Days after surgery to remove part of one of her ribs, Sen. Mazie Hirono was home resting, saying she was glad to be off the hospital food regime, but not too tired to still be lobbing grenades.
“At home &catching up on news. #Trumpcare, #MuslimBan, voter registries — let’s keep fighting this disaster of a President,” Hirono tweeted on June 30.
Who knows how you would react to a diagnosis of stage four kidney cancer? For Hirono, 69, it has been a political call to arms.
“It was a shock; totally unexpected. I was dumbfounded,” Hirono said about her diagnosis, in an interview last week. “I thought major illness happened to other people because I have been healthy all my life.”
Hirono has always been a strong liberal Democrat, but whether it was Donald Trump’s election or joining the fight to beat cancer, she has become all the more forceful.
Asked about the Trump presidency, Hirono fired back: “I am appalled on a pretty regular basis, the whole Russia investigation is something we need to get to the bottom of.
“It has been a steady drip, but now with Donald Junior’s emails, I feel the faucet is opening wider.”
Hirono quickly ran through a list of mounting concerns regarding the Trump administration.
Regarding the latest Senate version of the GOP health care bill, Hirono called it “just as bad, it just delays some of its worst parts; we are going over the bill piece by piece again and it is not good.”
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos “will destroy public education in America if she is allowed to start her school voucher program,” Hirono warned. And Tom Price, secretary of Health and Human Services, is devoting the administration to privatizing Social Security.
The battle to drop the Affordable Care Act and cut Medicare and Medicaid is a major concern, Hirono said. “Health care is a right, not a privilege.”
“We have been checking in with community health centers and seeing the huge cuts in Medicaid and what is going to happen to seniors in long-term care,” she said. “We are touching bases with both the institutions but also people who rely on Medicare expansion.”
As the Washington, D.C., battle continues, Hirono is likely to become something of a poster child for preexisting conditions. She quickly said health care “has become personal.”
“Believe me, this is not just some intellectual awareness I have, I am living this. The rib surgery was so much more painful than removing a kidney, but I know there are hundreds of thousands of people in Hawaii living with preexisting conditions.”
Hirono acknowledged she has become more vocal since Trump became president, explaining that the times demand it because people need to know someone is going to go to bat for those who oppose Trump’s policies.
According to a new Morning Consult’s senator approval rankings, Hirono is behind only Vermont’s Bernie Sanders and fellow Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz in voter approval in the national survey — so her criticism has registered, she added.
The good side of Trump, said Hirono, is that he is triggering a new group of voters willing to take a stand.
“I have always considered myself a fighter, but this administration just creates so many more opportunities to be appalled, become incensed and activated.”
