#15: We Are Seeking A Bit of Mercy for Our Country

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When you face truly bizarre circumstances, you seek as much equilibrium as you can maintain. That’s what we need to do right now with our country. At a benefit concert for the International Rescue Committee the other night, a performer asked that we sing about finding a bit of mercy for our country. The audience of a hundred quietly joined voices singing this plea. When can we get back to a world where we are just trying to make our flawed democracy better, rather than watching a President and his supplicants seek to unravel it? This present situation is just awful. Western European leaders openly speculate that we cannot be a trusted partner. Singled out by the President for praise instead are the autocratic leaders of Turkey, Egypt and the Philippines.

We are at risk, undeniably. Even in his increasingly neutralized position, Donald Trump can rend our relationships worldwide and endanger all of us. He can prove to be the absolute worst person to deal with Kim Jong Un, or with Vladimir Putin, or Bashar Al Assad. He can either walk away from the Paris Accords, or barring that, pretend they don’t exist. He can set the bar so low with his budget proposal, seeking to massacre food stamps and the EPA and Medicaid, that any Republican alternative that smites the poor and the environment, but with not quite as hard of a smite, will be greeted like it was written by Pope Francis.

Happily, the resistance is at its highest levels. At this point, all of the day-to-day opposition from the American people compares favorably in its intensity with the great social and political movements of the past century. Yet even with all of its thousands of chapters of Indivisible and other organizing groups, the January Women’s march, the successful legal actions and the town hall battles, the staying power of our resistance is still to be proven.

I am not worried that I don’t always agree with every sign or petition or post or chosen battle of the resistance. It is in the nature of opposition like ours for it to be sprawling and often undisciplined. Sure, as the 2018 Congressional elections near, more will need to be said about our alternative vision of where our country is heading. We will start wanting to coalesce around specific elected officials (and potential Presidential candidates) who are principled and authentic and compassionate and articulate.

But, right now it is not at all a bad thing to fashion ourselves as the anti-Trump insurgency. And it is working. Two analyses tell the story. Read the findings of Nate Silver in 538 using the data to illustrate that the support from Donald Trump’s electoral base is significantly eroding. 

We need to take back 24 Congressional seats on November 6, 2018. At this point the best way to analyze how that effort is working is the “generic” Congressional polls which ask who voters would support if the election were today. Quinnipiac is just one poll, but it is very encouraging. 

Right now, let’s use all this Trump disapproval to send members of Congress a signal on the people-destroying federal budget that Trump just proposed. Let’s remember that a score or more of Republican members of Congress have promised that this budget is dead on arrival. But let’s also remember that Trump and budget director Mick Mulvaney are seeking a steep decline for domestic social welfare programs in an attempt to win when they lose, to end up in a “compromise” position that still eviscerates programs that matter.

There is no end to the bad things to be said about the proposed budget. It exceeds all previous budgets in the extent it trades off meeting social needs for huge increases in military spending. Moreover, it is a cynical exercise because it is disconnected from any meaningful attempt to get American government to work better. It is meant to symbolically signal a change of priorities. What it instead signals is the approach to life of a circle of mean-spirited, wealthy, Trump associates who are divorced from the real lives of other humans. Shame on them.

There are big ticket budget items like the proposed Medicaid cuts, and 3/5 of the cuts come from programs serving low and moderate-income Americans.  

Let’s focus in this missive on three cuts of somewhat smaller scale and let’s fight back, now!

1) Make America Hungry Again?
	Just over 50 years ago, Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Joseph Clark visited the Mississippi Delta and exposed conditions of severe malnutrition among America’s poor. Their effort was spurred by Marion Wright Edelman, a 27-year-old attorney who would go on to found the Children’s Defense Fund. It would set in motion efforts that would expand food stamps by over 500% and significantly decrease hunger in America. Food insecurity is still with us. The nation’s network of food banks has grown. The Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) replaced and expanded the Food Stamps program. The proposed Trump cuts to SNAP would reverse 40 years of bipartisan support for fighting hunger in America. It would transfer billions of dollars in costs to the states and, similar to the proposed approach to Medicaid, it would permit states to make cuts to the basic package of food assistance and skirt the fundamental dietary needs for human health.   A cut of $193 billion over ten years for a program that provides at least a bit of food to 44 million people? This, in America? We would fund the first stage of a wall and hugely increase funding for weapons system while taking bread away from someone who needs it? We would do that? Some Republicans say we wouldn’t. They and their Democrat counterparts need you to reinforce that belief this week. Check these appropriations subcommittee lists to see if there is a member from your state in either the Senate or the House. If there is, email that member and tell them the nation is watching. If not, or if you are in a calling mood, phone House subcommittee staff director Tom O’Brien at (202) 225-2771. Don’t be shy about these things.
2) Protect This Small, Successful Program
	The winner of the award for most nonsensical budget cut is the proposed elimination of the Energy Star program, which costs $50 million a year and influences billions of dollars in energy savings. You may be familiar with this program because it provides the energy efficiency rating of the household appliance you are considering purchasing. Thousands of companies voluntarily participate in this program that encourages energy efficient purchases by existing homeowners as well as new homeowners, and commercial and industrial properties. This is a wildly successful program which spurs our energy efficiency and helps improve our energy self-sufficiency and it’s voluntary and it has everything to do with saving the planet and, and, and…. The Alliance to Save Energy has persuaded 1,000 companies to fight back against destroying this program. You can help them fight back.
3) And, About the Wall Which “We Will Build and Mexico Will Pay For”
	It is beginning to look like we may be able to stop this international embarrassment. Of course, Mexico was never going to pay for the wall. Donald Trump is still looking for money for it and has asked Congress for $1.6 billion in this round, which would build 74 miles, mostly in Texas, at the cost of $13,000 per yard. The estimated total cost of the wall would be over $20 billion. This would snatch protein from a low income kid, or essential services for a Planned Parenthood Clinic, or eliminate jobs of EPA staff who are trying to enforce the law. Let’s insist that enough is enough. Unfortunately, House Republicans have already realized that eliminating the wall proposal altogether would be a telling political blow to Donald Trump. Because of that, they will continue to put in enough money in the budget for design or for early stages. The only way to do anything about that is to make them the House minority on November 6, 2018, which we can surely do. In the Senate, Republicans have the same worries. They wouldn’t have chosen the wall themselves but they aren’t eager to deal Trump such an obvious blow. There are 6 Republicans and 5 Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has already protected Planned Parenthood. How about sending her a supportive e-note saying that you hope that she will oppose the wall fully and forthrightly? It’s just an email form she provides, but she will be noting the mail she gets on this subject.

It may seem that the battle is being joined the same way every week. But that isn’t so. Way too slowly, but still in a meaningful way, individual Republican elected officials are aiding the resistance. And as voter approval for Trump declines, more Republicans will do more things that are useful. It won’t be enough. It won’t be what their consciences beg them to do, but it will be more help than we had in January.

And of course, there is one other thing that makes everything fundamentally different than it was at the outset, Robert Mueller isn’t going anywhere. 

Our audience has grown with each missive. Please help me expand some more.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington

#14: Good People Will Stand on the Shoulders of Thomas Jefferson

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.

And so it goes. Each week of the Trump presidency takes us into new territory. Our nation, our government, our citizens, and our world pay a new price for having momentarily discounted how much the aptitude of the candidate matters in picking a president. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says that our institutions are under assault internally. Way beyond his climate change denialism and unacceptable approaches to health care and tax policy, it turns out that Donald Trump does not have the skills of a president.

He is not even tempered. He is not curious or measured or well-spoken or empathetic. He is not energetic or intellectually driven or thoughtful or patient or disciplined. So much of the damage of his presidency has come from the demonstrable absence of basic skills.

Do not think all of this has escaped Republican members of Congress. They whisper to each other about his bizarre and sometimes delusional behavior, and quietly clean up after him daily. Most are fully aware of the danger he presents to the republic for which they are sworn to stand. All too many seem to have made the calculation that they can control for the worst while reaping the advantages of having a president from their own party, however dangerous he is.

For the most part, their public opposition to the worst that Trump has done has been designed to not give offense to him and to not put up meaningful obstacles. At this point, these Senators have not been providing profiles in courage.

What must Senators Ben Sasse or Johnny Isakson or Bob Corker or Lisa Murkowski or Rob Portman or Jeff Flake be thinking about as they head to work in the morning? How could one watch the Comey firing and the health care debacle and this week's misuse of classified information and read the tweets and not have a heavy heart? How could you look at your children and grandchildren knowing that you are complicit in threatening their future? How long can they maintain this awful charade?

As Donald Trump loses support (even among the original base of non-college educated white males) these Senators may well modify what is their underlying political calculation, but the pace of their movement toward protecting our country is agonizingly slow. However, the political price to be paid for standing up to Trump is lowering, and the political price to be paid for failing to do so is growing.

This week, we saw some more Republican restlessness, which will grow further with disclosures that Trump asked James Comey to cease the investigation of Michael Flynn. In promising news, Susan Collins, John McCain and Lindsey Graham blocked Trump's proposed repeal of the Obama administration's methane gas regulations. And chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr of North Carolina criticized the Comey firing  and agreed to the Democratic request to bring deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein before Senators for questioning.

It's possible that Lisa Murkowski of Alaska will keep up her battle to save Planned Parenthood funding. It could be that Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, assigned to come up with a Senate approach to health care, will truly reverse the House approach. And, as the treat of the week, we can appreciate Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker of Tennessee saying that with the Trump disclosure of classified information to the Russians, the White House lacks discipline and is "in a downward spiral."

The best political signal to send to all of these Senators is to mount awesome campaigns to defeat Trump-supporting candidates on November 6, 2018. Our excellent chance is to take back the House. As we show signs of being able to do that, it will have the effect of giving the above-named cautious but somewhat principled U.S. Senators more focus and more opportunities to step forward.

These three things that we can do today will help bring joy into your heart on the morning of November 7, 2018:

1) Respond Directly to the Unacceptable House Vote on Health Care
	The organizations Act Blue, Swing Left, and the Daily Kos have combined efforts to raise funds immediately to target members of Congress who provided key votes to pass the Trump/Ryan health care bill in the House. The effort is ingenious and attracted nearly 50,000 donations the day it was announced. Don't miss out. We need 24 seats to gain the majority in the House. Appropriately, there were 24 Republicans who voted for the bill who are from districts where Donald Trump got less than 50% of the vote. Act Blue, Swing Left and the Daily Kos organizations are setting up campaign accounts that will be donated in each of these 24 districts to the winner of the Democratic primary in 2018. Here is the Act Blue approach.
2) Sort Out Where You are Going to Put Your Energy, If You Haven't Already
	The excitement about taking back the House has grown because of recent polling of "generic" races between Republican and Democratic Congressional candidates. Even before the Comey sacking and Flynn disclosures, the Quinnipiac poll revealed that 54% of those questioned would vote for the Democratic candidate if the election were today, and 38% for the Republican. Anything close to that in 2018 would mean that Democrats would pick up 60 seats! Of course it is way too early to say, and we must advance these dreams through hard work rather than just dream them. It's always good to understand the cautions, such as these put forward by political scientist Larry Sabato. Swing Left has improved its methodology for targeting races, and has come up with these 65, with a handy searchable map. The issue for each of us is the specific actions we will take once we have picked a race. On local organizing, each of us can pick the organization with which we are most comfortable and which can utilize our energies. In some cases, as the Democratic Party gets its act together, they could be the organizer. At this point, the best thing going in terms of local resistance activity is still Indivisible.You can search their site for the chapter near you.
3) Remember Two Special Elections Coming Up Soon
	New polls show Jon Ossoff running even with his opponent in Georgia, in a seat that the Republicans won by more than 20 points last November. The election will be held June 20. If you know someone in this district, please contact them right away! This will be an enormous boost and signal if we can pull this off. If you are vacillating between sending a check or not sending a check, please send a check. Rob Quist's effort in Montana is a longer shot, but take a look and see if you are game.

As I prepare missive #14, the situation is now changing daily. The allegation that Donald Trump asked James Comey to "let go"; of the Flynn investigation could constitute obstruction of justice if it can be substantiated. At minimum, it means that we are traveling into all new territory of subpoenas and investigations. The Trump agenda will stall. The movement to draft a health care approach in the Senate will slow, as will meaningful work on tax policy.

We will each interpret this turn of events, and some will understandably worry even more about the strain or even the threat to our wounded system.

I believe that with all of its excesses and misbegotten approaches, for all of its lack of attention to people in need and maldistribution of wealth, the country we all have created together is worth treasuring and worth saving. I believe the republic will be preserved and will become stronger and that good people will stand on the shoulders of Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Martin Luther King and make it so.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington

#13: Our Strength Grows, Our Dreams Are Huge, And We Will Not Be Denied

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 Sunday the New York Times featured a front page article suggesting that Donald Trump might, on some issues, be trending toward a process where he learns new information and approaches and "adapts to realities". They said that he had exhibited such a newly deliberative approach on matters related to Russia, North Korea, and moving the Israeli capital to Jerusalem.

Then, also over the weekend, Donald Trump destroyed the New York Times' evidence. He gave interviews saying that the false Obama wiretapping claim was "my opinion", ignoring the world of facts and verification. After a "very friendly conversation" by phone, he invited to the White House Federico Duterte, the Filipino ruler and proud extrajudicial killer of drug suspects. He called Kim Jong-un a "smart cookie" for surviving his rise to power at 27, even though the cookie accomplished that feat by executing his rivals. And, while suggesting slave owner Andrew Jackson (who died in 1845) could have avoided the civil war, he said, "Why couldn't that one have been worked out?"

Political leaders can make mistakes. They can dispute well established findings if they outline the nature of the dispute. They should and can and do debate research methods, the implications of the findings and the wisdom of the government response. The whole nature of our public policy debates and the associated political battles is the explication of differences in viewpoint, and the fashioning of collective response.

However, we cannot decide what and how to do together if you can just make stuff up, anytime you want. What if you make six things up a day, and what if you do that almost every day, and what if eventually the fact checkers can't begin to keep up? And what if the American people become desensitized to those inventions? And what if you are the president while doing all that? What if you expect the truth to be accepted as whatever you say it is? At a certain point, this disregard or even contempt for objective information will rend the democracy.

No longer are these outbursts the appropriate subject for a bemused email or an eye roll. If you are part of the resistance, you will need to up your effort to examine information yourself. You will need to actively follow and support the intermediaries (including newspapers) who try and sort out what is happening. You will want to use posts, letters to the editors and public meeting not only to offer your own viewpoint, but to provide core information.

By late fall, you will be able to summon your energies, to continue to get behind emerging Congressional races, and to entertain the growing sense that we will take back the House of Representatives on November 6, 2018. In the six months between now and then, I am asking you to become a more relentless truth-advancer than you are now. We must attend to the factual framework on each issue, lest we forget that there is one.

On the tax proposal front, that will ultimately mean that we can use real data to prove that the announced intentions in the new Trump one pager will provide huge comfort to the comfortable, not least in its elimination of the alternative minimum tax and the estate tax. We contemplate as much as $7 trillion in revenue losses and to this point, we've heard nothing about boosting the middle class or addressing income inequality.

Before we get into the tax discussions, we must obsess about the facts of proposed changes in the health care law, which in its new version threatens even greater loss of coverage than the previous draft before the House. Under the new plan, states could send people with pre-existing conditions into a high risk pool which presages much higher costs than under the Affordable Care Act and which for many will ultimately preclude coverage. How many people have pre-existing conditions? According to the Kaiser Health Foundation, there are 52 million! The new approach now before the House is a plan to generate untold human misery. Donald Trump seems to not have seen the plan he has endorsed, because he continues to say that those with pre-existing conditions will not suffer loss of coverage.

With this matter squarely before the House of Representatives, our missive identifies three things we can do to influence the outcome of the health care batte:

1) Shore Up Opposition to the New Trump/Ryan Effort
	In addition to allowing states to get a waiver permitting them to exclude pre-existing conditions in essential coverage, the proposal before the House would enable states to exclude mental health coverage and maternity care. There is no way the bill as written would pass the Senate, but the best way to defeat it is still at its inception. House Republican moderates are only a vote or two away from supplying enough votes for the bill to be defeated on the House floor, and a score more members are still considering voting no. Here is the existing tally to work from. The calls to Congressional offices opposing this bill are overwhelming the systems of individual members of Congress. One way to get through is: identify members of Congress from the above list. If they are already opposed, call and thank them for their principled stand. If they are still pondering this, call or email them and articulate your strong opposition in your own well-chosen passionate and articulate words. If you are going to limit your calls to two or three, start with members from your own district or own state. If there aren't any members that qualify, choose a state where you have some connection if you can. Rather than calling or email the member of Congress, look up their legislative director in the office directory or Google it. Email or call her or him instead of the member. The message will still be received and may even have more resonance.
2) Remember the Dreams of Universal Coverage
	With all the attention to essential coverage, one could forget another way the Freedom Caucus is trying to eviscerate health care protection in this country. The bill before the House also continues the attack on the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act that originally brought 14 million people health care coverage. Through the waiver provisions, the bill incentives the states who are bad actors and reduces resources for states who have expanded coverage for low income populations. This site identifies the 32 states who have opted for Medicaid expansion, and provides data on the level of expanded coverage. If you live in one of these 32 states, make certain your state legislators are keeping posted on what the House bill would do to your state, and make certain they are pushing back at the Congress.
3) Strengthen Advocacy Efforts
	Among the most effective opponents to the Trump/Ryan approach have been the major associations of health care professionals. It would be a nice thing to leave a message at the American Medical Association (phone: 800-621-8335) to thank them for their concerted efforts. Another important force is the AARP, which has registered adamant opposition. For those who love to see good solid analytical efforts on the impacts of the proposals that Paul Ryan floats, you can't beat donating to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Our movement is distinguished by the multiple forms of action our collective opposition is taking, the intensity of each. We will keep on marching, calling Congress, contacting the media, and showing up and countless town halls and other meetings.

Now and again, we may wonder whether our opposition is taking hold. The evidence is that our efforts are reaping rewards for our country. Were it not for the post November 8 sensibilities of millions of Americans, the Affordable Care Act would be repealed by now. The wall would be under construction and Planned Parenthood would be defunded. What we are doing together matters immensely. Our strength grows, our dreams are huge, and we will not be denied.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington