Jon Wiener: From The Nation Magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: Trump’s strategy of flooding the zone with executive actions is intended to paralyze the opposition and conceal the fact that he has the highest disapproval ratings of any incoming president in modern history.  And there are lots of grassroots mobilizations underway right now;
one of the biggest organizers of that mobilization is Indivisible. Leah Greenberg will explain the group’s strategy and tactics, and this week’s work assignments: to get four Republicans to vote “No” on Trump’s four terrible nominees.  Leah is one of the co-founders and co-executive directors of Indivisible.
But first:  Last week the pushback began – with a big victory for our side, reversing Trump’s spending freeze. What does that say about Trump, and about us?  Rebecca Solnit will comment – in a minute.
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It’s Trump’s week three. For comment we turn to Rebecca Solnit. She’s been a leader of our movement for a long time now. She’s a columnist for The Guardian U.S. edition, author of many books, most recently Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. We reached here today at home in San Francisco. Hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca Solnit: Hello, Jon.

JW: Trump is doing terrible things this week, unprecedented things, but this is turning out to be the beginning of the pushback, which got started last week when we forced him to reverse his biggest move. I want to start with last week’s events because, as Ezra Klein writes, “if you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one.”
To review: last week on Monday, the Trump administration issued that memo saying it sought to end the use of federal resources, I quote, “to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and Green New Deal social engineering policies.” And to accomplish this goal, they stopped payment of all federal grants, loans and assistance, and nobody knew exactly what that covered. It seemed to cover everything: Medicaid, school lunches, Head Start, student loans, a complete shutdown of government programs. Then there was a huge wave of protest from people and organizations, and within a day, the administration said the entire memo was rescinded, the freeze was canceled.
My first question is: how did we do it?  And what does that tell us about him?

RS: I think there’s a few things to note here. First of all, that it was a coup attempt to steal Congress’s power and consolidate all power in the presidency, massively illegal and unconstitutional.
Secondly, they walked it back because of massive outcry on I think tons of us contacting our elected officials, pushback in the form of lawsuits from some nonprofits and other impacted entities, massive outcry. And I think even the Democrats did something, although I’m not quite sure what. And the governors, the governors did, Pritzker, the attorneys general like California’s great, Rob Bonta, I believe showed up.
But Trump always floats these trial balloons and quite often we can pop them. It’s really, ‘what can I get away with?’ And a lot of times people will say, like, “Oh, you know, that was never going to fly.” And the reason it didn’t fly is because we responded. If we’d done nothing, they would be exercising that power now.

JW: You make an excellent point in your recent writings — that the reason authoritarians are authoritarian is that they’re unpopular. And in fact, Trump is the most unpopular president in modern history. In the first week of his presidency his disapproval rating is unprecedented, and that’s why he has to use intimidation, suppression, the threat of force to get his way. He could never get Congress to agree to these proposals in his executive orders, and that’s why he wants to scare people into obeying. And not being scared, not obeying, just demonstrates how limited his power is and how much of ours remains even in bleak circumstances. I’m just paraphrasing your recent writing here. Then I think we need to talk about what does our victory last week, forcing Trump to abandon this most destructive plan, what does that say about us?

RS: It says something I think that’s really important. My greatest fear is not what they’ll try to do; my greatest fear is that we’ll let them.
And I was really worried after the election as so many people were like, “I’m done. I’m checking out. I am just going to, a la Voltaire, cultivate my garden.” What felt like a big shutdown and withdrawal by a lot of people who I know had been engaged at other points. Fortunately, I think protective anger is a mighty force, and I am seeing people showing up in lots of ways. People are furious and behind that fury I think is a deep care and love of rights, law, constitution, and all the things they protect. And we are showing up, and that is the crucial thing. And we know they’re going to try every authoritarian thing they can, whether they can get away with it is up to us.
And so I feel like starting Friday we started to see the great pushback, and it’s pretty epic on a lot of fronts, trans rights, immigrant rights, this unconstitutional stuff, people protesting right at the sites where Elon Musk’s child army is attacking the actual machinery of the financial system. It’s kind of exciting in the midst of all this horror.

JW: I have friends who say, ‘but what about all the other terrible things he’s doing right now?’ ‘What about climate change?’ ‘What about the deportations?’ ‘What about all the suffering and misery he’s causing all over the world?’

RS: People are doing stuff. I’m on the board of two climate groups, Oil Change International and Third Act, and I was thrilled to see the day after the election, they were like, “Well, we made plans for this outcome and we are ready to step up.” Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something. And we have immigrants’ rights groups, we have trans rights groups and lawyers, we have climate organizations, and each of them has a piece of the puzzle and they are doing their utmost in that arena.
There’s a lot of, ‘nobody is doing anything, nobody cares, there’s nothing we can do,’ which is usually the sign of people who are not engaged, not doing the work, not even showing up where the people doing the work are. Because if you show up, you see, oh, there are these massive efforts–there are these lawsuits, there are these organizations, there are these protests.

JW: You have this concept, the argument that you call ‘what about-ism.’

RS: Oh, that’s not my term. That’s an old thing from how the Soviet Union’s propaganda worked. Where it be like, ‘the Soviet Union has put millions of people in Gulags,’ and the reply would be like, ‘well, what about Jim Crow?’ It’s basic bait and switch.
And one of the things the internet seems to have taught people, along with the fact that they have the right to have an opinion on everything, whether or not they know anything about it or even read the post or the article, is really bad argument techniques. And we see a lot of, ‘but also’ – ‘But also, this other thing.’ ‘But also, I’m going to attack you personally.’ ‘But also, I’m just going to make a blanket statement and predict the future — as though I have the power of prophecy.’ Oh my gosh. I wish we trained people to do research and understand logic in schools, instead of whatever the hell algebra is supposed to do, all that other silly stuff.

JW: We recommend that listeners call their senators and representatives in Congress. The second segment of our podcast today, we’ll be speaking with Leah Greenberg of Indivisible about their specific recommendations for this week. And at your Facebook page, you have an excellent rundown of the best ways to contact Democrats in Congress, for people looking to turn despair into action.
But rather than talking about that right now, I’d like to take a look first at other ways to resist. Yes, we need lots of phone calls, we need big public actions, but you have written it’s important not to limit our sense of what resistance looks like. Fighting for justice doesn’t have to be a big dramatic act. Your current column at The Guardian argues the resistance can be woven into everyday life. Let’s talk about that for a minute.

RS: What I saw in the first few weeks of this presidency is people running around with instructions about very specific things we should do: ‘Show up here’, ‘call this,’ ‘donate that,’ ‘do this.’ And what it left out is that in all of our interactions, in every arena in which we express ourselves, we can be people who defend reproductive rights, trans rights, immigrant rights, defend affirmative action, defend the historical record, defend the truth, do all this stuff that counters them. That just standing on principle and using our voices in all our ordinary conversations helps keep them from normalizing the hate, the lies, the distortions of history, the pretense that this country hasn’t been a giant affirmative action program for white men since its founding, that what we call DEI or affirmative action was meant to slightly counterbalance and create a slightly more level playing field.
So yes, do all those specific things if you can. Make the call, show up at your senator’s office, go to the protest. But just holding those values in the work you do in your conversations, your social media, all your communications, what you might do as a teacher or a coworker on your chat with the cashier or the mechanic, that is also really important. Be big. Take up a lot of space for your beliefs and don’t back down. Even if it becomes normal to believe lies, to hate vulnerable people, to go along with fascism. You don’t have to do it. Your voice is one of the powers you have all the time in everything you do.

JW: What Trump is doing is unprecedented in our political history. But there have been other disasters, emergencies, and you have written about this and thought about this a lot. What we can learn from people who have faced huge crises, what does that tell us about our own possibilities, our own powers now?

RS: I am always moved and inspired by people who under much worse circumstances than what a lot of us are facing in the U.S. right now, the people of Czechoslovakia who stood up for more than a decade before the Velvet Revolution swept a totalitarian regime away. Solidarity in Poland in the 1980s, laying the groundwork for the liberation of that country. The people of Syria who we saw after more than a decade of brutality by Bashar al-Assad, force him to essentially go into exile, let go of his power more than half a century on from that dynastic dictatorship.
You see people in the worst circumstances in Palestine, in so many places, act with humanity, act with courage, act on principle. And to see how good people can be, how strong, how brave in those circumstances is a reminder that this is who we can be, this is who we should be and maybe this is who we want to be.

JW: And to think about all this, you have launched a newsletter, a blog of sorts, not just a new Facebook post or a new newspaper column, but a space where you are posting new short essays. You’re calling it Meditations in an Emergency. It’s online at a new blogging platform called Ghost, a nonprofit alternative to Substack. Your first essay there takes up a magnificent idea: ‘We are not the resistance; they are.’ Let’s talk about this part of the big picture.

RS: Yeah, I wanted to have a place where I could respond immediately where I didn’t go through the filtration system of publishers, even though I will still be with The Guardian as long as they’ll have me. And I also had been posting essentially essays on Facebook. And while I love the people I connect with on Facebook, I do not love Mark Zuckerberg and the other people in charge of it and I wanted to stop driving traffic there and giving them some of my best stuff.
And so yeah, that first essay is a reminder that first of all, we’re in an emergency. What is the emergency about? It’s an attempt by the Trump administration, MAGA and authoritarians around the world to stop the emergence, a related word, the emergence of a more inclusive, egalitarian society when it comes to rights for people of color, queer people, women, understanding gender as a spectrum rather than an airtight binary, understanding the rights of nature and inseparability from it.
I think we’ve been in a grand revolution around all these things since the Civil Rights movement and the mid-1950s that has created a much better world. And when MAGA says, ‘make America great again,’ I’ve always called that ‘make America 1958 again,’ or ‘1858 again,’ because they didn’t really like the outcome of the Civil War either. And so they are the resistance. They’re trying to push back on what’s been achieved in reproductive rights and all sorts of forms of egalitarianism and inclusion, justice, protection of the natural world.
I drew on two really important things. One is the great Black writer Michelle Alexander in 2018 saying, “We are not the resistance. We are not the dam trying to stop the river. We are the river itself. And they’re the dam trying to stop us, and it will not be stopped.”
And then Anand Giridharadas published a beautiful piece on the fourth anniversary of the January 6th, 2021, attack on Congress, one of Trump’s many coup attempts. And he said, “This is an attack on the future. The future will not be stopped.”
And I do believe these things. They can’t make us give up the belief that we have the entitlement to these rights. As we can see with abortion, they can take away access to abortion and reproductive rights, but they can’t make people give up the belief that we’re entitled to them and keep fighting for them. They can win these specific battles with the power they’ve grabbed. But as you pointed earlier, the reason they have to be authoritarians is because what they’re doing is wildly unpopular. And I think they can win some battles, but they’re on the losing side of the war. But I also think it’s not an inevitability we can sit back and count on. That’s optimism, not hope. Hope is that we cannot, that it won’t magically happen.

JW: A small question about your own publishing plans. At Facebook, you have 284,000 followers and you post a lot.  Sometimes you post every hour or two about what’s happening right now. What are your current plans for your Facebook page?

RS: I’m still going to post there because I love the people I connect with. I reach a lot of people. It’s a useful platform for what I do. But I was giving it a bunch of writing. There was a moment during the election excitement last year where I was essentially posting an essay every morning because I didn’t have another place to put it out. And now I’m really happy that I do both, in that it lets me have some autonomy and a relationship with subscribers that doesn’t run through Mark Zuckerberg, one of the villains in all this. Both in how he’s manipulated his platform and his newfound enthusiasm for licking Trump’s boots, or whatever his golfing shoes should be called.
So, yeah. I’m not quitting there. I know there’s been a whole call to quit, which I think because it is a place where we connect with each other, it is really useful — until stuff like Bluesky, where I’m also quite active, become much more powerful. We are often told to silence ourselves in protest in ways that I think weaken and disconnect us in moments when we need to be strong and connected.
And so I never thought I was morally pure, because I’m an American taxpayer, so I’m not going to pretend I’m morally pure by staying home and being quiet. I’m going to talk about what matters and try and share the facts as I see them where I can, while also sharing the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is an evil human being and Facebook is an evil corporation and we need to address all that as well.

JW: Rebecca Solnit’s new newsletter, “Meditations in an Emergency,” is online now and free. Rebecca, thanks for everything you do and thanks for talking with us today.

RS: Always a pleasure, Jon. To be continued.
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Jon Wiener: Trump’s strategy of flooding the zone with executive actions is intended to paralyze the opposition – us. But there’s lots of grassroots mobilization underway right now to challenge and reverse this week’s nightmares. One of the key organizers of that mobilization is Indivisible, a grassroots movement of thousands of local groups with a mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda. Indivisible was formed at the beginning of the first Trump term. They are back at work now for the group’s strategy and tactics. And for this week’s work assignments, we turn to Leah Greenberg. She’s co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible. We reached her today in Washington, DC. Leah Greenberg, welcome to the program.

Leah Greenberg: Glad to be here. Thank you.

JW: First, explain a little bit about what Indivisible is and what you were able to do during Trump’s first term.

LG: Indivisible is a network of thousands of local grassroots groups. Overwhelmingly volunteer-led and driven, around the country, that formed after Donald Trump was elected in 2017. We got started when my husband and I, who are both former congressional staffers, put a guide to organizing locally to pressure Congress on the internet in December of 2016. We thought our friends were going to read it. We were surprised and incredibly excited and gratified when thousands and thousands of people picked it up. And added it into the menu of tactics that they had already started to adopt as they were organizing locally to fight back against Trump and begin calling their groups Indivisible. And we found ourselves organizing as part of a nationwide grassroots movement and building out the infrastructure to both support these local volunteer groups. And also, build out national strategies that would allow us to be more than the sum of our parts collectively.

JW: And what’s your assessment of where we stand this week?

LG: Where we stand this week is that Donald Trump could not make more clear that he intends to govern as a king. Or rather, he intends to both govern as a king and hand over an extensive set of powers to Elon Musk who is, as we speak, feverishly working with his deputies to take control of as much of the federal government as possible. Now, we’ve seen an entire raft of horrifying, shocking, and cruel executive orders rolled out over the last couple of weeks. And we’ve also seen a full-throated assault on the very concept of the separation of powers on the concept of Congress controlling and allocating budget on, really, any legal obligations of the executive whatsoever.
And we’ve also started to see how devastating the consequences of those things are for regular people at home and abroad, right? We are talking about an attack on the very idea of the government providing funds for hungry kids to eat, funds for education, funds for healthcare for millions of people around the country, funds for seniors to get heating. Basically, anything that we think of as the underpinnings of a good and dignified life here in the United States is under attack from this government right now.

JW: Sunday night, you organized an action call: Indivisible, along with partners, MoveOn and the Working Families Party, and some allied groups: The AFT, National Nurses United. How many people were on that call?

LG: We’ve had about 50,000 people join us in-person, and the numbers have only ticked up since then.

JW: Awesome. Last week was sort of the beginning of the pushback focused on Trump’s OMB memo, cutting off all grants voted by Congress, and we got that reversed in just a day. What was the effect of our success on Trump and on the Republicans?

LG: I think what we saw was two things. The first is that there is, in fact, a level of public pushback that is capable of making them back down. Within 36 hours of that memo going out, we had shaken up both Democrats and Republicans into a full-blown state of panic, and the Trump administration saw what was building and said, “That’s not the path. We’re going to walk this back,” so they rescinded the memo. Now, that does not mean that they’ve given up on their plans. It means that they’ve decided to pursue a bunch of sneakier and more difficult to track ways of getting at what they ultimately want.
And so, by the time the memo had been withdrawn, we were already starting to get reports about Elon Musk making entry into various government departments. Taking over the federal treasury payment system. Starting to make illegal intrusions into entities like USAID. And so, fundamentally, what we are seeing right now is that public pressure made them back off a full-frontal push on taking full control of all of these programs and funds. And now, they’re trying a different way that they are hoping will be quieter.

JW: The architect of the funding freeze effort last week was a man named Russell Vought, V-O-G-H-T, pronounced “vote.” That’s Trump’s nominee to be the head of OMB, The Office of Management and the Budget. He has to be confirmed by the Senate, and we need four Republican votes to tank that nomination. How can we help?

LG: Fundamentally, what we need is the kind of widespread constituent outrage that made them back off within 36 hours last week, right? This is a guy who is the architect of the freeze plan. This is a guy who, if he is confirmed, is going to have the ability to wreak his agenda by all kinds of means and powers embedded within the Office of Management and Budget. Fundamentally, we need pressure on both Democrats and Republicans. Right now, we’ve got all Democrats unified and agreeing to oppose the vote nomination. We need to flip four Republicans, as you mentioned.
There are a lot of Republicans who we have heard are behind the scenes pretty freaked out about this set of developments. If you think about it, if you are a member of Congress, you actually don’t like it very much yourself when the president announces that he simply has the power to disregard everything that you have done in allocating where and how the budget is funded. So there’s some meaningful potential to play on in interacting with Republicans. But fundamentally, I think this is a play to make sure that they understand that there are political consequences for a long-term being associated with such a wildly extreme and unpopular and radical plan to gut the services that Americans depend on.

JW: We all know something about street demonstrations, public protests. But what you guys have brought to the table is a detailed knowledge of how Congress actually works and how individual senators and members of Congress can be moved.

LG: Elected officials want to get re-elected. The good ones, the bad ones, they all want to get re-elected, or they all want to set themselves up for the next thing that they’re going to do. That means that they need to have a consistent base of support in their district that will get them to their next re-election, their next step. And that means that they’re all looking for a specific set of things, right? They want good press. They want good coverage and attention. They do not want bad coverage. They don’t like surprises. They don’t like wasted time. They don’t like looking unrepresentative and out of touch to their constituents.
All of this stuff means that specific ways of organizing can get their attention. And either make them decide to do something that’s more in line with what you want or push them into suffering political consequences for not doing so.
And so, one of the things that we talk about is how do you advocate to your elected officials and what’s the theory behind it? So we’re always saying to call your elected officials and that is absolutely true. And part of the reason why we say, “When it’s important, when you need them to know what is really important to you, you escalate. You go in-person. You show up. You have visits,” is fundamentally they’re using this very rough tool, right? They’re saying, “How much do these people care about it? Because if somebody cares enough about this to go to my office, then they might care enough to go volunteer for my opponent. They might care enough to do a fundraiser for me or for somebody else.” It’s a metric for saying, “These people are really activated. They took time out of their day to let me know how they feel about this. That means that I’ve got people watching me and who will be following me and I have to vote accordingly.”

JW: One of the big eye-openers for me was your advice that phone calls are much, much more important than emails, and more important than letters. Is that really true – and why is that true?

LG: There’s a few basic things on that, right? So first, letters go – a physical letter to Congress goes through the security protocols. So it’s got to be scanned for any kind of dangerous material, et cetera. That means that it literally does not get to the office, often until after the issue that you’re calling or writing about has passed. And so, when you want to have immediate feedback that is actually logged and fed into the systems, that is when we recommend phone calls.
Because fundamentally, on the other end of the line when you make a call, there is a staffer. The staffer has a computer system that’s from the 1990s that basically says yay or nay on the specific issue you’re calling about. You call in, you say, “I don’t like this.” They put you in the nay column, they record your address, et cetera. At the end of the day, they spit out a tally of how many yay votes and how many nay votes were on that issue. And that is an input that the elected official is going to use in making decisions. And so, calling is the simplest way to literally be counted in the metrics that an elected official is getting as they heat map within their district how much support and how much opposition there is for specific positions.

JW: Every day, the members of Congress and the Senate are told how many calls they got for and against various big issues. The calls are counted. Do they count emails?

LG: They do feed in, but it just depends a little bit on the office for the protocol and how fast they’re logged in and fed in.

JW: I live in Los Angeles. Does it do any good to call Democratic senators? Should I call Adam Schiff? Surely, Adam Schiff knows a lot more than I do about how bad Trump is.

LG: We are absolutely urging everyone to call all of their elected officials right now and we actually think it’s particularly important that you’re calling Democrats. And that is because every elected official has their actual formal vote, and they also have a real range of choices they make about how aggressive they are in opposing or folding to Donald Trump. And Democrats are – Democrats, we are not the most organized bunch under the best of circumstances. And over the last few months, we have not seen a great deal of organization from the Democratic caucus.
And I could go over all of the different times when we haven’t seen that. But the short version is if we want our Democrats to be fighters for us, if we want them to be aggressively looking for every opportunity they have to try to halt and check and block pieces of the Trump agenda, if we want them to treat right now what is happening like the constitutional crisis it is, we have to stiffen their spines and that means giving them feedback. That means saying, “I want to see you out there every minute of the day. This is a constitutional crisis. What are you doing to act like it?” Really just making sure that they understand that they’ve got a lot of people at home who are looking to them to be our advocates and who are going to be either giving them positive feedback, cheering them on if they are, or letting them know how disappointed we are if they don’t rise to the moment.

JW: It’s good to say” thank you” if your representative is doing the right thing. My member of Congress is Ted Lieu. I looked up Ted Lieu yesterday. “The insanity coming from the Trump administration is unacceptable. To say I’m concerned is an understatement. I’m furious. My office has been flooded with calls from citizens demanding action.” 

LG: That’s great. Yep.

JW: He knows that we want him to be fighting and I should be one of those callers urging him on and thanking him for taking the lead on this.

LG: And there’s a specific vibe that you get in the Congressional office when the phone is ringing off the hook. And it really does encourage people to go the extra mile to say, “What more can I do? Because I know that I am picking up a call every minute from another outraged constituent and I want a better answer when they say, ‘What are you doing?'”

JW: And if our listeners want to do more, Indivisible is very big on scheduling a visit by a group to your senator’s office. You have a toolkit at indivisible.org about how to do this. What’s the significance of a group of people going to the local office in the district?

LG: It’s a couple of things. First, it’s, again, demonstrating how seriously or how serious and how important an issue is to you, right? You are taking time out of your day as a constituent to show up. That signals a whole new level of prioritization for this issue. Second, it can be a public attention getting effort, right? What we tell people who are advocating in places where they might not be able to get the elected officials to meet with them is call local press. Tell them what you’re doing, right?
Just yesterday we had folks from our North Carolina chapters who are going into Thom Tillis’s office, Thom Tillis is a Republican senator from North Carolina, and who were getting press to come to cover the fact that the constituents could not reach their senator. That is the kind of press that, as I mentioned, elected officials don’t like to get because it suggests that they are unrepresentative. It suggests that they are out of touch. It suggests they are not addressing the concerns of their constituents. And so, I think you can see a group visit as either a tool for advocating with folks or a tool for making clear that they are not representing you.

JW: And it’s better to go with a group than as an individual?

LG: You can go with an individual and if it’s a matter of, “This is the time I can go and nobody else is available to go with me,” please do feel like you can and should go. These are public offices. These are folks who are working on your tax dollars. They should be willing to take drop-ins. And also, it’s just helpful to go with a group. It can be a social exercise, the value in courage and numbers. We know that some people are going to find it to be a little intimidating to go on their own the first time to talk to somebody who’s part of this process. So we recommend finding and connecting with a group.
There are a couple hundred different scheduled events on our website right now. If you’re trying to figure out if you have a group that you can go with, I encourage you to go look them up and see if anybody is going to head into a local office nearby in the next couple of days that you could join. But fundamentally, the thing that we are trying to stress to every elected official right now is the level of panic and alarm and urgent need for leadership that we have, and we’ll do whatever tactics to help to do that.

JW: One other question: every day, I get requests to sign online petitions from two or three groups. Some of these are addressed to Democrats. The MoveOn petition is addressed to Donald Trump, “Do not freeze or cut federal aid.” 60 or 70,000 people have signed the MoveOn petition addressed to President Trump. I doubt that President Trump cares about a MoveOn petition. I doubt he ever even sees it, but maybe I’m being too cynical about online petitions.

LG: Here’s what I would say about online petitions: I think they are a part of the tool package for moving people into higher order actions. And so, if somebody signs that petition and then we’re able to follow up with them and say, “Hey, thank you. Have you considered going into a Senate office? Have you considered calling your senator? There’s a rally in your immediate area, can you join?” All of those things are tools that allow us to make sure that as people are getting activated, they are given the kinds of opportunities to move into higher order levels of action that are ultimately going to help us collectively organize. And so, we work really closely with MoveOn. They were actually one of the core partners who helped put on the call over the weekend. These tactics are really fundamentally about, how do we get as many people as possible into the tent so that we can push together towards action?

JW: Last question. Is there any point in calling senators or representatives from other states?

LG: Short answer is no. Elected officials care about people who could vote for them or could not vote for them in their own district or state. If I am not in a Republican senator’s state anymore, so if I call them and I say, “I’m super annoyed. Here’s my zip code.” They are going to simply feed that into the trash can. They are not going to register it. It’s not going to go in the tally. It might be therapeutic, but it is not actually going to have a meaningful impact. Because fundamentally, they don’t view themselves as accountable to you.

JW: So the immediate task is to get the Senate to vote no on the Terrible Four, starting with Russell Vought at OMB. There is the House of Representatives where Leader Jeffries, Hakeem Jeffries, now has a 10-point agenda of legislation he wants to introduce. But we can’t help remembering that the Democrats are the minority in both the House and the Senate, so they cannot schedule votes on things. What can we ask them to do? What’s reasonable for us to want the Democrats to do right now?

LG: First, we’re looking a lot at the Senate right now, because that’s where a lot of the procedural tools to really gum up the works are. Now, there are limits on that, right? You only can do certain things as it relates to the confirmation of nominees. But fundamentally, there are a lot of tools within Senate procedure for determined, organized people to basically grind things to a halt.
And so, one of our asks out for Democrats right now is, yes, we want you to vote against these bad nominees. We want you to vote against every nominee. There’s simply no reason to be confirming people who are, obviously, on their cabinet positions to do Trump’s bidding. But also, demonstrate that this is a crisis by not having business as usual proceedings. So drag things out. We have an entire list of different protocol or different procedural maneuvers that can slow things down, stop various pieces from progressing. Basically, make Republicans work for it in other terms.
The joke that we’ve had over the last couple of weeks is pretend you’re Mitch McConnell. What would he do in this situation? So really just leaning a lot on Democrats to explore the full menu of tactics that make clear that this is a crisis because they are behaving like it’s a crisis. And I think there is an important point there. Most people, and I would include myself in this, are not experts on the division of authority between Congress and the President and how budgets are set and/or authorized, et cetera.
The way that they know that something is a constitutional crisis is because a lot of people are telling them that it is a constitutional crisis and are acting like it is a constitutional crisis. And so, what we need to do if we send the signals that, “We’re upset about this, but we are going to continue to move forward on the Secretary of Treasury or the Secretary of Energy,” what we’re telling people is if we are using all the tools in our toolbox, then we are actually telling people this is a 5-alarm fire. So that’s where we’ve been focusing when it comes to Democrats right now.

JW: So the task this week is to contact senators to get them to vote no on the Terrible Four for a start and to try to use all the tools in the toolbox to indicate, “We consider this a constitutional crisis,” and we’re counting on them to do something about it. That means calling your senators. That means checking the Indivisible website. If you think you have time and energy to visit your local Senate field office, there’s a big list and help in how to organize that or how to join one that’s already scheduled at indivisible.org. What else do we need to know for this week’s work?

LG: One of the biggest things that we think is going to be important for making it through the coming period is organizing locally and being in community locally. We’ve got a fascist takeover of the government and fascists want you to feel alone. They want you to feel scared. They want you to feel powerless. The best way to combat that is to get together with other people wherever you are and start organizing. None of us is going to solve this alone, but each of us is going to take our little piece of the puzzle and plug it in. And so, fundamentally, if you’re not hooked up with a local activist group, a local community of people who are figuring out how do they take action, we really encourage you to find that. Now, you can go to our website at indivisible.org to get started if you’re interested.

JW: Indivisible.org. Leah Greenberg, thanks for everything you are doing this week, this year, and thanks for talking with us today.

LG: Thank you.