I don’t know if a Trump presidency is a catastrophe, because I don’t know what Trump’s actual policies are going to be.\u00a0 I don’t think he knows.\u00a0 I think he’s going to enjoy the power and the attention, and leave the policy to the others.<\/p>\n
That’s where the catastrophe might be, because the Congress is suddenly empowered.\u00a0 I bet there’s a slew of bills that got stuck in the machinery because they’d never get ratified by a Democratic senate or signed by Barack Obama that are suddenly going to make their appearance, and fly through the Congress: abortion law, shutting down the EPA, withdrawal of funding for science, draconian curtailment of civil liberties.\u00a0 Forget addressing climate change on an international level; as soon as we drop out so will China and India, and we’re done.\u00a0 That’s on top of the stuff we know they’ll do, like repeal of the ACA, curtailing Medicare and social security, …<\/p>\n
The bastion of defense against popular legislation that infringes on the rights of the minority is the courts.\u00a0 And that’s the third thing that’ll change with the new regime, so I don’t feel confident relying on the justice system to hold the line here (Giuliani as attorney-general?)<\/p>\n
So, time for people who care about fixing this stuff to stop being spectators and start making noise.\u00a0 Find the good stuff and support it (Friends of Friends.\u00a0 Whidbey Community Solar.\u00a0 Good Cheer and the food bank.\u00a0 The sandwich bar behind the community coffeehouse.)\u00a0 Find the bad stuff, and push on it, hard. (Barbara Bailey, local congresswoman.\u00a0 Failure of the passage of I-732, the carbon tax for WA.)\u00a0 Work to change Congress (https:\/\/brandnewcongress.org\/home<\/a>)<\/p>\n The institutions are all aligning to make the bad stuff happen, so time for the alternatives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t know if a Trump presidency is a catastrophe, because I don’t know what Trump’s actual policies are going to be.\u00a0 I don’t think he knows.\u00a0 I think he’s going to enjoy the power and the attention, and leave the policy to the others. That’s where the catastrophe might be, because the Congress is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions\/313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ifmbanm.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}