By Andy Brack
It feels like the Alliance to Restore the Republic is starting to stand up to the authoritarian Empire sought by President Donald Trump, whose blitzkrieg of cruel executive orders over the last two months shocked and awed the establishment.
Our federal courts seem to be responding finally with rulings as a dizzying array of lawsuits continue to challenge Trump 2.0 on everything from immigration and foreign aid to whether a so-called Department of Government Efficiency can get rid of longtime government workers in the National Park Service, U.S. Department of Education, Pentagon and on and on.
Among the lawsuits is a case filed by the Southern Environmental Law Center on behalf of a North Charleston nonprofit and others that seeks to keep the administration from its yo-yo of turning off and then on grant funding that has already been approved.
By the end of March, according to The New York Times, federal judges temporarily paused more than 50 of the administration’s initiatives, which led Trump to thrash back, calling “for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against his administration on deportation flights, earning a rare public rebuke from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.”
The Force got a big boost this week when U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., took the Senate floor for a record-breaking 25 hours (beating a 1957 civil rights filibuster by the late U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina) to shine a light on how the country is at a “moral moment” as a representative democracy. The speech reportedly got more than 350 million TikTok likes with more than 300,000 watching at the same time, according to media reports.
Booker said he spoke because he believes the nation is in crisis.
“I believe that not in a partisan sense, because so many of the people who have been reaching out to my office, in pain, in fear, having their lives upended, so many of them identify themselves as Republicans.
“Bedrock commitments are being broken; unnecessary hardships are being borne by Americans of all backgrounds; and institutions, which are special in America … are being recklessly and, I would say, even unconstitutionally attacked and even shattered.”
He said what is happening in America is not normal and should not be treated as such.
“Generations from now will look back at this moment and have a single question — where were you?”
NBC News summarized the impact: “It was a cathartic moment for a vast swath of demoralized voters across the country, who tuned in amid hunger for some action by the opposition party beyond the traditions of business as usual.”
In the same week that Booker’s speech gave hope to many across the deeply divided nation, something happened in Columbia that also smacked of the Force getting a handle on legislative hubris: State Republican leaders, giddy just a week ago over a proposal to transform the income tax into a flat tax, started backing away from the proposal after getting lots of egg on their faces about how the cut would make the majority of South Carolinians pay more, not less, in taxes.
An odd coalition of hard right Republicans and Democrats joined to squeal about the unfairness, sending the leadership back to the drawing board to figure out a way to stanch the bad public relations blood spewing from the wounded bill. As of Friday, at least nine Republican House members – in a fit to get away from the bill after hearing screams of constituents – took their names off the measure. More will join – even as the leadership tries to rewrite the half-cocked, ill-conceived policy proposal designed to benefit the state’s wealthy.
Mainstream Americans of both parties have been floundering for the last couple of months, wondering what to do to save the republic. Now, for a change, they’ve got a little hope. The threat isn’t over, but maybe late March will be remembered as when the tide started turning against Trump 2.0.
May the Force be with the U.S.
Andy Brack is editor and publisher of the Charleston City Paper and Statehouse Report. Have a comment? Send it to feedback@statehousereport.com.
