Reopen the investigation into Trump's Egyptian bribe!

Sunday Dose of Democracy:

"Missing" GOP Congresswoman discovered living in dementia care facility
Rep. Kay Granger, Republican Congresswoman for Texas' 12th district, has not been seen or heard from in over six months, having cast her last vote in July. Some digging by the Dallas Express team discovered that Rep. Granger has been living at a local memory care and assisted living home for some time after having been found wandering lost and confused in her former neighborhood. Granger had already announced her retirement at the end of this Congress. Even in the wake of the coverup of Sen. Dianne Feinstein's declining mental faculties, Granger was somehow allowed to not show up for work for half a year while drawing a salary paid from public dollars. Heading into the next Congress, at least a dozen members are over 80, and the public has no clue how many can locate their marbles.

Take Action: End the electoral college!

VIDEO OF THE DAY: Prosecutor on whether Trump is BLOCKED from taking oath of office
Brian Tyler Cohen sits down with legal expert Glenn Kirschner to discuss the possibility that Trump could be BLOCKED from taking the oath of office due to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

Take Action: Don't privatize the Postal Service!

UNFPA leads the charge to protect women's dignity around the world
United Nations Population Fund: When the worst comes to pass and women are plunged into conflict, access to simple things like tampons can be suddenly cut off at a moment's notice. That's why UNFPA is working overtime to deliver life-saving "dignity kits" to women in conflict zones like Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza, so that even in the darkest of times, women and girls are able to manage their periods with dignity. Make a donation to UNFPA and help deliver out-of-reach and forgotten-about supplies like menstrual pads, clean underwear, and soap to the women who need it the most!

“I can’t afford my oxygen”: The human toll of for-profit insurance
Michael Mechanic, Mother Jones, interviewing veteran doctor Ed Weisbart: "I was a practicing physician for decades and got fed up with seeing patients unable to afford health care—not in the broad, abstract way, but in the very real, nitty-gritty way. The Type 1 diabetic who has uncontrolled disease, and I prescribe insulin for him, and it would make a huge difference in his life expectancy, but he comes back a month later and his blood sugars are no better. And I ask him why, and he would say, 'Well, because I’m taking my insulin every other day. It’s all I can afford.'I know he’s barreling toward dialysis. A patient with end-stage emphysema came into the office without her oxygen, huffing and puffing, unable to breathe. She’s had portable oxygen at home and we know this because she had it previous visits. And I said, 'Where’s your oxygen? Why are you so short of breath?' She says, 'Oh, I can’t afford my oxygen anymore.' We’re living in a country where we have people who literally can’t afford to breathe. I’ve got hundreds if not thousands of stories like that. It just drives me crazy, realizing you have to advocate for patients outside of the exam room as well, and then understanding that the reason it’s like this is because of the profiteers just leeching the blood and soul of everyday human beings so they can have the best returns on Wall Street."

Take Action: Block RFK Jr. from leading Health and Human Services!

Elon Musk is inaugurating a new era of billionaire rule
Ben Burgis, Jacobin: "Musk bought the social media platform then known as Twitter (now X) for $44 billion dollars in 2022. There’s every reason to suspect that he’s manipulated the site’s algorithm to boost his own posts. However that may be, he’s Twitter/X’s most popular user, with 207.9 million followers. Even the president-elect only has 96.2 million. Starting in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, he used that megaphone to post 150 times about his opposition to a bipartisan spending deal intended to stop the government from shutting down just before Christmas. During the election, Musk spent well over $200 million on two pro-Trump PACs, making him by far the highest-spending donor on either side of the race. He was rewarded with such a prominent place by Trump’s side that a casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that Musk rather than J. D. Vance was Trump’s running mate. The combination of the close association he bought with the president-elect and his prominence on the social media platform he had purchased would be enough, all on its own, for Musk’s noisy opposition to the spending deal to turn the heads of many Republican lawmakers. Not content with this level of influence, though, Musk used his day of rage-posting to publicly threaten that he would personally finance a primary challenge against any Republican congressman who voted for the deal. That’s not a threat any Republican with an instinct for political preservation would take lightly. Musk is the world’s richest man, with a reported net worth of $455 billion. To put that into perspective, it’s more than sixty-nine times Trump’s own estimated worth of $6.61 billion. Musk could finance a lot of primary challenges before he would feel his wallet getting lighter.Allowing billionaires to exist in the first place is absurd. A million and a billion are both amounts of money that greatly exceed what most of us can ever hope to have in our bank accounts, so it’s easy to forget the enormity of the difference. But to put this into perspective, if we imagine a long-lived being (perhaps a vampire) who came to the western hemisphere with Christopher Columbus in 1492 and somehow managed to earn and save the equivalent of a thousand contemporary US dollars every day since he arrived, the vampire would have $1 million by sometime in 1495. He wouldn’t even be a fifth of the way to $1 billion dollars in 2024. It’s hard to stretch your mind to even imagine how much money $455 billion is. As a matter of distributive justice, letting one man have that much while others struggle to make rent or afford groceries is an abomination. But when we combine that kind of wealth with letting billionaires buy political influence, the consequences for anything resembling meaningful democracy are grim."

Take Action: Stop Dr. Oz from dismantling Medicare!

Pelosi won. The Democratic Party lost
Kate Aronoff, The New Republic: "Fresh off hip replacement surgery, Nancy Pelosi, 84, secured another victory. House Democrats on Tuesday afternoon decided that 74-year-old Gerry Connolly—who announced his throat cancer diagnosis in November—will serve as ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, besting 35-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a closed-door caucus vote. “Gerry’s a young 74, cancer notwithstanding,” said Virginia Democrat Don Beyer, a Connolly ally. Connolly will join fellow septuagenarians in top committee spots next year. Richard Neal, 75, will lead Democrats on Ways and Means while Frank Pallone, 73, will be the party’s top representative on Energy and Commerce. Eighty-six-year-old Maxine Waters will be the ranking member on the Financial Services Committee, and Rose DeLauro, 81, will helm the Democrats’ presence in Appropriations. In other democracies, the leaderships of parties that have endured humiliating defeats like the one Democrats saw in November—or even just regular defeats—resign. That kicks off a process by which members determine a new, ideally more successful direction, represented by different people. But the Democratic Party isn’t really a “party” of the sort that exists in other democracies, with memberships and official constituencies, like unions, who have some say over how it’s governed. Members mostly make decisions based on their own interests rather than to drive some shared, democratically decided agenda forward. Pelosi and the old guard’s continued opposition to younger talent seems breathtakingly counterproductive in the face of the Democratic Party’s numerous challenges right now. If the Democrats have a future, its inspiration will come from outside the bounds of its own fiefdoms and sclerotic internal processes. It will come, for example, from unions that cultivate leaders who can genuinely speak to working-class voters. It will come from social movements that build momentum for populist ideas that haven’t been poll-tested into bland, business-friendly mush. At the very least, those things can outlive Pelosi and the old guard. Ideally, it can build an electoral force that aspires to more than meaningless loyalties and bigger checks from donors"

Brain-dead bipartisanship is getting us nowhere
Chris Lehmann, The Nation: "Fresh off a failed presidential campaign that fetishized a nonexistent body of pragmatic, centrist Republican voters, and right in the midst of the GOP’s latest deranged push to trigger a government shutdown, congressional Democrats have announced their new brilliant strategy to fend off the authoritarian MAGA threat in Congress: position themselves as brisk and efficient helpmeets of their GOP counterparts. “People want to see government work, and we’re going to hold Republicans accountable for whether they’re willing to help move things forward for the American people,” Washington Democratic Representative Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told ABC News. “I think we are telling them that we’re here to govern,” she went on to explain. “And I guess the question is, are they serious about governing?” The answer, of course, is “Hell, no,” as anyone who’s paid even cursory attention to the legislative record of the modern Republican Party can readily attest. The core mission of the government-baiting right is to marshal all available power and cash to demonstrate its central ideological presupposition: that government is incapable of functioning effectively. Going back to the Nixon era, Republican lawmakers and their White House allies have duly brought this self-fulfilling prophecy to pass by throttling basic government operations via a toxic assortment of privatization initiatives, austerity campaigns, rank corruption, and legal crackdowns. In short, DelBene’s plan to use Democrats’ waning political capital on the Hill to ferret out how deeply the GOP is invested in governing is a fool’s errand, on the general order of scheduling a midnight tryst with Dracula to monitor his tolerance for solid food. So here’s a useful rule of thumb as the second Trump term kicks off: When Democratic leaders come forward to extol the pantomime of Beltway bipartisanship as the best way to “fix things,” tell them and their fellow bosses to fuck off and get to work."

Time is running out to Trump-proof our climate wins
Evergreen Action: We have less than 50 days left to Trump-proof our progress before inauguration day. Evergreen Action is working overtime with partners across the climate movement to help climate groups around the country do everything they can between now and inauguration day — groups like the Ohio River Valley Institute, the Center for Coalfield Justice, and Climate Changemakers, who are all on the front lines supporting communites and working with the people directly impacted by climate disasters. Will you chip in to help protect all our of progress from Trump and his Big Oil cronies?