Devos might have gotten confirmed, and that’s BAD, but don’t think your efforts have not been worth it. Because of your actions:
- Devos confirmation got pushed back as much as possible
- two GOP senators defected
- Mike Pence had to be the tie-breaker, something that’s has NOT happened for a cabinet confirmation and the Trump Tower is already whining about it
While it is likely all other cabinet nominees will be confirmed, because of protests and calls from the public and actions taken by senate democrats, these confirmation hearings have been taking longer than previous cabinet confirmations. And just because they’ve been confirmed, the fight does not stop.
Put your senators who voted for DeVos on notice and that they’ll pay for their vote in 2018, thank those who voted against her. To keep fighting Devos, pay attention to your local school board. They are your best defense against her and many municipalities will be voting for a new school board this year. Make sure you vote then, or even consider running. If you know someone qualified to run, convince them to run. We all know someone who is a teacher or an educator, and I bet that you or someone you know in the education sector is infinitely more qualified than Devos. Attend school board meetings as well.
Vote for a democratic governor and state legislature.
If there’s some silver lining, maybe now we will continue pay attention to public education outside of an election year, and make it hard for Devos to push any of her agenda.
Here’s the other postmortem analysis I haven’t really seen:
Clearly the two senators who defected were allowed to do so. Others, apparently (haven’t verified this source, who is this? bio says “journalist”) wanted to, but “were not allowed”.
ANYWAY– clearly, these types of things are all worked out in advance behind closed doors, but the Rs who all promised to vote “yes” had not taken into account how incredibly, unprecedentedly mobilized and upset their constituents would be. I saw memes on Facebook, I heard chatter from apolitical randos in my daily life– people all over are mad about DeVos. And they let their senators know. And their senators ignored them, and dismissed them, and came up with flimsy excuses, and deflected, and in general pretended nothing out of the ordinary was going on.
But those senators are not on Trump’s level of delusional, here. They know that these aren’t paid protestors. They don’t truly believe that there will be no consequences for this. They sure hope that as the rest of the plan proceeds, they’ll be able to do what they originally intended– scrape scandal off the bottoms of their shoes after they’ve walked over Trump’s corpse, is the pretty obvious plan– but they’re definitely starting to worry that the scandal’s not going to come off. Some of them are going to lose their seats, and they’re starting to realize that.
We have to keep the pressure up. We have to do this for the rest of the Cabinet nominees getting shoved through this week.
Our explicit goal has to be to convince the Rs that their plan of using Trump and discarding him is not going to proceed in the way they’d planned. He’s going to destroy them on the way down. Every minute he’s in power stirring up shit and destroying things, they’re going to pay for.
That has to be the end goal. That has to be the long game. We can’t let anything slide. We have to remember all of this. I know it’s different for me in a blue state; I have to keep pressure on my reps to let them know to keep pressure on. I have to keep my state legislature strong to pick up Federal slack as crucial programs get defunded– I live in a powerful, rich blue state. It’s going to be different for most people.
This is a defeat, but it wasn’t pointless. We gained a lot. We don’t know what we gained, yet, but we know we did.
(via torrilin)
