Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.
Donald Trump plunged the United States into what he warned might be a long, bloody, and costly war early this morning.
He did so without permission from Congress, secure in the knowledge that even the putative opposition leaders would not lead opposition to an illegal war. And so it went, as Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to the imperial act with a milquetoast letter that criticized violations of procedural process instead of lodging moral, ethical, or legal objections to the attacks.
So for progressives, and anyone who values democracy, the battle lines are clear: Trump must be defeated, while at the same time, the sclerotic and cowardly old Democratic leadership must be replaced. Today, in both the above video and in the write-up below, I have a profile of a bright young Democratic star who is taking on the establishment in more ways than one.
Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. Constantly layoffs at these major media organizations, at the behest of billionaires, is making it even worse. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.
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Mai Vang went into a meeting with Rep. Doris Matsui (CA-07) hoping to gain some clarity on what the Congresswoman planned to do about the ICE agents abducting her neighbors in South Sacramento. By the time the allotted 30 minutes with Matsui were over, Vang found herself telling the 80-year-old lawmaker that she would be challenging her in this year’s Democratic primary.
“I was actually walking in that meeting, hoping she would give me something, say something, so that I wouldn’t even make the decision to run,” Vang recalls now.
The meeting happened in September, having taken eight months of persistent requests to set up — despite the fact that Vang wasn’t just some random constituent. A member of the Sacramento City Council, Vang was hoping to coordinate a response to the federal incursion with the Congresswoman, and came armed with information and logistics.
“I shared what we had been doing on the ground, like protecting immigrants and refugees, mutual aid efforts, Know Your Rights workshop, initiatives that I’m supporting throughout the state,” Vang says. “During the meeting, I asked her what her position was on immigration. And she turned to her staff and was like, ‘What is our position on immigration?’”
Matsui has not been entirely silent on the issue: in late August, she was illegally blocked from touring an ICE detention center in the district, then held a press conference after she finally gained access in early September, calling the facility “almost too clean.”
For Vang, it was too little, too late on an issue that is both urgent to her constituents and intensely personal: she is the daughter of Hmong refugees from Laos and married to the son of working class Mexican immigrants, and for the past year, has witnessed escalating enforcement tear her district apart.
“Our Latino neighbors were being detained at the federal Moss Building while they were doing their routine ICE check-in,” she says. “I received calls from families, Hmong refugees who were being kidnapped by ICE in Sacramento. And there was one call in particular that really broke my heart when a Hmong father, who was watering his front yard, was picked up in a black SUV in front of his family.”
In January, Vang began work on a resolution that would ban immigration on city-owned property.
Launching a primary against the 10-term incumbent is never easy, and there are few members more entrenched in their seat than Matsui, who won a special election to succeed her late husband Robert Matsui, the district’s representative from 1979 until his passing in 2005. That the congresswoman is now married to a billionaire and accepts campaign contributions from corporate PACs makes challenging her all the more daunting.
The political establishment hasn’t been particularly encouraging, either; at last weekend’s California Democratic Party convention, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi bent the caucus rules during the endorsement process and urged delegates to vote for her close friend and contemporary. Vang objected and appealed the vote, hoping that it would be put to a vote on the floor, to no avail.
“The conversation pretty much went, ‘Look, we’re sorry. That was a mistake that was made. It won’t happen again. But we appreciate all the great work that she’s done and we’re just going to uphold the endorsement,’” Vang relays.
In past cycles, the official endorsement of the party caucus might be enough to all but clinch the nomination. But as Democratic voters swell with anger at the party’s establishment, demanding more strident opposition to the Trump administration and generational overthrow of a geriatric caucus hierarchy, it may be that behind-closed-doors politicking proves to be impotent, if not backfires.
With support from both the Working Families Party and Justice Democrats, Vang has the infrastructural backing to run a viable campaign even without the official party apparatus. Besides, political outsider status suits the 40-year-old lawmaker: the first Asian woman elected to the Sacramento City Council, Vang is the oldest of 16 children, grew up in deep poverty, and only ever got involved in politics to stop mass school closures in her neighborhood.
This was back in 2013, after Vang moved back home after graduate school. Having gone to college to escape poverty, she returned to Sacramento to take care of her parents and siblings. Soon, the mission expanded. “I looked around the neighborhood and recognized that not a lot had changed,” she remembers. “And I thought to myself, what good is it to have two masters’ [degrees] from UCLA when your family and your community is still struggling?”
Reflection led to action, as Vang, then a policy analyst at a nonprofit, co-founded the activist group Hmong Innovating Politics, which has since become a statewide organization. She ran for Sacramento board of education in 2016 with the encouragement of her community — hesitant at first because she did not have any children, the realization that she had 32 nieces and nephews enrolled locally changed her mind — and passed sanctuary laws to protect kids from immigration enforcement during the first Trump administration.
Vang took the step up to city council in 2020, then ran unopposed for re-election in 2024. She can rattle off a significant list of accomplishments, from securing vaccines for her low-income community during the pandemic to creating the Sacramento Children’s Fund, which provides grants to programs that support disadvantaged youth in the city.
Having grown up in poverty, Vang emphasizes her support for the social safety net, including her advocacy for Medicare for All, a position that Matsui, herself a multi-millionaire, has never adopted. While Matsui’s husband is a billionaire, Vang’s husband has been working 12-hour shifts in the auto industry to cover bills as she runs for Congress, a contrast that the challenger — who is still paying off student debt — thinks speaks to a broader need for change at this pivotal moment.
“I don’t know the last time the congresswoman went grocery shopping and looked at her bank account or filled up her car with gas,” Vang says. “These are the struggles of so many of our families. I think that it’s really important, that when we have leaders in the halls of Congress, they need to understand that. It makes you a better leader as well, when you really know what is happening on the ground.”
To that end, Vang knows that she won’t be able to out-raise or outspend the veteran Congresswoman, but believes that the race will be won on the streets.
“The future is not predetermined; it is shaped by those who can reimagine what that looks like and those who are willing to fight for it, and I’m willing to fight for it,” she says. “And I know our volunteers are willing to fight for it too, so we’re going to out-walk them. We know that we have the volunteers, we have the message, and we have the heart.”
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