I think this is important to consider. A lot of people I know have taken the time to make phone calls, write e-mails, be heard by their representation (or most normally their staffers) and they’re probably wondering about their impact…
A note for all of us who feel defeated after Sessions from the Indivisible Team: This is the long game. We are going to lose a lot. We are going to get good at losing. We are going to lose cabinet votes for terrible nominees. We are going to lose bills that are offensive and appalling. But while we are losing, something else is going to happen. We are going to keep raising our voices and slowly our representatives are going to start listening to us. We’ve seen it happen.
It won’t happen because of next week’s call to action. It’ll happen over months, where you keep showing up, regularly. Then, we are going to start winning. It’ll sneak up on us. We won’t understand why we are winning. But it starts with losing in a particular way- where we raise our voices and call it out when we aren’t listened to, where we get close but not quite there.
The first 100 days of a President’s term are the honeymoon period, the moment when he’s most likely to get his agenda enacted. Trump is spending his first 100 days mired in controversy, scandal, and backbiting – and that’s because you haven’t for a moment let anyone in Washington forget just how unpopular he is.
Every time we change the narrative, every time we delay, every time there’s a newspaper story about a member of Congress avoiding his or her constituents, that’s a win. And it matters.
You have already made history. You’ve delayed the confirmation of Trump’s cabinet picks longer than any time in recent history. You stopped the gutting on the congressional ethics office. You’ve made Republicans so nervous about the repeal of the Affordable Care Act that it’s been pushed further and further down the road. You caused an uproar of historic proportions over Trump’s Muslim ban and saved lives and reunited families in the process. You’ve inspired people who have never before taken action to make their voices heard and learn how to do things like check how their members of Congress voted and call them out for it.
We’ll never even know about some of the victories – because those will be the fights that this Administration considered starting and then realized it couldn’t win.
We’re in this together. Every visit. Every call. Every loss. Every win. That’s just what friends do. #StandIndivisible
By Lee Rowland, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project
February 9, 2017 | 11:45 AM
Esther Calhoun, Ben Eaton, Mary Schaeffer, and Ellis Long helped create Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice,
a community organization dedicated to battling pervasive racial and
environmental injustice in Uniontown, where more than 90 percent of
residents are Black and the median per capita income is around $8,000.
As
part of their advocacy against a host of problems in Uniontown, these
four activists decried the presence of coal ash in a landfill located in
their residential neighborhood. And they were right to be concerned—the
Uniontown landfill accepted the very same coal ash that had
leaked out of a Tennessee facility, causing an environmental disaster.
In return, the two corporations that own the landfill sued them for $30
million in federal court, claiming defamation and slander over Facebook
posts that said things like “we should all have the right to clean air
and clean water.”
…
As my colleague Dennis Parker and I wrote when we took on this case, Uniontown has an unfortunately large and varied collection of injustices that need to be called out:
In
Uniontown, seeking health and justice means highlighting a municipal
sewage “system” that sprays fecal water onto a field while emaciated
cattle graze nearby. It means fighting the suffocating smell of aerated
whey that is shot into the sky, making the town reek like putrid
processed cheese — on a good day. It means following the trail of a $4.8
million Department of Agriculture grant that residents feel just
evaporated without any benefit to the citizens it was intended to help.
Fighting
for justice in Uniontown means opposing the trains that roll into town
carrying hazardous coal ash from 33 states to deposit it at the
Arrowhead landfill — a dump bewilderingly located in a residential
neighborhood, near wetlands, within this spacious county full of rolling
fields and open space. It means worrying about the safety of that coal
ash — the very same coal ash that catastrophically leaked out of a
Tennessee facility in 2008 and destroyed the surrounding environment
before it was hurriedly redirected to Uniontown.
…we will go to court to defend the constitutional rights of immigrants
and citizens alike — just like we have these past two weeks.
This is what we do. It’s why the ACLU was created.
The
day Trump took the oath of office we filed a Freedom of Information Act
request demanding any and all government documents that addressed
conflicts of interest and violations of the Emoluments Clause of the
U.S. Constitution. … We are now searching for a
business competitor to Trump who would have standing to challenge the
violation of the Emoluments Clause.
…
During Trump’s first week in office, we filed a constitutional challenge
to Trump’s Muslim ban. We now have several cases challenging its
constitutionality …
Just last week, 50 ACLU affiliates filed coordinated Freedom of
Information Act requests seeking information from Customs and Border
Protection field offices about how the Muslim ban was interpreted and
implemented at airports across the country.
And we have another lawsuit
in the works to file the minute Trump tries to allow federal government
employees and agencies the right to discriminate in the areas of LGBT
and reproductive rights under the guise of religious freedom.
…
We plan to spend over $40 million to build up our state offices. Among
advocacy groups, the ACLU is the only organization with boots on the
ground in every state. … Already, we see anti-reproductive rights laws, anti-immigrant
bills, and anti-Muslim policies being introduced in state legislatures.
…
We are also taking a close look at those states where the politics are
in flux — where our advocacy can be particularly impactful as people go
to the polls to vote in the near future.
…
We also plan to spend over $13 million to build a grassroots
member-mobilization program. With the surge of new members, we now have a
growing army of people who don’t just want to write a check. They want
to join the fight. We will be asking our volunteers and members to join
our team and partner with us to do grassroots calls-to-action, local
town halls, lobby days, acts of protest, and engagement on our core
priorities. Ultimately, we want to have our membership surpass that of
the National Rifle Association. We are now half the size of the NRA, but
with continued growth, mobilization, and activism, we can build an even
bigger force across a broader range of issues.
…
We plan to spend over $21 million to hire new lawyers, advocates, and
other staff in the headquarters of the ACLU to strengthen the core
functioning of the headquarters. We are still the David to the
government’s Goliath. We have 300 litigators on payroll nationwide — 100
of them in our headquarters. The government has over 19,000 lawyers on
its payroll. 11,000 of them belong to Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department
…
Our program/management ratio is 86 percent program, 14 percent management, including fundraising.
…
We are poised to launch a full-throttle response to whatever lies
ahead over the next four years. There is no limit to how big a
resistance to Trump we can build at the ACLU. It has been our history
for over 97 years to fight the worst assaults against justice, equality,
and democracy. It is our mission — our mandate — to rise to that
challenge again.
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court denied the government’s request to allow it to enforce President Trump’s travel and refugee ban executive order while the case challenging the ban makes its way through the courts.
“[T]he Government has failed to establish that it will likely succeed on its due process argument in this appeal,” the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in a unanimous, unsigned opinion.
Additionally, the court held, “The Government has not shown that a stay is necessary to avoid irreparable injury.”
Failing to meet either of those standards, the three-judge panel ruled that US District Judge James Robart’s Feb. 3 order halting enforcement of major parts of the ban would remain in place.
The Justice Department now could seek a stay of Robart’s order, a move that would start with a request made to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who could then refer the matter to the full court.
Robart’s decision had led the federal government to begin allowing travel from the seven affected majority-Muslim countries and allowing the refugee program to continue.
The Justice Department quickly filed a request with Ninth Circuit, asking the trial court’s order to be stayed, or put on hold, while the merits of the case could be hashed out in court. The appeals court heard arguments over the government’s request on Feb. 7. The three judge panel was skeptical of the government’s request, with one judge from the panel also expressing skepticism of the broad scope of Robart’s order.
I took this question really seriously, so I asked my parents to help me answer this. Here is what my dad said:
Here is what my mom said:
Here is what I say:
First of all, I am sorry for referring to you as “kid” to my folks. It was just a shorthand I used for them to understand in a simple way that I think you are someone younger than they are. They are professors/teachers, and are often tasked with communicating effectively with young people. (also, sorry if my dad misgendered you? I guess kid = boy in his head)
Next: Yes. To what my parents said. When I feel helpless I often turn to them because they are so blisteringly smart and compassionate, and if I seem strong and like I have all the answers, it’s because I come from an incredibly supportive family. I wanted to share that with you.
Because our representatives are firmly planted in the last century, online activism doesn’t cut through the noise to them—but phone calls do. Here is a website called 5calls.org that helps you make those calls with a script, and is especially effective if you (like me) have social anxiety.
Hearseeno 