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'Opposition will matter down the line' [1]
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Date: 2025-02-10
By BERRY CRAIG
Petra Prag Crutchfield had a special reason to join a group of progressive activists who recently delivered to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s Paducah, Ky., office a list of eight questions challenging his support for President Donald Trump and calling on him to vote against Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee for Office of Management and Budget director.
“I'm from Germany,” she explained. “I did not live during the bad, the dark times, but people I know lived through it, and we cannot have that here. So I'm here protesting for our rights.”
The Senate approved Vought, on a party line vote, 53 to 47. A fierce Trump loyalist, Vought was a principal author of Project 2025, the rightwing blueprint for a second Trump term.
Four Rivers Indivisible sponsored the Paducah gathering. It’s a local branch of the national Indivisible organization, which had urged local groups like Rivers to send members to their senators’ field offices in all 50 states prior to the Vought vote.
“We are facing a crisis, and we need all Members of Congress to fight back,” said a message on the Four Rivers Indivisible Facebook page inviting members and supporters to meet outside the city's 1937 red brick Federal Building. “Join your friends and neighbors in telling Senator McConnell that we demand he vote No on Russell Vought’s nomination as OMB Director, and to stop the federal funding freezes as well as Elon Musk’s clearly illegal intrusion into our governmental systems of funding and sensitive personal data.”
Twenty-six people gathered on the building steps and sidewalk as a raw wind gusted off the nearby Ohio River, making the overcast, mid-40 degree day seem colder.
Paducah is the seat of McCracken County in deepest western Kentucky. The region is arguably the reddest section of one of the country’s reddest Republican Red states.
Trump won Kentucky in a blowout in the region and the state in 2024. So did McConnell in 2020. Too, Trump Republicans represent every western Kentucky county in the state House and Senate; most county officials are MAGA GOP loyalists.
“But I’m getting membership requests constantly,” said Leslie McColgin. She and Karla Johnston are co-leader of the Four Rivers group.
Neither McConnell nor his office staffer were in the office. McColgin entered the building with the questions on a sheet of paper. After slipping the paper under the door of the senator's basement office, she came back out and read the questions to the crowd.
While the main goal of the gathering was to coax McConnell into a “no” vote on Vought, question seven focused on Elon Musk, head of Trump’s controversial Department of Government Efficiency.
“We’ve got a lot of Musk signs, and I haven’t talked much about Musk,” McColgin said. “Yeah!” somebody yelled. “No one voted for Elon Musk!” another listener shouted.
So she read: “Why haven’t you stood up to Trump’s allowing Elon Musk to interfere without oversight while he meddles in Treasury and other agencies such as USAID?”
Said McColgin: “There are many experts that fear they could actually break the payment system in the Treasury because they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re sending 19 to 24-year-olds that think they know something, but they don’t know” the complexity of the department’s computer systems.
Question eight asked, "Will you vote NO on Russell Vought's confirmation for OMB Director and do your job of proper oversight?” The query was followed by the group’s “demand that you oppose his confirmation” based on Vought’s “role in supporting this devastating funding freeze that has thrown the lives and jobs of so many Americans into chaos.”
After going over the questions, she urged everybody present to keep calling McConnell’s office in Washington and field offices in Paducah and other cities in Kentucky. “If you can’t get through on this one, call another one.”
She pleaded, “Call every day this week and stick to the issue of ‘say no on Vought, stop the Freeze, and send Elon Musk out of the treasury department.’”
Nora Clifton echoed McColgin. She chided “Democrats, independents, and progressive people” for not phoning enough. “We have failed in our duty, and I know none of us want to fail in our duty. I’m asking you, please pick up the phone and call.”
Throughout the hour-long rally, motorists honked, yelled and flashed thumbs-up signs of support.
Karen Selstad of Murray supplied signs, some printed, others homemade. Their messages ranged from “ELON MUSK DOESN’T RUN THE COUNTRY – WE DO” and “NO ONE VOTED FOR ELON MUSK” to “TRUMP & MUSK WANT TO RAID THE TREASURY” and “VOUGHT NO!”
The meetup included Leah Eubanks and Amanda Groves, two Christian Church pastors. “I’m here to speak and advocate for the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed,” said Eubanks. “I am here in the spirit of Bishop Marian Budde,” said Groves.
Others in the crowd included longtime union activist Jerry Sykes. “What brings me out here this morning?” asked the United Auto Workers retiree. “It’s what’s going on in our country. There is no way to get out of this unless we stand up as Americans and do the right thing and protect our country.”
He went after Elon Musk, “a billionaire – a kazillionaire” who strolled into “Washington D.C. for only one reason and we know what it is – to make himself more powerful than he already is. He wants to take away all of our rights, destroy our education system, and now he’s even into our Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. I’m disgusted at what’s going on in our county.”
Mary Byrne said she had been feeling helpless until she heard about the gathering. She was glad she "found out that there was at least somebody doing something.”
She joined in the massive Women’s March against Trump on Jan. 21, 2021, in Washington. So did Marcia Berenter. But she said she heard on TV that “they are not recommending huge protests right now because Trump has threatened to put the military out and it’s not safe. It’s much more effective to do small group activities where you are talking to the people who vote in Congress.”
Retired Marine Tim Cook spoke out against “the implementation of Project 2025 and Elon Musk’s takeover of our government institutions.”
McColgin was pleased with the turnout. “They said they wanted us to have five to 15 because it wasn’t supposed to be a protest. It was supposed to be a visit to your senator’s office to tell them your concerns.”
But Indivisible and MoveOn organized the big protest rally at the Treasury building last week that brought out several Democratic lawmakers.
“This is a long process, we must be patient and steadfast,” McColgin said in an email to rally the faithful. “ Too often the error is looking at the short term results and not the long term. Looking too narrowly at the strategy and not the big picture.
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