Tell our Members of Congress and Biden: Stand Fast Against Political Blackmail

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Call Script

My name is __________. I am a constituent, and my zip code is _______. I am a member of Indivisible SF.

We fully support your insistence on a "clean" Continuing Resolution without domestic-spending cuts or culture war poison pills that Republicans are unable to enact through the normal democratic legislative process. Do not give in to Republican government-shutdown blackmail—even if it means a government shutdown. America does not surrender to violent terrorists, and we must not surrender to political terrorists.

Background

Since Republican obstructionism has blocked every single 2024 appropriation bill, large portions of our government will run out of funding and be forced to shut down on the morning of Sunday, October 1—unless a Continuing Resolution (CR) is passed by midnight September 30. But MAGA Republicans in the so-called Freedom Caucus have declared they will block a CR unless it includes poisonous policy provisions they have been unable to enact using democratic legislative procedures.

They call themselves the Freedom Caucus. They have online Twitter accounts and webpages where they declaim and decry and fulminate, but nowhere do they have any clear statement of what they believe in, what they want, or what the word "freedom" means to them. Their actions and policies, however, make clear that for them "freedom" means:

Freedom for corporations to profit from exploiting their workers, polluting the environment, defrauding their customers, misleading the public, and evading their fair share of taxes.
Freedom for Congress to further enrich the already obscenely wealthy while further slashing the safety net that barely sustains those at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
Freedom for businesses and individuals to abuse, persecute, and discriminate against others on the basis of race, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, age, disability, and family status.
Freedom for religious fundamentalists to use state power to impose their dogmas on women by denying them bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.
Freedom for politically powerful politicians to restrict voting rights and gerrymander districts so that they can choose their voters rather than allowing voters to freely elect representatives of their choice.

Your freedoms are, of course, nowhere on their list of priorities, and some of your freedoms—reproductive rights and transgender rights, to name a couple—are actively opposed by them.

Only a portion of the Republican members of the House belong to the MAGA “Freedom Caucus”—they are a small minority of the House. But they wield outsized power because House Republicans voluntarily submit themselves to the Hastert Rule. Under the Hastert Rule, if the Speaker of the House is a Republican, he (it's always a “he”), will not allow the House to vote on a bill, resolution, or motion unless a majority of the House Republican caucus supports it. This allows a minority of House members to block legislation unless their demands are met. (In a sense, it is similar to the Senate filibuster.)

In this case, if just 5 GOP members of the House defy the Hastert Rule by voting with Democrats, together they can pass a CR and/or the appropriation bills. For example, if the Senate were to pass a clean CR and send it to the House for ratification, it would take only 5 GOP votes to first force McCarthy to bring it to the floor for a vote and then to pass it. But backed by Fox News and the MAGA propaganda machine, the “Freedom” Caucus uses intimidation as its main weapon. Until at least five Republican representatives summon the courage to stand up to MAGA intimidation, the “Freedom” Caucus will remain free to sabotage and subvert our democracy.

House Democrats do not have a Hastert Rule. Some Democrats regularly vote against their Party. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) for example, a conservative corporate Democrat, regularly votes with Republicans to restrict women's reproductive rights. Yet when a progressive woman challenged him in the 2022 Democratic primary, then-Speaker Pelosi stepped in to tilt the scales in his favor, allowing him to eke out a narrow 800-vote victory so that he could continue to vote against Democratic values.

The MAGA extremists issued their blackmail demands on August 21st:

Slash domestic safety-net and human-investment spending; increase defense/police/border spending. This means violating the Biden-McCarthy debt-ceiling bill passed last June that mandated a small reduction in domestic spending and a 1 percent increase in defense spending. For many years, domestic and defense outlays were equally balanced, but now defense is at $886 billion compared to only $740 billion for domestic. The MAGA-ites insist on increasing that disparity.
- Cutting housing subsidies for the poor by 33%
- Forcing 1,000,000 women & children to wait for SNAP nutrition benefits (for how long?)
- Reducing next winter's home-heating subsidy for the poor by 70%
- Significantly cutting Social Security administration
Demonize and persecute immigrants of color by enacting into law the House-passed Secure the Border Act of 2023, which would restore and worsen Trump immigration policies. Among other things, this would include the following actions:
- Restarting border wall construction
- Defunding NGOs that provide services to migrants
- Significantly limiting asylum in the US
- Rolling back safeguards for migrant children
- Narrowing the Executive Branch parole powers (individual case-by-case asylum)
In the Freedom Caucus's own words: "End the Left's cancerous woke policies in the Pentagon." By which they mean imposing far-right culture war policies on the U.S. military:
- Rescinding the military's abortion and reproductive care policy
- Rescinding the military's diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and training
- Rescinding the military's policies protecting transgender rights
- Rescinding the military's policies mandating that personnel be vaccinated against Covid
In the Freedom Caucus's own words: "Address the unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI to focus them on prosecuting real criminals instead of conducting political witch hunts and targeting law-abiding citizens." By which they mean blocking continued federal prosecution of crimes by Trump, election sabotagers, and insurrectionists by defunding and gutting portions of the Dept. of Justice.
In the Freedom Caucus's own words: "Oppose any blank check for Ukraine in any supplemental appropriations bill." By which they mean cease supporting Ukraine's fight for survival and instead support Russian dictator Putin's war of aggression.

Some terminology that may appear in CR/shutdown news stories:

Continuing Resolution (CR). Prevents government shutdown by allowing federal agencies to continue spending money as if the 2023 budget were still in effect.
Clean. A CR or other law that contains no controversial extraneous provisions ("poison pills") that are tacked on to the CR/bill because the authors cannot get them passed through the normal process.
Omnibus or Minibus. An omnibus appropriation bill combines all twelve of the annual appropriation bills into a single humongous piece of last-minute legislation that is crafted in secret by party leaders and then rammed down the throat of Congress on a take-it-or-leave-it basis with no (or very limited) amendments or time for members to actually read it. A minibus is a combination of two or more appropriation bills, but not all of them, that is passed the same way as the omnibus.

Defense spending. As commonly used, this is as much a political term as a technical one. When politicians want to make the defense share of our tax dollars sound smaller than it really is, they define "defense" as describing just the Dept. of Defense ("Pentagon," "DoD," or "Military") budget. An accurate definition of defense spending or National Security Budget (the term we try to use) includes these categories:

DoD (Pentagon) budget
Military construction
Veterans Affairs budget
Nuclear Weapons development/production (in the DoE budget)
Foreign military assistance programs (in the State Dept. budget)
National defense-related portions of Homeland Security budget
Some or all of the secret "dark budget" for CIA, NSA, DIA, etc.

In some years, it also includes supplemental appropriations for things like aid to Ukraine or the Overseas Contingency Operations/Global War on Terrorism.

References

House GOP hard-liners lay out stopgap funding demands, Roll Call, 8/21

House Freedom Caucus Statement of Demands, 8/21 (PDF)

Senate Democrats put McCarthy in shutdown squeeze. The Hill, 9/25

Moderate Republicans plot last-ditch shutdown plan with Democrats, The Hill, 9/26

Congress returns with only days left to avert federal government shutdown, The Guardian, 9/26

Bending to right, McCarthy pushes safety net cuts in shutdown battle, Washington Post, 9/26

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