Once again, I ask: shall the people rule?

Hello everyone.

I will begin with an apology for my 3 month silence. It is not out of a lack of desire to write pieces, but I have been spending the last few months acclimating to a new job, and more recently to a totally different work schedule at that job.

This piece will be short compared to my other articles, but I will have another piece out next week more extensively detailing where we find ourselves in this moment of peril.

The day after Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term as president of the United States in January, I posed a simple question in the article I wrote at the time:

Shall the people rule?

Since then, the Republicans have set about gutting massive portions of the federal government under the false guise of "efficiency." This includes firing food safety regulators at the US Department of Agriculture, firing cancer and other disease researchers at the National Institute of Health, cutting staffing and funding for the National Weather Service right before hurricane season, and don't forget the time they fired nuclear weapons safety officials – only to sheepishly ask them to come back.

This doesn't even scratch the surface of the destruction unleashed by this administration. And this is also to say nothing of the laughably named "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" just passed by the Republicans in Congress and signed by President Donald Trump.

Among other things, this bill stands to kick ~17 million people off of Medicaid by eviscerating federal funding for the program. It also guts food assistance for poor folks and give the country's richest ~0.1% of people a massive tax break. Additionally, it massively increases Immigration and Customs Enforcement's – also known as ICE – budget.

Indeed, the law increases ICE's budget so massively that ICE is now the largest-funded federal law enforcement agency. If you combined all other federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, ICE would still have far more funding than them. The purpose of this is to empower ICE to terrorize immigrant communities even more than it already has. Now more than ever, we need to show solidarity with the people and communities targeted by ICE's thuggery.

I will write more later about this law, but my take is easily distilled: It is a total economic and moral disaster, and must be opposed. And according to the opinion data we have on it, the more people learn about it, the more the public hates it. Indeed, it is the most unpopular law passed by Congress in decades. I am comfortable saying that a lot of Republicans signed their political death warrants by voting for it – and honestly, good riddance.

Instead of simply further ranting, I do feel a need to point out how utterly essential Medicaid is to tens of millions of Americans and the communities in which they live. From hospitals – especially rural ones – to nursing homes to children and disabled adult's healthcare, it's all supported by hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid funding from the federal government. 72 million Americans get healthcare through Medicaid currently.

You might not know somebody on Medicaid, but it's the economic glue that binds together healthcare for millions of poor and disabled Americans. Many hospitals and nursing homes need Medicaid funding to keep their doors open. And this is to say nothing of the fact that millions of American children are insured through the program. And Republicans are now set to take a harsh solvent to that economic glue with gusto.

Hollowing out the funding for Medicaid is nothing short of a disaster, especially – ironically enough – for rural America, the place that forms the core of Donald Trump's political base. This law is going to cause already-struggling hospitals and nursing homes to close. Indeed, the American Hospital Association recently engaged in a frantic lobbying blitz to get Republicans in D.C. to reconsider their gutting of Medicaid, warning of the gut punch it will deliver to hospital finances.

Already, with the bill's passage, we are beginning to see its nasty and mean-spirited effects. A rural hospital in the Nebraska town of Curtis, population about 900, announced its closure the day the bill passed Congress – even before Trump signed it. A statement from the hospital CEO noted:

Unfortunately, the current financial environment, driven by anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid, has made it impossible for us to continue operating all of our services, many of which have faced significant financial challenges for years.

The effects of this atrocious bill are not abstract, and will be more deeply felt as time goes on.

It might be tempting to attribute all of these bad happenings to the singularly cruel figure of Donald Trump. The stupid and insulting law name itself just screams of the sycophancy we've come to expect from the Trump-era Republican party, considering the Trumpian language of its name. But attributing this solely to him lets others off of the hook too easily. The entire Republican Party bears blame for this moment.

Indeed, almost 100% of Congressional Republicans voted for this law. In this moment where masked federal agents disappear immigrants off of the streets and many people are struggling with rising costs for healthcare and housing, the Republicans' top legislative priority is rushing billions more in tax breaks to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos while gutting healthcare for the poor and disabled.

So let's be clear: the entire Republican Party is enabling the rise of fascism in the United States. This is an institutional problem, because the frank fact is that one of America's two major political parties has totally abandoned any pretense of a commitment to democracy.

The good news is that many of us aren't going down without a fight. The No Kings protests from a few weeks ago drew out millions of Americans in defiance of this administration's fascism. This was in contrast to the embarrassing, vainglorious, and poorly-attended military parade Trump wasted tens of millions of taxpayer dollars throwing.

From coast to coast, Americans have demonstrated a spirit of defiance to dictatorship that those grasping for hope can take heart in.

And I would also note recent events here in Wisconsin, where Elon Musk and Donald Trump – alongside their accomplices in the Wisconsin Republican Party – were handed a massive defeat in April. Brad Schimel's double digit defeat by Susan Crawford in our supreme court race was so great that it has caused vast disarray within the ranks of the Wisconsin Republicans – including calls for their party chair to resign in disgrace. Elon Musk spent a staggering $25 million on this race in a cynical attempt to buy Wisconsin's supreme court, and it flopped harder than Trump University.

Indeed, the WisGOP had set Schimel's benchmark in April as him receiving roughly ~60% of the total votes that Trump did in November. That would mean him getting about a million votes - and the thing is, Schimel hit that number.

The problem? Susan Crawford got ~80% of the total votes that Kamala Harris did in November - meaning Crawford got about 1.3 million votes - defeating Schimel in a landslide and blowing up Musk's hopes of buying himself our state supreme court like a SpaceX rocket. As the proverbial debris fell to the ground, WisGOP officials expressed shock that their cynical support of Musk's efforts to buy our supreme court - including bribing voters with $1 million checks - didn't pay off for them.

You simply love to see it. To answer the question that once again frames this article: the people shall rule - if we fight to do so.

So don't give up the ship. Fighting back works. We won't always win, but our choice in this moment is as simple as it is stark: we have to act with energy, or lose by default.

I will have more to say in an article I will be publishing next week about our present crisis, what we can do to fight back, and beyond.

In the meantime, consider subscribing to support my work. I have both free and paid options available, and even free ones help me out a lot. Also, to my paid subscribers in particular - thank you for your continued support of me. I have not forgotten that you make this work possible!