I am not smug about this, or at least I hope that's not how I come across. But I told you so. And this time around, it is with great glee and truth here, relief, that this is something I can write, feel and say. So, what in the heck am I on about before it's even light outside here in Maryland?
Welp, the tipping point about which Malcolm Gladwell wrote. The signs were there and have been for months now, but only someone like me, a dyed-in-blue and pie-eyed optimist, would make lemonade out of the lemons we've been dealing with for almost a year now. That tipping point is now more than just an academic exercise in hopefulness.
I was up early to catch the YouTube video posted on The Rachel Maddow Show (I canceled Fios after MSNBC and now MSNOW, dumped Joy Reid and Mehdi Hassan and moved others including Ayman Mohyeldin to less visible positions; there were other channels sure, but I didn't really watch any of them).
And Rachel got to it straightaway last night.
First, she addressed the spontaneous and organic protests that arose all over the country--and which will likely count among the top five protests on record (not my words but those of Ezra Levin, co-founder along with his wife, of Indivisible; he was Rachel’s guest). Americans all over the country, big cities, big towns, little towns, even villages and outposts, were out in the cold Saturday or Sunday to protest. Millions of them. Looks like killing an American citizen on camera, a Minneapolis, MN mom, when she is heard to say to an ICE agent, "I'm not mad at you, bro," was that bridge too far.
Second, a middle-of-the-road Democrat has thrown her hat into the ring for the Alaska Senate seat of a Republican guy named Dan Sullivan who is extremely disliked in Alaska. Her name is Mary Peltola, a former member of Congress and she is viewed as the most likely to unseat Sullivan. So there you go, a Senate seat for the Dems if/when she wins.
And now the very big tipping points that give hope to our Sisyphean efforts.
Big one here, and third: The courts are standing up (they have been, but not like this--tons of rulings meant to raise Trump's blood pressure even more and send him to his junk food for solace). And glory hallelujah, days late and dollars short, but the US Senate and the House appear to have located several vertebrae on their collective spines.
First the courts: Several rulings just yesterday, Monday, January 12th.
1. Trump cannot shut down energy projects in blue states because their populations didn't vote for him. Energy funding isn't something the courts are willing to let him cancel just because he's pissed off at voters.
2. Associated: he cannot kill a wind turbine project off the coast of Rhode Island. Because, again, he is pissed at blue state voters and he has this medieval view of wind, sun, energy and how they work together when modern technology is brought to bear on harnessing them.
3. He cannot cut off federal funds to any state that doesn't change their election forms to suit him. This was a blatant attempt to take over the way states run their elections--by forcing them to change their forms. The court said, nope, you cannot do that--anything not expressed in the Constitution as being in the federal bucket is granted to the states. Period.
4. Trump and his minions cannot punish five blue states by cutting off all childcare subsidies and funding because he doesn't like it that these states' residents didn't vote for him. Period.
5. Trump must restore the $12 million he cut from The Academy of Pediatricians that had been granted to the organization by Congress. He did this one strictly out of spite because they didn't agree with him or Kennedy, the lunatic ruining healthcare, over vaccine standards and practices.
And now the House and Senate.
1. The Senate said nope, you, Trump, cannot unilaterally decide to go to war with Venezuela and spit on the War Powers Act. They have soundly rejected his "war" on Venezuela.
2. It looks like both the House and the Senate are saying, oh no you don't--you cannot continue forward with your war on science. In particular they have returned funding to NOAA (which we all know works very hard to keep us safe from harm due to disastrous weather events).
3. Further, Congress said no to his unilateral war on science in general--they have restored funding to what is euphemistically called in-general science work, research and projects.
4. And the biggie? The House, with 17 Republicans voting with the Democrats, said oh no you don't--you must restore the Obamacare subsidies that you ended (with, to be clear, their own cowardly vote to allow him to do this in the first place). Up to 22 million Americans have already lost their health insurance because without the subsidy they could not afford to keep it. Their monthly charges doubled, tripled, even in some cases, quadrupled.
Reaching the tipping point isn't a done deal by a long shot--it remains a Sisyphean task or at least almost one--we still have to push that damned rock up the hill until, unlike Sisyphus, we fully succeed and send it crashing down the other side.
It's starting to feel like, if not daylight in America, maybe the hours closest to dawn. We have a long way to go but all the protests, all the work and effort, all the money we've been contributing, all the phone calls to state and federal elected officials, and all the elections we've been winning by huge margins, plus those darned polls Trump hates are telling us and the world that he is massively underwater and hated, and that if we persist, we will win. We will be bloodied. But we remain unbowed. Fight on America, we're getting results. And it's okay to be an optimist.
