Will They Listen?

Call the House and Senate switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Six days ago, voters went to the polls and shocked the nation. And to be fair, they shocked the world. There was a deep repudiation of Trump and Trumpism, of MAGA’s feeble attempt to rejuvenate America, and a massive swing towards an alternative.

We live in a two-party system. So that alternative was also a party people aren’t sure they trust: the Democratic Party. A party fundamentally unpopular with a majority of the American people. That’s the way it works. In a two-party system, your votes are often as much or more a rejection than an embrace. A rejection of the status quo, of the path we’re on. A cry for help. That’s exactly what last Tuesday was about. A rejection of foreign wars. A rejection of struggling to stay afloat in an economy we’re told is doing great, in the richest nation in history, while we try to figure out how to feed ourselves, how to buy a home, how our kids can go to college. These things don’t add up to people. They don’t add up in their head.

So right now, we need to be loud. Call the switchboard at the House. Call the switchboard at the Senate. It’s the same number for both: (202) 224-3121. Speak to your representative and your senators. Leave a message with their people. Post on social. Sign the petitions. House Democrats pick their leaders November 18th and 19th, so we don’t have long. Can they listen? Can they do the hard thing? Can they break with the norms that have led us to this moment?

We’re in a moment of great, generational opportunity. But that opportunity calls for rebuilding trust. It calls for showing that government can work again, that the folks given the power to improve our lives can and will actually do it. Voters are looking for a government that listens. That hears our needs and puts those needs before party, before institutional norms, before an individual politician’s legacy, before “it’s their turn” or “they earned it.” We’re looking for leaders ready for the challenges ahead.

Six days later, the Democratic Party’s leaders, in their infinite wisdom, have shown they haven’t gotten the message. They’re proving it right now with the decision on Senate Leader and House Speaker. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you the people they’re picking, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, are both less popular than the President of the United States. They’re both less popular than the Republicans in Congress and the Democrats in Congress. We polled likely voters in Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio in the last weeks of October. In every one of those states, Schumer’s approval was between 25 and 29 percent. Jeffries was between 30 and 33. Trump was between 41 and 47. And look at what they represent. Defending Israel at all costs. Massive amounts of AIPAC dollars. Rejecting a health care solution that would provide enough health care to serve this nation. Refusing to rethink our economic system so we can once again have a rising and thriving middle class.

The senators and representatives have already gone into DC mode, refusing to listen to the people that sent them there. A number of the newly elected Democratic senators have said no to Schumer. Not enough, but quite a few. But in the House, zero. Not a single representative has said: Hakeem Jeffries won’t get my vote. He doesn’t represent the ideas I was elected to promote. That’s a bad sign, friends. It’s a sign that politics is overriding governance. Overriding open dialogue searching for competence and adequate solutions.

I understand Chuck Schumer feels like this is his swan song. But we don’t have time to worry about his retirement party. It may be that many people feel like it’s Hakeem’s turn, or that it’s important we elect the first Black speaker. I’m not sure Hakeem Jeffries is the best choice for that. We need leaders who can hear our voices, feel our pain and meet the moment for what it needs, which is radical, systemic change. Not negotiations with people whose ideas have failed.

So call. (202) 224-3121. Ask for your representative. Then call back and ask for your senators.

Because the solutions this moment requires will need supermajorities in the House and Senate and an aligned president. Look through our history. When America has risen to an existential challenge and transformed this country, even imperfectly, we didn’t have bipartisanship. We had supermajoritarian governments. Trifectas, with majorities massive enough to make the changes that were needed. The Civil War and Reconstruction. The Progressive Era, when the Republicans had marching orders to build a nation. The New Deal and the arsenal of democracy that won World War II. The civil rights era.

We had a chance at this in 2008. Barack Obama had massive majorities in the House and in the Senate. Imperfect, but massive. And that administration decided to make deals. It adopted a health care plan developed by the Heritage Foundation and first called Romneycare. It pushed bailouts that funded massive bonuses for the Wall Street goons who’d nearly destroyed the global economy. It decided not to break up the banks, not to jail the banksters who’d destroyed millions and millions of lives. It decided we needed to look forward, not backwards. That’s an instinct to avoid accountability. For war crimes. For financial crimes. All in the name of healing.

People in DC love the word bipartisanship. They think it’s a sign of reason. But negotiating with people whose ideas are fundamentally flawed isn’t reason or common sense. It’s adherence to a dead, broken ideology, to a God of bipartisanship in the name of nothing but that. In and of itself, that’s worthless unless the negotiation yields better results. The Republicans had their years to make their case to the American people, and it was soundly rejected on Tuesday. We can’t move forward negotiating with those broken leaders, the ones hanging on by a thread.

The path to those supermajorities is one not recently traveled. It’ll seem like a new path, even though it runs all through our American history. Look at Tennessee, where Democrats flipped one seat and came within single digits in five more. Look at the massive hope that showed up across the Southeast, where Angie Nixon nearly beat Ashley Moody, and where Democrats won in Texas. We can’t take advantage of that by doing the same thing we’ve always done, which is ignore the will of the voters. It’ll require moments of political courage. It’ll require standing up to norms that don’t serve the voters.

There are going to be so many moments when the people we elected need to do things that are out of the ordinary, that buck tradition. Whether it’s our economic systems, our health care systems, how we build enough housing, or how we get more competent at infrastructure. If along the way they prove incapable of rejecting those norms, of standing with us instead of with that political “this is how it’s done” thinking, they won’t be able to provide the change we need. And we may not get another shot at it. The same ingredients that provide revolutionary moments for good can be used for bad. We get to decide which way this goes.

So please, call. (202) 224-3121, for the House and the Senate. Leave a message with their people. Post it. Sign the petitions. Our role as voters, as Americans, is to yell as loudly as we can to see if they can listen, will listen. If they won’t respond to our pressure, then we’ll know it. And we’ll know it’s time to replace them in the coming primaries.

Corbin Trent