If the Republican collapse has begun, I want to talk about how we help tip it over the edge.
First, I think we keep on doing what we have been doing – because some of it is working:
- fighting hard for every potentially winnable seat in special elections
- citizens making a stand and holding our ground on things like ICE and CPB
- elected officials making a stand on things like ICE and CPB
- fighting everything we can in the courts
- big corporations and institutions start standing up for what’s right
- keeping independent journalism alive even as corporate media fails us
- finding new sources we can trust, because the government isn’t trustworthy
- taking the fight to gerrymandering in Blue states
- not ceding ground to the Rs without a fight
Second, we ramp up what we have been doing, and today I hope we can talk about ways we might do that.
There is not one right answer – we don’t have to argue what’s best. We simply have to identify possible actions and then everybody take action in the areas that are most important to them.
Third, come up with additional new options and ideas that we can add to the repertoire going forward.
There are things we can do as part of group that we can’t do alone. Let’s use the power we have as a group.
- Volunteering
- Fundraising
- Influencing
What do I mean by influencing? Jeffro repeatedly suggests that protests should be held at every legislative office. It’s a great idea, but we are the only ones who are seeing it.
Surely someone – or multiple someones – on Balloon Juice who are active with Indivisible. Even if no one has a direct connection to anyone high enough in the food chain to suggest this directly, surely someone here has a connection to someone who would have a connection to someone who could bring the idea to someone higher up the leadership chain.
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A smattering of the kinds of stories in my inbox this morning
Dan Pfeiffer: The Republican collapse has begun, and Trump is leading it.
Donald Trump’s stranglehold on American politics is coming to an end. The evidence of his political crisis is all around us. It started long before his ham-handed war with Iran and the resultant spike in gas prices, but recent events have catalyzed his downfall. Republicans are so far inside the right-wing news bubble that they don’t see the gravity of their own situation, and Democrats are so scarred by the 2024 election that we are struggling to process the changed political battlefield.
The most recent piece of evidence came on Tuesday night, when Democrat Emily Gregory won a special election for a state House district in Florida. Trump won that district by 11 points in 2024, and it just happens to be Trump’s own district, because it contains Mar-a-Lago. There is some incredible symbolism about a Democrat flipping the district that contains Mar-a-Lago. On the same night, a Democrat also flipped a Trump +7 state Senate seat near Tampa.
Simon Rosenberg: Senate Republicans Cave
Last night Senate Republicans finally yielded and voted to fund DHS minus ICE and CPB. This is what Democrats have been fighting for – separate out ICE/mass deportation funding from the rest of DHS, and work to rein it all in.
We will have time to discuss what comes next but the path Republicans choose last night for funding ICE and perhaps priorities – reconciliation – is a perilous one, and not at all what they or Trump wanted. Republicans head home for the Easter recess in an ugly place – ICE/CPB is unfunded; SAVE not passed; $200 billion war funding requested by the White House nowhere near being teed up; the war is failing, the economy slowing, inflation and gas prices spiking, the markets tanking, and Trump’s poll numbers falling.
Joyce Vance: Can the government punish Anthropic for refusing to cross their ethical boundaries?
The Trump administration responded by designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” a step that compromised not only Anthropic’s work with the government but also its work with virtually any other entity that wanted to do business with the Pentagon. Trump ordered all U.S. agencies to stop using the company’s products. Anthropic was essentially blacklisted. So they sued. We discussedthat when it happened. Tonight, Judge Rita F. Lin in the Northern District of California entered the preliminary injunction Anthropic requested, blocking the Pentagon’s order.
The significance of Judge Lin’s order is that it prohibits the administration from taking retaliatory steps against the company for refusing to violate its own red lines.
Ken White: Department of “War” having a tough time in the courts
Meanwhile, the “Department of War” has been having a rough time in court. The Pentagon’s anti-reporting press policy has been thrown out as a First Amendment violation, so now the Pentagon says no reporters at all can work out of the Pentagon press room. Meanwhile, Anthropic won a preliminary injunction blocking the Pentagon’s declaration that the company is a “Supply Chain Risk.” (The Anthropic order came down after we taped — we’ll have a further update on next week’s show.)
Public Notice: Who do you trust when you can’t trust the government?
We’re a month into President Donald Trump’s increasingly disastrous Iran war, and we have no idea what’s really going on.
In part, that’s because Trump is now nothing but a creature of pure id surrounded by enablers, running the country like an enormous out-of-control toddler. But it’s also because the administration is not at all interested in providing the American people with objective, reliable information.
That erasure of truth leaves us unmoored.
Trump’s increasing instability was always going to lead to chaotic, contradictory statements about the war, blurting out whatever ideas have taken hold in the nest of spiders inside his head.
These constant reversals about what he plans to do next aren’t always random or delusional, but the sheer volume of Trumpian proclamations that seem divorced from reality does a terrific job of obscuring when something is deliberate.
The Downballot: Republican plan to repealing Utah’s anti-gerrymandering laws failed
A Republican-backed ballot measure aimed at repealing Utah’s anti-gerrymandering laws failed to qualify for the November ballot on Thursday after opponents successfully persuaded enough voters to withdraw their signatures.
If the Republican Collapse Has Begun, How Do We Help Tip It Over the Edge?Post + Comments (66)
