In the News
Written by Matthew Green & Natalia V Navarro
About halfway through President Donald Trump’s contentious address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Lateefah Simon decided she’d heard enough.
“I did decide to attend because my job as a new member of Congress is to deeply understand the institution,” the freshman Democratic representative from Oakland told KQED. “But you know, I was in there for about 45 minutes and there was only so much hatred that I could hear.”
Written by Joan Walsh
On Thursday morning we got to see the worst and the best of the House Democratic caucus. I won’t soon forget either.
Written by Joe Garofoli
Days before they return to Washington to cast votes on the GOP-crafted budget, two California House members toured the Innovative Genomics Institute research lab at UC Berkeley Friday morning, in order to get a look at the real-life impacts of Republicans’ goal to whack $4 billion from the National Health Institute.
UC Berkeley receives $169 million in NIH funding.
Written by Joe Garofoli
WASHINGTON - Before Rep. Lateefah Simon took office as the East Bay’s new representative in Congress, it would have been easy to imagine how her first term was likely to go. She would join The Squad, and become a go-to source on MSNBC and others drawn to her incredible biography: The legally blind MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” winner grew up in public housing and is equal parts wonky and woke.
Written by Chase Hunter
Rep. Lateefah Simon thought she would be delivering a $2 million check to the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation this week — the first federal money she had secured for District 12 since being sworn in as a first-term member of Congress in January — but that was before the Trump administration issued a memo announcing a freeze on nearly all federal funding.
Written by Cynthia Laird
U.S. Rep. Lateefah Simon, D-Oakland, was ceremonially sworn in Jan. 7 in Washington, D.C., by her longtime mentor and friend, Vice President Kamala Harris, with whom Simon has shared a decades-long friendship and professional relationship grounded in their shared commitment to public service. Simon’s friends and family joined her in the vice president’s ceremonial U.S. Senate office for the swearing-in ceremony.