This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 5 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Americans took to the streets all over the country Wednesday. Two and a half weeks into Donald Trump’s second administration, people from Olympia, Washington, to Tallahassee, Florida, gathered to speak out against the destruction of the federal government as we know it.
Constituents have been flooding the Senate with calls demanding answers about what Trump is doing.
That included what appears to be the illegal mass firing of workers, attempts to shut down critical agencies and reports that the president has allowed his top campaign donor to access Americans’ sensitive personal, financial and, apparently, health-related information held in government computer systems, five people with knowledge of the matter told The Washington Post.
Wednesday’s protests aren’t even the first. They follow large demonstrations against immigration arrests this weekend, including protests that shut down a major freeway in Los Angeles. They also follow a quite large and dramatic protest at the U.S. Treasury Building in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
Even some usually shy major news outlets are starting to run headlines here and there raising a teeny, tiny flag that what this administration is doing may be illegal. A headline from The New York Times read “Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab,” and another from The Washington Post read “U.S. government officials privately warn Musk’s blitz appears illegal.”
I don’t know how private and quiet the supposed warnings are at this point. That same article from the Post quotes a law expert saying, “So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”
One way to react is for the opposition to start shutting down everything they can to try to stop it. That’s been the message to elected Democrats from many of their constituents this week.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reversed course from an earlier stance and urged all Democrats to vote no on Trump’s remaining nominees. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who had previously voted for a couple of Trump’s Cabinet picks, now says that’s over. “It would not help us to be working with Republicans at the very moment the Constitution is being lit on fire,” Murphy said. “This moment demands some extraordinary tactics.”
Those extraordinary tactics included Democrats holding the Senate floor overnight Wednesday and into Thursday to protest the nomination of Trump’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought. He’s the man behind Project 2025 and the mastermind of the whole idea of cutting off government funding for things already funded by Congress.
“No court in the country has ever endorsed the president’s interpretation,” the judge continued. “This court will not be the first.”
Even before the Democrats’ all-nighter, the Senate was already in a ruckus. Constituents have been flooding it with calls demanding answers about what Trump is doing. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said that the usual call volume coming into the Senate is about 40 calls a minute, but on Wednesday, it was 1,600 calls a minute.
The Associated Press reported that callers were getting busy signals and have been told voicemail inboxes were full because the volume of complaints was so massive. Republican senators, according to The Associated Press, in particular, have had their phone systems completely swamped. There’s also some drama over on the House side. According to Politico, two Democratic lawmakers, Reps. Judy Chu of California and Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, barged into Speaker Mike Johnson’s office Wednesday unscheduled to challenge him “about Elon Musk’s team gaining access to a sensitive payment system at the Treasury Department.” The agency’s system controls trillions of dollars in payments for Social Security, tax refunds and other government functions. But that’s not all. On Wednesday, a former National Labor Relations Board member sued Trump over her firing. Also on Wednesday, a second federal judge blocked Trump’s unconstitutional gambit to declare the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to be null and void. At the end of a court hearing on Trump’s executive order to restrict birthright citizenship, the judge ruled then and there, declaring, “The executive order conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment, contradicts 125-year-old binding Supreme Court precedent and runs counter to our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth.” “No court in the country has ever endorsed the president’s interpretation,” the judge continued. “This court will not be the first.” Allison Detzel contributed.
Rachel Maddow
Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award-winning “The Rachel Maddow Show” Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on MSNBC. “The Rachel Maddow Show” features Maddow’s take on the biggest stories of the day, political and otherwise, including in-depth analysis and stories no other shows in cable news will cover.
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