The Shameful, the Bogus, the Inept

The nearly 9 million peaceful No Kings demonstrators across the nation this month proved that high-minded anti-conservative populism is booming in America. As far as I can tell, non-violence reigned supreme. Not a single arrest was reported at any of the hundreds of demonstrations in all 50 states. Populist loathing of the Trump administration’s brutal and indiscriminate attacks against Latinos, many of them children, some of them American citizens, along with its heavy-handed dismantling of the federal government, was raucously expressed with constitutional savvy and graceful if skewering humor.

As heartening a success as those protests were, they also point to a frustrating and unhappy truth. The national leadership of the Democratic Party appears to have done almost nothing to incorporate the energy and intelligence of its populist base, many members of which feel so estranged from the party that they refrain from voting as a gesture of protest. The Republican Party, of course, has been energized and even recreated in the image and likeness of the often-violent populism of the MAGA movement, with its racist, misogynist, white supremacist overtones undergirding its government-hating Heritage Foundation policy agenda, known as Project 2025.

There are of course many local Democratic heroes around the country who are standing up against the MAGA Trump Republican Party. And New Mexico’s congressional delegation is full of them — Senators Ben Ray Lujan and Martin Heinrich, and Representatives Teresa Leger Fernandez, Melanie Stansbury and Gabe Vasquez.  All of them make me proud to call myself a New Mexican. They all have been critical of the Republican abandonment of climate change regulations. They all are vehement about protecting the nation’s social safety net and immigrant civil rights. They’ve all opposed spending cuts and freezes in education funding and how they impact local communities. They’ve fought against the potential catastrophe of suspending food stamp subsidies. And they have opposed attacks on various national environmental and healthcare initiatives.

As a solidly blue state, local Democratic leadership has aggressively opposed MAGA, Trump and Project 25 extremism. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, Democrat legislators and Attorney General Raul Torrez have all stood up against defunding food stamps, cuts to Medicaid and Republican policies that harm children and families.

While populism has put the conservatives in high gear, the nondescript centrism leftover from the Clinton and Carter legacies has rendered the Democratic Party an empty shell of its former self — all but lifeless and often ridiculously inept when it comes to winning national elections. Despite the New York Times editorial last weekend extolling the pragmatic virtues of centrism and its neutering of liberalism in America, the middle of the road is not an enlightened or mature form of the counterculture which still dominates the thinking of tens of millions of left-of-center populist voters who the Democrats need to inspire. Centrism is a door slamming shut on the still vibrant popularity of New Deal and Great Society policies and philosophies that extoll public service and compassionate programs that have given low-to-moderate income Americans a fighting chance in our country since the conservative-stimulated Great Depression.

Not only has the Democratic Party’s virtually invisible national leadership failed to welcome any infusion of vigor and policy conviction from No Kings demonstrations, it also failed miserably to incorporate the explosion of good ideas and populist fervor of the Occupy Movement, a global uprising that started in New York City in 2011 and spread to nearly a thousand cities in every part of the globe. Occupy’s highly popular message of social and economic justice fueled by its attack on the aristocratic rich, on corporate corruption and on the long history of flagrant environmental pollution by the giants of big business has been swept away by Democratic Party centrist leaders who apparently still think they can gain votes by trying to look like Rockefeller Republicans.

And now Democratic voters are left with a party that has no visible agenda to compete against the cruelties of the Republican Project 2025 that is methodically undermining what’s left of the New Deal. Democratic leaders are not only failing their feminist, working class and ethic base, but they’ve all but folded in the face of the Trumpian juggernaut. What’s left is a political party that appears to be little better than sinking barge with no inspiring message, no articulated alternative policy agenda, and a national fundraising campaign of barraging voters with countless obnoxious and ludicrous asks almost every single moment of every single day.

The Democrat leadership has sunk so low they’re telling tall tales about the Constitution, and incessantly begging for money from voters using bogus scare tactics and outright deceptions, hoping to squeeze out a few pennies more from the disgusted and exhausted multitude. They’ve even gone so far as to raise money by giving the impression that they can actually help remove the president from office by their donations alone.

Short of presidential term limits or voting a sitting president out of office in a formal election, there are only two legal ways I know of to relieve a president of the powers of his office. They are summed up in Article I, Sections 2 and 3 of the Constitution regarding impeachment in the House and a trial in the Senate, and in the 25^th and the 14^th Amendments. Inciting public outcry is virtually useless when it comes to removing a president from office. Raising money by building high hopes on the hoax of public outcry is shameful.

President Trump has already been impeached twice in 2020 and 2021, the first on grounds of obstructing Congress, the second alleging he incited an insurrection after the 2020 election, an act forbidden by the 14^th Amendment. Both impeachments failed in the Senate which voted along party lines to dismiss them.

The 25^th Amendment, ratified in 1967, is a totally in-house affair. It is next to impossible to activate it by popular demand. No amount of fundraising will ever change that. It can only be applied when a president is unable to perform the duties of his office. The president himself can temporarily step aside from his duties for health or other reasons, or the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet can declare the president incompetent and send their declaration to the president pro tempore of the Senate and to the speaker of the house. If the president contests the declarations, a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress are needed to keep the president out of office. And I can’t imagine any public outcry that would pressure Vice President Vance and the Trump Cabinet into invoking the 25^th.

But still the Democratic fundraising machine inundates us daily with desperate pleas for money based on bogus hopes. And from what I can tell, most Democrats are sick of it. For many of us such a hoax gives a clear picture of how oblivious and bankrupt the leadership of the Democratic Party has become. Heaven help us if the party can’t come up with anything better to do than that in trying to win next year’s mid-term election.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it