{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.merkley.senate.gov/news/in-the-news/the-2016-progressive-honor-roll", "The 2016 Progressive Honor Roll", "2016-12-20", "2016", "2016-12", "Democrat", "House", "OR", "Jeff Merkley", "M001176", "www.merkley.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "The 2016 Progressive Honor Roll \r\n\r\n      Yes, it\u2019s been an awful year. But the untold story is that grassroots activists have actually frequently prevailed. \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nTuesday, December 20, 2016\r\n\r\n\t\n\r\n\r\n\r\n  \r\n    By:\u00a0\r\n    John Nichols \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nYes, the election results were generally awful. But the untold story of 2016 is that grassroots activists, bold campaigners, and the movements they embraced frequently prevailed\u2014and their successes showed progressives how to press forward even in the most frustrating and difficult of times. Our 2016 honor roll of the most valuable progressives is a chronicle of the fight that has already begun, and a road map for the resistance yet to come.\r\nMost Valuable Campaign\r\nBernie Sanders\r\n\u201cSo, are you guys ready for a radical idea?\u201d the Vermont senator asked as he kicked his 2016 presidential campaign into high gear. Sanders was speaking about creating \u201can economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.\u201d But he could have been referring to the idea of a presidential bid by a seventysomething democratic socialist from a small state that began, as Sanders likes to point out, at just 3 percent in the polls. \u201cWe had no campaign organization and we had no money. And we were taking on the most powerful political organization in the United States of America,\u201d the senator recalled. Yet his rallies would soon fill the largest halls in the country, and he would go on to win more than 13 million votes, 23 primary and caucus contests, and more than 1,800 delegates. That wasn\u2019t enough to clinch the nomination, and Sanders is the first to admit that his campaign made strategic mistakes in its initial outreach to key Democratic constituencies and superdelegates. Yet he won overwhelming support from young people; he forged a coalition that energized Native Americans, Arab Americans, rural voters, and displaced and disappointed workers across the country; he opened up transformational debates about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and about pipelines and climate change; and his supporters played a crucial role in writing the most progressive platform in the modern history of the Democratic Party. Most important: Sanders encouraged his backers to build an organization, Our Revolution, to extend the energy of his progressive populist campaign beyond 2016.\r\nMost Valuable Struggle\r\nStand With Standing Rock\r\nBy the time most Americans had heard about the Dakota Access Pipeline project, it was close to completion. But the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota kept raising objections to the project\u2019s plans to tunnel under the Missouri River, which would threaten not just sacred lands but access to safe drinking water for the Sioux and for millions of people living downriver. Tribes from across the country and indigenous peoples from around the world recognized the importance of the struggle to prevent completion of the oil pipeline as planned. They were joined by Bill McKibben, 350.org, and other climate-change activists in standing up to the fossil-fuel industry. Against daunting odds, this intersectional movement delayed the project and, in early December, the US Army Corps of Engineers refused to issue the permits needed to complete it. The feds will now consider \u201calternative routes.\u201d Despite this major victory, the struggle is far from over, as Energy Transfer Partners, the pipeline\u2019s developer, has powerful allies in Congress and the incoming administration. Yet, as Naomi Klein says, the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline has shown \u201cpeople everywhere that organizing and resistance are not futile.\u201d\r\nMost Valuable Strategy\r\nA Day Without Latinos and Immigrants\r\nAs Republican presidential candidates were outdoing one another giving voice to anti-immigrant bigotry last February, Wisconsin Republican legislators suddenly backed off a plan to penalize municipalities that respected the rights of immigrants in their interactions with police. The announcement that the scheme was \u201cnot a high priority for any of [the GOP] members\u201d came just hours after the \u201cDay Without Latinos and Immigrants\u201d protest, which saw 20,000 restaurant, grocery-store, warehouse, and dairy-farm workers leave their jobs to surround the Capitol. \u201cThe mass general strike was an undeniable statement of the essential and positive contributions that immigrants make to our economy and our society,\u201d said Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of the activist group Voces de la Frontera. That statement was heard, loud and clear, by the state\u2019s Republican legislators, who finished the session without taking up the bill.\r\nMost Valuable Senator\r\nJeff Merkley\r\nWithin hours of Donald Trump\u2019s announcement that he would appoint Steve Bannon as his White House chief strategist, Merkley declared: \u201cThere should be no sugarcoating the truth here: Donald Trump just invited a white nationalist into the highest reaches of the government.\u201d Others may have reacted with shock at Trump\u2019s election, but the Democratic senator from Oregon was ready to fight. He ripped the Republican\u2019s cabinet picks and promised scrutiny and opposition. Along with close allies Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders (whose presidential candidacy the Oregonian had backed), Merkley was in the forefront of successful efforts to block the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2016. Now he\u2019s objecting to Trump\u2019s empty sloganeering and cheap gimmickry when it comes to the serious work of renewing American manufacturing and investing in infrastructure. As a veteran legislator who served as speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives before defeating a Republican senator in 2008, Merkley has emerged as an essential opposition leader\u2014someone who knows how the Senate works and pulls no punches when it comes to taking on racism, sexism, economic inequality, climate change, and Trumpism.\r\nMost Valuable Senator-Elect\r\nKamala Harris\r\nCalifornia\u2019s attorney general celebrated her landslide election as the state\u2019s new US senator by visiting the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. Choking back tears as she recounted stories of children who asked after Trump\u2019s election whether they would be deported, the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica declared, \u201cYou\u2019re not alone. We\u2019ve got your back.\u201d That\u2019s not just rhetoric; it\u2019s who Harris is. \u201cI grew up with a stroller\u2019s-eye view of the civil-rights movement,\u201d says the next senator from America\u2019s most populous state. \u201cOften I joke that as a child, I was surrounded by adults marching and shouting for this thing called justice.\u201d In the Senate, she\u2019ll be the one raising her voice for social and economic justice, and she will be heard.\r\nMost Valuable US House Caucus\r\nCongressional Progressive Caucus\r\nThe question of how Democrats in Congress plan to respond to Republican hegemony was answered immediately by the House of Representatives\u2019 most progressive activist group. \u201cWith every new staff announcement and cabinet appointment, Donald Trump makes it clear that his government is going to look exactly like his campaign: racist, Islamophobic, and totally unfit,\u201d declared Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Ra\u00fal Grijalva and Keith Ellison and first vice chair Mark Pocan in a statement after the president-elect tapped Senator Jeff Sessions as his nominee for US attorney general. \u201cAs Democrats, we will never bow to intolerance and we will meet these appointments head-on by standing firmly on the side of victims and doing everything in our power to protect them and our democracy.\u201d The CPC is setting the right tone: Ellison and Pocan are leading the drive for a \u201cRight to Vote\u201d constitutional amendment that addresses voter suppression and the decay of the democratic process. And along with California Congresswoman Barbara Lee, they continue to challenge \u201ca disproved consensus that favors recklessly militaristic approaches to handling current international conflicts and has yet to reckon with the grave consequences of its errors.\u201d\r\nMost Valuable New Agenda-Setter\r\nJamie Raskin\r\nWhen newly elected House Democrats gathered in Washington, they chose Raskin to serve as their representative on the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, the influential body that sets the party\u2019s agenda. The move recognized Raskin\u2019s remarkable background as a constitutional-law professor with a history of national leadership on voting-rights and civil-rights issues, and as a Maryland state senator who helped lead successful efforts to abolish the death penalty, establish marriage equality, restore voting rights to former prisoners, pass the Dream Act, lower carbon emissions, and hike the minimum wage. Raskin knows the work will be harder in the Republican-controlled Congress, but he says he\u2019s determined to \u201cguarantee that the House Democratic agenda reflects the diverse voices of hard-working Americans who need government to be on the side of the people.\u201d\r\nMost Valuable Inside/Outside Strategist\r\nPramila Jayapal\r\nWhen permits for the Dakota Access Pipeline were denied, Washington State Senator Pramila Jayapal tweeted: \u201cYES! The people\u2019s victory! Moral Resistance works!\u201d Though her title as of January will be \u201cUS representative,\u201d the Seattle Democrat is a heart-and-soul advocate who knows how to link struggles in the streets to struggles inside the corridors of power. And she\u2019s good at it: As a veteran immigrant-rights and civil-liberties campaigner, Jayapal brings a wealth of grassroots experience to the House. Savvy Democrats will take her counsel as they seek to build a moral resistance to Trumpism.\r\nMost Valuable New State Official\r\nDavid Zuckerman\r\nWhile Democrats were struggling to figure out how to reconnect with rural Americans following 2016 election setbacks in most of the country, family farmer David Zuckerman was preparing to take office as Vermont\u2019s second-highest-ranking state official. Elected as lieutenant governor with the support of Democrats and the state\u2019s independent Progressive Party, Zuckerman campaigned on his record as a state legislator who led fights for sustainable development, GMO labeling, cannabis-law reform, and progressive tax policies that benefit working families in rural and urban areas. Elected on the same day that a Republican won Vermont\u2019s governorship, Zuckerman ran 20,000 votes ahead of the top of the Democratic ticket\u2014piling up votes in rural regions that don\u2019t always back the party.\r\nMost Valuable New State Legislator\r\nIlhan Omar\r\nDonald Trump made one of his last campaign stops in Minnesota, where he tried to win the state by stirring up fears of the large Somali-American community in the Twin Cities. Trump lost\u2014and on the same day, Minneapolis voters elected Ilhan Omar to the state\u2019s House of Representatives. Raising a clenched fist and pledging to struggle for unity and justice, the first Somali-American Muslim woman elected to public office in the United States declared: \u201cIt matters that I am a woman. It matters that I am a Somali-American woman. It matters that I am a Muslim and immigrant woman. It matters that our campaign won\u2026by creating a multicultural coalition.\u201d She is so very right.\r\nMost Valuable Mayor\r\nDr. Karen Weaver\r\nA clinical psychologist who defeated the incumbent mayor of Flint, Michigan, in November 2015, after a campaign in which she vowed to address that city\u2019s water crisis, Weaver declared a state of emergency upon taking office and began demanding accountability and aid. Complaining that \u201cthe people weren\u2019t put first; the health of the people was not put before profit and money,\u201d she urged visiting politicians\u2014from President Obama to Hillary Clinton to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Donald Trump\u2014to recognize the damage done to urban centers by corporations and government agencies that have neglected basic duties owed to humanity. Seeking access to clean water and infrastructure investments to replace the corroded pipes that leached lead into the city\u2019s tap water, this activist mayor declared: \u201cWe\u2019ve got to get this fixed.\u201d\r\nThe stakes are higher now than ever. Get The Nation in your inbox.\r\nTop of Form\r\nBottom of Form\r\nMost Valuable Activist\r\nLori Wallach\r\nThe media outlets that so badly bungled coverage of the 2016 campaign imagined that Donald Trump made the Trans-Pacific Partnership an issue. Wrong. Lori Wallach and the mass movements with which she has long been aligned made the TPP an issue well before Trump began to consider a presidential run. As the director of Public Citizen\u2019s Global Trade Watch, Wallach has for decades exposed and challenged race-to-the-bottom trade policies, and she has worked with labor, farm, environmental, and human-rights groups\u2014as well as congressional allies like Bernie Sanders\u2014to establish a fair-trade ethic that respects workers and the planet. \u201cAmericans have become aware that our trade agreements have been hijacked by corporate interests that use the free-trade brand to Trojan-horse into place special protections,\u201d the veteran of the 1999 \u201cBattle in Seattle\u201d against the World Trade Organization said during the 2016 campaign. That awareness wasn\u2019t forged by a \u201cbillionaire populist\u201d; it was forged by movement builders like Wallach.\r\nMost Valuable Activist Campaign\r\n#WeveSeenThisBefore\r\nThe hashtag on the \u201cJews Reject Trump\u201d signs was stark and haunting, and the Bend the Arc Jewish Action campaign made sure that it was seen outside Trump Tower, at the Republican National Convention, and at events across the country, where activists announced: \u201cWe have seen this kind of hate and political violence before. And we won\u2019t let it happen again.\u201d An offshoot of the movement\u2019s broader work on social justice, Bend the Arc Jewish Action developed the \u201cWe\u2019ve Seen This Before\u201d campaign in 2015 to sound the alarm \u201cabout Donald Trump\u2019s hateful anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-woman, and violent agenda.\u201d The campaign did not end on Election Day: In November, Bend the Arc Jewish Action CEO Stosh Cotler and Muslim Public Affairs Council president Salam al-Marayati circulated a joint letter urging Trump to withdraw his appointment of Steve Bannon, because \u201cHate has no place in the White House.\u201d\r\nMost Valuable Union\r\nNational Nurses United ?\r\nBold, loud, and fiercely committed to transformational change, National Nurses United has always campaigned for single-payer health care, adequate hospital staffing, and labor rights. But the union extended its reach in 2016, emerging as a key backer of the Sanders campaign and the People\u2019s Summit that sought to build on its momentum, as well as a California initiative to control prescription-drug prices; the national \u201cRobin Hood Tax\u201d campaign to fund social needs; efforts to combat climate change in communities across the United States; and the movement to block the Dakota Access Pipeline. NNU actually seeks out causes to join, urging Americans to \u201cTell Us Where It Hurts\u201d as part of its Nurses\u2019 Campaign to Heal America.\r\nMost Valuable Commentator\r\nVan Jones\r\nCNN commentator Van Jones came into his own during the 2016 campaign. Unlike the pundits who responded to every unsettling development by resorting to shallow talking points, Jones was informed and insightful in his approach. The veteran environmental and human-rights campaigner, who once served as President Obama\u2019s green-jobs adviser, argued that \u201ca bipartisan political consensus\u201d forged by elites in both parties had sold out working Americans. Yet Jones was never willing to settle for simplistic explanations regarding the response to that sellout. Jones recognized the \u201crebellion against the elites\u201d that defined much of the 2016 campaign, but he demanded that others recognize the racial component in what he described as the \u201cwhitelash against a changing country.\u201d With equal measures of intellect and humanity, Jones wrestled ably and honestly with what he referred to as \u201cthe messy truth\u201d of American politics in the 2016 election.\r\nMost Valuable Free-Press Campaigner\r\nAmy Goodman\r\nDemocracy Now!\u2019s Amy Goodman played a pivotal role in drawing attention to the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance\u2014so much so that, after she chronicled the brutal treatment of activists, she found herself charged by local authorities with participating in a \u201criot.\u201d Goodman wasn\u2019t the only journalist targeted by North Dakota prosecutors, but she was particularly outspoken and effective when it came to pushing back. The award-winning broadcaster returned to North Dakota to challenge the charge; after she prevailed in court, Goodman used the attention she was accorded to declare: \u201cI wasn\u2019t trespassing, I wasn\u2019t engaging in a riot\u2014I was doing my job as a journalist by covering a violent attack on Native American protesters.\u201d\r\nMost Valuable Radio Show\r\nLetters & Politics With Mitch Jeserich\r\nVeteran broadcaster Mitch Jeserich started a radio program called Letters From Washington to chronicle the first 100 days of the Obama administration. That program evolved into Letters & Politics, which airs daily on Berkeley\u2019s pioneering Pacifica station KPFA. Erudite and adventurous, Jeserich can jump from a discussion about how civilization has changed over a thousand years with historian Ian Mortimer, to an examination of Islamophobia with international human-rights campaigner Arsalan Iftikhar, to a review of Trump\u2019s conflicted cabinet picks with Pratap Chatterjee, the executive director of CorpWatch. This is talk radio that makes you smarter.\r\nMost Valuable National Electoral Reform\r\nNational Popular Vote Interstate Compact\r\nDespite assaults on voting rights and the very infrastructure of democracy, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by roughly 3 million votes. But Trump narrowly prevailed in enough swing states to claim an Electoral College win\u2014the second time in less than 20 years that a Democrat has lost to a Republican with fewer votes. California Senator Barbara Boxer is right: The Electoral College should be abolished. But the constitutional amendment Boxer proposes will be a hard sell in a GOP-controlled Congress. Luckily, there\u2019s another way to let the people choose their president: The bipartisan National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, proposed by the National Popular Vote campaign, would require states to \u201callocate their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the most popular votes in all fifty states and DC.\u201d The compact goes into effect after states with 270 electoral votes have signed on. So far, 10 states (and the District of Columbia) are in, and the movement is growing.\r\nMost Valuable State Electoral Reform\r\nRanked-Choice Voting\r\nOn November 8, Maine voters approved a ranked-choice (or instant-runoff) system to elect US senators, US representatives, the governor, and state legislators. Under the new plan, voters will rank candidates in order of preference, with the votes of losing candidates being reassigned to more viable preferences until a clear winner emerges\u2014no spoilers, no wasted votes. State Representative Diane Russell says this system \u201callows [Mainers] to vote their hopes.\u201d That freedom and flexibility will advance the promise of democracy, and the group FairVote is working to get other states to embrace that promise.\r\nMost Valuable Rappers and Rockers\r\nProphets of Rage\r\nFormed by members of Rage Against the Machine (Tom Morello, Tim Commerford, and Brad Wilk), Public Enemy (Chuck D and DJ Lord), and Cypress Hill (B-Real), this rap-rock supergroup has been described by Morello as \u201can elite task force of revolutionary musicians determined to confront this mountain of election-year bullshit, and confront it head-on with Marshall stacks blazing.\u201d They did just that in 2016, touring the country to rally opposition to corporate power and political reaction. Outside the Republican National Convention, the group performed a raucous set at an \u201cEnd Poverty Now\u201d rally and then marched the crowd through downtown Cleveland to a protest in the city\u2019s Public Square. Thundering against Trumpism, the Prophets promise to \u201cMake America Rage Again.\u201d\r\nMost Valuable Music Magazine\r\nUnder the Radar\r\nThe magazine that dubs itself \u201cthe solution to music pollution\u201d has in recent election years also been the solution to political pollution. Instead of interviewing politicians, Under the Radar publishes a fall \u201cProtest Issue\u201d in which prominent musicians are photographed \u201cholding protest signs of their own making.\u201d The point is to highlight issues and ideas that might be neglected during the quadrennial cacophony of presidential politicking. The fall 2016 issue rocked, with Amanda Palmer\u2019s cover-shot poster explaining that \u201cRadical Empathy Is the Only Way to Gender Equality.\u201d Inside, Thurston Moore\u2019s sign demanded \u201cFree Chelsea Manning,\u201d while Kristin Kontrol\u2019s declared \u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d and Billy Bragg\u2019s proclaimed \u201cDeath to Cynicism.\u201d \u201cMy job is to take people who want to change the world and punch through their cynicism,\u201d Bragg told the magazine. That\u2019s precisely what Under the Radar\u2019s protest issue did.\r\nMost Valuable Movie\r\nSnowden\r\nOliver Stone\u2019s Snowden isn\u2019t the first great film about the NSA whistle-blower; that would be Laura Poitras\u2019s Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, the making of which Stone depicts in the film. But Snowden was a gripping return to form for the director, who, The New York Times noted, used the project to \u201ccircle back to the grand questions of power, war and secrecy that have propelled his most ambitious work.\u201d It was also a call to action: Linking art and activism, Stone used his promotional appearances for the film to urge President Obama to pardon Snowden. And as the film hit the theaters, the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and dozens of other groups stepped up their own campaigning on the issue, with ACLU executive director Anthony Romero explaining: \u201cCases like Edward Snowden\u2019s are precisely the reason the president\u2019s constitutional pardon power exists.\u201d\r\nJohn Nichols is The Nation\u2019s national-affairs correspondent.\u00a0He\u00a0is the co-author, with Robert W. McChesney, of People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy, published in March 2016\u00a0by Nation Books.\r\n\r\n \r\n           \r\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tPrint\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tEmail\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t  \n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\tTweet", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.merkley.senate.gov/news/in-the-news/the-2016-progressive-honor-roll"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.6769124194979668, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}