victory and finally the fight on snap and food stamps here in massachusetts i'm fortunate i have jim mcgovern as my congress member he's led to fight to reinstate the bodies that are being cut from food stamps that's a fight to the democratic party leadership gave up on and it's to the leadership of jim mcgovern that that fight continues and we're proud to be part of that and p.d. and finally tom i do beg your victories every day by the community which you were by being part of that change setting that up at the end being a part of real change we're winning every day p.v.a. numerically in our numbers are growing every day we come to washington as part of our roundtable discussion with activists and with congress members from around the country and the numbers are growing and finally the last thing i would leave you with on how we're growing and decrease every month the third wednesday of every month today we delivered one hundred twenty two letters to members of congress by the end of this way. we have delivered over two hundred seventy letters last month we delivered two hundred fifty this i

good politician by all means we'll do everything we can to help him but the barber leaves or the jim mcgovern son fortunately there aren't two hundred forty one of them yet so we've got a lot of work to do and and p.t.a. has been doing an amazing job with that work can you give us just a quick recap of what you consider to be the major accomplishments of p.t.a. the metrics that might cause somebody to go oh i should take this group seriously. well i think the first thing is to understand about progressive democrats america what makes us different as we said from the outset we're part of a larger social movement we understand the work both inside and outside to bring that social heat inside the democratic party it's very difficult when you're a minority within a minority of which p.d.'s were the progressive wing of the progressive caucus the democrats are organized in washington by caucuses democrats make up what's called the progressive caucus the congressional process where half of caucus over seventy two members but in reality there's only about ten or fifteen of those members are really ma

we know we have democrats like jim mcgovern and rose delora who probably can't going to vote for thissee how we're going to pass this. but what i'm really concerninged about here is it seems to me that we are no longer investing in our most precious commodity and that is people. when you have 1-6th of the people who can't actually participate in the american dream, something is wrong with our entire system. when we see 50 million americans who are food insecure, this is just a canary in the coal mine. this suggests that there are a lot of other problems right now and things that we need to address. and unless we start addressing this, unless we start changing the conversation and talk about how we're going to invest in our future, invest in our children, send them to school with food in bellies so they can learn, and we're talking about getting people job training programs so they can get back to work. >> how about more employment? there's a graph recovery and there's this little part of the graph where the recovery, the jobs recovery ticks up very dramatically and it's the census hir

jim mcgovern of massachusetts: >> let's not turn our backs on the most vulnerable in this country.has become unfashionable to in this congress to worry about the poor. it has become unfashionable to stand up for these programs just to help people get by. this is the holiday season. have a heart! >> reporter: republicans argued jobless benefits should be handled separately. georgia's rob woodall: >> the gentleman knows that anything short of a bipartisan, bicameral solution is showboating for those folks who are hurting, not doing a daggum thing to help them. we don't need showboating in this institution, mr. speaker. we need results. >> reporter: republicans also faced pressure from outside conservative groups opposed to the deal, but, for a second day, speaker john boehner rebuked them. >> i came here to fight for a smaller, less costly, more it's not everything i wanted, but when groups come out and criticize an agreement they've never seen, you begin to wonder just how credible those actions are. >> reporter: the senate is expected to take up the budget measure next week before