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| Ravinder Bhalla will be one of the nation’s first Sikh mayors after he takes office in January. |
From all-out efforts to stop Republican attacks on the Affordable Care Act to counter-protests against white supremacists, 2017 demonstrated the power of resistance.
A
year-end recap under the Trump presidency doesn’t have to
be depressing. At Rewire,
we don’t want it to be.
We’ve reviewed the
inspirational moments that punctuated the fraught months since Inauguration Day
and how they’ll power us through holding the powerful accountable in 2018 and
beyond. Here are just a few of our favorites. By no means do they represent an
exhaustive list, but they do give us hope, and we hope they’ll do the same for
you.
Constituents and
Activists Largely
Preserve Health Care
The Affordable Care Act, or
Obamacare, remains the law of the land thanks in large part to public outcry
and organizing. Many constituents became first-time activists, overwhelming the congressional switchboard to demand that their U.S. senators and
representatives vote down repeated GOP legislative repeal attempts. The
disability rights group ADAPT and people with disabilities repeatedly put their bodies on the
line in sit-ins and
die-ins, playing an outsized role
in saving Obamacare.
Carrie Ann Lucas was arrested and removed from Colorado GOP Sen. Cory Gardner’s Denver
office with other ADAPT protesters. “This
issue is just too critically important for my own independence and that of my
children so I felt like it was time to do more,” Lucas told Robyn Powell, a
disability rights attorney reporting for Rewire.
The GOP-controlled U.S. Congress was able to repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate as part of a
regressive year-end tax overhaul. As Vox‘s Dylan Scott reported, there’s still reason to be hopeful for the ACA’s
continuation, not least of which is Doug Jones’ victory in the special election for
Alabama’s open Senate seat. “The bare Republican majority seems to have no
viable path left for a more substantial repeal plan,” Scott wrote. And there’s
more:
Repealing the individual mandate is a legitimate blow
to the Obamacare marketplaces, but doing so won’t unravel the markets entirely.
They will function worse than they did before, and premiums will rise. But
millions of people who receive generous tax subsidies to buy coverage will not
feel the brunt of those cost increases. The law’s rules prohibiting health
insurers from discriminating against pre-existing conditions remain on the
books. Finally, and most importantly, Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, which
covered upward of 15 million people, remains untouched.
“The heart of the ACA has always been the Medicaid expansion,
the premium subsidies to make insurance more affordable to lower-income people,
and the protections for pre-existing conditions,” Larry Levitt, senior vice
president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “Those things will all
still be in place.”
Obamacare won’t function as well as it might have under a Democratic
administration of if Republicans in Congress weren’t bent on repealing the
individual mandate. But it will still be here.
The Trump administration is
still waging a regulatory war against key Obamacare regulations, including
the popular birth control benefit. The American Civil Liberties Union and the
Center for Reproductive Rights jointly filed suit against the
administration, as did the
National Women’s Law Center and Americans United for Separation of Church and
State in another pending case. As of December 15, a federal judge in another case
temporarily blocked the birth control benefit rollback via a
nationwide injunction.
The court of public opinion is in the birth control benefit’s
favor; the majority of the general public, across party lines and various polls, support
it. More than a dozen advocacy groups hand delivered more than 500,000 comments they gathered from the public to the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services. Together, members of the public and
advocates fought on behalf of the 62.4 million cisgender
women and untold number of
transgender and gender nonconforming people who rely on the benefit.
Resistance Trumped Hate
The Charlottesville, Virginia, “alt-right” rally of white supremacists and neo-Nazis left
counter-protester Heather Heyer dead and President Trump scrambling to defend “some very fine people on
both sides.” But the racist
violence in August didn’t stop people from speaking up and speaking out. About
100 people later that month began a 111-mile march from
Charlottesville to Washington, D.C.,
in a nonviolent response to the hate groups. As Jackson Landers reported for Rewire, the marchers encountered insults,
stalkers, and an armed man—”and
a lot of supportive horn honks.” And they vowed to keep up the
fight upon reaching
the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in the nation’s capital.
“The next step, resisting, is
a matter of day by day,” said Mateo Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant who
identifies as a transgender man of color. “Waking up and just looking for a job. After the
march we’re going to do an action and then take this energy into our local communities.”
A prominent example of
channeling energy into resistance occurred in Boston, a city known for pervasive racism beneath
its progressive surface. Rewire‘s
Amy Littlefield documented how some 40,000
counter-protesters shut down a so-called
free-speech rally that
numbered just a few dozen people advocating for hate.
“I saw Black folks out here
today. I saw queer folks out here today. I saw Muslims out here today. I know
we have undocumented comrades among us. I saw Jewish comrades out here today. I
see women out here today. There were trans folks out here today,” activist Khury Petersen-Smith said to cheers.
“We know what it is like if
you belong to any one of those groups, to walk down the street with your eye
over your shoulder, watching your back. And what we’re saying is: We’ve got
your back,” Petersen-Smith declared. “We’ve got your back.”
Diverse Candidates Won
Elections …
LGBTQ candidates, people of
color, and women achieved groundbreaking
victories in 2017
down-ballot races. Minneapolis City Council member-elect Andrea Jenkins became
the first openly transgender
Black woman elected to
public office in the United States. Manka
Dhingra flipped control of the state senate in Washington with her win.Ravinder Bhalla will be one of the nation’s first Sikh mayors after he takes office in January.
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