House and Senate Democrats spoke out Monday when they were blocked from visiting the offices of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington after Elon Musk announced that the humanitarian aid body would be shut down..
But the lawmakers' very appearance revealed something that many Democratic activists believe party leaders have been missing ever since Trump's election: A drive to fight.
Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, declared to The Wall Street Journal that he's putting in place a blanket hold on all of Trump's State Department nominees until Trump's attacks on USAID end.
Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts complained: "I'm sorry that you have to put up with this offensive bulls*** coming out of this White House."
The action at the USAID building appeared to signal a change in how Democrats would approach Trump. For much of his first week, Democrats seemed willing to work with him – or simply stayed silent. Many collaborated with Republicans on the Laken Riley Act, Trump's anti-immigrant bill. Every Democratic senator voted to confirm Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who Monday annointed himself the acting director of USAID.
For Democratic activists, seeing Democrats push back on Trump's attempts to neuter USAID felt like they finally saw some fight from their party.
"I think ... today we are definitely seeing some signs of fight in Democrats that we're excited about and wanted to cheer on," Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of Indivisible, a progressive advocacy group, told The Independent Monday. Greenberg said the night before that Indivisible had a livestream with 50,000 people over Trump's dramatic takeover of the federal operation.
Prior to that, some advocates and fundraisers felt there had been no direction since Trump's victory.
"I think we're seeing Democrats in Congress over-interpret the 2024 election to mean that Trump has a popular mandate, and that therefore what the voters want to see is them working with him," she said.
Trump won the presidential election by a tight 1.5 percentage points — the smallest of any president who secured a popular-vote win since Richard Nixon in 1968. And only some 64 percent of eligible American voters cast a ballot, while 90 million voters did not.
Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, posted on X that she wanted to know what the plan was from Democrats.
"The Democrats have had four years to prepare for this. Then they had three months between the election and the inauguration to prepare for this. They've been on recess since January 24 they could have prepared for this." Watts told The Independent.
She warned: "There's only so much time to fight back before democracy is completely dismantled. Other than angry press releases and outrage on social media, I'm not seeing any action."
But Democrats are in the minority in both houses of Congress, and they don't control the White House. Senator Chris Van Hollen said the fight against the Trump takeover will require help from the courts.
By the same token, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told his colleagues that any efforts to "steal taxpayer money from the American people, end Medicaid as we know it or defund programs important to everyday Americans, as contemplated by the illegal White House Office of Management and Budget order, must be choked off in the upcoming government funding bill, if not sooner."
This is building up to be a major test for Democrats.
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