Norms vs Effectiveness

In a recent piece on Democracy Docket, Marc Elias wrote about how the Biden administration failed to secure free and fair elections because officials below the president and vice president were fixated on preserving norms. Attorney General Merrick Garland was particularly strict about not wanting to appear partisan. In Elias's words, he "brought norms to a Trump fight."

The problem comes down, as always, to the conflict between electoral politics and operational politics. You might even say between electoral politics and actual government.

I read the complaints of Democratic supporters who say that they want their party to fight with the fervor and effectiveness of Republicans. But the Republicans win by trampling the rules and trashing the systems that made the country functional. They win by creating instability, promoting suffering, and profiting from the stress that they create. Maybe the price of gasoline drops a little bit for a while. This allows Republican propagandists to crow about the great economy while they continue to undermine the future prospects of entire generations.

If Democrats use Republican-style tactics to force policy changes, the right wing message machine will scream about it nonstop. Yes, the Republican Party is hell bent on destroying the country as we knew and loved it, but gosh darn it you don't want to look partisan by pushing the efforts of the other party, that wants to halt and reverse the destruction.

The elements who managed to seize control of the government in 2024 are tightly focused on a divergent array of entirely bad policies for the average citizen. That divergence is all that saves us from the imposition of more complete totalitarianism, whether it's a technocracy craving some sci-fi dystopia with their billionaires on top, or a Christian nationalist theocracy. Christianity has been notoriously divided for centuries, so the theocrats can't even agree amongst themselves about the details of that dictatorship. Praise the Lord(s). The mess we have now is a result of letting all of the allied autocrats operate during the first weeks and months of the current regime, wrecking things in ways that make sense to each mastermind, but add up to a disorganized mess.

The statistical average citizen is politically apathetic and not extremely religious. Zealot factions gain power when a party figures out how to rope them in and uses them as a reliable percentage of support. They seem like the majority, because they get pushier and pushier as they feel validated by political rhetoric. The Democrats haven't really enjoyed a reliable bloc like that in years, as the "left" is actually more divided by splintering purity tests. This reflects a basic naivete among Democrats and left-leaning independents, that they feel they have the luxury of insisting on perfection.

Independent voters are the key to winning elections. It's a diverse population under one misleading heading. Political campaigns have to find the right balance between terror and Utopia to spook each element among them in the desired direction and convince them where safety and prosperity await them.

As the deteriorating situation makes it obvious that this specific regime needs to be replaced as soon as possible, the party that seeks to replace them needs to represent the rules-based order that used to protect everyone. Its imperfections annoyed many and stoked paranoia in some. Our country definitely got up to some reprehensible hijinks in the post-World War II world, and for all of the decades since, but we also provided a great deal of humanitarian support. That's been chiseled away steadily by selfishness in the general population and in the leaders they elected. Since the 1980s, dedicated selfishness in business has led to a massive shift in wealth toward a small percentage that now controls every major institution.

The party in power now is clearly dangerous both domestically and globally. They're prone to violence on a local and international level. Their hard-core supporters respect and admire violence. They will make the country much less safe for nearly everyone. The threat is obvious to groups targeted now, lulling the remainder into believing that the winners in power will always consider them teammates. Good luck cracking that loyalty. You may peel off a few. The remainder will keep pushing talking points that undermine confidence in the progress of any administration that displaces them.

Most people would rather be alive than dead, most of the time. None of us ask to be born, but life becomes a habit. We don't know whether heaven, hell, or oblivion wait for us when we die. We put off the discovery as long as possible. If tyranny becomes the norm, most people will try to go along, get along as best they can. That was the secret to the Big Brother regime in 1984. The proles were never going to rise up. Their drab existence was better than the high likelihood of not existing at all. Find what happiness you can.

We are approaching the last exit for a long time at which we can exert what's left of citizen power to make citizen interests a top priority again. Most people today don't know what "the liberal consensus" is or was. Conservatives were taught to loathe it, even though many rely on its programs, like Medicare and Social Security. The bustling, improving United States of the second half of the 20th Century depended on the idea that government exists to improve the lives of everyone, not to enhance the power of the already privileged and rely on them to distribute benefits to the general population as they see fit. Government, not private enterprise, sent us to the Moon. Government funds most basic research, which leads to new and better drugs, medical devices, environmental safeguards, and much more.

It's not all good. But the good parts are all that the Republicans are destroying right now. They're beefing up surveillance, unleashing a poorly trained and unaccountable police force that appears focused only on "undocumented immigrant criminals" but which has no restraining rules to keep it from turning the same tactics of kidnapping and imprisonment on anyone the regime considers a threat, or just an annoyance. The Navy operates like pirates (in the Caribbean, no less!). The current occupant of the Oval Office operates like a mob boss whose territory is at least the Western Hemisphere, if not the world.

Only the citizens themselves keep any nation from operating like a criminal syndicate. Authoritarian leaders have varying success repressing their populations, based on the traditions of a region and its people. The United States as a country was formed by people who moved here, creating it from intellectual principles. By the time of the American Revolution, there were multiple generations of the native-born, but still plenty of young adults from away who believed in the philosophical basis of the new nation and its charter. And immigrants have played a major role ever since. It is based not on thousands of years of ancestral possession but on an idea, handed from generation to generation, evolving steadily as our species learns more and more. Some should not be more equal than others once a very basic threshold is met.

The warrior kings of capitalism

The petty kings of corporate empires swagger through their lives as if they had led armies to conquest. None of them did. The real warrior kings kicked ass on their own behalf. In more modern times, your stereotypical gangster has racked up at least a murder or two themselves before rising to upper management. The present kings of corporate states, on the other hand, have not fought any of their own battles. If armed force was needed, they hired it from the countries in which they are nominally headquartered, or perhaps from the murder-for-hire mercenary contractor industry.

A historical warrior king would need personal security: bodyguards, a palace regiment, things like that. Our modern corporate potentates need that personal protection now, as well, because they've pissed off so many people. A warrior king in or shortly past his prime might be able to serve as his own last line of defense. How many of the current crop of corporate tyrants could do the same? They have to hire everything. They need poor people they can trust, when poor people in general cannot trust them.

The right wing has a conflicted relationship with poor people. On the one hand, they need us to do the dirty work. On the other hand, our poor character is what makes us poor: we're lazy moochers who breed like hamsters. And a lot of poor people are not Caucasian. They have to meet a more stringent standard to be acceptable. Maybe they rise to the level of a Clarence Thomas in their service to white wealth and patriarchy. Maybe serving as a social media influencer is enough to preserve their illusion that they will be okay when power completely solidifies in a few hands.

From the top down, ruthlessness is the guiding principle. Survival of the most useful. It's presented as meritocracy, but who determines merit? The people writing the checks. They might as well rule by divine decree, because they judge from a high throne, controlling the lives of the masses with their manipulation of the economy.

The philosophy is seductively hard-core. Down among the workers, we divide ourselves on the basis of world view. The right talks about rugged individualism and ascribes all success to personal virtues of courage, strength, industriousness, and intelligence. In grayed-out text, barely readable, are the words "and race." That text is emerging more and more boldly, but they still maintain a little plausible deniability to allow space for their non-white allies to be used now and discarded later.

The left speaks of collectivism, which divides into many branches. Those range from benign social support programs to totalitarian control of all industry and business. From right or left, totalitarian control is undesirable. But is it avoidable? The world grows more and more crowded. Technology gives the controlling class more and more powerful tools with which to exert that control.

By breeding a chronic inferiority complex among the workers, the ruling class perpetuates the system by which the lower orders keep each other in line. Your value is directly proportional to how much of your life you sell to other people. If you are lucky enough to work at something that fulfills you creatively, the sale of your hours goes to produce the work by which you define yourself. For instance, the young man who recently built us a small deck and a fence takes great pride in his craftsmanship. He asks for referrals from anyone who has hired him, to line up more and more jobs. But there are only so many hours in a day, and there's only one of him. Like every contractor I've ever known, he has to juggle simultaneous jobs among clients who all want their job done yesterday. We may try to be patient, but inevitably chafe at delays. Still, he can rate his success on the work he gets and how well he does it.

Most of the rest of us look for "work-life balance" because our jobs were a compromise between what we really wanted to do and what we ended up doing, just so we could have shelter and food.

Can you have work-life balance when your job is to take a bullet for the rich bastard if necessary?

Marc Elias has written about billionaire capitulation to the Trump regime, but it isn't capitulation. It's the open acknowledgement that government and the top echelon of the private sector have completely merged. There is absolutely nothing adversarial in that relationship. The corporatocracy has claimed the power.

The last vestiges of the electoral system mean that we still have the power to catapult them out of there. While the party of big business works feverishly to cripple the power of voters before the next election, they also realize that voters are conditioned to apathy. Mass psychology favors the status quo, and the status quo gave us the shitshow that we're in now. Massive turnout of voters opposed to any or all of what the regime is doing now and its successors plan for later would stop them dead. What are the odds? It would either beat them back or force them to drop all pretense and try to suppress us by force.

The threat of force from our ruthless overlords is scary, but what's the choice? Let them rule and they will soon resort to strong-arm tactics even more widespread than they are now. So: vote against them now and maybe there's a scuffle, or roll over for them and hope that the jackboot never lands on your particular neck.

A Quiet Thanksgiving

 As I headed out on a morning bike ride today, the roads weren't deserted, but they were quiet. The patches of ice that had formed overnight had melted as the sun angled in and nudged the temperature into the mid 30s (F).

The lack of traffic and the silent houses made me think that the majority of people went away for the holiday, or were sleeping late. The sense of abandonment pulled up one of my favorite Thanksgiving memories.

In November, 1975, I was at the University of Florida. My family was in Cheboygan, Michigan. That's almost but not quite where the tip of the middle finger would be if lower Michigan was wearing a glove instead of a mitten. It was more than 1,300 highway miles to drive there. The family had already expended a lot of travel budget at the end of the summer to get everyone to my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary party. So we all agreed that it made sense for me to stay on campus for the Thanksgiving weekend.

The scene on Wednesday looked like evacuation ahead of an invasion. Students stuffed luggage into their cars, hurrying from the dormitory exits and filling the street as they loaded up. It was a bit more festive than a real evacuation, but a tension hung over it as well. The frenzy peaked in the early afternoon and quickly dwindled until no one was left. Dust swirled in a gust of wind. Northern Florida doesn't have seasons the way New England does, but it still looked bleak.

I went outside to survey the empty campus. I lived in the oldest dorm complex, considered a bit slummy by the denizens of the more modern blocks and towers. The architecture was classic brick collegiate, with peaked roofs. Most of the sections were vertical, four stories tall, rather than long horizontal hallways. I wandered  through empty courtyards.

There were others left behind. We found each other and gathered to make turkey pizza on the day itself. I don't remember what I ate or where on the other days. I just remember that feeling of being outside of life, but fully alive. For those few days, we were the masters of the campus.

On Sunday, everyone else came pouring back.

In other college years I went with friends to their family gatherings. It didn't feel weird to me back then, but it certainly does now. I guess Thanksgiving family weirdness has cranked up a lot during this century, particularly since 2016, even among the relatives, let alone adding a lone weirdo. I'm just as happy to spend a quiet day. I have to get ready for an intense few weeks coming up, which involves gathering equipment and preparing.

In a wider sense, the holiday itself seems like an unquestioned habit: gotta gather for a festive meal with someone, anyone. Family, friends, a community group. It's nice, I guess, for anyone who needs to merge gratitude for life's blessings with a concentrated shot of social contact. But I sense that it seems like an obligation to some of the participants. It might serve as part of the glue that holds a group together, or it might just serve as little rocks that they have to wear in their socks for this one designated weekend a year.

November sunshine

 We're in the part of the year where the sun acts like an ex who ran into you in public and can't get away fast enough. If you see them at all, they're hurrying away, hiding behind anything convenient: a hill, trees, their friends the clouds, who block you. If you do get a clear shot, you'll get stabbed in the eyes just for looking in the general direction.

You knew it was coming months ago. They started sending love notes to that other hemisphere in mid summer. By late September you both knew it was over. They'd been spending less and less time with you, consigning you fully to the darkness of true night, and casting long shadows during their grudging daylight appearances.

Hold on for a few months. In only another month after this one, the notes will start to come your way, easier and easier to read. You have to get used to being a summer romance, year after year for as many years as you get.

The Democratic Party's accidental 4-D chess

 The Democratic Party has been a consistent disappointment at least since Lyndon Johnson buried us balls-deep in the Vietnam War. I mean, they've had their moments, but even after Watergate the party couldn't get the White House back for more than one term between 1972 and 1992. The Democrats did control Congress until the mid 1990s, but that power crumbled as well.

The Vietnam War was very much a bipartisan endeavor, from all the way back when it was our French allies getting forced out of their colony in Indochina. But it became the Republican Party's problem when the Nixon administration viewed it as not a burden but a joy when they took over from the departing Johnson administration. They became the party of war, of the military-industrial complex, of heavy handed reactions to protest under leaders like California governor Ronald Reagan.

The Democratic Party pivoted to an anti-war stance, or at least a portion of it did. It had already stressed itself by passing civil rights legislation. Now it dallied with being "soft on Communism." This was the era when you could buy bumper stickers that had a picture of a peace sign with the caption "footprint of the American chicken." Yep, even then, masculine virtue was linked to fighting in any war assigned to you, to prove that your physical courage -- or the insecure need to project its image -- far outweighed your moral courage.

Regardless of the party in power, our country made social progress on multiple fronts, as well as enacting environmental protections that addressed some of the more obvious pollution and degradation effectively enough to make industry organize politically and economically against government. As elections became more and more just sales campaigns, and society grew more noisy and complicated, voters were easier and easier to distract and divert while powerful financial interests focused on taking control.

A philosophical basis isn't really a detailed plan, but generation after generation of Republican politicians advanced the idea that the rich should be allowed to become richer. Because every American liked the idea of being rich, having seen the freedom, luxury, and leisure that the top tier enjoyed, even on the hippie side of the aisle no one seemed averse to making a pile if they could. During the dark age when a Democrat couldn't get within sniffing distance of the presidency, this embrace of a prosperity gospel seeped in to saturate them. The neoliberal was born.

Mind you, I witnessed most of this as a dipshit kid, and later as a dipshit adult. I always had this vision of a country and a world where everyone had enough, no one had too much, and we were all fine with it. I mean, how stupid is that? It seemed to me then, and still does, that it requires the least wasted effort on cruelty and the artificial suffering of war, for the most return on the true simple pleasures of life. As far as I could tell, I was nearly alone in this belief. There was absolutely no political machinery devoted to something so benign. But if anyone was going to pay it lip service it was probably Democrats. It was a thread in the successful campaign of Bill Clinton to finally unseat the Republican fuddy-duddies who acted like grandparents and made our government smell like mothballs and cordite.

Of course the Democrats couldn't break the Republican hold on the Oval Office without the leverage of corporate money. Someone has to pay for the media saturation. So lip service was all we got, along with incremental tidbits.

The partisan divide is the reason so many voters identify as unaffiliated. Shallow observers identify this as "the middle," where the wishy washy majority loll in contemptible political apathy, but it's more than that. It's a diverse ecosystem of assorted malcontents. We are all afflicted by the same foul forces from above. And here's where the accidental 4-D chess comes in.

There's some chess involved in governing, but what is chess anyway? It's a game with known pieces on a finite board. Seriously, after all these years with so many documented games, why doesn't every game between Grand Masters end in a draw? Any top level player knows where the pieces go and has gamed out every possibility. But in real life, a player blinks, forgets, or is successfully distracted for just long enough. Politics and government take place on an almost infinite board with many more pieces, none of them reliably under direct control. Philosophies that stress obedience to authority have an advantage keeping their pieces moving where the plan requires, so authoritarianism has come to dominate. But the combination of Republican centralized authority and Democratic structural instability may finally have pissed off enough of that reachable rabble of independent minds to get them to mutiny and take control of the one party still up for grabs and publicly devoted to the general welfare. The brilliant, accidental move by establishment Democrats has been finally to demolish themselves and let the next wave climb the rubble to plant a flag and build something better.

Some of us have been waiting a long time for a politically viable number of people to catch up. Maybe they finally have. The party label only matters because branding still matters. The Democrats were the party of slavery in the 1850s and the party of civil rights in the 1960s. The Republicans were the party of abolition in the 1860s and the party of cronyism and corruption in the Gilded Age. But we're comfortable with the names. I don't care what you call it. Just get busy proving that life really will be better when the lowest are lifted and the highest are hauled down a few notches.

It's never going to happen like the flip of a switch. Progressive activists today hiss angrily that the Democrats never really intended to fix anything, because they so seldom succeed. This narrow-minded perpetuation of the blame game betrays a youthful naivete about human nature and the political headwinds that nominal members of the same party face in their highly varied home regions. Democrats have been the less popular party for so long that they are always more worried that a backlash will whisk them out of office or that a "blue wave" will roll back leaving them flopping helplessly on parched sand before they can spawn a new generation. 

Ignorance and malice always move with great confidence. We are by far a country of bystanders when it comes to elected office. Snappy put-downs resonate with us as an audience, because most of us have never had to try to bring together disparate factions to enact large-scale policies against well-funded resistance. The oversimplification gives these darts a sharp point and a sticking barb. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom.

Cynics are disappointed optimists. Don't let the bitterness fool you.

As always, success comes down to gathering the votes. Candidates and their organizations have thousands and millions of cats to herd to get everyone to go to the polls at all and then to make the desired choice. Then the actual legislating starts, with more votes to wrangle from officials gathered together from all across the sprawling country. Each one comes with their own set of leashes and tripwires installed by everyone who had a hand in getting them there. Some of the strings are clearly visible, some are not. Even the ones not obviously owned by some power bloc are answerable to the voters back home, some of them placid, others highly volatile.

Building the resistance movement

 The No Kings demonstrations on October 18th stirred up backlash from the right and left. You can find many examples for yourself in written postings and in videos from the many aspiring and established influencers.

Firebrands on the left want to fulfill the regime's wish for violence. Bullies on the right have been looking forward to violence for decades. Russia and China would be on board. The real losers would be the American people, no matter who "won."

Wiser voices have reinforced that the demonstrations of opposition encourage others who may more quietly oppose the regime to feel more confident and become more active. They energize the already committed. They show the regime and its supporters that their actions and policies are unpopular.

Because the regime has many fascistic qualities, and a visible percentage of their base openly displays Nazi imagery and expresses Nazi sympathies, resistance discourse has looked for parallels in the rise of the National Socialists in Germany, their use of power once they had it, and the opposition they faced within their own country and, ultimately, from the combined military forces.

The sad story of Sophie Scholl and the German anti-Nazi White Rose movement inspires many with her courage and tragic end. She and her older brother Hans, along with Christoph Probst, were beheaded by guillotine after a show trial in 1943. Their heads were cut off. They were young people in their 20s. Shoved into an execution device, and thunk.

Their movement and murder have motivated many in the years afterward to honor their sacrifice, even though it failed at the time. As I read the story, they weren't on a suicide mission when they set out leaflets for their fellow university students to find. It was just bad luck that their littering -- tossing their last 100 leaflets from an upper floor into a large space, just as one of the people charged with keeping that space tidy happened to be passing through -- spurred that person to chase them down and turn them over to the Gestapo.

Human sacrifice is a terrible recruiting tool. Christianity didn't really take off until it became the state religion of Rome instead of a great way to get nailed to a wooden fixture or get to meet a bunch of lions face to face.

As for the ultimate defeat and removal of the Nazis from power, that required years of military action, and the deaths of millions. The time for internal resistance against the Nazis to work was way back in the 1930s, when they seemed like a good bet for Germany. Even Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst were Hitler Youth and served in the German army. Political resistance before it was too late just wasn't going to happen.

The circumstances in Germany were not the same as what we have now in the United States. Political resistance has a very good chance here, without the strong risk of summary execution for those who speak out and act up. So far, anyway... Which leads to the other half of the comparison to de-Nazification in Germany: the world war itself.

Hitler's big mistake was in pushing for more and more territory. If he had stayed more or less within his own borders, he could have committed atrocities to his heart's content. Other nations might condemn, but they wouldn't interfere. It would be like Russia today, where political opposition faces arrest and/or unfortunate accidents, elections are for show, and everyone knows who is and always will be in charge. The German citizens might not be extremely happy, but they would get by.

Even when the United States was finally dragged into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the armed forces didn't magically spring into full size and strength on Dec. 8. Over the course of the war, 61 percent of the people who served were drafted. They served with valor, but they waited to be called, and probably hoped that they would not be needed. That wasn't recruiting. Patriotic films and whatnot served not so much to trigger a flood of volunteers as to take the sting out of inevitable induction.

Moving forward in time to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, there again the front line people faced injury and death at the hands of adversaries who would in most cases never face punishment or, if they did so, it was so many years later that it was a formal gesture at best.

Every murderer gets away with the crime. Even if the killer is caught, tried, convicted, and serves a sentence, the victim is still dead. This unfortunate inequity is even worse when the killer has gotten to live a long and prosperous life. In the case of unrepentant racists, their legacy is the continuing culture of bigotry that shows no sign of just dying out on its own. Younger generations aren't born at the highest level of enlightenment. They're born empty, blank, to be filled in by whoever is around them.

Humanity faces a huge challenge now, as every neglected area of concern reaches a crisis at the same time. Economic disparity, gender bias, racism, environmental disregard, and general paranoia all need to be addressed. They can't be addressed by one single thread of appeal, because not enough people connect the dots to get the picture. All are related, but have been treated as separate for eons. Our species needs group therapy, but avoid getting homogenized into a bland blend or forced into a mold under restrictive authority. On the other hand, restrictive authority has the power to act quickly to respond to the crises that can't wait for the slowest students to reach consensus. Like, the planet is baking right now. Resources are being devoured right now. At least two factions of super wealthy power mongers have different -- but both unpleasant -- visions of the future that they are poised to impose on the rest of us.

How much should one person or one generation worry about the generalized future? You live, you die, you're gone. Maybe you think you care about your children and grandchildren, but once you're dead you can't hear them complain anymore. The planet itself doesn't care whether we're here, or even how we treat it. What reason does anyone have not to live completely selfishly to the fullest extent of their skills and budget? That logic exists at some level inside every human mind. "Why should I care?" You have to make a damn good case. Find out what motivates each individual with whom you interact. Not too many of them will be very enthusiastic about getting their head smashed like John Lewis, or get murdered by racists just for trying to sign up voters, or guillotined for a principled stand against one of the most evil regimes that ever rose.

Peace is most definitely possible, a productive peace with a high degree of personal freedom of expression and movement. All it requires is universal acceptance that it is the greatest good. Sacrifice in a case like that consists of mild things like forgoing seconds on dessert rather than submitting to lynching or state execution. A simple concept but a surprisingly hard sell.

Edited petition to Brooke Rollins

You probably get these too: emails asking you to contact various government officials to ask them to be decent human beings or good stewards of the environment or some crap like that. If they were either of those things, we wouldn't have to petition them. So in the part that I can edit I usually try to reach them where they are rather than call them to where the petition sponsor thinks they should be.

The most recent example is a petition to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, asking her to release the contingency funds to cover SNAP benefits during the government shutdown. The suggested language was conciliatory and deferential to human rights and values of which this regime has not demonstrated a single scrap. So I took my usual approach.

To: Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture

 At some point, your party's top-down approach to ruling has to become obvious, as it does now in this cold move to use Americans in need as hostages to coerce the Democratic Party to surrender to your party's overall plan to make life more precarious for the working class.

Your party's policies will increase mortality among children, the elderly, and the disabled, three groups that represent little value to a wealthy elite. Children have some utility as future workers, but only if they are sturdy enough to do the work required of them before they are discarded by your system when they get too old or injured. A good example here is how the Republicans pay lip service to military personnel and veterans, while cutting funding for support systems after their service. As for the elderly, just die already, am I right? And the disabled... they never had anything to contribute in the first place. Life ain't the Special Olympics. Eventually, it will be legal to just leave a defective baby out on a frozen hillside to die, won't it? Or maybe part it out for useful organs first. Just because some parts don't work doesn't mean that no parts work. All that lies a little further down the road, but we're at a critical fork right now.

Preventing 42 million Americans—including about 16 million children and nearly 7 million pregnant and postpartum women, infants, and young children—from being able to buy groceries seems unnecessarily cruel and dangerous until you consider that it's a first step toward necessary culling of useless people. The tough will survive. Anyone not tough enough to endure the test is just dead weight on society anyway. Am I getting this right? You know I am.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has an emergency contingency fund, and experts indicate that the US Department of Agriculture is able to use this or other funds to keep food on people’s tables. Or you can siphon off the funds to pay for CBP officers, golf trips, and Gatsby parties. Maybe pay to ship senior military commanders in for another pep talk by Major Hegseth over at the Pentagon.

According to your own shutdown contingency plan, the agency has a reserve of funds, which can be used to pay SNAP benefits directly. In fact, the SNAP Appropriation law’s own language makes the contingency reserve broadly available for program operations. Even in President Trump’s first administration, SNAP benefits were paid out during the government shutdown in late 2018 through early 2019—the longest recorded shutdown in American history—without interruption. You can come through again or admit that was a mistake, a moment of weakness you won't repeat.

I now return you to the earnest entreaty that assumes that you have a core of humanity that can be appealed to. Who knows? Maybe they're right. Surprise me.

I call on you to do the right thing for the American people and put politics aside to fund SNAP benefits so that millions of families can eat. You have the power to stop needless suffering and children going hungry. Please use it.

Sincerely,

(Your information here)