Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense.  I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: A big victory in court — Trump cannot shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Rob Weissman of Public Citizen will explain.  But first: good news from Wisconsin. John Nichols will report – in a minute.

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Wisconsin had an election on Tuesday for the State Supreme Court. And maybe you heard the news, Elon Musk’s candidate lost. For comment, we turn, of course, to John Nichols. He’s The Nation’s National Affairs Correspondent. We reached him today at home in Madison, the morning after the voting. John, how are you feeling this morning?

JN: Pretty peppy, my friend.

JW: I think you were up late.

JN: I was up very late. Interestingly enough, last evening and very early this morning, a lot of people wanted to talk about Wisconsin. And as you well know Jon, if someone wants to talk about Wisconsin, I’m ready.

JW: So how exactly did this race become a referendum on Musk? Was that just the genius strategy of the liberals and Democrats from the start?

JN: I wish I could say so. No. This is the first major electoral test of the new Trump presidency. The new Trump presidency has been very controversial. It has been really troublesome to a tremendous number of Americans, and the most controversial and troublesome part of it has been Elon Musk. So yes, it is true, many Democratic strategists in Wisconsin, including party chair Ben Wikler, I think from the start would’ve loved to have been able to mount a campaign focused on Elon Musk. But that’s a little hard to do. He’s out in Washington. He is working on federal stuff. And so their inside guy who helped the Democrats figured out how to get Musk into the Wisconsin race. And I guess I better identify the inside guy.

JW: Please.

JN: He’s Elon Musk. He made himself a giant issue, started tweeting about the race or Xing or whatever he does back in January. February, he started moving money in, first a million or so, then many millions. And apparently at the end of the day, he got up to around $26 million spent in the Supreme Court race, more than a quarter of all the spending. And because he flew in at the end, put a polyurethane Cheesehead on top of himself, and bounced around a stage in Green Bay, he basically made himself the center of discussion for the last 120 hours of the race. All I can tell you is this, Jon, if Elon Musk hadn’t been able to find the money to pay for a flight into Wisconsin, I do think that the Democratic Party of Wisconsin probably would’ve paid his fare.

JW: I just want to look at the numbers here a little bit. Just four months ago, Trump won Wisconsin narrowly, 50 to 49%. This week, the Republican candidate lost by 10 points. It was 45/55. 1.7 million people in Wisconsin voted for Trump. Only one million voted for the Republican candidate for the state Supreme Court. Now, of course, we expect a higher turnout in a presidential election, but as I understand it, the Republican strategy was to mobilize the Trump voters. Why do you think that didn’t work?

JN: Well, I think the Trump presidency dented that project.

JW: Yeah.

JN: Right? Look, when you are running an administration that is dancing around the prospect of cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Veterans benefits, weather forecasting, airline safety, and all of these other things, all in a project that appears to be aimed at lowering taxes for billionaires, there’s a chance you’re going to lose some of your working class base. And I think that’s exactly what happened.

To be honest, a couple things happened. Number one, there were a lot of younger people and some portion of the Democratic base that were very dissatisfied with the conclusion of the Biden presidency and to some extent with Kamala Harris’s candidacy. Some of that had to do with Gaza. Some of that had to do with less of a focus on economic issues that I think people thought would’ve been a good idea. All the discussions have been had on your show. But what happened with this race was a moment of clarity. And so, to give you an example, I was down on the UW campus, and back in November, a surprising number of young voters, including particularly young men, voted for Trump. He did better than expected in the campus area. Yesterday I was by the polling place in one of the key places on campus just before the polls closed and people were running in to vote, and they were wearing Susan Crawford stickers. They were supporting the progressive candidate.

And so I think that first and foremost, there was kind of a return, if you will, to the progressive fold – this is officially a nonpartisan race – to the progressive fold by some of those progressive folks. That in itself was significant. And then at the same time, there was a disenchantment, a discomfort on the part of at least some of the more casual Trump voters.

What Wisconsin tells you is it’s possible, right? If the race is framed around Trump and Musk, you have a clear opponent or set of opponents. And frankly, if the race is issue-oriented in ways that appeal to the voters that Democrats have to get out, right, it’s not just Republicans declining, it’s also Democrats strengthening.

JW: Now, you mentioned voters being mobilized because of their concerns about Social Security, Medicare, and vets — but these are not issues for the Wisconsin State Supreme Court.

JN: You are correct, Jon, although I have to tell you that the nature of the campaign did not always distinguish between the federal and the state and local. But there was a set of issues that did extend from, and kind of circle around, this race. These are the issues that came up a lot in the one debate they had and also in a lot of the campaigning and in their mailings and things of that nature – they were voting rights, labor rights, and abortion rights. And those are, by the nature of it, I think progressive mobilizing issues. The labor rights very much for working class folks, and frankly, for anybody who works. The voting rights, it should be universal, but it’s certainly a very big deal and has civil rights, civil liberties, democracy components to it. And then finally, the abortion rights issue, which I think you always hear pundits who will tell you that that issue is kind of fading, that we’re not where we were in 2022 or 2023. And it’s almost as if the pundit class wants to shut that issue down and move on to something else. Well, I don’t think Wisconsinites wanted to do that.

And so I heard and saw a lot of energy around the issue of abortion rights. And Susan Crawford, the progressive who won, was a lawyer for labor unions and in a major case for Planned Parenthood. She was an absolute supporter of abortion rights and labor rights. Brad Schimel, the Republican politician who lost, had been State Attorney General and had been way out front in opposing labor rights and voting rights, and also, I think throughout his career abortion rights. So there was actually sort of an issue clarity here that I do think benefited Susan Crawford a lot.

JW: You say the real issues at stake for Wisconsin were abortion rights, voting rights, labor rights. I looked closely at Elon Musk’s campaign appearance. He hasn’t made too many of these in his life, but he had this big rally, you talked about it, just Sunday in Green Bay. Two hours, he talked for two hours wearing that foam Cheesehead. I understand he didn’t really talk about the candidate he was supporting. He talked about – according to The New York Times, he delivered extended monologues about immigration policy, alleged fraud in the Social Security system and the future of artificial intelligence. And then he concluded that this election would be, quote, “important for the future of civilization.” So how do you evaluate Elon Musk as a campaigner?

JN: He is certainly going to be welcome to take the stage in any race where Democrats are hoping to win. And look, the interesting thing is you actually left out one of his longest soliloquies, a very extended conversation on why it’s a problem that our birth rate is too low. People can debate that, of course they can discuss that, but it wasn’t really a front and center issue in the state Supreme Court race, but he went on and on about that. He also had a lengthy discussion of the Federal Reserve, which everybody likes to wake up for that discussion.

JW: Spellbinding.

JN: Yes. But I think this sums it up: Elon Musk is a very, very wealthy man, he’s a very powerful man. I think there’s very little question he’s quite a smart man. There’s a lot of things he knows, especially around technology and some stuff, and I’ll give him all that. But I don’t think he has ever had much interest in politics, particularly the politics of the United States. And as a result, I don’t think he probably had thought more than five minutes about Wisconsin before he came to Wisconsin. And boy, did it resonate.

He basically could have done his appearance in any state in the country. Most of what he was saying, it didn’t relate to Wisconsin. He made a very brief reference to Brad Schimel at the end. I think he bizarrely thought that he could win over by taking a polyurethane Cheesehead and putting it on his head, a little yellow hat. Which it is true, Wisconsinites do wear those at Packer games, but they don’t generally wear them at political rallies. I think when they see someone who’s not from Wisconsin, who doesn’t seem to know much about Wisconsin prancing around on stage in a Cheesehead, I tell you very bluntly, I had a lot of people who said they felt insulted. They felt he was almost mocking them.

JW: Elon Musk spent more than $20 million, we’re told, of his own money through his, what shall we say, front groups. I understand most of it was for TV ads, but they did spend something like $4 million on their door-to-door canvas, which apparently was pretty massive and pretty successful at reaching lots and lots of people. So that’s sort of a good idea, except that it didn’t work.

JN: Yeah, I think it’s probably going to be a lot more than four million, to be honest. And in fact, right now, the charting of it is that overall, Musk looks to have spent around 25 or 26 million. It keeps going up. They keep finding other expenditures. I think that the door-to-door part was a smart investment. You and I have often said that too much is spent on TV, not enough on grassroot mobilization. So in that sense, there’s very little question that Musk got the concept right, but there is evidence that he was bringing in people from out of state to do it, folks who didn’t know Wisconsin. As I can tell you from covering politics for a long time, the most effective door-to-door campaigning is done by your neighbors, not by somebody who flew in from Texas or Illinois or wherever.

Secondly, their messaging was quite bizarre. They had on the front of the literature picture of Trump and saying how great he’s doing, and we voted for him. And then on the back something saying how awful Susan Crawford is, don’t vote for her for a whole bunch of reasons. What they didn’t do, I don’t think until quite late stages, was to make an affirmative case for why you’d vote for Brad Schimel, their candidate. So I think they made a classic political mistake right off the bat. If you want to get a measure of how big a mistake, there’s a map that came out just this morning where it showed the vote shift from November to April in Wisconsin — not a long time. If you have a red arrow moving to the right, that’s telling you that that’s an area that went more conservative, went more toward the Republican-supported candidate. You have a blue arrow going to the left, that’s where the progressive, the more Democratic-supported candidate did better. Every arrow on the map was blue to the left. Every single one, rural, urban. It looks like every major county had significant shifts from the Trump-Harris vote into this vote. In fact, in some counties, battleground counties like Kenosha, there were 12 to 15-point shifts. That’s huge. And so whatever they were doing—

JW: Yeah, especially in a state that’s 50/50.

JN: Right. So whatever they were doing at the doors wasn’t working, number one. And there’s a pretty good argument that what the progressives were doing at the doors was working.

JW: Yeah, now, we’ve been talking this whole time as if Elon Musk was the whole thing here, but Susan Crawford seems to have run quite a good race. Even though she’d never been a statewide candidate, I sort of worried about this with you several times, she turned out to be quite a skilled and impressive candidate I thought.

JN: Yeah, look, there is some argument that being a lawyer for decades, former Assistant Attorney General, counsel to the Governor, lawyer for labor unions and progressive groups and stuff like that that you develop some skills, right?

JW: Yeah.

JN: You can handle things under pressure or courtroom, things of that nature — and so maybe the speculation over whether she was ready for the statewide stage was always stupid. But, boy, did Susan Crawford prove herself. She was running against a career politician, somebody who’d been on the ballot many, many times at the local and state level, that’s Brad Schimel, and who really is kind of a political beast. He’s into politics. The law is maybe not a central focus for him.
For Crawford, law was always her central focus. But she was an exceptionally good candidate who got better and better as the race went on. It was summed up in the debate because the debate was her first debate or first certainly statewide televised debate ever. Whereas, Schimel had been on debates when he was Attorney General, he’d faced very capable Democratic candidates. So the assumption was Schimel would come in very strong. Early in the debate, they were talking about the money in the race. Schimel was trying to suggest, “Oh, there’s a lot of Democratic money and rich Democrats giving money,” which there was some of, but it was so disproportional compared to what Musk was doing. And Crawford shot back at him, came back at him strong, and she had a really strong answer. And then in one of her sentences, she referred to him as Elon Schimel.

It could have just been you’re talking really fast and sometimes a name shifts or whatever, could have been intentional. She is a lawyer, she’s a skilled communicator. But whatever it was, it stuck. You couldn’t have had a more successful moment in the debate than to do that. The final thing is that, look, both these candidates worked very hard, this was an intense race, but Susan Crawford just never let up. Even in the hours before the election, she was in the Northwestern part of the state, the Southeastern part. She was all over, spent an immense amount of time in rural counties and smaller cities, which is sometimes a mistake Democrats make, they don’t go to those places. And she was rewarded for it in she won a lot of rural counties, quite a few, more than you’d expect. But she also, even where she didn’t win, she ran well.

My sister lives down in a place called – and my mom – down in Walworth County, Wisconsin. It’s a very, very Republican county. I think they were for Lincoln and have been Republican pretty much since. But on the weekend, Crawford went down to Elkhorn, Wisconsin, which is a county seat in Walworth County, to an event organized by the local Democrats — 450 people showed up, not for a rally, but to go out and canvas for her, to go knock doors.

JW: Whoa.

JN: I can tell you, if you know Wisconsin, if I tell you that a progressive candidate got 450 people out to go do actual campaign work in Walworth County, I’m going to tell you that candidate’s going to win.

JW: John Nichols, read him at thenation.com. John, thanks for talking with us today.

JN: It’s been quite a pleasure.
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Jon Wiener: We had a big legal victory on March 28 when a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration cannot shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and it must undo the actions Musk and Trump have already taken to dismantle it. The case challenging Trump and Musk was brought by, among others, the nonprofit group Public Citizen. Their co-president Robert Weissman joins us now. Rob, welcome back, and congratulations on this victory.

Rob Weissman: Thanks. It’s great to be with you.

JW: Well, remind us, for starters, what the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB, is, and why it’s important.

RW: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is probably the nation’s most important consumer protection agency. It was the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren. It came into effect after the 2008 financial crisis. It was included in the Dodd-Frank Act, which was the legislation that followed that crisis, and it was based on the idea that consumers have protections if a toaster is going to blow up in their face. But they don’t have protections if a mortgage is going to blow up in their face. That we needed an actual agency whose actual job was to focus on consumers, not on the well-being of banks and the financial companies that other regulatory agencies are in charge of. And that’s what the CFPB was designed to do, and it’s what it has done, especially in the last four years under the awesome administration of Rohit Chopra, who’s probably the most effective Consumer Protection official in American history in the last 50 years.

JW: I know Trump openly declared one of his campaign promises was to totally eliminate the CFPB. How far did they get with that project?

RW: Well, out of the gate, they were ready to do it. This was a combination of Elon Musk and DOGE working in concert with Russell Vought, whose name people should know. He’s the head of the Office of Management and Budget, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist, who’s one of the real strategists in the Trump administration. They had told everybody basically working through CFPB, “You’re fired.” They were on the verge of deleting all of the records the CFPB has accumulated over its dozen years of existence.

They’re ready to transfer the building to other uses. They’ve taken the sign down from the building right across the street from the White House. They were really trying to put it in the ash heap of history. We got in between them, and, succeeding at that, just in the nick of time, got an order from the judge in this case first temporarily stopping them with a TRO from proceeding. And then, as you said last week, won a really far-reaching preliminary injunction to block them from their plans.

JW: And the judge in your case had some memorable phrases in her ruling. You want to tell us a little about that?

RW: It is a spicy ruling. It’s also worth noting that it’s 112 pages, which is significant because it is an extremely detailed account of what they were trying to do and how it contravenes the law. The short of that is the U.S. Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB, and only Congress can terminate it. The president can’t just unilaterally do that. So, a lot of the evidence gathered in the case looked at what the Trump administration was actually doing. Was it really trying to shut it down, or were they just trying to shrink it and reallocate some responsibilities elsewhere? And the judge goes through in great detail to make the point, “No, they were trying to shut it down. They actually said so when they weren’t in court.” And then she concludes properly that it’s both illegal and unconstitutional.

JW: So, the judge issued an order requiring the administration to maintain the agency’s existence until this case has been resolved on the merits. I’m quoting here, “Reinstating and preserving the agency’s contracts, workforce, data, and operational capacity and protecting and facilitating the employee’s ability to perform statutorily required activities.” The judge’s argument here was a constitutional argument based on the separation of powers. Explain why that’s important here.

RW: It gets to this issue of who has the authority to create and terminate agencies. This was an agency created as a matter of law by Congress. It’s only Congress that can decide we no longer need that agency. We do still need that agency, but only Congress could make that decision. The president can’t just come in and unilaterally close it down, and that’s what the judge found. It’s interesting that that portion you read to make sure they pursue their statutorily required duties, she had a colloquy, a back-and-forth with the government lawyers over that issue. And she said, “You know, you have to do that.” And they said, “Sure.” But then she said, “Are you clear on what that is?” And they said, “Well, it’s too vague for us to really commit to do our statutory required duties.” And she said, “Well, if you’re saying you don’t know what the statute requires you to do, you’ve resolved the case, and I’m now ruling against you.”

JW: I assume that Trump lawyers had better arguments than that. What kind of argument could they make against the separation of powers case?

RW: They don’t really have good arguments in these cases. Their best arguments are why either it’s not ready for a judge to hear these kinds of cases, or the wrong plaintiffs brought the complaint, or maybe the cases are really about the rights of workers and it should be handled through some administrative process, or that they’re not really doing the thing that they announced that they’re doing, that they’re not really closing the agency, they’re just kind of shrinking it and moving things around. But the judge concluded that was not the case, as, in fact, it’s not.

JW: And who were your clients here? Who did have standing to preserve the CFPB?

RW: We had a wide range of clients. We have the employees at the CFPB and through their newly organized union. We have the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group colleague organization that uses and works with the CFPB but uses also critically the databases that they’re required to maintain, and we had a pastor who was trying to get personal assistance because the CFPB handles individual cases to resolve a student loan issue she had. She was dying. I mean, she was trying to get this resolved before she died so that the debt would not attach to her family. As it happens, she has just passed away, but in her place, the standing will go to her family, which have that debt and have the same interest in the CFPB helping resolve an improper debt that she was being required to pay.

JW: Of course, this was reported everywhere in the media. I was struck by the headline in Forbes Magazine about your victory. Their headline was “Student Loan Borrowers Get a Big Court Win.” They pointed out that the CFPB has been quite active in protecting people with both federal student loans and private student loans, and the issue here is illegal debt collection and exploiting borrowers with what is politely called loan servicing. Can you explain this area?

RW: Yeah. Well, the CFPB has really done a lot. They’ve returned $20 billion to consumers since they were founded. Under the last director, they put out rules to protect consumers from having medical debt attached to their credit reports, to deal with improper overdraft fees that banks attached to us, to deal with all kinds of junk fees. And they’ve done a ton of work on this issue of student loans where many, many students end up, and most worrisomely, those who go to for-profit colleges, with large student loan obligations that they can’t really pay, especially if they go to a school that doesn’t equip them to make the money that they would need to pay back the loan. There have been all kinds of tricks and manipulations of students in these cases with high interest rates or tricking people into taking on loans where they don’t understand the terms, and the CFPB has been leading the charge to crack down on these student lending abuses.

JW: What happens next with the CFPB? This was a temporary injunction. Will this, do you think, end up at the Supreme Court?

RW: We had a temporary restraining order. This is a preliminary injunction. It’ll have a much longer shelf life while the case is ultimately decided. The government is repealing this, though, so we’ll see what the appeals court say about it. But that’s why it’s worth referencing the detail of the judge’s opinion in the case. It wasn’t just that she thought it was a clear case. She went into great detail to explain why she was reaching the right decision. So I think it should be in really good shape as it goes up. You never know.

JW: You never know. But it seems like the separation of powers is a real constitutional issue.

RW: From my point of view, as I like to say, a simple country lawyer, from my point of view, it is a slam dunk. There’s not really much issue here. Congress created the agency. Only Congress can shut it down.

JW: And has this Supreme Court said anything yet about the separation of powers?

RW: Out of all the Trump litigation, there isn’t much that’s yet hit the court. These issues on agency shutdowns are likely to get there unless the administration is willing to back down in the face of the obvious correct call that lower courts are making. So I don’t know if this case is going to get there. I think this issue will get there, but we’re not there yet.

JW: Public Citizen, the organization you head, has been busy. You have a lot of cases going. There’s a new lawsuit filed just this week, March 31, against the Trump administration officials to stop the IRS from disclosing tax return information to ICE, the immigration enforcement authorities. Tell us what that’s about.

RW: The IRS collects information on undocumented people in the United States because they pay taxes, and they pay about $100 billion a year in taxes, even though they don’t always get the benefits that citizens get for paying taxes back in terms of government services. So it’s a substantial amount of money. And the IRS, over the decades, has had a major program to encourage undocumented people to pay their taxes as the law requires, with a guarantee that their information will stay private, not be used for any immigration enforcement purposes. We filed a case originally earlier in March on behalf of undocumented people with a couple of immigrant rights associations as the plaintiffs. We moved for a temporary restraining order. In that situation, the judge decided that it was premature to issue a TRO. She credited claims from the government that it hadn’t yet turned over any information from the IRS and that it would follow the law.

But we urged that she not rely on a promise that they follow the law because their interpretation of following the law may be different than ours would be or than hers would be. In any case, she denied that motion. There’s now been new reporting, and The Washington Post is leading the way on this, that an agreement has now been reached, finalized, between the IRS and immigration authorities, and the scheme, as it’s being described, is something like ICE will give a long list of addresses to the IRS and say, “True or false? These are right or wrong for these people?” And then the IRS will say, “Yes, that’s right. No, that’s not right.” And I guess their theory is that’s not really infringing on the privacy of the people who have given their information to the Internal Revenue Service.

That’s for sure not what anyone’s understanding was when they gave this information. It’s not any reasonable understanding of what it means to protect people’s privacy and confidentiality. So, we’ve moved today for a preliminary injunction. We’ll see how this case goes. We don’t have all the details yet on this agreement. We just know it’s been reported to take place. And we’re really trying to get an order before the information transfer starts because once the IRS hands over information or responds to a request of about 700,000 people, they can’t take the information back. ICE will have it. So, we’re hopeful we can get a good ruling in this case.

JW: And just speaking for myself here, if I were an undocumented person, and I knew that if I filed a tax return, that information would be given to ICE, I wouldn’t pay my taxes.

RW: That’s absolutely an issue going forward. It’s also the case that if they’re going to start breaching the really ironclad promise of confidentiality around IRS information for undocumented people, it suggests they’ll do it for other people, too. So, if we can stop this, it’ll hopefully halt other abuses that may yet be coming.

JW: And what’s the schedule on this? When do you hope to get a ruling?

RW: We won’t know. When you file for a temporary restraining order, there’s a lot of urgency around it. In light of our prior effort, we did not do that this time because we don’t really know if the information has been turned over or is about to be turned over. So, we filed this motion for a preliminary injunction, which will move at a slower pace. We’ll see. If we have reason to believe that something is about to happen, we can go back to the court then.

JW: I know there’s several other active lawsuits Public Citizen is pursuing. The two we’ve talked about. I think there’s at least what, six more? Are there any big updates on any of your other cases?

RW: One thing that’s worth highlighting, as we’ve discussed, we have cases on the foreign aid freeze. This is the freeze on grants distributed by USAID, the humanitarian agency, where we’ve effectively prevailed. We prevailed at the Supreme Court. We prevailed on the law. But then separately, according to them, the administration has canceled 83% of the grants. And we’ve got the parallel case over at USAID where the agency is really on generously, you could call life support. I think we’re going to ultimately win that case, that the closure is illegal, but there may not be anything left to save.

What’s worth underscoring is it’s not in the front of people’s minds in this country, but the closure of these programs, to take one example, is likely to lead to millions of deaths every year because of immunization programs that the United States has been supporting that will no longer be supported, a real likelihood of a significant increase in the spread of malaria and TB. The state of the U.S. landmark AIDS program, PEPFAR, is really unclear right now. If that program goes, you can see millions of people dying needlessly. So, the stakes in these cases, it’s not just abstract principles of law. The stakes in these cases are unbelievably high, really in life and death terms.

JW: I noticed that in the Public Citizen mailings, you don’t say the courts will save us. You say Public Citizen urges everybody to take to the streets, starting this Saturday, April 5, when there are nationwide demonstrations to fight back against everything Trump is doing. You’ve urged people who support you to go to one of the 950 rallies that are being organized in all 50 states this Saturday, April 5. What exactly do you see as the relationship between citizens taking to the streets and Public Citizen going to court?

RW: I think the litigation is incredibly important to stop as many of these abuses as possible. And we’re seeing our litigation and those of partners have a real impact on what the administration is doing. But we’re obviously seeing an authoritarian steamroll and a real consolidation oligarchy just power for a very small number of entrenched billionaires. And at the end of the day, our successful litigation, assuming we’re successful, can stop a lot of the abuses, but it can’t really fundamentally address that. To fundamentally turn back the authoritarian steamroller and to deal with this issue of oligarchy, we just need people organizing and mobilizing in massive numbers. And as you’re correctly advertising, April 5, this Saturday, is the first really big day to do that. It’s going to be organized under the banner of Hands Off. Hundreds of groups are partnering to do this.

We’re one of the lead organizations trying to spearhead this thing, and if people go to Hands Off on the internet, they can get information. And there is a protest wherever you are. There is one near you. On the off chance that you live somewhere where there’s not, you’re really welcome to start one. We’re up to almost 1,000 of them. They’re pretty much everywhere. But we’re still taking more in these last few days and hoping people really join together, both for themselves to overcome the sense of isolation and hopelessness that happens when you stay at home and watch the news or look at your scroll and your inbox and feel the power of all of us together operating in solidarity and to actually grow the power we need to take on this horrible administration.

JW: Rob Weissman – he’s co-president of the group Public Citizen. Rob, thanks for all your work, and thanks for talking with us today.

RW: Always great to be with you. Thanks.