An Open Letter To The Majority Of Congressional Democrats

The norms are gone. Wake the hell up!

The US Capitol on a nice day when Trump supporters didn’t decide to visit.

This post was originally published at Ali’s newsletter Davis Ex Machina.

Hello, Congressional Democrats!

I need to explain something to you, and you may need to sit down:

We are in the middle of a constitutional crisis and a fascist coup. And you are blowing it. If you would like to be re-elected in glory instead of ejected and put into Donald Trump’s next concentration camp, you need to move, and you need to move fast.

1. Understand that Republicans are no longer your colleagues, and they sure as hell aren’t your friends.

Some of you are acting like this is just Helen the new office manager changing the birthday cake schedule around and soon it will all blow over and you can all be friends at the pizza party at the end of the month. You cannot.

The Republicans have been radicalized. There’s a whole crop of them who actually believe Fox News. And a whole bunch of those who crave a king, either because they are insecure dipwads who need a strong Daddy or because they are calculating that they’ll at least get to lap up some of the ketchup that drips off the napkin tucked into Trump’s collar. They are not here to make the country work. They do not believe any rules should apply to them. Rules only apply to YOU, and those rules will keep changing.

Stop voting to confirm Trump lackeys like Marco Rubio just because you used to share a gym and coffee room with him. Marco Rubio crawled back to work for the same man who spent weeks workshopping degrading nicknames for him. Marco Rubio and his ilk would shank you for a dogcatcher appointment. Treat them accordingly.

Any Republican who approaches you to work together, even if it’s ostensibly against Trump, get collateral and lock down consequences before you even start talking.

And no more confirmations, not one, until you get a handle on the Trump administration.

2. Stop making it easy and fun for fascists to take over the government.

I don’t care if you are in the minority. There is plenty that you can do to make this a monumental and very public pain in the ass for them. Every inch, every hour, and every tiny procedural technicality is now of vital importance. Nothing, nothing should be easy for them.

For one thing? Democratic senators, someone needs to object to unanimous consent every single time. Every. Single. Time. Make them take the hours it takes to override your objection.

Insist on a quorum for everything. If they are going to try to gut our government, they don’t get to do so from the golf course or a donor call.

And hey, remember those years when the Republican minority was such a pain in the ass that they essentially got their way all the time even though they shouldn’t have? Do that! At a bare minimum, do that.

They get easy governing back when their party shows some respect for the government again. Every monstrous thing they do needs to be blocked and held up and sent back through committee. Every. Single. Time.

Yes, that means it will be tedious, long hours for you too. PUT THEM IN. The Korean legislature climbed fences to stop a coup. You can miss a few brunches. If you can’t, get the hell out and let someone who cares take the job.

3. Understand that you cannot ride this out.

Trump wants to be a dictator. Listen to Mark Milley and John Kelly when they tell you that Trump is a fascist. If you can’t do that, look at what he and his lackeys are doing as they pull the arms, legs, and wings off the government.

They know that there will be an enormous midterm backlash when they have crashed the economy and people are keeping their eggs in safety deposit boxes. That means that impeachment proceedings against Trump — or JD Vance, after Trump’s own team Article 25s him — could succeed.

And that means they will do absolutely everything they can to stop midterm elections from happening at all. If you think that drumming up a national crisis and imposing martial law is off the table, I appreciate your sweet little baby lamb innocence, but you need to either wake up or step the hell aside so someone who has been paying attention can take the reins.

If we do by some miracle manage to have midterm elections, your constituents will be broke, traumatized and furious. If you have been keeping your head down and quietly letting Trump and his goons pillage the nation, you’re going to be primaried so hard you’ll shift dimensions.

And that’s if Trump and his team don’t simply find a way to purge all the Democrats.

If you keep your head down, there is no scenario in which you are keeping your elected office. So you might as well find your righteous anger, get loud, and get in the fight. If you go down, at least you’ll go down swinging with your self-respect intact.

This piece was inspired by my own congressional rep, a comfortable back-bencher who reliably votes with the Democrats but doesn’t do much else. When I called his office to say that I don’t want Elon Musk’s phosphorescent hands all over the payment system for the entire United States government, the nice young man who answered the phone said, “So you would like the Congressman to voice a strong objection?”

NO. No I do not want him to voice a strong objection. I want him to use every scrap of power at his disposal and every bit of his cunning and tear some shit up. He can make a strong objection if and when we’re back to fighting over the capital gains tax.

If he does not step up to do everything in his power to stop the roll of fascism, I will join my fellow constituents in voting his comfortable ass out, and he will deserve it. May we all be lucky enough that he only loses his job that way.

4. Stop playing by the rules. Stop being polite.

Remember Al Gore nobly handing over an election he knew was stolen after the Brooks Brothers riots? Stop that. The Republicans are counting on you wasting time and energy. They are counting on your thinking that surely they won’t go as far as it looks like they will. They are counting on you continuing to be polite and play by the rules and upholding social norms while they let a flock of harpy tech bros in to burn the whole place down around your ears.

Stop letting it happen. Social and governmental norms will not save you right now. That time has passed. Hit low, hit hard, and keep on hitting. They are literally staging a coup. Some Republicans have literally been calling Democrats demonic pedophiles. Accurately call a fascist a fascist and a racist a racist and let them howl all they want. Oh, and speaking of racists and fascists …

5. Get Elon Musk the hell out of our government.

Musk, a man who is so in thrall to his own pettiness, vanity and insecurities that he hired other people to cheat and level up his video game characters, now has his hands on the tax and banking information of every American who ever got a direct deposit from the United States government.

The man who gamed the Twitter algorithm because his vanity was wounded when Joe Biden got more views and likes than he did has the power to stop Social Security checks and Medicare reimbursements from going out.

This famously mercurial and vindictive man has your banking information and your home address and the power to withhold your paycheck. Get. Him. Out.

Stop playing along with the pretense that DOGE is a real thing, or in any way official. If they want to be real and official, then Musk should have to glower and preen through confirmation hearings and must stop all activities until he does so. (Delay those hearings. Remember from up top?)

Ask in every public format you can why a multibillionaire from a foreign nation has his hands on everyone’s banking information. Shout in front of every camera that you can get to that he has the power to stop people from getting their tax refunds, their social security, their Medicare. And then ask why Republicans want this.

Ask why someone who started his career in the United States working illegally is allowed to be here at all, let alone acting as a second president. Ask why this criminal who came to the United States the wrong way hasn’t been deported when so many other people are. (Yes, you already know why. Make the Republicans say it out loud. Make them defend it.)

Do everything you can to jam up his citizenship. Denaturalize and deport his ass, and if that gets blocked, make every Republican publicly defend the guy who stopped grants for cancer research and is refusing to pay NGOs that provide dialysis treatment.

Ask why someone who couldn’t get top security clearance and violated the clearance he had has his hands all over your constituents’ tax dollars. Ask it loud and long and make Trump answer. Put it all over social media when Trump refuses to answer.

He’s a fascist who is trying to break our nation. Use every legal means you have and then use every dirty trick you can think of. Again, he’s not playing by the rules. You shouldn’t either.

6. Force them to eat each other.

Once you have made Elon Musk radioactive, hang him around Trump’s neck. Throw Musk’s crimes at Donald Trump’s feet, over and over. Did Trump plan this assault on everyone’s personal information or is he too weak and ineffective to stop this bad actor from coming in? WHICH IS IT?

Accurately point out that Musk is making Trump look weak. Talk about the fact that Musk is acting like he’s the real president, like he’s smarter and stronger and better at being president than Trump. Shout that Musk thinks he bought Trump and Trump is acting like he’s bought. If you used to think that Trump was Vladimir Putin’s puppet, but now you see that he’s being manipulated by Elon, put it out there.

Trump can’t handle people hating him and he can’t handle people holding him accountable. Direct the nation’s ire his way until he inevitably throws Musk under the bus. Then make congressional Republicans and conservative news organizations choose which one they’re supporting and do it publicly.

While you’re at it, get every rumor you’re even a little bit sure of to the press. If rumors that Trump’s cronies are planning to Article 25 him as soon as his Cabinet is confirmed have gotten all the way to me, they have definitely gotten to you. Leak like you are made of fishnets.

Vance used to hate Trump. Call out the fact that Vance is just using Trump to get his own shot at the presidency, ideally for two terms plus a partial. We’re done being polite. Say it out loud. Keep saying it publicly until Trump can’t ignore it anymore.

Republicans love to march in lockstep, but you know far better than I do that there are really 17,000 factions that all loathe each other. Bring the bile to the light, amp up the entirely justified paranoia, and all the while make sure to keep telling average Americans to call their Republican representatives if they don’t like what Trump is doing to our nation and their hard-earned benefits.

And then identify the six Republicans who still care about the Republic and start impeachment proceedings already.

It does not matter that Vance is waiting in the wings. The man is a charisma sink. He won’t keep the MAGA masses in thrall the way Trump can. He can try to make it through the Lord of the Flies of establishing a new Republican Party leader on his own. Line up the votes, line up the penalties for chickening out, and impeach that pathetic, treasonous felon.

Oh, do you as a congressional insider have better understanding and better ideas than these? Good. Fucking implement them. Do it now.

You campaigned for this job because you are better than those fascist dipshits, because you actually love and want to serve our democracy.

Now is the time to prove it.

You might throw us a one-time or recurring donation if you’re feeling it too.