(Photo by Daniel Pierce Wright/Getty Images)
When Rep. Susie Lee, a Democrat from Nevada, attends President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech Tuesday, she’ll be “paying close attention to what the President doesn’t say in his address, which is how kids with disabilities will suffer without special education programs while billionaires get tax breaks.”
Lee, who routinely prides herself for her bipartisanship, is hoping to stick it to Trump by bringing along Michelle Alejandra Booth, an education advocate and mother of an autistic child.
Nevada received $97.2 million in federal funding for more than 67,000 special needs students in the last fiscal year, according to Lee, who said in a news release that Trump’s cuts “would devastate special education programs in Nevada.”
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), like Lee, is focusing on Trump’s threatened cuts to education funding and bringing Jason Shipman, principal of a high-achieving school for low-income students in Sparks, to Trump’s speech.
“As schools across the country face the potential cuts to critical federal funding, I won’t abandon our educators,” she said in a news release. ”I’m proud to work with Nevada leaders like Principal Shipman to ensure our students have everything they need to thrive.”
Cortez Masto says she’ll be looking for Trump to “put his money where his mouth is – I want to hear real plans for how he is going to lower costs for families.” In the first month of Trump’s second term, she said in a statement, families “have seen their cost-of-living skyrocket, and new taxes on food, energy, and cars are on the horizon.”
Sen. Jacky Rosen announced Monday she’ll bring Dominic Rampa, a Las Vegas resident who has relied on Medicaid since he was a child to pay for treatments for genetic disorders, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and other conditions. He’ll be accompanied by his mother, Rebecca Ennis. Without Medicaid, Rampa “would lose the health care coverage he needs to live, which at a minimum comes out to around $200,000 per year,” the news release said.
More than 350,000 children are enrolled in Medicaid/CHIP in Nevada.
Rep. Dina Titus, a Democrat, did not respond to the Current’s request for comments.
Rep. Mark Amodei, a Republican, also did not respond.
Other Democrats, according to news reports, are planning to be accompanied by veterans and others recently severed from their federal government jobs by Elon Musk’s figurative chainsaw, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Unlike 2017, when Democrats viewed Trump’s electoral college victory as an aberration, and used his State of the Union address as a platform to voice their resistance, 2025 presents a new challenge – how to wave the progressive flag in the face of a majority electorate that voted, with eyes wide open, for Trump.
The president is on a mission to wreak “chaos and cruelty,” says U.S. Rep. Steven Horsford, a Democrat from Nevada.
“A part of it is to distract us while they work on their tax giveaway scam for the rich and the billionaires. But it’s also to dismantle the very institutions – whether it’s education, health care, or our Veterans’ Affairs system – that so many people rely on,” Horsford said when asked about Trump’s endgame. “He’s about tearing it down, and he does not care, because for him, this is about doing one thing – giving tax breaks to himself, Elon Musk and the billionaire friends who were in the front row of his inauguration and to whom he has all but abdicated our federal Government.”
Last week the House of Representatives voted by a slim margin of 217-215 in favor of Trump’s budget resolution to gut government spending.
“The House Republican budget is a ‘Screw America’ plan that will devastate essential health services, including Medicaid in Nevada,” Horsford said during an interview Monday. “It not only cuts $2 trillion on the backs of working people, the most vulnerable, it increases the deficit over $4 trillion to do what? To leave us carrying the bag and give tax breaks to big corporations, tech tycoons, and billionaires. That is the Donald Trump way.”
Billionaire wealth increased by $1.4 trillion—or $3.9 billion per day—in the U.S. alone in 2024, and 74 more people became billionaires, according to OXFAM International, a global organization dedicated to ending poverty and injustice.
Horsford said Monday that he’ll be accompanied to Trump’s speech by Yolanda Garcia, a Las Vegas hospitality worker who earned $2.13 as a subminimum wage employee before moving to Nevada, where the practice of paying tipped earners less than non-tipped workers is illegal.
“That is a Jim Crow-era policy from post-slavery, and 70% of those workers are women and people of color,” Horsford said, adding Garcia can “speak to how life changing it is to escape the poverty trap” of being paid a subminimum wage, a practice endured by some 6 million tip earners in 29 states. “These employers are actually skimming off of these workers by not paying them a livable wage.”
Unlike Trump’s ‘no tax on tips’ bill, which would deliver a modest savings of about $35 a week to about 60% of tipped earners, Horsford’s bill seeks to also eliminate subminimum wages.
“I believe women and all people deserve to get paid a livable wage, and that one job should be enough,” he said, adding that employers “are actually skimming off of these workers by not paying them a livable wage.” His bill, he adds, has “guardrails so that millionaires can’t cheat the system.”
Horsford is one of two Democrats to serve on the Department of Government Efficiency caucus, a position he says he volunteered for in order to ward off debates on cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and more recently, Medicaid.
“I chose to participate so that I could be in the room and defend my constituents from those cuts,” Horsford said. “Elon Musk is an unelected bureaucrat who is trying to get richer off of the American taxpayer, and his actions around the mass firings are legal. The data breach, the largest in U.S. history, is illegal. And the dismantling of federal agencies, and unilaterally deciding what grants or contracts to pay or not is illegal.”
Horsford says Democrats are working “within the Congress and with groups outside to use the legal process to hold him and his hackers accountable for their illegal activity.” He says he still has faith in the judicial system.
As for the DOGE caucus, which has met twice, Horsford says he’ll begin the search for fraud with “Elon Musk’s (government) contracts, and corporate subsidies to Big Oil and Big Pharma.”