Are We Ready for a Showdown over ‘Martial Law’?

The U.S. House of Representatives passed two bills last week that all Americans should feel are deliberate slaps to their faces. One bill deals with money and one deals with voting, and both are horrors that Donald Trump may as well have written.

The money bill promises to cut government spending by at least $1.5 trillion without raising taxes or inflating the national debt. That sounds nice, but experts warn that although the bill would enrich the billionaires, it also would be impossible without making deep cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security and other popular programs.

In other words, the bill would literally rob the poor to give to the rich.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) put it this way to Republicans: “You target earned benefits and things that are important to the American people, like Medicaid, and what are you doing it for? What is it in service of? All to pass massive tax breaks for your billionaire donors like Elon Musk.”

The voting bill, which Republicans call the “SAVE Act,” involves voting rights. And it also is a horror because it is blatantly and purely designed to keep people who tend to vote for Democrats away from the polls. If adopted, the bill will:

• Make it hard for people who have changed their names – married women for instance – to vote;
• Force anyone who tries to register to vote or update their voter registration to provide a birth certificate or passport, which many people do not have or do not have easy access to;
• Ban mail-in registration and online voter registration (which 42 states currently allow). The bill would even prohibit voter registration drives.

That is what Trump wants. How is it possible that anyone but billionaires can support such an attack on themselves? How is it possible that Congress can do nothing about all the impeachable offenses Trump has committed? How is it possible that Congress could ignore the 5 million-plus people who rallied around the United States a few days ago to demonstrate their disgust with the Magas (click here for the definition of, and need for, that word Maga).

Compare what Trump and the Magas want with what Democrats want. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt expressed it well when he rallied Americans to oppose fascism by emphasizing the principles that would provide the foundations for a healthy and strong democracy, which he listed as: “Equality of opportunity for youth and for others. Jobs for those who can work. Security for those who need it. The ending of special privilege for the few. The preservation of civil liberties for all. The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.” He called for “the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.”

Instead, we get a Trump who is so evil that he illegally sends foreigners who are here legally to a prison in El Salvador known to be a torture chamber – he even pays El Salvador $6 million to run the prison for him, and he and wants more prisons like it built there. He threatens to send “homegrown” people there – “I would love to do that.” He even admits he accidentally expelled one man who he knows is innocent, but he refuses to return him even though the Supreme Court has ordered him to do so. He expels foreigners who are here legally if they speak out against him or something he believes in. Oh, good Lord, the list seems endless.

And so, since neither Congress nor the Supreme Court is doing anything to stop him, and since the Senate is his lapdog and can’t be counted on to do anything either, that leaves it up to the so-called “fourth estate” – the press, the news media – to fulfill its responsibility.

And yes, the fourth estate does have a responsibility. The First Amendment to the Constitution “frees” the press from government control or oversight, and that freedom carries with it the responsibility to be the people’s watchdog. A functioning free press is necessary for a functioning society.

But it is not doing that. The press, like Congress and the Court – and several universities and major law firms and businesses and others — are meekly giving in to Trump’s dictatorial ways.

One problem is that the powers behind many news outlets do not care about news. They care only about money. Conglomerates buy newspapers, squeeze every penny they can out of them, and then shut them down. More than 3,200 U.S. newspapers have closed since 2005, which is an average of about two a week.

Big newspapers aren’t doing much better. Recall during the presidential campaign how the press harped on how Joe Biden’s age showed during the Biden-Trump debate but largely ignored Trump’s stream of baldfaced lies during the same debate. Or how they largely ignored Project 2025, which Trump is using now to destroy America’s democracy.

Trump’s threats of expensive-to-fight lawsuits also tend to dampen investigative reporting to newspapers, which are hemorrhaging readers and therefore income.

Television outlets are doing even worse. CBS settled a baseless $20 billion – billion! — lawsuit Trump filed against it in order to gain his approval for a corporate merger. The suit claimed CBS “deceptively edited” an interview with Kamala Harris, which it did not do, but caved anyway to assure the merger.

Likewise, ABC gave Trump $16 million to settle a defamation lawsuit rather than stand by its reporting. Anchor George Stephanopoulos said Trump had been found “liable for rape” when he had been convicted of “sexual abuse.” The judge, however, said that the jury’s verdict “established that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her, albeit digitally rather than with his penis.” In some states, that would have been rape.

We do have one thing in our favor, as far as the press goes. More and more readers are turning away from traditional news sources and are turning to major bloggers and organizations that are focusing on the truly important news of the day. They are reading bloggers like historian Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Hubbell, Joyce Vance and Robert Reich, and information from organizations like Indivisible (my favorite), Common Cause, Common Dreams, ACLU, the Contrarian, CREW, the Meidas Touch – among others.

But mostly it is up to us, individual citizens who must take to the streets in ever-growing numbers, who will not give up. It is the people above all who have stopped dictators in the past, and it will be We the People who will stop Trump this time – just by regularly showing up, speaking out, and resisting however we can.

Robert Hubbell put it this way: “The upwelling of institutional resistance … is due to the grassroots protests by concerned citizens who have demonstrated the political will to resist Trump. Resistance by the people reinforces judicial and institutional decisions to push back against Trump’s vengeance-fueled reign of political terror.”

And if anyone wants to make a truly dramatic impact on the world today, and you think one person cannot make a difference, I have a suggestion for you. Rumors persist that Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act of 1870 Sunday or Monday – essentially, declare martial law — so he can send the armed forces and the National Guard to our southern border to stop illegal immigration. From there it would be just a short step to using the military against U.S. civilians, which he has said he would love to do even though doing so would probably violate the Constitution.

Hence my suggestion: Use Go Fund Me to raise money to place a billboard near a military base (or billboards {plural} near military bases {plural}). The billboards should remind members of the armed services that they took an oath to serve the Constitution, not the president, and they must take great care to live up to that oath no matter what the consequences.

Personally, I think it would be a badge of honor to accept a dishonorable discharge if it became necessary to live up to that oath.

Onward and Upward!