TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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Weekend Hot Takes.
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You Won.
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Please Don't Spend It in Court.
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Well, well, well.
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A week ago, Democrats went to bed nervous and woke up holding the House, the Senate, and the kind of hangover you only get from winning.
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Seven Senate seats flipped.
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North Carolina.
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South Carolina.
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Ohio.
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Iowa.
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Maine.
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Kansas, which just sent its first Democrat to the Senate since 1932.
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And Texas.
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Texas.
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Hakeem Jeffries is about to become the first Black Speaker of the House.
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Chuck Schumer walked up to the microphones and promised, in five words, that relief is on the way.
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So enjoy it.
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Genuinely.
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Sleep in.
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Order the good takeout.
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Text the cousin who told you Kansas would never.
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And then, on Monday, sit down, because we need to talk about what you do with it.
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We have seen this movie.
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In 2018, Democrats won the House on a wave of righteous fury.
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Then they spent the next two years in court.
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The fight to make Don McGahn testify dragged on so long the administration that defied the subpoena was gone before it was resolved.
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The fight over Trump's financial records went all the way to the Supreme Court, which sent it back down to start over.
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Hearings were held.
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Chyrons were written.
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Lawyers billed.
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And nobody's rent got cheaper.
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Now look at the plans for 2027.
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Committee aides are describing their strategy as "death by a thousand cuts."
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Letters have already gone out to companies and contractors to pave the way for subpoenas.
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There is a subpoena list.
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There is, reportedly, a pile.
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We're not making this up to be mean.
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One of your own staffers warned months ago that bank records can take years to produce, that the White House will drag out compliance, and that biting off too much leaves you handing the public interim reports.
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Interim reports.
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That is what the most criminalized people in this country are supposed to eat for two years.
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That's not what you were hired to do.
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This election was about the cost of living.
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It was about people who are tired of being robbed by the powerful in broad daylight.
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That is what you ran on, and that is what voters in Iowa and South Carolina showed up for.
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They did not flip Kansas so you could hold a hearing about who paid for the ballroom.
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"But the voters asked for oversight!" Oh, we heard.
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Fine.
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Then don't overlook anything.
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Since apparently somebody has to write it down for you, here's a starter list: The Epstein files.
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All of them.
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The pages that came out, the pages that didn't, and the people who decided which was which.
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Survivors have spent decades watching powerful men get protected.
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End that.
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Economic justice.
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Rent.
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Groceries.
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Medical debt.
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Wages that don't cover a month.
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Most of what gets called "exploitation" starts with someone who can't make rent.
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Fix that and you'll do more to fight trafficking than any sting ever has.
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Racism and discrimination.
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In
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who gets stopped, who gets charged, who gets sentenced, who gets deported, and who gets called a "victim" versus a "criminal" for doing the exact same thing.
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And for God's sake, FOSTA.
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Stop funding a failure of legislative policy that harms and isolates marginalized and vulnerable sex workers and trafficking survivors to the same degree.
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Stop paying to enforce it.
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Repeal it.
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(We'll come back to this one.
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Oh, we will come back to this one.)
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Oversee all of that.
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Gladly.
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Just remember that oversight is supposed to end in something: a law, a repeal, a refund, a person who isn't in a cage anymore.
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Not a contempt citation.
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About FOSTA, since nobody in Congress read the report.
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FOSTA was sold in 2018 as the law that would finally let survivors fight back.
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Prosecutors would get a shiny new federal crime.
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Victims would get restitution.
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Websites would pay.
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FOSTA itself ordered the Government Accountability Office to check back in three years.
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So it did.
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Prosecutors used the new crime once.
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One case, filed in June 2020.
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Criminal restitution for victims: never sought.
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Not once.
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Civil damages: one person tried.
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The case was dismissed.
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Zero dollars.
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That's the "fight back" part.
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And the part about finding victims? DOJ officials told the GAO that gathering tips and evidence got harder after FOSTA, because platforms moved overseas and payment systems got more complicated.
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The ads didn't disappear.
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They scattered: offshore, onto social media, onto the hobby boards and sugar dating sites that grew in its wake.
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Even Backpage, the site
FOSTA was practically named after, was seized days before FOSTA was signed.
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Prosecutors took it down with money laundering and conspiracy charges they already had.
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So let's be precise.
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FOSTA didn't take trafficking off the internet.
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It took the evidence off American servers.
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It took screening tools away from sex workers and the paper trail away from the investigators who were supposedly the point.
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A law that endangers sex workers and delivers nothing to survivors isn't a tough compromise.
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It's a failure that hurts both groups the same.
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Meanwhile, the law that actually works is stuck in a hallway.
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Here's the part that should embarrass everyone.
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The Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the 2000 law behind the real prosecutions, the survivor services, and the visas, is overdue for reauthorization.
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Its own champions credit it with thousands of federal trafficking convictions, Ghislaine Maxwell's among them.
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The current reauthorization, H.R.
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1144, cleared the House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously in July 2025.
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Then it sat.
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This April, its Republican sponsor announced leadership had promised a floor vote within weeks.
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By July, survivors were still holding press conferences begging for one.
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As far as we can find, it never got a vote.
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Earlier versions passed the House in each of the last two Congresses and died in the Senate.
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Let that sink in.
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A Republican trifecta had two years and an anti-trafficking bill nobody opposed, and couldn't find a free afternoon.
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FOSTA, though? Still on the books.
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Still doing damage.
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When this Congress ends in January, that bill dies with it.
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So, new majority, here is the easiest win you will get all decade.
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Pass a real TVPA reauthorization, and pass it early.
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Write it with survivors and sex workers at the table, not just the people who run stings.
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Put the money into housing, services, and immigration relief, not raids.
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And while you're in that statute anyway, take FOSTA out of it.
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That's what protecting trafficking survivors actually looks like.
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We know how long litigation takes.
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We sued over FOSTA in 2018.
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We know what it is to be right on the law and still wait years for a courtroom to catch up while people get hurt in the meantime.
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That's not a strategy.
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That's a waiting room.
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"But he'll just veto everything" He's said he will.
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And some coverage has already floated that your whole affordability agenda might end up as a messaging tool for 2028 rather than anything that touches people's lives this side of it.
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That is exactly the trap.
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Don't walk into it.
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You hold the purse.
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Government funding has to pass, and you write it.
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Put the money where the people are.
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You hold Senate confirmations.
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Use them like they mean something.
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And you hold oversight.
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Use it where it saves lives, not where it saves face.
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Point it at ICE detention.
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Point it at the Bureau of Prisons.
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Point it at the conditions our members write to us about from inside.
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That isn't litigation.
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That's governing.
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Two years is not an abstraction.
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Two years is a full sentence for a lot of the people we write letters to.
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Two years is how long someone coming home has to find housing, an ID, and a job before the system decides they've failed.
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Two years is two more leases, two more rent hikes, two more winters in a car.
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Two years is a lot of nights working without a screening tool because a law you could have studied, fixed, or repealed made it a federal crime to warn each other about a bad date.
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The people we serve don't get to wait for a ruling.
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They never have.
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So here is the ask.
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Fund harm reduction like you mean it, not like a pilot program that expires before the evaluation comes back.
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Fund reentry so people coming home actually have somewhere to come home to.
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Pass the study on FOSTA's harms that has been introduced, and introduced, and introduced again.
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Then act on what it finds.
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Use your oversight power on the cages, not just the cash.
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And make every fight you pick end in something a person can feel in their wallet, their housing, or their safety.
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Please.
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We are begging you.
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Don't litigate the next two years.
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Don't hand us a binder of interim reports and a 2028 slogan.
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Don't confuse a good hearing with a good life.
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You asked us to show up, and we did.
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Now show up for us.
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Make our lives better.
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That's it.
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That's the whole ask.