**GOOD NEWS**
Before we get started on the news… get excited. There’s talks of a BIG nationwide Indivisible action coming in early April. So watch this space!
Headline of the week from Political Wire: DOGE Struggles With Math!!
Indivisible quote of the week: “Sometimes I hear things from these folks that makes me wonder if they’ve ever met a regular person.” 🤣
Now to the much needed good news.
– U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, D.C. said President Donald Trump’s firing of a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board was illegal and ordered that she be reinstated to her post. “An American President is not a king — not even an ‘elected’ one — and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like [Wilcox] is not absolute, but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances, as are present here.”
– The Supreme Court denied the Trump administration’s request to block a lower court order on foreign aid funding. The move clears the way for the State Department and USAID to restart nearly $2 billion in payments that had been halted for weeks. 🎉
– Republican lawmakers said President Trump’s call for Congress to “get rid of” the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which provided $52 billion for the domestic semiconductor manufacturing industry, is dead on arrival on Capitol Hill. (Are our Republicans congresspeople finally starting to stiffen their spines??)
– Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue same-sex couples’ marriage licenses, loses her appeal at the Sixth Circuit of a lawsuit she lost at trial that was brought by same-sex couples whose constitutional right to marry she violated.
– A judge permanently blocked Arizona’s abortion ban. This is a direct result of voters passing the state’s constitutional amendment to protect abortion access in November.
– Elon Musk. Oh, Elon. There’s a reason he has been at the center of Indivisible’s actions from day one. He is the weak link in the MAGA chain. He’s DEEPLY unpopular. Nothing looks worse than the richest man in the world coming after your Social Security check, or your Headstart, or your Meals on Wheels. And they know this, but were too high with glee on his slashing spree to do anything about it.
The White House has represented that DOGE is run by acting administrator Amy Gleason, rather than by Musk. However, during his address before a joint session of Congress Tuesday, Trump clearly identified Musk as the person running DOGE. Less than an hour after Trump finished his joint address to Congress, lawyers representing a group of nonprofits and unions that are challenging the legality of the DOGE cited his words as evidence in a lawsuit challenging Elon Musk’s role in the administration’s drastic cuts to federal spending, workers and services. They argue that more information is “urgently needed to ascertain the nature of the budget-slashing group.”
Then on Thursday, after weeks of pressure from groups like Indivisible and mounting mid-steps and lawsuits, President Trump delivered a message to his Cabinet: You’re in charge of your departments, not Elon Musk. He clarified that Musk is empowered to make recommendations to the departments but not to issue unilateral decisions on staffing and policy. The meeting followed a series of mass firings and threats to government workers from the billionaire Tesla founder that created broad uncertainty across the federal government and its workforce. DOGE’s actions have faced ferocious resistance in court and criticism from Democratic lawmakers and even some Republicans. According to Trump’s new guidance, DOGE and its staff should play an advisory role — but Cabinet secretaries should make final decisions on personnel, policy and the pacing of implementation.
Time will tell if their actions match their words.
All of our phone calls, emails, and actions ARE paying off. We know sometimes it doesn’t feel like it in the daily grind, but the louder our united voices become, the harder we are to ignore! To quote Indivisible’s co-founder Leah Greenberg, we need to reclaim the understanding that our side is the majority. “Our ideas are popular. Our policies are popular. Their policies are incredibly unpopular when actually put into action!” Republicans and Democrats alike are feeling the pressure, and they’re in turn putting that pressure on Trump. And THAT is our end game.
Indivisible is not Sisyphus. We MOVE things!
