{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/newswatch/100417", "October 4", "2017-10-04", "2017", "2017-10", "Independent", "House", "VT", "Bernard Sanders", "S000033", "www.sanders.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "October 4\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\tWednesday, October 4, 2017\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\tSenate Budget Slashes Medicare, Medicaid\u00a0Senate Republicans are proposing to slash Medicare spending by $473 billion over a decade, once again diverging from one of President Donald Trump\u2019s key campaign promises, according to Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee. The panel\u2019s minority party staff, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, published the figure in a five-page report,\u00a0Politico\u00a0reported.\r\nRandall Woodfin Elected Birmingham Mayor\u00a0Progressive challenger Randall Woodfin on Tuesday unseated William Bell, the mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, in a nonpartisan runoff election. Woodfin\u2019s win is a coup for national progressive groups that backed him, including the Working Families Party and Our Revolution, the legacy organization of Sanders\u2019 2016 presidential campaign. Sanders personally endorsed Woodfin and recorded a robocall for him on Monday,\u00a0The Huffington Post,\u00a0WBHM\u00a0and\u00a0The Intercept\u00a0reported.\u00a0\r\nSanders Emotional Learning About WWII Relative\u00a0Sanders recently choked up after he learned that one of his relatives died while fighting the Nazis during World War II. The Jewish former Democratic presidential candidate discovered details about his ancestor during the taping of the new season of the PBS series \u201cFinding Your Roots,\u201d\u00a0The Algemeiner\u00a0reported.\r\nVermont College Fairs\u00a0Sanders is set to host a series of college fairs in Vermont, for high school students and their parents to learn more about educational opportunities in Vermont and the resources available to help pay for them,\u00a0WCAX-TV\u00a0reported.\u00a0\r\n2020 Democrats Target Guns\u00a0 Not long ago, Democratic presidential hopefuls shied away from talking about gun control \u2014 or at least made sure to pepper their rhetoric with nods to the Second Amendment. Sanders, who was hammered for sometimes voting with the gun lobby by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, said Americans should do \"everything we can\" to stop gun violence,\u00a0NBC News\u00a0reported.\r\nNative Vermonter Killed in Vegas\u00a0Sandy Casey, a native of nearby Dorset, Vermont, was among the dozens of people killed in Las Vegas. Sanders and Patrick Leahy both offered public condolences to Casey\u2019s family.\u00a0 Sanders tweeted: \u201cJane and I are deeply saddened to hear that Vermonter Sandy Casey was among the victims in Vegas. Our hearts are with her family & friends,\u201d\u00a0The Washington Post\u00a0reported.\r\nSanders: College for All\u00a0\u201cWe live in a highly competitive, global economy, and if our economy is to be strong, we need the best-educated workforce in the world. The only way to achieve that goal is to make sure that every young person in this country can get the education that he or she desires, regardless of his or her family\u2019s income, and without going into major debt,\u201d Sanders wrote in an op-ed run in\u00a0The Hofstra Chronicle.\u00a0\r\nSanders, Larry David Discover They\u2019re Related\u00a0When Larry David debuted his Bernie Sanders impersonation on Saturday Night Live, the similarities were uncanny. When two appeared on the season 4 premiere of the PBS\u2019 show Finding Your Roots they were given a shocking discovery: they were related,\u00a0The Associated Press,\u00a0Newsweek,\u00a0TV Line,\u00a0Vulture\u00a0and\u00a0Deadline Hollywood\u00a0reported.\r\nBiden: No More Extreme Senators\u00a0In the process of delivering the rather socialistic message that wealthy people didn\u2019t need a tax break, Joe Biden, former Vice President managed to take a sideways jab at Bernie Sanders. \u201cDoug understands about tax fairness,\u201d Biden told the crowd. \u201cGuys, the wealthy are as patriotic as the poor. I know Bernie doesn\u2019t like me saying that, but they are,\u201dPaste Magazine\u00a0and\u00a0The Hill\u00a0reported.\u00a0\r\nChomsky on Diagnosing the Trump Era\u00a0\u201cThe most remarkable feature of the 2016 election was the Bernie Sanders campaign, which broke the pattern set by over a century of US political history. A substantial body of political science research convincingly establishes that elections are pretty much bought; campaign funding alone is a remarkably good predictor of electability, for Congress as well as for the presidency,\u201d Noam Chomsky said in an interview with\u00a0The Nation.\r\nGOP Strategist: This Is a New Gilded Age\u00a0Republican strategist and lobbyist Bruce Mehlman sees \u201ceerie\u201d parallels between the Gilded Age and today. \u201cOn issues like race and on immigration, we're now finding the culture war is competing with a class war,\u201d Mehlman said. \u201cYou used to hear it from the Pat Buchanans of the world and some of the Democrats like Bernie Sanders, but it's now becoming mainstream in, for sure, the Democratic Party and, increasingly, the Republican Party,\u201d\u00a0The Washington Post\u00a0reported.\r\nColumn: Congress\u2019s War Powers Must Become Reality\u00a0\u201cAlthough a reactionary monarchy, Saudi Arabia has long enjoyed a special relationship with the United States\u2026 Now that impunity is starting to wear thin. In his foreign policy speech at Westminster College, \u2026 Sanders courageously called out our support for Saudi Arabia\u2019s \u2018destructive intervention in Yemen,\u2019 arguing that \u2018such policies dramatically undermine America\u2019s ability to advance a human rights agenda across the world,\u201d Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote for\u00a0The Washington Post.\r\nColumn: Get a New Base\u00a0\u201dTraditional Republicans should consider reverse-engineering their party. Their beliefs \u2026 may find a following among suburbanites, college-educated voters, immigrants, nontraditional families... millennials, small-business people, workers in the New Economy and Democrats and independents resistant to that party\u2019s tilt toward Sanders and Western European-style democratic socialism,\u201d Jennifer Rubin wrote for\u00a0The Washington Post.\r\nColumn: Money from NRA\u00a0\u201cNRA spending reached $7.7 million for McCain and against his Senate electoral opponents by 2016, placing him second among all members of Congress, behind only Sanders, who despite his progressive credentials has been a consistent supporter of the gun manufacturing industry ($8.3 million),\u201d Michael Hiltzik wrote for\u00a0Los Angeles Times.\r\nColumn: Quiet Battle Between Sanders and Harris\u00a0\u201cThe Atlanta mayoral election is a microcosm of the war within the Democratic Party between progressives and the establishment. The opposing factions are likely to continue pushing against one another in local and congressional campaigns across the country leading up to an anticipated showdown in the 2020 Democratic primaries,\u201d Michael Sainato wrote for\u00a0Observer.\r\nColumn: Obama Too Conservative?\u00a0\u201cAs Democratic Party leaders continue to lurch toward Bernie Sanders\u2019 brand of Marxism, they are clearly making Mr. Obama appear more moderate ...\u00a0 But it is striking, given that Mr. Sanders won 22 states and nearly 1900 delegates in the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, that even among Democratic voters almost nobody will cop to being \u201cfar left\u201d and just 16% call themselves \u2018very liberal,\u2019\u201d James Freeman wrote for\u00a0The Wall Street Journal.\r\nColumn: Who Will Be the Bernie of Gun Control?\u00a0\u201cIf Bernie Sanders won\u2019t be the Bernie Sanders of gun control, who will? The person trying the hardest so far is potential presidential candidate Sen. Chris Murphy. Murphy, who was profoundly moved by Sandy Hook and has little to fear from pro-gun voters in deep-blue Connecticut, has been a vociferous critic of the NRA,\u201d Bill Scher wrote for\u00a0Politico.\r\nColumn: Even Kennedy Used Tax Cuts\u00a0\u201cThere is a pattern here, but the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren-Kamala Harris class warriors in Washington won\u2019t acknowledge it because they are so ideologically committed to a zero-sum view of our economy that has some earners benefiting only at the expense of other earners. If only these progressives cared about wealth creation as much as they care about wealth redistribution,\u201d Jason Riley wrote for\u00a0The Wall Street Journal.", 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.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/newswatch/100417"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 2.9415800236165524, "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"}