaking up the banks and addressing our dramatic income inequality—he’s insisting that we pay attention to the way we’re choosing a President and how we’re raising and dispersing frighteningly large sums of campaign money. One of the complaints that Clinton’s supporters have about Sanders is that he’s not actually a Democrat, and in a way that’s the point. He’s not out to lead a new party, or, really, an old one; rather, in his single-minded stubbornness, he honors the spirit, and carries on the legacy, of an increasingly rare political species, of people like Senator Wayne Morse.