We’ve got two great stories to tell you on today’s BradCast. One is likely to invigorate you. The other is likely to enrage you. You’re welcome. [Audio link to full show follows this summary.]
FIRST UP… Be invigorated. After a complicated, three-step, months-long process, a refusal to back down, a determination to stand up against legal challenges, and a willingness to embrace and exploit political loopholes — in a way that we’ve become accustomed to seeing Republicans, not Democrats, do — voters in Virginia on Tuesday narrowly approved a Constitutional Amendment placed on the ballot by Democratic lawmakers to redraw VA’s U.S. House map for this November’s critical midterm elections.
The Special Election for the referendum was held as a direct response to Trump’s orders last summer to Republican-controlled state legislature’s to gerrymander their U.S. House maps in the middle of the decade in a pathetic and desperate attempt to hold on to a razor thin GOP majority after this year’s midterms.
If (and its still a big if!), the VA Supreme Court doesn’t put the kibosh on the entire thing, Democrats hope this move will result in the flipping of four currently Republican-held seats to Democratic ones, increasing their current 6 to 5 majority delegation to a whopping 10 to 1 in the otherwise very “purple” commonwealth.
It was an expensive and grueling election, with a whole lot of confusion purposely seeded into the matter by Republicans hoping to hoax voters into voting against the measure. They didn’t succeed, though it was a pretty narrow 3-point victory for the “YES” coalition.
No matter what ends up happening in the courts in regard this matter — and in a special session of the Florida legislature next week, where state Republicans hope to redraw their own already-gerrymandered U.S. House map to further advantage the GOP — the complex story of how the measure in VA even made it to Tuesday’s Special Election ballot in the first place is a harrowing lesson in how voters will have Democrats’ backs if they are willing to stand up and fight for the people.
Tune in for the entire sordid and/or inspirational tale.
NEXT UP… Be enraged. After taking office again last year, Donald Trump placed a non-partisan, career professional with a 30-year history at the Social Security Administration in “acting” charge of the agency.
The good news didn’t last long. Soon, Trump and Elon Musk‘s DOGE Bros came along and demanded access to the agency’s master database containing the most sensitive data on 500 million Americans, both living and dead. That includes Social Security numbers, birth dates, medical and income history and much much more. It is data that had been jealously guarded, without a breech, for the nearly 90-year history of the beloved federal program — until Trump and DOGE came along.
Soon, career professionals, including the top staffer in charge of data security at the agency, were resigning in protest. Lawsuits from unions and whistleblowers started flying, and the corrupt U.S. Supreme Court majority ultimately refused to stop the unprecedented DOGE access to American’s most sensitive records. We have since learned, largely via whistleblower lawsuits, that the DOGE Bros entered an agreement to share the data with a disgraced, rightwing “voter fraud” outfit. One of the Bros reportedly even copied the entire database to a portable thumb drive and offered access to it to his next employer.
Our guest today is longtime advocate NANCY ALTMAN, co-founder and President of the non-profit watchdog group, Social Security Works and co-author of Social Security Works For Everyone! Protecting and Expanding the Insurance Americans Love and Count On.
“It is outrageous! They have the most sensitive of all our information,” she tells me, detailing so much of what has now been stolen from the elderly, the disabled, and children who receive Social Security to help them stay alive. “All kinds of information. It is a scammer’s treasure trove.”
“They’re talking about suppressing voting and using our information to do that. And Elon Musk, I’m sure, is trying to monetize all of our information,” charges Altman. “It has been very securely held, and now it’s in some cloud. Who knows who has access to it, who can hack into it? We are all in danger of being scammed.” Some, she explains, already have been.
You may recall, in the early days of the second Trump nightmare, when he and Musk were falsely claiming to have found hundreds or thousands of people who were receiving Social Security payments, despite being 122 years old or older. That, she explains, was all a lie. “Whether it was incompetence or intentional, the answer is there is no truth to it.”
“Even MAGA voters value Social Security and don’t want to see it cut,” Altman says. “So what do you do when the whole country feels that way and you want to get rid of it? You undermine confidence. You tell people there are all these people who aren’t really disabled who are claiming benefits. They’ll tell children they’re never going to see their benefits. And they tell the American people there are all these dead people getting benefits. That is such a lie.”
In the meantime, Altman asserts, all of this is just “the tip of the iceberg,” noting, “I’m concerned that a lot more groups have this information now.”
“If the Democrats are able to take the House, they 100% will have hearings on it to get to the bottom of what’s going on,” she insists, to find out “who has this data, what they’ve done with it, where it is now, and what — if anything — the Social Security Administration is doing to protect the data from further disclosure.”
Until then, Trump has fired the Inspector General who might have looked into and exposed all of this, his Dept. of Justice is, naturally, doing nothing to hold anyone to account, and Democrats in Congress have been stymied from carrying out probes or hearings by Republicans who want to pretend none of this is going on.
But it is going on. It is still underway. It’s “horrendous” and “malicious” and we are now, according to Altman “in uncharted territory.”
“It’s important to find out what has happened, what the dangers are, what the risks are, and what can be done to at least ameliorate it,” she says, urging action by voters in the months ahead.
“The Democrats have a plan to expand benefits and require the wealthiest pay their fair share. They also have been pushing, repeatedly and endlessly, to get their colleagues to look into what’s happening with DOGE, what’s happening with offices, what’s happening with pushing out the most experienced people — so much that’s going on that’s harmful to our ability to access benefits. So it’s very important, if you care about Social Security, to vote.”
There’s an idea. I hope you’ll follow her advice and tune in for today’s program…
Just another thing that has been happening since dirt (Blind Willie McTell News – 8).