Joan is joined by Congressman Brad Schneider (D-IL), who discussed strategies for Democratic Party resistance against President Donald Trump's policies and highlighted the importance of maintaining faith in American institutions and ideals. 

He said that despite finding that a majority of his constituents prefer Congress to work "on their behalf in a bipartisan way . . . that's not possible right now. The Republicans have made it very clear they want nothing to do with the Democrats. They want to ram down their agenda to put burdens on working families," he said.

Schneider took aim at House Republicans for recently passing a budget blueprint that calls for $880 billion in spending cuts. "The bulk of that has to come out of Medicaid," he said. "Seventy million Americans rely on Medicaid for their health care. Forty percent of the babies born in the country are born covered by Medicaid. This is a horrific agenda. We're not going to enable it.

"So it's very hard to envision how there might be a prospect for bipartisan effort. That said, if the Republicans wanted to come to the table and put out ideas that are going to benefit people, going to lower prices at the grocery store, make housing more affordable, those would all be things that Democrats would sit down and talk to our colleagues about. But that's not what they're interested in."

Schneider told WCPT that he had invited 20-year Army veteran Adam Mulvey to be his guest at that evening's presidential address to a joint session of Congress. "He was a probationary employee, which means that he was in his first year of service -- 11 months," Schneider said. "He was getting rave reviews, and in the middle of the night, he got an email from DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency], from the Elon Musk team saying we no longer want your services; you're being terminated. And what's worse, it was a form letter; it went out to at least 6,000 veterans, thousands of federal workers, saying you're being terminated for performance. It had nothing to do with their performance. Their probationary status was a reflection of their tenure, not a reflection on the quality of their work." 

Catch "Joan Esposito: Live, Local and Progressive" weekdays from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. Central on WCPT (heartlandsignal.com/programs/live-local-progressive).

And find the Joan Esposito (Full Episodes) podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, YouTube, and Amazon.