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Happy Thursday, Fellow Democrats!


The Democratic-controlled Senate is poised to make history this afternoon by confirming Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court. Glory hallelujah! “Government of the people, by the people, for the people…”

Office Hours

Our regular office hours are Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Our address is 2345 14^th Ave., Suite 7, Downtown Vero Beach.

Newsletter Highlights


* We have a school board candidate who needs petitions signed to get on the ballot and to support her campaign. Learn how to help in the School Board Candidate section
* Literacy Services needs volunteers! See the flyer in the Local section.
* We are in need of a Communications Chair! See the Democrats of Indian River section for more details.

School Board Candidate


A candidate for school board could use our help!

Cindy Gibbs is running for Jackie Rosario’s seat on the school board. Here are ways you can help:

1. Get her name on the ballot! Cindy is close to achieving the goal of 1,245 petitions but could use your help to get some signed in your part of the county. Please sign her petition (which you can access here: [link removed]) and drop it off at the Democratic Headquarters OR you can also stop by the office and sign a petition and grab some to share with your friends!

2. Cindy only has 170 followers on her Facebook page. Please like and share the Cindy Gibbs for School Board Facebook page - @gibbs4schoolsLet’s get 1,000 likes on that page!Plus, that way you can see all the information Cindy shares about her campaign and goals for our school district.

3. Share her campaign website on your social media or in emails to friends and colleagues in Indian River County [link removed]

4. It takes money to run a campaign, especially when you are running against a Republican. Could you host a house party for Cindy? Invite some friends over for some light snacks and drinks and let Cindy speak for a few minutes. Then ask your friends to support Cindy with a donation.

5. If a house party isn’t your thing, you can easily make a donation at [link removed]

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DEMOCRATS OF INDIAN RIVER


Elsie Visel – Longtime Democratic Volunteer

For those of you who knew Elsie Visel, we are sad to announce that she passed away this week. Elsie was a fixture in Democratic circles here in Vero Beach for 30 some years. Kathie Jaskolski remembers Elsie as a genuine treasure. From Kathie:

I know we each have so many fond memories of Elsie, the things we did together, the places we traveled, the many projects, the victories, the laughs. She is missed. Some of us have had the privilege of visiting her in St. Petersburg after her move. She has had a giant impact on many lives. There will never be another like her.
In lieu of flowers Elsie would want her friends to make a contribution to the Democratic Women's Club of Indian River County Scholarship Fund. She was a Lifetime Member of that group and very proud of all of the club's accomplishments, especially supporting the education of young Democratic women through scholarships.

You can read her obituary here:
** [link removed] ([link removed])





Democratic Executive Committee

We are in need of a Communications Chair! The Communications Chair is in charge of writing website blog posts, press releases, social media, and chairing the committee. For more information or to get involved, please email Stacey at
** [email protected] (mailto:[email protected])




Democratic Women’s Club

The next DWC Book Group meeting will be at 2:00 p.m. on Friday 4/22/22. “A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health”, by Dr. Leanna Wen will be discussed. If you are not a Book Group member and would like to attend the Zoom meeting, please contact Rita Milelli at
** [email protected] (mailto:[email protected])
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Democratic Club of Indian River

The next Democratic Club meeting will be on Thursday, April 12th at 6 p.m. (location TBD) and our guest speaker will be Tony Ray with Death with Dignity.

We are planning a kayak/paddleboard crew that will meet on Sunday mornings at Round Island. If you are interested, but don't have a kayak, Wal-Mart has them starting at $160: 8 ft Sit-In Kayak (Paddle Included).


FEDERAL

Heather Cox Richardson’s April 6 Roundup of American Politics

Today, all but two of the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against a resolution finding Trump aides Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Among the early “no” votes was Representative Greg Pence (R-IN), whose brother, Vice President Mike Pence, was in danger from the mob on January 6 after then-president Trump blamed him for his refusal to overturn the election. The two who voted in favor were committee vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) and committee member Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).

The Republicans explicitly backed former president Trump and insisted that the investigation of the January 6 insurrection was simply a way to try to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024 and to distract from scandals potentially involving President Joe Biden’s son Hunter (who holds no government office).

The Democrats, in turn, warned that Trump’s attack on our democracy must not go unchallenged. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) called the Republicans a party “drenched in Putin propaganda” and noted that it had turned even on Cheney, who used to rank third in the leadership of House Republicans, “[b]ecause if you don’t go along with Donald Trump…a cult…they will attack you.”

An important current feeding the Republicans’ embrace of Trump is that the Republican leadership is wedded to an ideology that sees the most important American principle as a specific form of individual economic “freedom,” not democracy.

After World War II, Americans of both parties began to defend the concept of democracy, in which every person was equal before the law. That meant civil rights for Black and Brown Americans, as well as for women. But it also meant that the government tried to keep the economic playing field level enough that everyone had an equal shot at rising to prosperity.

Beginning with the New Deal in the 1930s and reaching into the 1970s, the government regulated business and protected workers and consumers. Those opposed to such a government insisted that such protections hurt their freedom to arrange their businesses as they saw fit. Second to their hatred of regulations was their dislike of the taxes that funded the government bureaucrats who inspected their factories, as well as underpinning social welfare programs. But it was the promise to cut taxes for working Americans that enabled them to take the White House in 1980.

The idea that America meant freedom for individuals to act as they wished took over the Republican Party after the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Beginning in 1981, the party focused on tax cuts to put more money in the hands of the wealthy, who would, they insisted, use it to expand the economy. Using the government to defend the “demand side,” by protecting equality, would destroy the ability of business leaders to arrange the economy in the most productive way possible. It was, Republicans said, “socialism.” And so, Republicans focused on cutting regulations and slashing taxes.

Rather than revise their ideology when their “supply side” economics concentrated wealth upward rather than promoting widespread prosperity, the Republicans doubled down on it, promoting deregulation and tax cuts above all else. They have now, in the second generation since Reagan, become convinced that their version of “freedom” is the fundamental principle on which the United States stands and that any challenge to it will destroy the country.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida in late February, the attendees had little to say about authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of democratic Ukraine, which had happened days before. But they had plenty to say about Democrats.

On February 26, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) gave a speech in which he said “We survived the war of 1812, Civil War, World War I and World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War,” but “[t]oday, we face the greatest danger we have ever faced: The militant left-wing in our country has become the enemy within.” He claimed: “The woke Left now controls the Democrat Party. The entire federal government, the news media, academia, big tech, Hollywood, most corporate boardrooms, and now even some of our top military leaders… They want to end the American experiment. They want to replace freedom with control.”

This is completely wrong historically, of course. But the rising extremism of the Republican leadership suggests that it is concerned that American voters, including Republican voters, are turning against the ideology of “freedom” that focuses on concentrating wealth on the supply side of the economic equation and would like to see the government try to restore some semblance of equality. This would mean higher taxes on the wealthy.

A YouGov poll released April 1 shows that 60% of Americans think that billionaires don’t pay the full amount of taxes they owe. Among poorer voters, only 16% thought billionaires were playing fair, while a whopping 63% thought they were not, and 20% were not sure. Two thirds of Americans think that households should pay at least 20% of their income over $100 million in taxes. In not a single demographic category did that number fall under 50%, and the only category for which it was 50% was Republicans.

More broadly, Americans have called for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations now for years. In 2018, two thirds of Americans said they were dissatisfied with “the way income and wealth are distributed in the U.S.”; in 2017, 78% said that what bothers them about the U.S. tax system is that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share, and 80% said what bothers them is that corporations don’t pay their fair share.

Biden’s proposed $5.8-trillion 2023 budget, released at the end of March, proposes tax increases on the wealthy and on corporations. It would end Trump’s 2017 tax cut for the wealthy early. That cut sliced the top marginal income tax rate from 39.6 to 37% until December 31, 2025. It would also tax the interest on stocks and bonds, which currently is not taxed until those assets are sold, which means that their owners can accumulate large sums of money without ever being taxed on it, while wage workers pay full freight on their income. Biden wants to make American households worth more than $100 million pay a tax rate of at least 20% on their real income as well as on the gains on their unsold stocks and bonds.

The administration also wants to get rid of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Biden’s proposal would raise the corporate tax rate from the Trump low of 21% up to 28%.

The White House says these taxes would raise $1.5 trillion over the next decade, and it wants to use that money to fund public housing, science, police departments, climate change adjustments, education, pandemic preparedness, and, in this precarious time for democracy, increases to the military. While Trump’s tax cuts drove the national debt up to an astounding $23.2 trillion by the end of 2019 (up from $19.9 trillion when he took office), Biden promises to use money from his proposed tax increases to pay down the deficit.

Biden’s plans signal an end to the era of “freedom” in American politics and a return to a focus on equality and democracy. In this, they, hark back to the principles of the original Republican Party. During the Civil War, when faced with a mounting debt in their fight to protect the government, the Republicans invented the U.S. income tax in order, as Senate Finance Committee chair William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME) said, to make sure that tax burdens would “be more equalized on all classes of the community, more especially on those who are able to bear them.” Representative Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) agreed, saying: “It would be manifestly unjust to allow the large money operators and wealthy merchants, whose incomes might reach hundreds of thousands of dollars, to escape from their due proportion of the burden.”

Meanwhile, Senator Rick Scott’s “11-Point Plan to Rescue America” promises to put income taxes on the 50% of Americans who currently don’t make enough to be taxed. It’s part of his plan to “grow America’s economy, starve Washington’s economy, and stop Socialism.”

It’s no wonder the Republicans are trying to keep the national focus on Trump and the culture wars.

~ Heather Cox Richardson

STATE

Florida Judge Blocks Voter Suppression Bill

Last year, the GOP led Florida State Legislature passed SB 90, and DeSantis signed it into law. It limited vote by mail provisions, created unnecessary and expensive security measures, and added a voter registration warning to scare voters. While the defendants who wrote Florida’s new election law argued that the changes to voting rules were minor tweaks to avoid voter fraud, the plaintiffs said the new law “runs roughshod over the right to vote, unnecessarily making voting harder for all eligible Floridians, unduly burdening disabled voters, and intentionally targeting minority voters—all to improve the electoral prospects of the party in power.” Walker concluded that “for the most part, Plaintiffs are right,” and notes that “the right to vote, and the V[oting] R[ights] A[ct] particularly, are under siege.” For now, we are safe but there is sure to be an appeal directly to Republican majority courts of appeals.

You can read more here:

** [link removed] ([link removed])




Senator Taddeo Sends Letter to Department of Justice About Voter Registration Fraud with Support from The Entire Senate Democratic Caucus and 38 Democratic House Members

You may remember that voters in south Florida had their voter registrations changed to “Republican” against their wishes. This week, Senator Annette Taddeo announced that she sent a letter to the Department of Justice urging them to investigate the coordinated efforts to unknowingly switch voter registrations across Florida. Senator Taddeo sent a similar letter to Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee on December 3rd of last year when her office received the first call from a voter who had been switched and has yet to receive a reply. The Miami Herald investigated this story and they found over 100 affected voters across just 8 buildings in Miami-Dade County. Late last month, her request for a Senate inquiry into the matter was rejected.

Senator Annette Taddeo issued the following statement:

“My office has fielded numerous calls since December from mostly elderly Hispanic Democratic voters that have had their voter registrations switched without their consent. It’s unacceptable that in the so-called “Freest State in the Country”, people are having their political party chosen for them. It’s imperative that we get to the bottom of this so that people can have faith in our electoral system. Considering voters from across the state have now come forward it is only appropriate for the Department of Justice to investigate this matter.”


LOCAL

Literacy Services Needs Volunteers!

Fellsmere Easter – Donations Needed



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Interesting letter to the editor this week.


Why I Have to Stay Republican

I am a fiscal conservative and registered Republican. Recent moves by the GOP, such as their attack on women's reproductive rights, excusing the insurrection, separating children from their families at the border, perpetuating the Big Lie about the winner of the 2020 election and other fealties to Donald Trump, supporting high drug prices and not supporting infrastructure or the environment – have inspired me to turn Democrat.

But I must stay Republican for the following reasons:

Republican gerrymandering here and in other states is weakening Democratic representation.

New laws are allowing Republican legislators to override elections where Democrats win the vote.

Non-partisan election officials are being driven out, replaced by Republican election boards who control who can vote and how votes are counted.

Voting laws here and in other states are skewing toward long lines and diminished service in Democratic neighborhoods.

So if I register as a Democrat, my opportunity to vote will be vitiated or my vote might even be ignored. If I stay Republican, the Republicans can't easily identify me and discriminate against me. We can then select the most moderate Republican available in the primary, or vote for a Democrat during the election. Maybe we should all register Republican and put an end to the shenanigans.

Peter Utz, Fort Pierce


If you would like to write a letter to the editor about an issue important to you, you can submit your letter here:
** [link removed] ([link removed])





CALENDAR

Monday, April 11, 2022

12:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. – Superintendent Workshop, School District of Indian River County
For agenda and meeting information go to
** [link removed] ([link removed])




Tuesday, April 12, 2022

9:00 a.m. - IRC County Commission
For agenda and meeting information go to
** [link removed] ([link removed])




Wednesday, April 13, 2022

5:00 p.m. – Democrats of Indian River, DEC Steering Committee Meeting
Meeting via Zoom. Contact Stacey at [email protected] for meeting link.


6:00 p.m. - Sebastian City Council
For agenda and meeting information go to
** [link removed] ([link removed])




Thursday, April 14, 2022

6:00 p.m. - Democratic Club of Indian River Monthly Meeting. If you would like to attend, please
** [email protected] (mailto:[email protected])






TIDBITS

It seems a bit unfair that I can’t even skateboard, but this bulldog can! And in Paris nonetheless!

** [link removed] ([link removed])

That's all Democrats!
Stay Safe out There!
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