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We Need to Think About What We Do When the Court Cases End [1]

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Date: 2025-02-16

I have been following the numerous Trump resistance cases in various courts with interest. They’ve been an interesting watch and a fun ride so far to be sure. But there should be no mistake: they are mostly doomed in the end — and in the context of those cases, the end is coming sooner than you think. Procedurally and substantively there is precious little there with the legal resistance. There may be some traction with refusing to make disbursements mandated by Congress, but the vast majority of the spending at issue is discretionary contracting choices by the prior executive branch team, not things that were specifically funded by Congress.

So the question is what do we do the day the court resistance is largely over. Again, do NOT put any faith in blocking anything that Trump / DOGE are doing in the courts. The bottom line is that the executive has vast authority to make these decisions and can make them. Further, because almost all legal objections that hold a some promise (very little honestly) are statutory and not Constitutional and also relate to spending, the GOP has the ability to very easily override any problems with these actions and grant Trump/Musk their entire wish-list without any ability for the Dems to stop it. Because it’s all related to taxing and spending, they can just include it in their annual Reconciliation budget bill which cannot be filibustered. In other words, they can give access to anyone Trump wants for budget analysis, taxing and spending purposes, cut any program Trump/Musk wants cut and do anything else that can be reasonably construed as relating to taxing and/or spending — which encompasses just about the entire stack of case against them at this point.

So what I am thinking about and working on now is what direction the resistance should take. If legal cases relating to taxing, spending and agency/data access won’t be of much help soon, we need to figure out where to go next. We cannot change the composition of Congress until January 2027, we cannot rely on Scotus coming to the rescue and those within the federal government at senior levels who support progressive values are being removed as fast as they can do it.

So we need to create a sandbox with new ideas on how to resist. Peacefully and patriotically. I have been struggling to come up with new ideas. I have found only one, I’m not even sure it’s half-decent. I hope others have some better ones to add to the pile:

A Week Without Federal Government Workers (or just Without Government Workers) . A massive sickout. Folks just don’t show up. The country can learn first-hand what it is like when there is no government to help out. Health and emergency services excluded, obviously. ????

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2025/2/16/2304142/-We-Need-to-Think-About-What-We-Do-When-the-Court-Cases-End

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