Friday, February 24, 2017

Where is Dave Reichert?

I sort of got off track today.

I was going to a protest rally for a local Senator, not mine, who's voting all Trump all of the time. The Congressman is Dave Reichert. Trump Nation is arriving and the Republican-led Congress generally isn't seeing the danger signs yet. John McCain and Linsdey Graham get it, but most of the rest of them don't. Not yet.

Instead of representing their constituents, they're still letting the Trump administration plow services and regulation under, as Bannon said, ' the deconstruction of the administrative state.' That's double-speak for eliminating the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Urban Development and Housing, and the National Parks. These may not be the most efficient government programs, but they do a lot of good for our country and our people. How much more of an overt message do moderate Republicans need that the Trump administration isn't draining the swamp as much as sucking the swamp dry? Corporate deregulation is also part of their mission. The Republican majority Congress is still going along with it all and resisting the protests of real people at their town hall meetings, if they arranged the meetings at all.

Reichert put a camera and a lock on his door and won't open it except for people with appointments. Today, he threatened to cancel an appointment with the local Indivisible group if any people showed up to protest in conjunction with the meeting, even a silent protest that aligned with local police requirements.

Other Republican Congressmen faced angry constituents in their town hall meetings, reluctantly, but with some grace. Reichert refused to host a town hall at all. Oh yesterday, he did this Facebook live thing, but who knows if he answered any of the real questions. You couldn't even watch unless you first 'liked' him. I don't consider this Facebook live to be a live event, just picture one man in a room with an assistant. Nope. That's really just someone hiding out in a room and pretending it's an event. And with Facebook live, you can edit lots of what people see and hear. It's not a town hall meeting at all.

So, Reichert used to be the Sheriff of King County. He has experience with the public. Yet, he's too afraid of his constituents to unlock his door and face them except for extremely closely vetted individuals. He even coached other Congressmen to make sure their local offices had back doors from which they could escape. We're just a bunch of angry moms, dads, and grandparents, not vagrants or criminals.

But last week, Reichert voted to give people with extreme mental illness access to guns. Seriously. I wonder if he can see the irony in that vote.

So then, I didn't have anything to do this afternoon. I was too worried to keep watching the news. Instead, I made pancakes for Nick's sleepover kids and walked the dog. I really need to take a break from it all now and then. It's incredibly vexing. When I got back, Nick and I watched a couple of episodes of Neil DeGrasse Tyson in Cosmos on Netflix.

We watched science on television. Science is on the chopping block too, so I felt rather patriotic while I did it, standing up against the oppressive government in the name of learning more science and defying the anti-evolutionists.

I'll get back to active protesting tomorrow. I will. I promise.

Thank you for listening, jb
 

No comments:

Post a Comment