January 23, 2019
Now that our federal government has been shuttered for 33 days, the impact is being felt beyond the 800,000 federal workers (and countless federal contractors) going without pay. Yesterday, the Commandant of the Coast Guard released an unprecedented video decrying the fact that service members had rely on food pantries while protecting our nation’s coasts without pay, (Source: ‘Unacceptable’: Coast Guard’s top officer criticizes lack of payment in government shutdown”, by Dan LaMothe, The Washington Post, 1/22/19). The FBI Agents Association released an anonymous report depicting an agency whose investigative capabilities had been crippled by lack of funds. In the Southern District of New York, the district executive said that if the shutdown was not resolved by this Friday, it would activate the pandemic emergency plan developed in 2005 in the wake of the “bird flu” outbreak, (Source: “City’s Federal Courts Brace for Full Force of Shutdown By Beth Fertig, WNYC.com, 1/22/19).
We are in the midst of a pandemic all right, but not of the bacterial variety. This is a man made outbreak of authoritarianism, where determined misrule has spread from the charlatan in The White House to a Senate Majority Leader drunk with power, who sits harnessing arcane rules to let the country burn to the ground. It has spread to the members of his caucus, who slavishly fall in line, despite Trump’s falling poll numbers, and refuse to pressure McConnell to allow a vote.
The frightening reality, as Sarah Kendzior has warned us, is that Trump and Republicans may not plan for this shutdown to end. Think of whose interests it serves if the FBI and federal courts are hamstrung. Think about whose agenda is advanced by a safety net that evaporates if there is no money to fund SNAP, or to pay rent subsidies for affordable housing. How gratified will the anti-science crowd be if NIH and CDC research comes to a halt for lack of funds? These consequences are already being felt after 33 days and will only mount as the shutdown lingers.
Meanwhile, too many others in the press are obsessed with the Rashomon-like story of the Covington Catholic boys. Here are the facts: a group of Catholic school boys were bused to D.C. to protest a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. In the aftermath of the March, they harassed a group of young women, making rape “jokes.” In the most charitable version of events, the boys were so enraged or threatened by bigoted jeers from a handful of Black kooks that scores of us have ignored for years, that they were compelled to mock a Native American elder who tried to intervene. Endless re-hashing won’t change those basic facts and the attention being paid to these privileged young jerks is completely disproportionate to their importance.
America is being held hostage by a “mob” in the Senate led by Trump and McConnell, whose reaction to the election of a Democratic House majority with a record number of women determined to hold this grifter accountable is to shut the whole thing down. This is nothing short of an emergency. We had better act like it.
#CallyourSenator
#NoWall
#Reopengovernment