It's time to filibuster the Musk coup

PRESENTED BY MARGARET ATWOOD

Every day, the Trump coup tears down more of the American government.

“For nearly two months, President Trump and Elon Musk have been shutting down our government piecemeal, illegally shuttering programs, agencies, and now attempting to close entire departments,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) explained yesterday.

Yesterday, the regime shuttered the Environmental Protection Agency through fiat. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the regime would attempt to drop rules on greenhouse pollution, automotive pollution, power plant pollution including mercury, coal ash, and other toxic chemicals, toxic waste, water pollution, and more. Zeldin plans to eliminate “the climate change hoax” by trying to overturn EPA’s Supreme Court-ordered 2009 finding that global warming pollution is real and dangerous. He also shut down every environmental justice office in the agency. Zeldin’s confirmation was backed by Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego of Arizona and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania.

Also yesterday, American citizens flooded the halls of the U.S. Senate and jammed phone lines to stop the GOP funding bill, which would ratify the Trump regime’s unconstitutional reign of destruction.

More from Sen. Coons: “The House Republican bill enables Trump’s and Musk’s devastating and unconstitutional cuts that have reduced our government’s ability to protect public health and safety, made it harder for seniors to get their Social Security checks and created an opening for China by dismantling our foreign aid partnerships.”¹

Free DC, the local campaign led by climate leader Keya Chaterjee to protect home rule in the nation’s capital, organized hundreds of people to meet with dozens of Senate offices to oppose the bill, which would slash the city budget by $1 billion.

Free DC is back at Hart atrium today from 10 am to 3 pm. Parents are encouraged to bring their kids, as DC public schools are closed today.

The plan hatched by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to back the Trump-Musk coup resolution on Friday in return for meaningless show votes was exposed by yours truly in the morning, before Schumer and other Democratic senators tried to sell their head fake to the public in the afternoon. A few even directly admitted the plan was to vote for cloture—the only meaningful vote on the CR—in return for votes on amendments they know would fail:

• “I think there’s a pretty consistent theme that we want to get amendments. And we think we are entitled to get an amendment vote. And we’re not going to support cloture until we get that.” — Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.)

• “Everybody in the caucus wants an opportunity to vote for a clean 30-day [bill] that puts us on a pathway to regular, legit appropriations. So it’s not an unreasonable ask to say, if you want cloture, you’d better give us a vote.” — Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Va.)

Pointing out that Trump and Musk are already shutting down the government, the American Federal Government Employees union calls for filibustering the DOGE funding bill.

The vote is scheduled for Friday.

Meanwhile, the courts are calling DOGE to account:

• On Monday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ordered DOGE to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington for all communications between DOGE and other federal agencies, starting immediately.

• On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ordered DOGE hackers Ethan Shaotran, Jacob Altik, and Nate Cavanaugh to appear before him in early April to testify under oath on their activities at the U.S. African Development Foundation.

• On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered discovery on Elon Musk and DOGE interference with agencies, employees, contracts, grants, federal funding, legal agreements, databases, and data management systems affecting the 14 states represented by Democratic attorneys general in the suit. They have three weeks to supply the documents.

This morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee reported out on party lines the Trumpist election deniers Dean Sauer, Harmeet Dhillon, and Aaron Reitz for top positions in the Department of Justice. The extremist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was supported in committee on party lines, but Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) crossed over to join Republicans in backing extremist Dr. Martin Markary to be Commissioner of Food and Drugs.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) takes us a tour of the U.S. Capitol:

Hearings on the Hill:

• 9:15 AM: Senate Judiciary Committee
  Vote on Nominations of Dean Sauer to be Solicitor General of the United States, and Harmeet Dhillon and Aaron Reitz both to be an Assistant Attorney General

• 9:30 AM: Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee
  Vote on Nominations of Jayanta Bhattacharya to be Director of the National Institutes of Health, and Martin Makary to be Commissioner of Food and Drugs

• 10 AM: Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee
  Nomination of David Weldon to Serve as Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

• 10:30 AM: Senate Foreign Relations Committee
  Nominations of Peter Hoekstra to be Ambassador to Canada, Ron Johnson to be Ambassador to Mexico, and George Glass to be Ambassador to Japan

Climate Action Today:

• 10 AM: Free DC
  Empower Ed
  Recess at the Capitol

• 5 PM: Sunrise Movement
  Rally to Save Our Schools

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. If you’ve got job listings, event listings, or other hot news, I want to hear it. Connect with me—@[email protected], @climatebrad on Threads, and @climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky.

1  Coons could have also mentioned that dismantling foreign aid means that people die by the millions.