On December 3, South Korea’s right-wing President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law and ordered troops to block the opposition party from gaining entrance to the National Assembly. But the opposition didn’t blink. They formed human chains and broke through the barricades. In one iconic confrontation, a lawmaker grappled with a soldier, grabbing hold of his rifle. Ultimately, lawmakers succeeded in gaining entrance to the Parliament and voting down the president’s declaration.
It was an inspiring example of what real, vigorous opposition to tyranny can look like—and one that did not paint our own opposition party here in the United States in a very flattering light. While President Trump has not yet declared martial law, we are beyond a doubt in a severe crisis: Elon Musk has seized control over the payment apparatus of the U.S. Treasury—the fundamental vascular system of our federal government. Recent reporting confirmed that Musk’s 25-year-old henchman, Marko Elez, had direct “read and write” access to the code of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s payment systems.
This means that a corrupt and entirely unaccountable billionaire is close to having the power to choose what government bills to pay and what not to pay. I’m talking about Elon Musk being able to delete the file that controls your Social Security payments, or the payments to your kid’s Head Start program; to unilaterally shut down an agency’s funding, or cut off all benefits to blue states. It’s an unimaginably dangerous situation. And unfortunately, Democrats have been a lot slower in their response to this crisis than their counterparts in South Korea were.
Part of me understands this reaction. I certainly had a lot of trouble shaking off my malaise and getting back into action mode following the election in November. I mean, we already did the #Resistance eight years ago, and god was it exhausting. How could we possibly find the energy to do it all again? What’s more, it wasn’t clear to me what actions we should be taking—after all, Trump’s return to power seemed self-evident proof that the resistance failed.
But now that we’re back in the throes of a fascist takeover, it’s clear that massive noncompliance with that takeover is a hell of a lot better than despondent resignation. That’s what the resistance actually accomplished, back in 2016 and 2017: It forced the Democratic Party to start acting like an actual opposition party.
We need to bring back that energy, and fast. The good news is, Democratic leaders—under pressure from their constituents, who are demonstrating and calling in to their representatives’ offices in record numbers—have begun to intensify their opposition. Their recent all-night stand against Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, Trump’s pick to head the Office of Management and Budget, was a great step. And their increasingly focused messaging on Elon Musk seems to be working, with his approval rating taking a significant dive—more evidence that actually engaging in adversarial politics works, that publicizing and opposing the bad things the administration is doing, rather than preemptively rolling over and giving in, can shift public opinion.
But given the truly unprecedented threat from Musk’s ongoing takeover of the Treasury, these measures aren’t enough. Democrats have additional tactics they can, and must, start deploying. As groups like Indivisible have been highlighting, the U.S. Senate is an institution designed to protect the rights of the minority party. That means Democratic senators have an arsenal of procedural tools they should be weaponizing to disrupt and delay Republicans’ agenda in protest of Musk’s infiltration of our federal payment systems.
Perhaps the most significant tool Democratic senators could use to throw sand in the gears is the denial of unanimous consent. Unanimous consent is the framework by which the Senate operates. Technically, all of the basic day-to-day functions of the Senate—from scheduling votes to moving bills forward—require time-consuming procedural steps like roll-call votes and debates. But senators agree, or unanimously consent, to skip over these processes. If Democrats deny unanimous consent, they can grind Senate business to a crawl.
Relatedly, Democratic senators could place a blanket hold on all nominees moving forward until the crisis at Treasury is resolved. Senator Brian Schatz has already announced he was putting a hold on all State Department nominations to protest the flagrantly illegal demolition of USAID – the rest of the caucus should be joining this action and extending it to all of Trump’s nominees.
Finally, Democrats in the Senate could use quorum calls to disrupt the flow of GOP business. Officially, according to Senate rules, business can’t be conducted without a majority of senators present on the Senate floor. Most of the time, nobody asks for a quorum, as there are rarely a majority of senators on the floor. But any senator can request a quorum check at any time, making the clerk do a full roll call of all the senators. If less than 51 respond, Senate business stops until there’s a majority.
To be clear, these aren’t tactics to use for everyday, run-of-the-mill disputes, and none of them are actual solutions—the majority can still overcome these strategies eventually. But as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has argued, these actions can force the GOP to “fight for every single step” because “the slower they go, the less they can break.” This slower pace also gives the opposition more time demonstrate Musk’s depravity to the public.
When you’re in a five-alarm fire, you use every possible tool at your disposal to slow it down. We’ve done our grieving and spiraling. Now we’ve got to shake the numbness off. Comic book supervillains are threatening everything we hold dear, and they want us to think we’re powerless to stop them. But we’re not. It’s time for Democratic leaders need to start acting like it.
The post Here’s What Senate Democrats Should Be Doing to Fight Trump appeared first on New Republic.
