On Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) made a surprise pit stop while on the road for his “fighting oligarchy” tour with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) across the West. He appeared at the Coachella annual music festival. Sanders took the stage to introduce the singer Clairo, whom he praised for standing up for reproductive rights and speaking out against the war in Gaza. He then urged the crowd to get energized and fight back against President Donald Trump’s lawless, authoritarian agenda. “The future of what happens to America is dependent upon your generation,” Sanders told the crowd. “Now you can turn away, and you can ignore what goes on, but if you do that, you do it at your own peril. We need you to stand up, to fight… for economic justice, social justice, and racial justice.” Coming on the heels of Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) recent marathon speech to Congress, Sanders’ music festival appearance is the latest high-profile attempt by a sitting member of Congress to rally opposition against Trump. The president had made significant gains among young voters in the November election compared to his 2020 race, and Coachella’s audience, which tends to be mostly Gen Z and millennials according to one survey, is a crucial demographic for the Democrats. Sanders was not the only lawmaker at Coachella: he was introduced by Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), the youngest member of Congress. Sanders got a warm welcome; Trump, not so much. Each time Sanders mentioned him, the crowd roared with boos. “I agree!” he replied at one point. The 83-year-old Sanders warned, in a roughly three-minute speech, of the threats Trump and the GOP pose to tackling climate change and improving abortion rights, worker’s rights, and access to equitable healthcare. “We have an economy today that is working very well for the billionaire class, but not for working families. We need you to help us to create an economy that works well for everybody, not just the one percent,” Sanders told the crowd. “We have a health care system that is broken. We are the only major country not to guarantee health care to all people. We need you to stand up to the insurance companies and the drug companies and understand that health care is a human right.” > View this post on Instagram > > > > > A post shared by L.A. Times Entertainment (@latimes_entertainment) As my colleague Tim Murphy wrote, Sanders has become something of a leader of the Trump resistance these past couple of months, seeking to gain the support of otherwise apolitical voters as other high-profile Democrats largely have remained silent. “I mean, Kamala [Harris] is not talking, Barack [Obama]’s not talking, [Joe] Biden’s not talking,” one longtime Democrat said. “Right now, he’s the only one talking, and he’s the only one making sense.” Sanders appears to be doing exactly what Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Democrats should be doing during an appearance on CNN Sunday morning. “I think our secret, super-duper strategy is, just tell the truth about what’s going on,” she noted. “The American people will see pretty clearly who’s fighting for the billionaires and who’s fighting for them.” Meanwhile, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have been hitting the road. He delivered the Coachella speech after making a stop earlier in the day in Los Angeles with the New York lawmaker. In a post on X, Sanders said the LA turnout was about 36,000 people, making it “our biggest rally ever.”

It was clear from the outset that the Joint Resolutions of Disapproval from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would not pass. The trio of bills, brought to a vote on Wednesday night, would have stopped $20 billion in weapons from being sent to Israel. Every single Republican in the Senate voted against Sanders, as expected. A majority of Democratic senators voted against the bills, too.  But there has still been movement in favor of limiting military aid: About 40 percent of the Democrats present for the vote wanted to stop billions in arms sales to Israel, despite loud opposition from the White House, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Major figures in the Democratic party—Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.)—voted for at least one of the resolutions. 19 Senators backed at least a piece of Sanders’ call to limit aid, a historically high number showing explicit, public support for upholding American law as it applies to Israel. Polls show that the majority of Americans support suspending offensive weapons to Israel until an end comes to the country’s yearlong bombardment of Gaza—in which, experts estimate, over 100,000 people have already been killed. But that majority view—endorsed even by some explicitly pro-Israel organizations, such as J Street—has not been reflected in the US government. In fact, hours before Sanders brought his resolutions to the Senate floor, the United States vetoed another ceasefire resolution in the United Nations. It is the fourth such resolution since Israel’s war in Gaza—which United Nations agencies, independent experts, and several world governments have declared a genocide—began. (That resolution would have demanded the release of all hostages, and implemented Biden’s own ceasefire plan.) On the Senate floor, Sanders spoke next to a large photo of a dead, emaciated Palestinian child. “Every member of the Senate who believes in the rule of law, that our government should obey the law, should vote for these resolutions,” he said. “The Foreign Assistance Act and the Arms Export Control Act are very clear. The United States cannot provide weapons to countries that violate internationally recognized human rights or block US humanitarian aid. That is not my opinion, that is what the law says.” In mid-September, Biden administration leaders sent a letter to Netanyahu warning him of these specific provisions of US law, and saying Israel had 30 days to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza or face cuts to military aid. But 30 days came and went, Palestinians continued to starve, and the Biden administration refused to enforce its own deadline. Joint Resolutions of Disapproval are not unheard of—they’ve previously been levied against Saudi Arabia and Egypt, for example—but this is the first time that this type of weapons-trade-restricting measure has been brought against Israel, which is by a far larger recipient of US weapons, having been given about $310 billion in military aid from the US since its founding. Sanders recounted anecdotes from doctors who saw civilians shot in the head in Gaza, explained that per satellite imagery two-thirds of the buildings in Gaza are flattened entirely, and told fellow congresspeople that reporting showed almost no one in Gaza has had consistent access to electricity or clean water for nearly 14 months.  “Fundamentally, [President] Joe Biden will not uphold the law,” Matt Duss, a former Sanders aide now at the Center for International Policy, said of the White House pressure campaign to vote against Sanders. Instead, it’s “purely ideological: [Biden] just believes that Israel is entitled to absolute total wall-to-wall support, no matter how catastrophic the impact on Palestinians or Lebanese.”  “A lot of people wrongly thought that it was because of political considerations,” Duss continued. “But no, even after the election, [the administration] remains completely committed to ignoring US law and keeping the flow of weapons running, even with the knowledge that these particular weapons will not reach Israel for over a year.” The first bill to be voted on Wednesday night concerned exploding tank shells. Cat Knarr of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights noted that these shells are thought to have killed 6-year-old Hind Rajab as she sat alone with the bodies of her family, pleading for help. Knarr’s group staged a protest the day before the vote at the Senate. “You’re either on the side of justice and stopping the weapons, or you’re on the side of arming a genocidal state, and you will go down in history for how you vote today,” she said.  When opponents of the JRDs came to the floor, their talking points sounded like they were lifted directly from a White House memo circulated earlier that morning. As reported by Akbar Shahid Ahmed of the Huffington Post, the White House declared that those who would block weapons to Israel were aiding Hamas and prolonging the war. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are among the senators who seemed to speak from that playbook. “If you love peace you have to destroy those who hate peace,” Graham said.  No one argued against Sanders’ fundamental point—that sending weapons to a nation blocking humanitarian aid is illegal. Instead, they said Israel needed to defend itself against a region in which it is the only reliable ally for the West. Senator John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) said of the Palestinian people: “They hate Americans. They want to kill us and drink our blood out of a boot.”  But the closeness of Israel and the West is showing signs of cracking. The next day, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant for using starvation as a weapon of war as well as “murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” This marked the first time the ICC has ever indicted a pro-Western official on war crimes charges—which means the United States is certain to push back. After 14 months of unabated carnage, opposition to arming Israel even within the United States is looking less fringe.

On Friday, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) will introduce a potentially groundbreaking piece of federal legislation in the House of Representatives—one allocating $10 billion in funding to fight Long Covid, the increasingly widespread, chronic condition that follows many Covid infections. The Long Covid Research Moonshot Act is a companion bill to one that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced in the Senate in August. “Long Covid is a silent health crisis impacting over twenty-three million Americans, including one million children,” Omar said in a statement to Mother Jones. “I’m proud to lead this effort in the House to recognize Long Covid as the public health emergency that it is and invest in countering the effects of this terrible disease.” > “Long Covid is a silent health crisis impacting over twenty-three million > Americans, including one million children,” Rep. Omar said. Long Covid symptoms often include debilitating fatigue, and many people found to have it have also been diagnosed with conditions like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. ME/CFS, which is characterized by post-exertional malaise, is known to be associated with other infectious diseases—the CDC states that about 1 in 10 people infected by the Epstein-Barr virus (which 95 percent of adults get) experience ME/CFS-like symptoms. And research shows that repeated Covid infections increase people’s risk of developing Long Covid. The Long Covid Research Moonshot Act would establish a new research program within the National Institutes of Health to better understand the condition (and others, like ME/CFS and POTS) with its own database, advisory board, and a new grant process to accelerate clinical trials. It would fund public health education and comprehensive care clinics dedicated to Long Covid, especially in underserved, disproportionately affected communities—and would require any new treatments developed through the act to be reasonably priced and accessible to more patients. “We know that the only path forward out of this generational crisis is to fund research that builds on our expertise about infection-associated chronic conditions like ME/CFS, and that is accountable to the patient community for delivering results, including clinical trials,” said Laurie Jones, executive director of patient advocacy group #MEAction. “The Long Covid Research Moonshot Act lays out a comprehensive plan for doing just that.” Megan Carmilani, the president of Long Covid Families, believes the bill would fund vital research into how Long Covid presents in young people, a focus of her organization, and called on Congress “to prioritize the health and wellbeing of our nation’s children by supporting this bill as well.” The Long Covid Research Moonshot Act is not Congress’ first attempt to fund such treatment. In December 2020, Congress allocated $1 billion to NIH to study the long-term impacts of Covid, and boosted that funding by more than $500 million this year. But a 2022 attempt, Rep. Ayanna Pressley’s (D-Mass.) TREAT Long Covid Act, did not make it out of committee—despite having 41 co-sponsors, including Rep. Omar. That act, also unsuccessfully reintroduced in 2023, would have made direct grants to clinics that treat Long Covid and associated conditions. Communities of color and disabled people have been disproportionately harmed by Long Covid. Black and Latino people, for instance, are more likely to develop Long Covid symptoms than white people. Disabled people are twice as likely to do so as non-disabled people. A February 2023 analysis published by JAMA Network found that people with Long Covid symptoms, which can include severe fatigue and issues with cognitive function, are more likely to be unemployed. The only way not to get Long Covid is to avoid Covid infections, underscoring the importance of mask-wearing and high-quality air filtration. “We must take bold action to help Americans suffering from Long Covid,” Omar said in her statement.