It’s easy to get caught up in doomscrolling. The latest polls. The most recent revelations about how Trump plans to take revenge on his enemies. The plan to stuff the White House with lawyers who will do as they are told. The intent to replace civil servants with Trump loyalists who will destroy the “deep state”. The latest courtroom antics.
But too much exposure to the stress of the political moment (not to mention the geopolitical moment!) can produce “learned helplessness,” a psychological state in which we come to believe that we are unable to control or change a situation, even when the opportunities for change become available.
And elections are nothing but opportunities for change. We saw that in Tuesday’s elections - across the country, voters recognized that the Republican Party is a threat to reproductive rights, and the success of the Democrats was in large measure due to the voter turnout that the issue generated. We have hammer away on this issue, as it will surely still resonate in one year’s time.
We also need an unrelenting focus on what MAGA and Trumpism have done to the country - and what they will bring to us if it remains unchecked. We can start by looking at the House and the antics of the Republican leadership - and the milquetoasts like Tom Kean Jr who are enabling an extreme right wing agenda to careen into a government shutdown, and corrode our democracy.
We knew MAGA Mike Johnson would be a tool of Trump. This is the man who masterminded the effort to overturn the 2020 election result, and who voted against certification of the result; who has advocated repeatedly for anti-abortion legislation; who is virulently homophobic, . Kean, and the 17 other UnRepresentatives from districts Biden carried in 2020, helped bring Johnson from back bench obscurity to second in line for the Presidency. Now, those self-proclaimed “moderates” will have to live with their decision - and with the votes they will be forced to make under a Johnson Speakership.
Roll the clock back to June, when Kean Jr called the legislation that raised the debt ceiling “a good bipartisan deal for America.” Since then, he and his GOP colleagues have done nothing to enact the twelve appropriations Bills necessary to support the spending agreed to under that compromise. Instead, after a summer of paralysis, we were subjected to the clown show that resulted in the election of Johnson.
The first Bill passed under that new House leadership, H.R. 4394, ignored the spending levels agreed in that “good bipartisan deal.” Instead, it imposed new cuts, including $5.58 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act - the most significant environmental legislation of the past 50 years.
And now, $18BN in aid to Israel is to be “paid for” by enabling tax avoidance by high income individuals - a fatuous example of linking poison pill politics to the serious demands of policy and diplomacy.
There is more. House Republicans recently approved legislation that would slash nearly 40 percent of the budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and will also target funding aimed at helping underserved communities combat climate change and pollution.
And now, Johnson spent last week trying and failing to push through two individual spending bills that collapsed for lack of support within his own party - one of them touted as a triumph by Kean in his most recent “Tuesdays with Tom” video, before he was aware of its collapse.
We are now FIVE DAYS away from a government shutdown, engineered entirely by Republicans who cherish performance art above policy making.
Truly, the inmates are running the asylum. And Congressman Thomas Kean Jr cannot claim to be a moderate while acting as a fellow traveler with MAGA madness.
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