Last Saturday, Jan. 21, we all saw something incredible: millions of people marching in solidarity for women, and in opposition to the Trump regime. The cumulative turnout far outweighed the one at his inauguration, or even Barack Obama’s first inauguration.
We showed everyone around the world that we have the numbers, the commitment, and the passion to fight back against the tide of Trump’s oppressive totalitarian agenda. And yet the struggle goes on. But now we know Saturday was not a bug in our political system—it is now a vital feature of it.
Yes, he will try intimidation and threats, but that doesn’t mean he’ll win.
The resistance started up right away, on the very night of his victory.
And it continues even after the huge Women’s March on Washington and around the world, and in Boston with Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
And it continues at local congressional offices, and out in the streets.
Dan Rather; If you want change, you have to do what the Donald Trump people did. Organize, get to the polls, get other people to the polls, be ready to run yourself.
The Resistance movement is alive and well—not that the media has really noticed that much:
The peaceful blockades received little media attention despite the fact Trump supporters instigated violence, according to eyewitnesses. One participant, Jamie McCallum, says, “We were attacked, pushed, insulted, spit on, and assaulted while the cops watched. But not a single person got past our line of nonviolent blockaders.”
...
After the weekend there is a sense of a huge movement afoot against Trump. Signs and chants at the Women’s March spoke of resistance, appealed to patriotism (“Dissent is patriotic”), the power of voting, Trump’s illegitimacy, ridicule of Trump (his hair, hands, penis, and intelligence), self-affirmation (“strong women,” “nasty women”). Many slogans were blasts from the past, such as, “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries,” “My body, my choice,” and most tellingly, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
…
The best strategy is counter-power. Because Trump is in the mold of a Third World autocrat, state force can only be confronted by popular force in the streets. But this means unions, liberals and leftists will all have to address their respective failures.
Unions need to return to educating, politicizing, and organizing workers instead of acting as ATMs and get-out-the-vote machines for Democrats. They have little choice in any case. With a national right-to-work law or court ruling set to happen in the next two years, union coffers will be drained, and to survive they will have to organize workers into democratic and militant class movements rather than telling them to vote for Wall Street Democrats.
Organization is vital.
Following the “Indivisible” guide put together by former congressional staffers, there have now been more than 4,000 groups registered who are ready to take action and make their voices heard. Their voices only grow louder with each new totalitarian action taken by the Trump administration and GOP.
Using the guide, the vote to gut the independent Congressional Ethics Office was reversed thanks to efforts begun by grass roots activists. Since then, things have stayed highly active.
And this has been an amazing week.
The mayors of Boston, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles have defiantly pushed back against Trump’s executive order threatening to cut off federal funding over “sanctuary cities.”
The mayors of American cities large and small reacted with outrage on Wednesday as President Trump signed an executive order saying he would halt funding to municipalities that did not cooperate with federal immigration officials.
The defiant officials — from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and smaller cities, including New Haven; Syracuse; and Austin, Tex., said they were prepared for a protracted fight.
“We’re going to defend all of our people regardless of where they come from, regardless of their immigration status,” Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said at a news conference with other city officials.
In reaction to the gag order placed on government scientists and workers, the Office of Special Counsel sent out a letter reminding Herr Drump & Co. that totalitarian gag orders and non-disclosure agreements for government employees violate the Whistle Blower Protection Act.
"Under the anti-gag provision, agencies cannot impose nondisclosure agreements and policies that fail to include required language that informs employees that their statutory right to blow the whistle supersedes the terms and conditions of the nondisclosure agreement or policy," the OSC press release said.
The OSC reminder followed several reports that employees at agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency were told not to issue press releases or use official social media accounts. There is also speculation that President Donald Trump may require some administration employees to sign non-disclosure agreements, as he has required his employees to do so in the past.
The press release sent out by the Office of Special Counsel on Wednesday noted that the anti-gag order provision in the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA) requires that agencies must notify employees about their whistleblower rights in any nondisclosure agreement or general policy regarding communication.
In reaction to the FBI’s last minute interference with our election, the DOJ Inspector General has started an investigation, and complaints have been filed with the Ethics Office over a potential breach of the Hatch Act.
The former chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House (but now Hillary Clintonsupporter) has filed an ethics complaint against FBI Director James Comey over the letter he sent to lawmakers on Friday.
Richard Painter worked in the White House Counsel’s office between 2005 and 2007, serving as the chief ethics lawyer for then-President Bush 43. On Sunday, Painter penned an op-ed in The New York Times explaining his decision to file an ethics complaint against the FBI Director.
“The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election,” Painter wrote in the op-ed. “And that is why, on Saturday, I filed a complaint against the F.B.I. with the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates Hatch Act violations, and with the Office of Government Ethics.”
Not at all ironically, several of Trump’s senior staff have been caught using a private RNC email server rather than accounts via whitehouse.gov. What a shocker. Also, a bipartisan Senate Intelligence committee is looking into Russia’s influence on our election and their coordination with the campaigns.
Sen. Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, the committee's chairman, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, the committee's vice chairman, said in a joint statement that the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the election also will focus on Russian cyberactivity and "active measures" against the US.
It was known that intelligence panels in both chambers of Congress were tapped by Republican leaders to probe the hacking, but Friday's announcement makes clear the scope and details about the review. It is also notable that the announcement was joined by Warner, as Democrats have clamored for a bipartisan look into what role, if any, Russia may have played in the election.
The statement said the committee will produce both a classified and unclassified report on its findings.
The backlash to Trump’s unjustified and bigoted bashing of Rep. John Lewis over the exact issue of such improper influence “by Russia and others” has been swift and withering.
“A stunned Atlanta, along with admirers of John Lewis from across the country, took to social media to harshly criticize the remarks,” said the Journal. “They characterized Trump as clueless about everything from Atlanta’s thriving intown neighborhoods to the beating Lewis took years ago as he marched in Alabama for voting rights. Brushing off the accomplishments of Lewis, who is widely revered by many Americans well beyond Georgia, went too far, they said.”
Atlanta’s Mayor Kasim Reed tweeted, “John Lewis is an American hero & a national treasure. Period. Full stop.”
All of Trump’s noise about “massive voter fraud”—besides being dangerously deluded—has only highlighted the ridiculousness of such claims in the long-term GOP strategy of using similarly false claims to implement voter suppression plans. Similar schemes used in North Carolina were found blatantly unconstitutional.
North Carolina Republicans are at it again. Barely one month after a federal appeals court struck down the state’s anti-voter law for suppressing African-American voter turnout “with almost surgical precision,” election officials in dozens of counties are taking up new ways to make it as hard as possible for blacks, and others who tend to support Democrats, to vote.
A ruling issued by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on July 29 invalidated most of a 2013 law. The court’s scathing opinion said that “because of race, the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history.” The law, passed by a Republican-dominated legislature, imposed strict voter-ID requirements, cut back early-voting hours and eliminated same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting and preregistration for those under 18.
The court restored the week of early voting that the law had slashed, but it left it to local election boards to set the number of polling places and voting hours. This permitted those boards, all of which are led by Republicans, to cut voting hours below what they were for the 2012 election.
The same former George W. Bush attorney who filed the complaint against Comey has also joined with CREW to file a lawsuit against Trump for his violation of the Emoluments Clause. He is in violation of it by continuing to take money from foreign sources, and his massive business corruption while serving as president.
“We want a president to be an effective president within the bounds set forth by the Constitution,” Painter continued. “A president who cannot do that will be impeached. But I don’t think Donald Trump is going to choose that route.”
Painter specifically cautioned Trump not to run afoul of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, which bans presidents from receiving things of value from foreign governments.
“That also means the provisions of the constitution that protect Americans from discrimination based on their religious faith,” he continued. “We are not going to be keeping a registry of Muslims, we are not going to be deporting Muslims, we’re not going to be barring people from coming into our country because of their religion.”
“He is going to need to comply with the Constitution in order to be a good president, in order to remain as president. We will remove a president who cannot comply with the Constitution.”
And lastly, Trump and his sycophants from Spicer to Conway have become laughingstocks with their “alternative facts” nonsense.
“Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall.
“This was the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings had been used to protect the grass on the mall. That had the effect of highlighting any areas in which people were not standing.”
“This is also the first time that fencing and magnetometers went as far back on the Mall, preventing hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the Mall as quickly as they had in inaugurations past.”
“We know that 420,000 people used the D.C. public transit yesterday, which actually compares to 317,000 who used it for President Obama’s last inaugural.”
“This was the largest audience to witness an inauguration, period. Both in person and around the globe.”
Yeah, all of those are lies—and now the public knows that Trump’s chief mouthpiece is willing to spout an endless stream of falsehoods to the public, and that the current White House live-in guest is pathologically deluded. Nice going, Sean.
In short, this president is being hit from every angle and in every corner. I wrote just a couple weeks ago that only after hitting rock bottom would America rise and while I don’t see Trump’s election as a good thing in any shape or form, it may have been a necessary thing to help wake us up and get us active rather than complacent or apathetic.
The election may be over and we may have a new president in place—but that doesn’t mean that we will be standing idly by and not challenging him, fighting back against him, in each and every way that we can.
In each and every way that we must. We will. Oh yes, we will.
If you have a chance to find and join a local Indivisibles group in your area, I advise that you DO IT. Like now. The Resistance has only just begun.
Sunday, Jan 29, 2017 · 5:01:34 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
Things are changing quickly in Drumpf’s America. When I submitted my draft for this diary the facts on the ground were one thing, now they are something quite different as a result of the pointless self-defeating Muslim country ban, and in just a few hours a judge had put down and injunction not allowing people who held valid visas are were in transit while they order was announced from being sent back. Protestors have flooded into our airports all over the country and they have made a difference.
In this segment from Rachel Maddow this week she documents multiple cases during the last week were pressure applied to the Trump administration has forced them to move, over and over again.
After describing a story about how researches at Harvard have managed to create metallic hydrogen by applying a super giant amount of pressure to a sample in solid form, Rachel describes how the gag orders placed on the USDA has been reversed in the wake of outrage and pressure, the shutdown of the EPA providing media to the public has been at least partially reversed, the hiring freeze at the VA has been reversed. She goes on to point out that many of his executive orders are completely worthless and meaningless, particularly without the agreement of congress to appropriate funds and/or change laws. Many of them seem to be flat out illegal and unconstitutional and almost none of them have been vetted through the affected agencies.
I wrote about the machinations of the Bush administration for years and although they were highly mendacious they were also very careful and would hide their hand as they made their moves. Before Bush began his black site and torture programs had made a series of strategic moves and pronouncement meant to carve out a patina of legality around those moves. For example he made Presidential determination that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to non-state action and “illegal enemy combatants.” This was wrong factual and legally, but he said this because doing so granted him protection from possible prosecution under the War Crimes Act, which relates to “grievous violations of Geneva”. So he covered his tracks. He then received rulings from the OLC claiming that water-boarding wasn’t “torture” — ignoring all the legal precedents including when Japanese soldiers were executed for waterboarding U.S. Soldiers in WWII, a U.S. soldier was court martialed for it during Vietnam, and a Texas Sheriff was prosecuted by the Reagan Administration for doing it — which granted him the illusion of legal protection from the Torture statute. He did his homework.
Trump and his people don’t do that. They have little or no respect for the processes of government or the law and it shows. Compared to Bush They. Are. Clumsy. They are arrogant and they are dumb. Rather than carefully planning and vetting their orders before they put them out, they’re having Steve Bannon — who isn’t a lawyer or experienced with government — write them. [He personally overrode DHS objections for including people with green cards in the Muslim country ban.] They’re going to stumbling over their own shoes and making it easy for us to catch them. The least we can do is nail them every time they pratfall.
The Resistance is working, it is making a difference. We need to keep up the pressure, we need to keep pushing back. Last night’s airport protests have shown that many of us, if not most, are in direct opposition to the alt-Totalitarianism of Trump. We will not have this, we will stop this. Trump has awoken an America that he does not and will not control.
We’ve got work to do, let’s get on it.