The cavalry has officially arrived
As Donald Trump and his henchmen have run roughshod over the American way of life for the past two months, it’s been easy to feel alone in all of this. The House and Senate Republican majorities have obviously done nothing to stop Trump. And while the courts keep stopping Trump in big and important ways, those feel more like clinical victories than emotional ones. People keep asking where the Democratic Party is.
In reality, the Democrats have been doing a lot. They’ve initiated much of the legal action against Trump that’s resulted in so many court rulings against him. House Democrats have also held town halls in the districts of their Republican counterparts. But without a majority in the House or Senate, what exactly else can the Democrats do?
On Monday night we began to get our answer, when Democratic Senator Cory Booker took over the Senate floor with a filibuster for the ages. It wasn’t just Booker, as a large number of Democratic Senators jumped in with well timed procedural moves in order to give Booker a break here and there. By Tuesday afternoon. more than fifty million people were watching the live stream of Booker’s filibuster. Let me repeat that: more than fifty million people.
This obviously goes far beyond our own base. This is the American public at large tuning in for a live stream, in the middle of a workday, because that many millions of Americans are that concerned and outraged about what Trump and his complicit Republican Party are trying to do to the country. There’s that widespread of momentum for trying to stop Trump, and yesterday the Democratic Party managed to seize that momentum at just the right time in just the right way.
The base often doesn’t like to hear this, but in order to win over mainstream Americans in the middle, the Democratic Party can’t be seen as getting out ahead of them. In politics, if you’re a leader without any followers outside your own base, you’re just a guy taking a walk. But there’s now such overwhelming popular momentum against the entire Trump agenda, yesterday was the day to start seizing it. And we saw it happen.
So what’s next? The Democrats still don’t have a majority in the House or Senate, so they have to pick their spots. We saw that in the House yesterday, when House Democrats managed to convince just enough House Republicans to join them in order to defeat a proposal by Speaker Mike Johnson. After the vote, Johnson was apparently so worried about House Democrats continuing to show him up, he canceled House proceedings for the rest of the week and sent his people home. That’s when you know we’ve got them on the ropes.
And what’s next for us? We keep fighting. The Democratic Party is now doing precisely what so many of us have been demanding they do, so it’s now time for us to rally behind the Democratic Party as loudly and enthusiastically as possible. Apart from that, we have to keep doing what we’re doing with our own voices. We’ve been making a difference, and we’ll continue making a difference. All you have to do is look at the popular momentum that our side has garnered, and it’ll give you the motivation to continue fighting.
