Please Shout Fire. This Theater Is Burning

Rebecca Solnit — Meditations in an Emergency

"The United States is being destroyed from within, and mainstream journalism isn't making that clear."

One Million Rising: One Million Trained, Millions More Empowered

Hosted by No Kings

Indivisible National is strongly encouraging folks to attend.

When:

Wednesdays, 7:00–8:00pm CDT

Where:

Online

"One Million Rising — a national effort to train one million people to help lead in this moment and gain the skills to lead others. This is how we build people power that can't be ignored. You're invited to join us—and lead."

Right-Wing Supreme Court Acts Again
& the "Rescissions" Before Congress

Heather Cox Richardson

"Without any explanation, the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court yesterday granted a stay on a lower court's order that the Trump administration could not gut the Department of Education while the issue is in the courts. The majority thus throws the weight of the Supreme Court behind the ability of the Trump administration to get rid of departments established by Congress—a power the Supreme Court denied when President Richard M. Nixon tried it in 1973.

"This is a major expansion of presidential power, permitting the president to disregard laws Congress has passed, despite the Constitution's clear assignment of lawmaking power to Congress alone."

This article by Richardson goes into several critical recent moves to grab more powers for the Executive Branch. She provides a very helpful explaination of what is happening & who might be driving it.

Dismantling It All With A Whisper

The Big Picture and Jay Kuo

"The Supreme Court's 'Shadow Docket' is letting the Trump White House burn it all down.

"One of the most historically consequential rulings of the Supreme Court came down yesterday. But you wouldn't know it from the order itself.

"That's because it comes to us again off the Supreme Court's so-called “Shadow Docket,” which the radical majority of justices has wielded to horrifying effect. All we get is a decision, without explanation, and we must rely upon the dissent (once more, of the three liberal justices) to try to parse what just happened."

Rapid Response

Compiling a list of resources

We are learning together how to protect our neighbors. We welcome your thoughts.

• ICMJ Twin Ports
• COPAL, Comunidades Organizando el Poder y la Acción Latina
• Immigrant Defense Network
• National Lawyers Guild — Know Your Risks (KYRs)
• CLINIC — KYR Flyers
• UnidosUS
• MN Immigrant Rights Action Committeei (MIRAC)
• ACLU KYR
• National Immigrant Justice Center KYR
• Interfaith Coalition on Immigration (ICOM)
• ISAIAH MN
• The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR)

Public opinion on immigration is moving left

from Strength In Numbers

"The highlights of their report are here:

• 30% of Americans want immigration decreased, down from 55% a year ago
• A record-high 79% of adults consider immigration good for the country
• There's been a meaningful decrease in support for building a border wall, mass deportation"

Keith Ellison is Standing Up

from Robert Hubbell

"Minnesota's Attorney General Keith Ellison has consistently used the full scope of his role to defend Minnesotans from unconstitutional federal overreach and his actions set the standard for what bold leadership looks like in this moment.

"Earlier this year, he issued a formal legal opinion declaring that local law enforcement in Minnesota cannot legally detain individuals based solely on ICE detainers. He made it clear that such actions violate constitutional rights and expose agencies to civil liability. He has also joined multistate lawsuits challenging federal attempts to undermine birthright citizenship and other core protections.

"Following the ICE detention of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, he publicly condemned the act, stating:

"'When a government deports, threatens, [and] arrests people for First Amendment activity, that government is tyrannical. Mahmoud Khalil is being persecuted for his beliefs and free expression.'

"AG Ellison's swift legal positioning and vocal defense demonstrate precisely how AGs can wield both legal tools and public pressure to confront injustice. This is the kind of principled, aggressive leadership every state needs right now."

"Resistance and change often begin in art"

"I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of Being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art: the art of words."
—Ursula K. LeGuin

"The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself — always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested in adversity."
—Jimmy Carter

"Does the law exist for the purpose of furthering the ambitions of those who have sworn to uphold the law, or is it seriously to be considered as a moral, unifying force, the health and strength of a nation?" "
—James Baldwin

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want the rain without thunder and lighting. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, and it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will."
—Frederick Douglass

You can find other inspiring quotes on the new Writers for Democratic Action MN website.