DC Adventures

6/25/25 Today Ben and I faced an unusual dilemma. Two organizations that we have both done a lot of protesting with and are deeply committed to, both wound up having civil disobedience actions on Capitol Hill today. Popular Democracy was holding a press conference and a large civil disobedience to protest cuts to Medicaid and healthcare. That action had been planned well in advance, but then Russell Vought, the despicable head of the Office of Management and Budget and also one of the primary authors of project 2025, was scheduled to speak to the Senate Appropriations Committee. The group that has been doing actions about PEPFAR, the global HIV treatment and prevention program, which includes many people from Housing Works decided to interrupt his testimony. Ben and I were both torn, but I decided that the opportunity to directly confront Vought and challenge his lies was important. ACT UP and other organizations fought for decades for global HIV treatment, and the decision to stop the program has already caused more than 40,000 deaths since January. Ben, on the other hand that he had made a commitment to Jennifer Flynn of popular democracy, and so he and the other activists that drove down with us participated in that action. The five of us jammed into Ben‘s car before dawn and drove to DC, arriving at roughly 10 AM. Their action was first, so we parted ways at Union Station while they headed up to the Hill. I met up with the other PEPFAR people at Union Station and we went over the scenario and handed out T-shirts that said AIDS cuts kill. Then our smaller group headed up to the Hill as well. Other people from the group had gotten in line for the hearing earlier, so they were in the front, and we switched places with them. We stood for a long time in the warm hallway as various group showed up, including the SIEU people in their purple shirts, and a group of doctors with matching shirts under their white robes that I couldn’t quite read. Every now and then the heavy hearing room door would open and a gust of cold air would come into the hallway and perk us up. When the hearing opened, a substantial section in the front was roped off for congressional pages, and we took seats in the row directly behind them, the first row open to the public. The congressional pages were well groomed young people, mostly white, who reeked of privilege. We sat through Senator Collins opening remarks. We also had to sit through a Republican senator trying to justify the recissions by bringing up various odd sounding programs, such as a program to encourage vegan food in Africa. Aside from the fact that he was mischaracterizing these programs, those programs were already ended by the first round of cuts. Recission is about bigger programs, such as PEPFAR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Next came a Democratic senator opposing the recission and then they introduced Vaught. As he got ready to speak, signs were quickly distributed among our group and shirts were removed to show our AIDS cuts kill shirts underneath. We stood up and started chanting "Vought lies, people die! Restore PEPFAR now." I’m used to the Capitol Police being well trained at handling protests and being pretty respectful in their interactions with us, so I wasn’t prepared for a large male officer to suddenly slam into me from the side and then proceed to roughly arrest me, including banging me into a wall and tightening my cuffs too much so that the fingers on my right hand went numb. Other officers were equally rough, throwing tiny Asia onto the floor. I also saw Eric Sawyer, now in his 70s, being knocked to the floor by an officer and dragged out of the room. In the elevator, one of the fellow activists, a black woman, was distraught. She kept saying to the police how could they treat her like that, a woman of their own skin color in her 60s. I was so caught off guard by their violence that despite my training and years of experience, a deep emotional response kicked in and I found myself shaking. They took us somewhere I’ve never seen before, an area under the Capitol where it looked like they handle garbage and there is a lot of wood stacked up like a carpentry shop. They searched us and then hey loaded us into the vans. In the van, the upset woman kept talking about how rough the black officers had been, and how the white officers were so gentle. She also talked about how being packed so tightly into the van reminded her of slaves packed into the ship for the middle passage. The rest of us did our best to calm her. Several of the activists in the van had been spooked by an officer who told them that if they had more than a certain number of arrests recently that they would be going to the DC city jail overnight. It’s hard to know where they’re taking you because you can’t see much out of the heavily armored van, but it quickly became clear that they weren’t taking us to Capitol Police headquarters, and the activists who were spooked started saying that we were going to the DC Central Cellblock overnight. I was pretty sure that we were going to the warehouse which is where we wound up, but they were getting worked up, thinking about the cell block and being held overnight. While we were in the van, one of our fellow activists was really struggling because of the tightness of her cuffs. Tight cuffs are not only extremely painful, but they cut off the circulation and put pressure on the nerves. Once the van stopped, we yelled for the officer,and they unloaded us and uncuffed her and redid the cuffs. They also redid mine because my cuffs had slipped from my wrist so that they were compressing the back of my hand and causing numbness in my fingers. I had deep grooves across the back of both hands. They looked so bad that one of the officers who uncuffed me said "that’s a real problem." While we waited to enter the warehouse, I asked one of the officers what we were waiting for and he told me that there were other activists already there. When we were brought in, the Popular Democracy folks were already seated on folding chairs waiting to be processed. Instead of just seating us next to them, they had created a separate area for us with kind of an aisle between the two groups. It was kind of like they had picked up a couple of feral cats, and they thought we might fight. We had to yell back-and-forth to communicate. Charles was in yelling range of Ben and he started giving him a hard time about choosing the other action, calling him a balding traitor. He kept the comments up for a rather long time which seemed unnecessary. I was afraid the warehouse would be extremely hot because it’s not air conditioned and it was 98 degrees, but they had the doors on all sides open, and some strong fans blowing. They set up a bunch of folding tables across the warehouse and put nine rookie cops at them and handed them paperwork to fill out, but once they would fill out one set then there would be a long pause before they got to the next set. By then we had been cuffed for a long time and my shoulders were really aching because I have fairly short arms. Luckily an officer agreed to cuff me in front, which helped my shoulders and also let me drink the water they handed out. You can’t count on them to give you water - I have seen them drink water in front of activists without giving any on a hot day, but this time the officer in charge was an older black man with a star on his uniform shoulder. He was going around asking people if they were OK and told me that he just wanted to take care of everyone. Slowly they began to release the Popular Democracy people. By then I was dozing off in my seat, but every time they released one person, the other 40 would cheer and that kept waking me up. it took a long time for them to get through all of them and get to us. One by one they released our group and the dwindling remainder of those left behind cheered for them. Finally we were down to just me and one other woman who was a loud cheerer and I thought if she gets released first, I’m gonna be the only one left to cheer for her and that’s what happened. I was the absolute last one released. Once we were out, we grabbed some pizza and some water and our property from support and they photographed both our legal paperwork and the deep red bands around my hands and arms. My knee was feeling bruised. I don’t even know exactly what happened, I just remember feeling an impact during the arrest chaos. The five of us headed back to Union Station in a taxi . When we opened the door, there was a blonde mother with a small herd of blonde children standing right there, and when Ben decided we needed a group picture, she offered to take it for us. One of our group had taken off her activist shirt already and she said "wait. Let me put it on" and the woman taking the picture said "yes please put it on" and then when we looked at her surprised by her vehemence, she said "I’m a nurse" and we understood. "We just got out of jail," we told her and she thanked us. I told her she can look up Popular Democracy to get involved in advocating around Medicare and healthcare cuts. Then we headed to the garage where Ben had to deal with the fact that his arresting officer had lost his parking slip. He told the person on the intercom that he had an altercation, and the slip was gone, and they were pretty accommodating about it. Then we all packed back into the vehicle and headed north. We stopped to get gas in Maryland, and decided to get some cold drinks too. There was only one cashier working, a large woman with long white hair. She took in our shirts and said that she agreed with them. I told her we’ve been protesting and she said "yeah we’ve been doing a lot of that here too". And I said "yeah, we just got out of jail so if you see other people coming through, looking frazzled and in shirts, that’s what’s going on." She asked where we had come from and we told her DC, and she said, "isn’t it terrible how everything is going?" which we agreed with. I fell asleep in the car and woke up as we were approaching Staten Island. It was 1:30am and I was swarmed by cats wondering where I had been.