By Kindler
In basketball, it’s smart to pass the ball to whichever player happens to have the hot hand, making all their shots for the moment. Politics is not any different. And the hottest hands right now belong to the non-profit groups leading the lawsuits against the brutal assault on American government led by the richest a**hole in the world. Considering the speed with which the MAGA thugs are taking their wrecking ball to key institutions, restraining orders and other legal actions to halt (and hopefully reverse) this destruction are absolutely essential.
These groups need your support – to state the obvious, lawsuits are expensive! Here’s my initial list of such groups, but please let me know of any which I may have inadvertently left out:
– Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) was a major opponent of Trump’s last stab at dictatorship and they have wasted no time jumping back into the fray. Per Just Security’s Litigation Tracker – an essential resource I encourage you to bookmark – CREW is one of the groups suing the administration to stop its effort to gut the civil service by turning thousands of public workers into political appointees easy to fire. CREW is also tracking the hundreds of millions of dollars the Trump family is making through corruption as he even more blatantly uses the presidency as a profit center than he did last time around. They’re an essential follow, worthy of support.
– Democracy Forward is another key player, partnering with CREW on the case mentioned above as well as representing unjustly terminated federal employees in the crucial case to stop the incredible damage Trump and Musk are doing by ending the careers of thousands of needed public servants nationwide. Democracy Forward is also leading the cases to save the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and US Agency for International Development (USAID). They are devoted to the work of fighting to preserve American democracy nationwide.
– Public Citizen is working with the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) to sue the administration over the existence of the mysterious, lawless, undefined blob named “DOGE” which does not fit any of the categories of a legal governmental organization – not following the rules of an agency, an advisory committee, or anything recognizable. A truly important case to put a leash on this wild DOGE.
– Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is focused on the presently endangered federal employees who work on environmental issues. It is the plaintiff in the case mentioned above to prevent civil servants from being stripped of their legal protections to not be fired from their jobs without due process and just cause.
– American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the best known of all of these groups, is leading the way on lawsuits to protect the rights of targeted groups including people legally granted “birthright citizenship” per the 14th Amendment, legal asylum seekers and LGBTQ Americans denied the right to use their chosen gender designation on their passport.
Bottom line – we are not powerless, but we cannot waste any time as the Muskrats are very much living up to their motto of “move fast and break things”, those “things” now referring to the agencies of the Federal government that enrich, help and protect us in so many ways, from environmental protection to air traffic control to health care research and services. We have to get this right and, for the moment, that means getting into court and using the full powers of the judiciary to blow the whistle and maintain some semblance of the rule of law in America.
Per one estimate I recently heard, there are around 70 lawsuits pending against the Trump administration. I am supporting a number of the groups doing this life-saving, democracy-preserving work and I encourage you to do the same.
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