WASHINGTON—Declaring government is broken and responds now to the rich, but not working people, a group of several dozen protesters—many from the National Education Association—gathered on Capitol Hill to urge massive structural reforms.
Their point and their command: “No more business as usual.”
No more half-measures, no more filibusters, no more rigged elections by plutocrats or the Republican Donald Trump regime, no more bans on a woman’s right to govern her own body, and no more gerrymandering, preventing it by law. Change the Supreme Court, one speaker said.
And, especially, no more massive assaults on voting rights. Those assaults, in Southern and/or deep “red” states, would take the U.S. back to the days of Jim Crow, speakers warned.
The protest came as Southern states continued their Trump-ordered assaults on congressional districts represented by people of color. The latest battle erupted in South Carolina, where the GOP-run state House again approved a redistricting plan to eliminate the seat of influential Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn, the only African-American and Democrat in the state’s seven-member delegation.
Other Southern states have already redistricted Black lawmakers out of their chairs by abolishing their districts, leading to protests and lawsuits region-wide. Trump ordered the destruction, which began in Texas, to preserve the slim overall Republican U.S. House majority.
But redistricting is only one facet of a much wider net of repression, speakers said.
“Educators feel” the impact of racism and oppression by the wealthy and well-connected–and their destruction of the safety net that helps the rest of us “every day,” said Noel Candelaria, an El Paso, Texas, special ed teacher and Secretary-Treasurer of the NEA, the nation’s largest union.
“They feel it when students come to school hungry, when teachers have to hold two or three more jobs to make ends meet, when billionaires get what they want.
“When the political system fails, it’s part of a larger story of who gets heard in America. And no one should be silenced because of who they love versus how much money they have.”
The solution is to expand, not contract, the right to vote, and then act on it by flooding the polls this fall, overcoming the rightists. That would give workers “a seat at the table” through strengthening collective bargaining and their rights, and would give the nation as a whole a chance to elect lawmakers to enact the massive changes the U.S. needs.
And organized labor “has always been in that fight,” she declared.
“I’m from Louisiana,” said Kentravious Coleman of United for Democracy, a sponsor of the event. “I have friends there who had a congressional district on Tuesday, and no district on Wednesday.”
That was the result of the Supreme Court’s latest redistricting decision involving his state. It emasculated what was left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The next day, the heavily Republican legislature abolished Louisiana’s second majority-Black congressional district out of seven overall. It left one district around New Orleans. One in every four Louisianians is Black. The justices ruled that the map with the second district unconstitutionally discriminated against whites.
Coleman’s group runs ourpowernow.org, which has practical measures people can undertake in a wide range of fields. Methods range from lobbying lawmakers to pinning down candidates on the campaign trail, to petitions and phone-banking, all leading up to the November balloting and beyond.
The group got strong support from the sole lawmaker who spoke, newly elected Rep. Analilia Mejia, D-N.J., a strong progressive and former union organizer and political director with SEIU 32BJ, Unite HERE, and Change To Win. Most recently, she was co-director of the Center for Popular Democracy and led New Jersey’s Working Families Party.
“I’m an organizer first and an organizer always,” she said. Organizers must fight the intertwined “rigging and destabilization of our economy and our democracy,” which deeply hurts workers.
“Our political system has been corrupted for decades. Powerful interests have rigged it so they can protect themselves from accountability.”
“In an era of an unholy alliance between an authoritarian and his lackeys who attempt to take us back to the pre-Civil War days or the 100 years of Jim Crow, we must say ‘Hell no,’” concluded emcee Meagan Hatcher-Mays of United for Democracy.
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