Marble Falls       My hair is on fire, and it just keeps burning higher and hotter.  Reading all of the articles about the big bad budget for me is what I think the cool kids call a “hate read.”  Voices on the Republican side against cutting benefits include moderate-ish Congress folks in districts where their margin is thin or that Biden won.  Republican voices on another side want even more cuts to benefit and entitlement programs that have already been decimated over many decades by the tag team of pass the buck federal government and mean-spirited, tight-fisted state governments.  Why don’t they fear the people they are hurting, even as they do everything they can to help the rich?

While I’m grinding my teeth and slapping my head, I remember my time as an organizer for the National Welfare Rights Organization and think of the demonstrations we would be doing now.  I mourn the weaknesses of ACORN now in the US, even as we take steps to rebuild, and the absence of collective protests around the country from the successor organizations and others either unable or unwilling to fill the space.  Maybe that’s just too old school?  Too last century?  Protests can’t be passe, look at the effectiveness of immigration protests and actions around the country still.  Immigrants are at least as hated as welfare recipients and other low-and-moderate income families, and, in fact, in the current climate we have intersectionality in the melding of hate-baiters equating all of them as slackers and worthy of attack.

I get it.  There’s no way to add water and stir and suddenly there’s a national movement of the poor rising up to resist all of these actions that can offset the army of the rich that wants their tax breaks and inequity so much that from the White House on down, they are willing to leave families unhoused, unfed, and dying without health care now and in the future.  I’ll still go to work every day to try and build organizations where lower income families can find voice and built power to fight back, but maybe there’s another way as well.

Looking at the map where there are the most Medicaid recipients, it shouldn’t be a surprise that there are tons in red states and huge percentages in lots of red districts.  The House Speaker’s own district in north Louisiana is in fact one.  Yet, they argue for these cuts without a thought about whether they will be held to account by the people they are hurting on their home turf.  They do so fat in the knowledge that they have created barriers to voting and registration, but also in the age-old conceit that lower income people just don’t vote as much as other income groups.  Reading about constituency groups being targeted or endangered by the mainstream parties there are men, workers, women, ethnic and racial groups and others, but I never read about any party or candidate saying, “let’s make sure all of the lower income men and women get out and vote and turn this thing upside down.”

Hundreds of millions go into get-out-the-vote efforts designed to pull out chronic voters and persuadable voters as they are identified, but not for these voters or potential voters.  Are the Democrats raising hundreds of millions to mobilize the victims of this administration to become an active recipient voting block?  No!  As much as I abhor Elon Musk, I’ll give him credit for putting his money where his mouth is.  Where’s the person or group that’s willing to look at this devastation for lower income families and say, “hey, here’s my $250 million or billion or whatever, let’s organize them into a voting bloc that will change US politics now and for generations.”  Who’s ready to say, “let’s rewrite the electoral playbook?”

This would be GOTV that pays for voting day child care, pays for lost time for workers to vote, runs buses, car pools, and an open account for ride shares.  This would be a registration effort and GOTV effort that starts now to hit the doors using this budget to stir the stew, that runs public meeting, sets up tabling stalls in LMI areas, identifies with voters, does what can be done now, and gets pledges for voting in 2026 and 2028.

We know how to do this work and have proven that if you do the kinds of things – and more as I’ve suggested – you can move the needle to win.  Let’s do what we can now to protest and stop this, but who wants to join us in building a voting bloc of the victims of these policies in order to turn it all around?  I know this argument is crazy and against the odds, but that doesn’t make it wrong.