Thank you for continuing to share these messages with your friends, if you are not already on our mailing list, please click here to be added to our list. You can also follow me on Facebook. The more people we can reach, the more we contribute to this growing movement. We share these posts on our blog, A Path Forward to November 3, 2020, every two weeks, which means there will be a total of 100 missives before the Presidential election of 2020, in which our country will select a whole new course.
On some days, you are just worn down. You have been focused on being a part of the resistance for over 600 days, since November 2016. On the best days, you allow yourself some recognition of the progress we have made together. You permit yourself to talk with your friends about the excellent opportunity to take back the House of Representatives in November 2018, and that brightens you further. You even allow yourself to think about the much longer shot prospects of taking back the Senate. Jon Tester fights back! Beto O’Rourke gains momentum!
Then there are the other days in which you cannot even believe this is happening. When this history is written over the next couple of decades, we will discover that things within the Trump presidency were even worse than we knew. Last week, we found out that Trump consulted with Latin American heads of state over how they would feel if we invaded Venezuela! Now he has tweeted “I have confidence Kim Jong Un will honor the contract we signed and even more importantly, our handshake. We agreed to the denuclearization of North Korea.”
Well, Donald Trump of course you didn’t. You agreed in a made for TV event to “work toward” denuclearization. Your faith in the honor behind a handshake with a murderous dictator is absurd, given he just accused you of “gangster-like diplomacy.” You swell with great pride over your show meetings with Kim and with Putin and save your invective for Justin Trudeau and NATO. You want more than anything to never be duped, but you are “played” on a regular basis.
Donald Trump, this is what making America greater than it is would look like if we had a president who was seeking such an outcome.
- We would be a beacon for the world in the exercise of individual freedoms. Rather than seeing a free press as an enemy, we would have a president who celebrates it as a key element of our strength.
- We would have a president that skips the “trust” of Putin and Kim and Duterte and remembers that they preserve power by jailing and killing dissidents.
- We would invoke “national security” in our trade dealings only when national security is at issue. We would be ashamed to utilize these presidential powers against the Canadians, who have died to defend our security.
- We would eagerly participate in international climate change efforts to prevent irreversible environmental harm.
- We would see NATO as a fundamental defense against countries who wish us ill.
- We would demonstrate global leadership. Who would have ever predicted that the number one foreign policy achievement of a Republican president would be to expand and accelerate the global leadership of China?
We don’t need to over-think this. First, we focus on what is before us--- putting a brake on the mindless destruction of the environment, human rights, equal opportunity and our position in the world by this president. We must increase our intolerance of distraction. It does not matter whether Alan Dershowitz is getting along with his neighbors. Or that Kelly Ann Conway had intemperate words with Anderson Cooper or anyone else that Kelly Ann Conway gets deployed to talk to.
Second, we work much, much harder than the other side, which we have been doing now since November of 2016. Any flagging is nothing more than blowing a kiss to Donald Trump, don’t you think?
And while we are attending to election year politics, Congress is in session. Here’s three things we need to do to try to keep them from having a weekly drawing on the House floor to determine which program to eviscerate:
| 1) Join the Fight to Save SNAP | |
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Well, you knew that eventually the House of Representatives would get around to doing something mean-spirited about the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) which is the United States Department of Agriculture program that provides food stamps. A reader of this missive urges us to respond to this effort by the House to establish a work requirement for 5-7 million food stamp recipients. She says “there is so much racial injustice in food and discrimination of the poor that we need to be vigilant and do our part to change our own attitudes." The work requirement is drafted in such a way that one wonders if the supportive House members ever met a food stamp recipient. There are already plenty of ways that USDA helps up-skill food stamp recipients and takes into account the multiple factors that drove them into poverty. There are already provisions that severely limit the issue of food stamps to able bodied persons. The new House approach seeks to change a hand up to a hand slap. Luckily, the Farm bill is subject to Senate rules and thus will require 60 votes to close debate. Democrat Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan and the other Democrats who will serve on the Conference Committee will have a lot of leverage. Please call Debbie Stabenow’s office at 202-224-4822. Tell her how grateful you are that she stood up and tell her that you are counting on her to continue to do so. |
2) Get the Senate Some Fortitude on Trade |
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Donald Trump has been such a misinformation machine on trade that it would be easy to conclude that he is misrepresenting everything. It’s not the case, but we aren’t going to go back any time soon to quieter, more productive bilateral or multilateral talks to resolve specific, legitimate claims. So, in this period of escalation we need to remember that it isn’t true (as Trump has maintained) that it is easy to win a trade war. Mexico, Canada, China and the European Union each have their own political stake in not being seen to capitulate. Also, identifying modest trade deficits or trade surpluses with a particular country is an awful way to figure out whether unfair trade practices are occurring. Trump does not seem to be caught up to date on the ways in which global manufacturing investment has changed in the last two decades. When Harley Davidson announced it was going to shift some manufacturing to Thailand because of Trump’s steel tariffs, Trump said “Harley-Davidson should never be built in another country - never!” But Harley already has manufacturing plants in Brazil, India, and Australia, so never wasn’t going to be possible. And innumerable foreign companies have manufacturing plants in the United States. Of all the disputes, the Canada trade war is the oddest, because Trump went into the first discussion admitting he didn’t know which country had the trade surplus. Trump is clearly reacting to Justin Trudeau’s refusal to bow. His use of bogus “national security” grounds to impose tariffs on Canadian steel is what has Senator Bob Corker doing battle on the Senate floor. He was able to get an 88-11 vote for a non-binding resolution calling for Trump to have Senate review before using national security as grounds for imposing a tariff. Senators are happy to have Corker be the one to feel Trump’s tweet-tirades. But ultimately other Republican Senators from the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees will have to step up if we are to maintain any international standing at all. Call any or all of these for tell them our place in the world matters and then it falls to them to protect it: Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado (202) 224-5941 Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina (202)224-5972 Senator Marco Rubio of Florida (202) 224-3041 Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska (202) 224-4224 |
3) Our Fellow Resisters Have Some Good Advice |
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We are heartened to receive notes from recipients of these missives offering their own counsel on how to move forward in these times, including the above counsel on food stamps. One activist recommends this David Leonhardt column. It argues that our understandable opposition to Brett Kavanagh could cause us to forget the issues like health care which are most likely to generate a blue wave. I agree that we should always put health care in a dominant position, but I believe that any number of Supreme Court confirmation issues could generate an electoral boost, including choice and gay marriage. From Vermont we have heard a seconding of our recommendation that we all participate in projects where we customize and send postcards to voters in swing districts. This writer notes that there are several suppliers of names for postcards--- resisters should find one that works for them. Here’s another: Sister District Project. Two other notes of note, one commending a recent David Brooks speech at Davidson College for its thoughts on way forward. The other demonstrates that Donald Trump’s approval rating has declined in every state of the union since January of 2017. That isn’t so surprising, since January 2017 was the apex of his approval, but it is delicious information nonetheless. |
One could weary of being urged in these missives to be focused and relentless in one’s contribution to the blue wave. If there was any other way (besides focus and relentlessness) to win back the House and (possibly) gain control of the Senate, this missive would recommend that action early and often. We are doing the only thing we can do, and the rewards will be reaped.
David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington
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