Organizing & Resistance

A counterpoint from reader Desargues:

Excuse me, Tim, but I have to disagree with your framing. You did what they call “himpathy” in feminist theory. Reflexively empathizing with the bad guys. You know who’s had to literally fear for their lives from day 1 on their job in Congress? Ilhan Omar, AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and a few others like them. Constant death threats — out in the open, not from an anonymous payphone — plus daily incitement by the braying beasts like Limpballs and his animal ilk.

These Republicans deserve no sympathy from anyone. They have choices, and they’ve always had a choice. They’ve made their choices, and whatever risk they incur is their problem, not our problem. Please update your understanding.

Yep. This complaint describes me to a T. And if you disagree with that then you’re going to disagree with me.

Lemme tell you a quick story about a Republican I knew a long time ago. This guy was one of those aggravating hoo-rah milbloggers who popped up like fireweed after 9/11. These guys all had their blog-rings and friends’ blogs on the left margin of the page and award bugs down the right margin like “second most popular milblog, signals or intelligence, top 800-1000 traffic, 2002” or “RCP wipes self regularly prize, 2003”. He was a bit of a blowhard who helped Erickson start RedState, but he let anyone comment on his blog and he was more fun to annoy than a brick like Jim Hoft. I wouldn’t say I was friendly per se, but I did try to write with what you could call “himpathy”. I made a point to disagree about the topic and not his character or hygeine.

Anyway, after a while that blogger got so annoyed with the George W. cult’s brainless groupthink that in ’04 he invited me to join him on the blog. And that’s how some medium profile diarist at Daily Kos became a writer on a crappy right wing milblog called Balloon Juice. It was a weird time.

So yeah, I lean towards this “himpathy” thing. I like the dissonant feeling of seeing from a different angle. That’s true even and maybe especially when it’s hostile. I will also say as an old activist that I have learned to use it tactically. I tried the “at” theory of change, and I have tried the “with” theory of change, and if I had to rank them I’d say that “at” feels a *lot* more satisfying but the “with” method gets better results.

So the operative question here is, what am I after? I want the Republican party to break into smaller parts so we Democrats (if we hold together) can beat them in the next election like a rented stepchild. It happens that right on this day we have arrived at a moment that I’ve been expecting for a long, long time. To wit, we are looking at a powerful and (hopefully) irreversible break between Chamber of Commerce Republicans who just want to steal everyone’s money versus Trumpist maniacs looking for some Khmer Rouge regime of insanity and murder. That’s an opportunity that comes up once in a lifetime, and I’d like to seize it. If I have to convince people like Pat Toomey they want to work with a liberal asshole like me more than with dangerously unstable colleagues like Goehmert, Nunes, Tuberville, or Hawley, then the scumrag who *isn’t* interested in genocide gets a warm hug from me.

Now, imagining we had Bart Stupak-type blue dogs to convince, those guys would get quite a lot of my attention. You can’t split Republicans without Democrats holding together. Thankfully (in one sense anyway) Stupak, Blanche Lincoln, Evan Bayh, those guys are all gone. Hell, one of the great no-shits-to-give barn burner speeches last week came from Conor Lamb. There just isn’t enough daylight between ‘the squad’ and Democratic leadership to matter right now. The edge of the knife is in the Republican party, and if giving some of them a hug helps me push the knife in further then that’s what I’m gonna do. If that inspires you to tear me a new one, well, you came to the right place.

Sympathy For The DouchenozzlesPost + Comments (212)

All right everyone, it’s game day in the House. Most Representatives should know how they plan to vote by now, but enough may be on the edge today that it’s worth calling their offices again. In the end though, whether five GOP Congressmen vote to impeach or fifteen, the House will send a bipartisan referral to the Senate some time late today or tomorrow. What happens then will be “interesting”, as the apocryphal Chinese proverb says.

WATCH: Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) says majority of GOP "paralyzed with fear" @RepJasonCrow: "I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues. … A couple of them broke down in tears … saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment." pic.twitter.com/ESEu40WW1P

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) January 13, 2021

I called Pat Toomey’s Pittsburgh office this morning and told a pleasant young man that I greatly respect the Senator’s courage in standing up to Trump. While it’s fair to say my opinion of Toomey could hardly have gone down, we should acknowledge that Republicans who stand up to Trump each take on a significant a personal and professional risk.

Actually, correct that. The personal risk and the professional risk are stark opposites of each other right now. Professionally speaking, Republicans who *support* Trump have gotten themselves way, way out on a limb. The nutbag faction is watching donors and job prospects dry up like a rain puddle in the Mojave desert. Republicans who want the Chamber of Commerce to take their phone calls in a year know they need to lose a shoe up Trump’s ass today, or at least keep their head down in the fashion of blog favorite Tom [****] Cotton. On the other hand, *personal* risk is the same story flipped on its head. For Republicans like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, Trump’s frothing mob is their neighbors. It’s the people who sit next to them at church, the dude who cuts their grass, and the guy who walks their dog back home. It’s their kids’ best friends and the reliable primary voters who hoard survival rations and keep binders of printed-out instructions for hand-made ghillie suits and home brewed IEDs.

An atheist city dweller like me has the privilege of seeing all those folks from a distance. I don’t have to care (much) whether some part-time machinist in the exurbs gets over his Trump mania or does something self-destructive and regrettable. Any Republican who stands up to Trump doesn’t have that privilege. They’re going to lose lifelong friends and gain a security detail, and it’s worth keeping that in mind when you call their offices today.

Get To Know Your Senators’ StaffPost + Comments (115)

Busy today. Use this space to check in if you’ve gotten any responses from your Senators or Congresspeople.

Has anyone spoken with staff from Murkowski or Collins’ offices?

Call your representatives open threadPost + Comments (70)

From reader No One of Consequence:

As luck would have it, I was fortunate enough to be ahead of this curve. I called Senators Grassley and Earnst (ETA: on last Friday). I prefaced the reason for my call with the fact that I was proud of both of my senators for not siding on with the Electoral Results Deniers, and that indeed they should not have. I then followed with my belief that the events of Wednesday provided evidence of a clear and present danger to the Country in the person of Donald J Trump, and that he should be lawfully removed from office as quickly as possible. I left my name, address and the fact that I am a born-and-raised Iowan.

My last call to their local offices was to express my belief that their actions and votes in the most recent impeachment trial were unconscionable, and I was disgusted with my Senatorial representation.

After you call, please use this thread to note how the offices reacted, if you got a reaction. CaseyL voices a concern that I have heard a lot:

I don’t know if that is a rule or SOP, but the rule of thumb for years has been, there is no point calling a Representative or a Senator if you’re not in their district/state. Their policies affect all of us, for pity’s sake.

You have to call your own representation because American democracy, refreshingly, works more or less exactly as intended. Representatives represent their district and only their district. The only exception is the few people with enough money to get the Congressperson or Senator’s personal attention, and that does not describe you or me. If you call someone who does not represent you, you will waste your time and annoy their staff.

I’ll post a Max pic when I see more reports in the comments. Yes, that’s extortion. No, you can’t send a screenshot to Bad Legal Takes.

This is what I’m talking aboutPost + Comments (74)

Hi folks, for those who don’t know me, I’m a relic of the blog’s George W. Bush era. Someone unwisely said my name three times and here I am. Apparently the republic is in trouble again and we need you people to light some fires under Congressional asses.

I’ll be honest, calling Congress feels inadequate at a moment like this. Insofar as the Trumpist mob has any plan, they seem to want some combination of the Argentine dirty war, the Handmaid’s Tale, and Rwanda. If a Republican leader knowingly signs onto that then there’s no reaching them with phone calls.

However, I can assure you that not every Republican wants to wear an armband and pick up a machete. You have never Trumpers like the Lincoln Project, Amash, Walsh, etc of course. And yes, while that whole crew could fit in a laundromat, you can tell that in-party disunity stings by how bitterly Trump cultists loathe them. Among Republicans who stayed loyal, you can see that plenty of them put up with Trump exclusively for the judges. Well, the judges are confirmed now. The tax cut’s passed and signed. Since Biden won, Trump’s value for the Party has depreciated faster than a 500-Guilder tulip.

Why do you suppose Republicans are pleading for unity now? They don’t want national unity and they never did. We all know they’d gladly rule with a plurality like they won a landslide. Republicans want “unity” because Republicans are divided. Mitch and his old guard loathe Trump’s drooling maniacs, and Trump loathes Mitch so much that he threw his “$2,000 checks” grenade into the Georgia elections just to spite him. The party is at each other’s throats and eunuchs like Rubio are begging Democrats to help calm things down. Party leadership is desperately scared that party members who want to jettison the Trumpers will find a voice.

So why not help them? Obviously, wavering Republicans will only waver as long as Democrats stand together. I think we can count on that for the moment, but we should encourage it anyway. Call the Democrats who represent you and demand a full and relentless accountability for violent insurgents and those who aid them. However, if you have a Republican Congressperson or Senator(s), then you have an even more important job. Trumper maniacs are certainly mobbing the phone lines right now, but they always do that. What your average GOP office doesn’t hear is voices urging them to do the right thing. Get on the phone with a Republican’s office and urge them to stand up for American democracy, and I promise your call will have an impact.

If you make a call, please note how staff responds to you. I will post a thread later to collect how offices are responding, especially Republicans who might back an impeachment vote. We can use that information to target specific officials for follow-up calls.

If you’ve never called a Congressional office before, here is an old thread telling you how to do it. The only things I would add are:

1. the Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121.
2. DC offices are likely in turmoil across the board. I would suggest using Google to find the number for your Representative / Senator’s local office(s) and call those instead.

What about email? Don’t use email. Pressure groups use online forms to send emails in batches of thousands at a time, and no one ever reads it. Unless you have the private address of someone in the office your email will go straight to the junk bin. Use the phone.

Someone should do somethingPost + Comments (70)