MoveOn Director FIRES BACK At Hakeem Jeffries

Bonus Episode 213 with Rahna Epting

We are releasing a special bonus episode this week in order to give the Director of MoveOn a chance to respond to reports that Democratic leaders are irritated by their grassroots activists demanding those leaders actually fight back against Trump. We will still have our normal episode out for everyone later this week. Subscribers receive that full video on Friday and the audio will be free for all Saturday. We so appreciate your support for this show which I can assure you will never waver in holding power to account!

In this free bonus episode, Rahna Epting, leader of MoveOn, gives us essential insight into the friction between a Democratic voter base fired up about opposing Trump and the party establishment that isn’t acting like much of an opposition. We talk to Rahna about Hakeem Jeffries’ recent calling out grassroots liberal orgs like MoveOn and Indivisible in a closed-door meeting for Democrat lawmakers and how she interprets the criticism.

The issue Jeffries and other lawmakers took with MoveOn this week might strike you as surprising: as Rahna explains it, the organizing MoveOn has been doing with elected representatives in the wake of Trump’s inauguration has been pretty “business as usual.” That is, members of MoveOn, of whom there are millions (at least one in every congressional district, according to Rahna), called their lawmakers to encourage them to oppose Trump’s agenda. Sound familiar? It’s the kind of organizing that’s been bread and butter for grassroots progressive orgs to get everyday people involved in the process of democracy and in rejecting abuses of federal power.

Rahna and the MoveOn team weren’t expecting to be met with hostility from Democrats in office, with whom they presumably share common goals and strategies. But perhaps the Democrats weren’t expecting to be relentlessly called by their constituents demanding they take action, holding them accountable to their electorate, and strongly supporting opposition to Trump. Rahna suggests that this is where Democrats’ energy should go: rather than critiquing parallel efforts from grassroots organizations to join the party’s professed resistance of Trump, they too can act on the recommendations of their constituents and oppose the latest budget cuts, attacks on civil rights, and federal austerity that Trump has already begun to usher in.