is Retake Our Democracy’s campaign to resist the Trump Agenda. Perhaps the single most important thing you can do to resist Trump’s regime (and it is quickly becoming a Monarchic Regime) is something you can do from home and you can do it every single day.
There is mounting evidence of GOP legislators becoming rattled, particularly with Trumps penchant of Executive Orders. One of our supporters sent us a summary of a meeting that a Mennonite Pastor from Pennsylvania provided about his visit with Sen. Pat Toomey. It provides compelling evidence of the power of the resistance. In short, Toomey and others are reported to be seriously rattled and questioning Trump’s ‘monarchic’ tendencies and his overuse of the Executive Order. Click here for the full summary.
So if some forms of pressure could be rattling some nerves, what should we do? Reach out to your friends and family who live in other parts of our state and nation. Share with them the importance of becoming active and help them see how easy it can be. For example SwingLeft is a cool little app through which you can plug in any zip code and it will show you the boundaries for a currently red-held US House Swing District nearby Click here to access this app.
Roxanne and I plugged in our zip code and found Colorado House District 3 as a swing district nearby. It includes Durango. You may know someone who lives elsewhere in this district, and you definitely know family, friends, and former colleagues all over the country. The real power in this tool is that all of us know people across the nation.
So here is what you do: Make a list of a dozen folks you know elsewhere who are just as affronted by this crisis as you are. And I mean take out your laptop or a notebook, create a list of names, phone numbers and zip codes, and call 3-4 of these folks every day until you have worked through the list. In every call, you commiserate, you listen, you talk about what you are doing here in NM, you share the Swing Left tool. Because you’ve already done a search on their zip code, you tell them about the district near them that could swing Democratic in 2018, and you ask them to get started.
If they live in a state with a GOP Senator and/or in a House District with a GOP Rep, you ask them to make a habit of calling their GOP representatives every single day voicing their opposition to whatever this regime is doing at the time: Supreme Court, Sessions nomination, Executive Orders, etc. Here is a link to a site with contact information for every US Senator and member of the House.
As important as their calling their representatives, it is important that they also send post cards. The word is that voice mails left are not being reviewed because of the sheer volume. This does not mean that these calls don’t matter as the mere fact that their phones are jammed makes an impression: this has never happened before. But there are a growing number of advocacy groups calling for people to begin sending post cards to their Senator or House representatives home offices, i.e. not to Washington, D.C. where mail is subject to security scrutiny and the volume of mail being received is overwhelming, causing delays in receipt.
When you write a post card, email or letter to your Senator or US House Rep describe one or two specific policies where you are concerned: dismantling ACA, eliminating regulations that protect our climate, refugee bans, deportation, attacks on abortion. There are plenty to choose from, but focus on one or two.
In sum, here is the plan:
- Retake Our Democracy supporters begin calling to their friends living in states with GOP representatives in Washington;
- Get your friends active, provide them with Swingleft, and encourage them to begin calling, sending post cards;
- Get your friends to reach out to others, the pyramid scam works in politics: you call 5 friends who get active; they each call 5; and those 25 call five and you have 125 activists generated by our five calls.
- Encourage your friends to host an Open House Action Party: invite friends, share conversations about the things that are most bothering them and then begin writing post cards to the local office of their Senator or US Rep.
- Encourage your friends to go to the Retake Our Democracy website, hunt down the blue follow button on the lower right side of the home page, click the blue follow button and select: follow by email.