By admin 
Young liberals are no longer willing to ignore the casual collaboration between congressional Democrats and companies, organizations or individuals making our nation a worse place to live. These same young voters have made it clear that they will work to vote out anyone — regardless of party — who cannot or will not meet the needs of constituents.
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If you need a concrete example of this rising tide of discontent with incumbents among young liberals, look no further than the Democrat vs. Democrat fight nearing a boiling point in California’s 7th Congressional District. Sacramento’s longtime U.S. Rep. Doris Matsui, 81, is in a race with a challenger pushing her to answer serious questions for the first time in two decades.
Mai Vang, 41, serves on the Sacramento City Council and is taking direct aim at how Matsui votes in Congress, who is giving her money and how she is profiting from it.
Matsui has quietly accepted tens of thousands of dollars in the form of campaign contributions from Immigration and Customs Enforcement contractors, weapons manufacturers and corporate PACs. That includes contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the highly controversial, pro-Israel organization that is one of the nation’s most influential lobbying groups. Track AIPAC is a grassroots organization seeking to counter the influence of AIPAC, and it reports that Matsui has taken more than $20,000 in contributions from the committee.
By doing so, Matsui is like too many mainstream Democrats who are out of step with the views and beliefs of Democratic voters. The Pew Research Center, for example, recently reported that eight-in-10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have an unfavorable view of Israel in light of the war in Gaza. Mainstream Democrats may be sticking their heads in the sand about this, but young liberals care deeply about it and have much more in common with Vang than Matsui.
Meanwhile, in a new political mailer sent out to District 7 residents this week, Matsui says she voted “HELL NO on ICE funding.” But her congressional record does not back that claim. According to Bee reporting, between 2019 and 2024, Matsui voted in favor of five different government spending packages mainly via large appropriations bills that included nearly $42 billion for ICE.
You would think that a woman who campaigns so heavily on her personal history, having been born in a Japanese internment camp in 1944, would understand the horror of racially profiling and imprisoning immigrants, many of whom then, as now, were hardworking people, and whose undocumented status is the result of a federal failure to reform our broken immigration system.
Vang, meanwhile, is the daughter of Hmong refugees, and would be the first representative of Hmong descent in Congress if elected. She has worked to pass laws from her seat on the Sacramento City Council that protect local, undocumented students and children, and is working now to lead the council on banning ICE agents from operating on city property.
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During her time in Congress over the last 20 years, Matsui has accepted $19,000 from the Lockheed Martin Corporation Employees PAC, $7,000 from Raytheon Technologies Corporation and more than $30,000 from the Boeing PAC, according to the Federal Election Commission.
For the 2026 congressional campaign, Matsui has raised more than $1.3 million, with less than half coming from individual contributions.
The company founded by Roger Sant, Matsui’s multi-millionaire husband, recently sold to a consortium that includes Global Infrastructure Partners, a part of BlackRock Investment Company — known for its involvement in fossil fuels and the global arms industry. BlackRock also owns around 17% of Core Civic, the largest for-profit operators of private prisons and detention centers in the U.S.
BlackRock owns about 16% of the Geo Group, also a private prison operator that owns BI Incorporated, an ICE contractor. (Last year, a Sacramento-area undocumented woman sued BI Incorporated for sexual harassment. (The case is still ongoing.) BlackRock also owns 9% of Palantir, a controversial tech company that builds software for government agencies.
Vang, who pledged not to take any corporate donations, had raised about $600,000 by the end of March, according to the Federal Election Commission, and more than 93% of that has come from individual contributions.
“I’ve been consistent about not taking money from the very corporations that profit from war and ICE,” Vang told me in a statement. “Voters want their representative to have a sense of urgency, not only when they have a challenger for their seat in Congress. Unfortunately, we have not had that same moral clarity here in this region because Doris (Matsui) is beholden to her corporate PACs and the donor class.”
Matsui’s seat has been safe until now. Consequently, she hides from any forum that would require her to debate Vang, or even just answer the public’s mounting questions.
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