We stand perilously close to a point of no return, where mass action is the only form of opposition that might save the country.

But for the time being there’s still power, in courts and on Capitol Hill, to stop or slow Donald Trump’s attempted authoritarian revolution. And in this twilight moment, at least some Democrats in Congress are responding to public clamor for them to use power more visibly and creatively.

Cory Booker broke the talking filibuster record; Chris Van Hollen will put himself in harms way and fly to El Salvador this week to ensure the safety of Kilmar Abrego Garcia—a Maryland father whom the Trump administration illegally rendered to a torture prison. Other Senate Democrats have announced that they will deny speedy confirmation for Trump’s nominees, which will require Republicans to devour precious floor time.

But that’s the Senate, where the minority party has power written into standing rules. Most political observers, even fairly sophisticated ones, tend to take it for granted that the House minority has no cards to play. There’s no filibuster in the House. There are a few procedural means for the House minority to force the House majority to take uncomfortable votes, but that’s about it. On a good day, the best the House minority can do to cause problems for the majority is band together and vote no—in a closely divided Congress, when the ruling party is overreaching, this can drive division in the majority, and cause rules and bills to fail.

But the truth is more complicated.

In conversations with senior aides and members over the past weeks, it’s become clear that some Democrats on Capitol Hill want to do more, and have ideas about how to do more, but feel stymied by the leadership, which wants to proceed cautiously.

In particular, staffers have begun circulating a memo detailing the procedural steps individual members and members working together can take to slow things down, vie for attention, and make life painful for Republicans as they prepare to slash taxes for the rich, take health care away from tens of millions of Americans, and abet Trump’s efforts to establish an American dictatorship.

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BUSINESS AS UNUSUAL

The memo, provided to me and attached below, enumerates lesser-known tools Democrats can use in committees and on the House floor to run down the clock and be squeakier wheels.

Some Democrats are already availing themselves of some these methods. All of them have been used at one point or another in the past, though never together, in a concerted and organized way, as a means of maximizing obstruction.

Even if used that way, the direct, procedural consequences of massive resistance might be smaller than the implicit effect of alerting the public that things have gone badly off the rails. At bottom, there is some truth to the conventional wisdom that the House minority just doesn’t have a ton of power, and has lost power over time, as majorities have stripped old privileges away.

But House Democrats certainly do have the power to be more confrontational and meddlesome than they have been so far.

Indeed, the memo concludes, “[M]ost of these actions have been deployed by Republicans when in the minority. In fact, Republicans have deployed them for far less pressing reasons than those that face our country now. Efficient use of these tools and a member’s time will require dedicated non-leadership staff coordination. It’s hard to imagine a more important time to deploy these tools than when the executive branch is violating the rule of law with near impunity and the Congressional majority is refusing to defend its Article I authority to be a check on executive branch excesses.”

	Business As Usual Memo 120KB ∙ PDF file
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We’ve been outside the Constitution since practically the moment Donald Trump took office, but in a liminal space between democracy and dictatorship. ...