USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: David Harrison: Here are the Rules

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From: David Harrison <dsh347@125610242.mailchimpapp.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2025 at 23:55
Subject: David Harrison: Here are the Rules

This is the next of our series of missives on our unfinished work to restore the promise of our country and its government. Each will focus on a single element of the many opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. .  If you are not already receiving these messages by email, please click here to be added to our list. You can also follow me on Facebook where you can read and share these messages. The more people we can reach, the more we contribute to this growing movement. We share these posts on our blog, Our Unfinished Work, every month. You could watch the news and become dispirited, and it wouldn't be just because of Donald Trump's awful assault on America.  Jill Biden is known to be angry at Nancy Pelosi for her lack of "loyalty" displayed in getting Joe to withdraw from the race. This is preposterous. We should be outraged at Jill and Joe Biden and their aides for serving democracy and all of us up on a platter. If Nancy Pelosi made an error, it was in not starting a quiet campaign to block Joe a year earlier in 2023, when he had promised to be the bridge to new leadership. Even in running against an un-constitutionalist, the margins were too narrow for Democrats to field an 81 year old burdened by a serious bout of inflation coupled with obvious cognitive deterioration. How about just reading epic tragedies laced with deep irony, rather than acting them out? As much as we can puzzle that voters bought Donald Trump's con, our initial wounds were self inflicted. So, what now? Led for the time being by lawyers seeking injunctions, the resistance is reforming. It demands our full commitment until we are out of this mess. A condition of our success is learning how to better sort out which of the mass of Trump's executive orders and other actions are contestable in court; which need Congressional approval in the face of slim majorities; which are subject to the reaction of voters and the market; and which take advantage of those powers of the presidency that are most difficult to constrain. Making these distinctions is an essential part of resisting. Note these examples: Trump's quest to end birthright citizenship will be blocked by the courts. As federal district court Judge John Coughenour (a Reagan appointee) has already emphasized, Trump has no path. The constitutional protection for these babies is unambiguous. Trump will be blocked by the courts as well in his effort to destroy the Civil Service, since the statutory protection for civil servants is also clear. But there is little protection for the fired inspectors general and there Trump will prevail. Trump's massacre of environmental protections will bring effective but uneven legal challenges, depending on the environmental laws he is citing or ignoring. Though Mike Johnson's house majority is tiny, the media and the markets are following anticipated social welfare budget cuts and corporate tax reductions as though they have already happened. The media seem to think the choice is one giant budget reconciliation bill (Mike Johnson and the House) or the same content spread over two bills (John Thune and the Senate). However, members of the House Freedom Caucus have already ignored the Trump/Musk entreaties on lifting the debt ceiling and they will continue to do so, Right now, on the budget there is no path forward for Trump, even if he shuts down the government he is running. There is a very real chance that Johnson will have to turn to Hakeem Jeffries at some point in the process. Trump has broad authority to change Denali's signage. (Be sure to click here right now for John Snell's better sense of Denali)  On foreign policy, to Zellensky's chagrin, Trump's presidential powers allow him to chat with Putin regularly. He can bully Denmark and Panama with relative impunity, and his presidential powers to apply tariffs are broad. Here his problem is that a lie repeated a thousand times remains a lie, even when your Senatorial sycophants are swooning. The primary impact of Trump's tariffs placed on Mexico and Canada is to increase costs for the American consumer, thus spurring inflation. The stock market will correct downward, and Trump will be chastened to the extent that is possible. That's why tariffs are a better as a bullying position for Trump's trade negotiations than they are an actual step to be taken. In certain cases, the public's response will cause Trump to sand off the sharpest edges of what he otherwise would do. That's the case with deportations. Once he gets beyond deporting felons (which is an old practice) and turns to the seven million undocumented workers and their families, people will be herded and employees will be removed from jobs. Farmers will say they can't complete the harvest, families will be torn apart, and thousands of people will hit the streets. As with Trump's last term, everyone from Oprah to Melania will watch this all on the news and will seek a pause. What to do right now? First, don't forget we need to take back the Virginia governorship by electing Abigail Spanberger in Virginia to replace the term limited Republican governor Glenn Youngkin. Then, for now, you could also look for who needs help among the many organizations who are filing or are intending to file to block Trump in court. It is a good thing that attorneys general from the states will be major players on selected issues, as they already have been on birthright citizenship. During Joe Biden's presidency, the Supreme Court narrowed the circumstances under which states have standing to challenge federal actions, but they still will be there a lot. Those inclined to provide financial assistance to litigating organizations need to decide whether to boost organizations who will seek to block Trump in multiple areas or in one specialty area like federal civil service or climate change. The larger litigants include the American Civil Liberties Union and the very well respected Brennan Center at NYU. An interesting player on multiple fronts is Democracy Forward, a coalition of litigants whose purview is even broader than that of the ACLU and Brennan Center.  Often there will be multiple litigants. This is the case with the three separate promising lawsuits filed against Musk and the "Department of Government Efficiency". These suits have a statute behind them that forces transparency upon government advisory commissions.  At this point, the major fighter against Trump's attempted takedown of the civil service is the National Treasury Employees Union. (NTEU). There has yet to be anything filed to try to defend our country's role in the World Health Organization.  Several environmental organizations are headed to court. Ironically, they will seek to take advantage of the Supreme Court's Biden-era ruling in the Chevron case, which scaled back considerably the power of the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency to broadly interpret environmental laws when carrying out enforcement. The litigation will grow in coming months and there will be early successes. Slowly and certainly, these and other avenues to put MAGA in decline will become clearer. And we will all be there to do just that. David Harrison Bainbridge Island, Washington Copyright © 2025 Our Unfinished Work, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: Our Unfinished Work 12249 Arrow Point Loop NE Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-1479 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list. Copyright © 2025 Our Unfinished Work, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: Our Unfinished Work 12249 Arrow Point Loop NE Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-1479 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

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