By Rob Okun
Lost amidst the firehose of lies uttered by Donald Trump at his address before Congress March 4, was a New Mexico Democratic congresswoman’s succinct description of the crisis facing the United States: Rep. Melanie Stansbury held a small sign that said, “This Is Not Normal” as Mr. Trump greeted lawmakers upon entering the chamber. That Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden ripped the sign from Ms. Stansbury’s hands was not surprising. What is remarkable was that more Democrats didn’t highlight Rep. Stansbury’s message.
Only Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) challenged the president, shouting, “You do not have the mandate to cut Medicaid…” For his efforts, he was censured. Shamefully, 10 Democrats voted with the Republicans. Since 2017, Mr. Green has been sounding the alarm that Donald Trump is not normal, including introducing articles of impeachment. Immediately following the censure vote, progressive colleagues surrounded Mr. Green in the well of the House and sang “We Shall Overcome.”
While there are numerous Democratic leaders, including many governors and attorneys general, standing up to Trump, ultimately, it is we the people who hold the future of democracy in our hands.
Bishop William Barber II underscored that point during an interview on Democracy Now on March 7. Barber, president of Repairers of the Breach and national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, is founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School.
He predicted that it won’t be long before the resistance movement against Trump’s dangerous agenda will grow to include low-wage white workers, a third of whom live in the South.
On February 25, House Republicans narrowly adopted a budget proposal to cut some $2 trillion in spending over the next 10 years, in large part to fund Trump’s tax cuts. An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the proposed budget would require massive cuts to Medicaid.
According to Elon Musk, purportedly the world’s richest man, the government will go bankrupt without his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, taking a chain saw to slice a trillion dollars from the deficit. Musk drew bipartisan ire when he described Social Security as “a Ponzi scheme.”
“If an unelected technocrat can delete the financial commitments of a government established for the people and by the people—and we don’t say anything—we betray our moral commitments to liberty,” Bishop Barber told the protesters.
The Republican tax plan calls for cutting around $880 billion from Medicaid over 10 years, callously ignoring the 72 million people enrolled in the program, and the seven million in the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Bishop Barber has the receipts. Pointing to a new study, “The High Moral Stakes: Our Budget, Our Future,” that Repairers of the Breach cowrote with the Institute for Policy Studies and others, he said they uncovered that “about 39% of the enrollees in Medicaid are white, 18% are Black, 29% are Latino, 4.7% are Asian…”
That’s right—nearly 40 percent of everyone on Medicaid is white. When Medicaid recipients absorb the reality of the eviscerating cuts, the burgeoning resistance movement taking on the Trump-Musk administration will likely see a significant uptick in white supporters.
The Ash Wednesday protest was just the first step in nonviolent civil disobedience actions, Bishop Barber announced. The clergy told the Trump White House that what they were doing was “wrong” … “unconstitutional”… and “immoral”… adding, “We abdicate our own moral capacity if we walk away from this moment. And we’re not going to walk away from this moment,” Barber said. “We will bring the people and the clergy in diverse form—every race, creed, color, because the times require that we do this.”
Trump and Musk are attempting “to totally… tear apart not just this democracy, but the hope and the health of this country,” Bishop Barber warned. “The only way a king becomes a king is if you bow. And we cannot bow. Bowing is not in our DNA. We have to stand in this moment,” he said. “[W]e will see more and more and more intensification and emboldening and agitation, but it will be done from the deepest depths of our nonviolent, love and justice traditions.”
One question looms large: Who else will join them?
Rob Okun (robokun50@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is editor emeritus of Voice Male, a magazine chronicling the antisexist men’s movement.
