She’s on the list:

In the end, eight broke off on Sunday night to side with Republicans and allow the measure to advance: Mr. King, Mr. Kaine and Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois; John Fetterman of Pennsylvania; Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen, both of New Hampshire; and Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, both of Nevada.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/09/us/politics/government-shutdown-senate-vote.html

There are already mechanisms built into the SNAP distribution system for repayment by the recipient. These include reversing the EBT payment to the extent of available funds, withholding the disputed funds from future disbursements, penalizing the recipient by withholding SNAP payments entirely for a certain number of months, and/or, if there are to be no further SNAP payments, simply presenting the recipient with a bill for whatever the state wants back because they think some amount was overpaid, fraudulently obtained, used outside permitted guidelines (traded for other valuables), whatever.

Unfortunately, even if they can’t immediately claw the payment itself back, they can and will try. Whenever the govt releases even the tiniest portion of funds via benefit payments to regular citizens, they always build in a number of ways to get it back. Always.

As anyone can tell you that has ever had to wade through the maze of requirements and jump through all the moving hoops of getting govt benefits they desperately need, the only REAL “welfare queens” left in the US are sitting on corporate boards like WalMart, Amazon, and McDonald’s, training their new hires how to apply so they don’t have to pay their workers a living wage.

Not too many people can sew or do leather repair work.

Truth. (At least not well.) Glad you were able to get out of there.

Really good article. Thank you for posting it.

I can see how it isn’t clear to non-USians, but each state has its own house, senate, and “supreme” or highest court that it elects representatives for at the state level, as well as the federal equivalents you are familiar with.

For example, Warnock and Ossoff, as you rightly pointed out, are federal senators elected statewide in Georgia, to represent Georgia at the federal level in DC. But there are also Georgia state senators who represent various areas of the state in Atlanta at the Georgia State Assembly.

EVERY state has this duplication of representatives for the judicial and legislative branches, and even the executive (governor = state president, if you like) though the names for the state equivalents can vary from the federal.

The way to spot the difference is that the reps will have either US or state in front of their titles, US being federal, and sometimes you have to look closely for it, but it’s always there. Also, there are zero state elected “commissioners” at the federal level, which is another clue: when you hear “commissioner” it’s either state level or a leader specific to a govt agency at any level.

Edited to add: The commissioners mentioned in the article are not state senators, they are representatives on the state’s Public Service Commission, which controls public utilities in the state of Georgia.

A commissioner in Georgia can also be county government, which is another level of possible duplication under the state level (the variation is even wider when you get down to county and city level).

To flip these seats is actually really significant, because local power structures are real, and can be much harder to ever change than even their more visible counterparts at the state and federal level.

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Exactly. And for all of this “the exact lesson from apartheid” we’re all supposed to have taken to heart about the uselessness of non-violent protest, remind me again because it’s been some thirty years since I last heard about it . . . where is apartheid now?

I love when these fifth columnists show up to shit on any individual effort toward change, no matter how tiny, and to shower any “I can” idea with contempt, because it tells me who they are, and confirms that my own infinitesimal contribution, in combination with millions of other like contributions, is anything but useless.

Clearly it does matter what we think, very much.

This AI response is weak.