Citizen Cartwright

A farewell to Musk — and what’s next for DOGE

“President Trump gave Elon Musk a formal send-off on Friday after one of the most tumultuous experiments in modern American governance, in which the world’s richest man had free rein to slash the federal work force,” as The New York Times puts it.

Musk said he'd turn his focus to his businesses now that his time as a “special government employee” had ended. Trump said Musk would continue to advise the administration on cutting costs.

“The DOGE team will only grow stronger over time,” Musk said. 

At the news conference with Trump, Musk was asked about a Times article on Musk’s drug use and “tumultuous” family life. Musk questioned the Times’ credibility and told the reporter to “move on.” Later, he said on social media that he didn’t do drugs, the Times reports.

Here is the CBS News interview with Musk on Tuesday that aired on Sunday, which has gotten a lot of attention.

In the interview, Musk says, “It's not like I agree with everything the administration does. … I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, doesn't decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing. … I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful. But I don't know if it could be both. My personal opinion.”

As far as what Musk’s departure means for DOGE, fired DOGE staffer Sahil Lavingia tells Wired that two of Musk’s closest lieutenants, Steve Davis and Nicole Hollander, appear also to be leaving. 

Davis, who's worked with Musk for years, including at X and as CEO of Musk's Boring Company, has been integral to the day-to-day operations of DOGE, Wired says.

Without Davis in charge, Lavingia says, it’s unclear who will lead DOGE — and in what direction. “Steven was the only person who was across everything,” Lavingia tells Wired.

Meanwhile, federal workers from at least six agencies tell Wired that DOGE-style work is escalating in their departments. DOGE appears to be actively recruiting, and over the last week, federal workers have been asked to urgently review and potentially cancel contracts across the government.

Australia, like Canada, says no to Trumpism

In elections five days apart, centrists in both countries saw their fortunes revived, as parties that had borrowed from the MAGA playbook lost, says a New York Times analysis.

Canadians on April 28 gave the left-leaning Liberal Party a fourth term in office, after the party trailed badly in the polls at the beginning of the year. Canadians embraced the tough-talking approach of Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former central banker, while shying away from the conservative candidate, Pierre Poilievre, who was viewed as being too similar to Trump, says The Wall Street Journal.

A similar dynamic played out in Australia’s election on Saturday. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was down in the polls at the start of the year, though by a narrower margin than Canada’s Liberals. As the election grew closer, the polls flipped. Much of the campaign centered on how best to address the high cost of living, inflation and affordable housing, but Albanese and his main conservative opponent, Peter Dutton, also sparred frequently over who could best negotiate with Trump, the WSJ says.

Australians also watched with alarm as the balance of their mandated retirement accounts fluctuated wildly with the markets in reaction to Trump’s policy announcements, says a second Times analysis.

“The Trump tariff decisions that were seen as mad by Australians, that really accelerated the process of people looking at Dutton, and at Trump, and going, ‘No,’” says Chris Wallace, a professor of political history at the University of Canberra. “It’s a victory for sensible, centrist politics.”

Australians’ repudiation of Dutton and the campaign he waged was most apparent in his defeat in the parliamentary seat he had held for 24 years, says the Times. And that was another parallel with Canada’s election, in which Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre lost the parliamentary seat he'd held for 20 years.

Reasons for optimism about U.S. democracy

Columnist David Brooks writes in The Atlantic: "America may well enter a period of democratic decay and international isolation. It takes decades to develop strong alliances, and to build the structures and customs of democracy — and only weeks to decimate them, as we’ve now seen. And yet I find myself confident that America will survive this crisis. Many nations, including our own, have gone through worse and bloodier crises and recovered. 

 

"In 'Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis,' the historian and scientist Jared Diamond provides case studies — Japan in the late 19th century, Finland and Germany after World War II, Indonesia after the 1960s, Chile and Australia during and after the ’70s — of countries that came back stronger after crisis, collapse, or defeat. To these examples, I’d add Britain in the 1830s and '40s, and the 1980s, and South Korea in the 1980s. 

 

"Some of these countries (such as Japan) endured war; others (Chile) endured mass torture and 'disappearances'; still others (Britain and Australia) endured social decay and national decline. All of them eventually healed and came back.

"Even now, as I travel around the country, I see the forces of repair gathering in neighborhoods and communities. If you’re part of an organization that builds trust across class, you’re fighting Trumpism. If you’re a Democrat jettisoning insular faculty-lounge progressivism in favor of a Whig-like [Whigs emphasized traditional morality and progressive improvements, Brooks says] working-class abundance agenda, you’re fighting Trumpism. If you are standing up for a moral code of tolerance and pluralism that can hold America together, you’re fighting Trumpism.

"Over time, changes in values lead to changes in relationships, which lead to changes in civic life, which eventually lead to changes in policy and then in the general trajectory of the nation."

 

Laura Gamboa, an assistant professor of democracy and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame, says in Foreign Affairs: "For democracy to survive, it must be protected. In the past few decades, in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Poland, opposition groups pushed back successfully against leaders with authoritarian tendencies early in the process of democratic backsliding, when they still had institutional levers to pull. 

"The Democratic Party in the United States can make the erosion of democracy visible to the public and costly to the perpetrators. It can obstruct legislation in Congress, compete in electoral districts where Republicans typically run uncontested, and coordinate to maintain a presence, even if only in protest, in as many institutional spaces as possible. Recent attempts to lead town halls in districts where Republicans refuse to hold them are great examples of this strategy.

"Well-organized social movements and civil society groups can shelter democratic institutions, mobilize voters, and increase the costs of antidemocratic behavior."

 

Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, and Lucan Way, a professor of democracy at the University of Toronto, write in Foreign Affairs: "Civil society is another potential source of democratic resilience. One major reason that rich democracies are more stable is that capitalist development disperses human, financial, and organizational resources away from the state, generating countervailing power in society. 

"Wealth cannot wholly inoculate the private sector from the pressures imposed by a weaponized state. But the larger and richer a private sector is, the harder it is to fully capture or bully into submission. In addition, wealthier citizens have more time, skills, and resources to join or create civic or opposition organizations, and because they depend less on the state for their livelihoods than poor citizens do, they are in a better position to protest or vote against the government. 

"Compared with those in other competitive authoritarian regimes, opposition forces in the United States are well-organized, well-financed, and electorally viable, which makes them harder to co-opt, repress, and defeat at the polls. American opposition will therefore be harder to sideline than it was in countries such as El Salvador, Hungary, and Turkey."

In a webinar, Levitsky and Erica Chenoweth, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, say the important thing is for individuals to act, to choose the cause that’s most meaningful them. They cite as a resource the website Choose Democracy. 

Voters and a senator have big messages for Musk, Trump

The results of three elections on Tuesday are “early warning signs” to Republicans and President Trump, says The Associated Press.

In the race for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, conservative Judge Brad Schimel — who was endorsed by Trump and backed by Musk and his groups with $21 million — lost to liberal Judge Susan Crawford 45 percent to 55 percent in a state the president won in November. 

And while Florida Republicans held on to two of the most pro-Trump House districts in the country, both candidates also significantly underperformed Trump’s November margins, AP says.

Republican Jimmy Patronis, the state’s chief financial officer, fended off a challenge from Democrat Gay Valimont to win Florida’s 1st District seat vacated by Matt Gaetz by 15 points. Trump carried the district by about 37 points in November. 

And Republican Randy Fine won his special election in Florida's 6th District to replace Rep. Mike Waltz, who stepped down to serve as Trump’s national security adviser. But Fine’s Democratic challenger, Josh Weil, lost by 14 points, less than five months after Waltz won the district by 33 points.

The elections — the first major contests since Trump’s return to power — are seen as an early measure of voter sentiment “as Trump works with unprecedented speed to dramatically upend the federal government, clashing with the courts and seeking revenge as he tests the bounds of presidential power,” AP says.

Also on Tuesday, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., broke the record for the longest speech on the Senate floor. He spoke about his roots as a descendant of both slaves and slave-owners as he spoke for 25 hours, breaking the record of Sen. Strom Thurmond, the avowed segregationist from South Carolina who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Throughout his speech, Booker read letters from Americans about the impact Trump’s agenda is having on their lives, drawing historical parallels and warning that the country faces a “looming constitutional crisis.”

“This is a moral moment,” Booker said. “It’s not left or right; it’s right or wrong.” 

Booker invoked the words of his mentor, the late congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis: “He said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble, to redeem the soul of our nation.”

Protests of Trump actions are scheduled for April 5 in 1,000 places around the country.

Risks as DOGE plans to rewrite Social Security’s code

The Department of Government Efficiency is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system — and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans depend — at risk, Wired reports.

 

“One of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se; [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions,” says a Social Security technologist.

 

In 2017, Social Security announced a plan to get funding to replace its core systems, Wired says. The agency predicted that the replacement would take about five years. That effort ended up being put off. 

 

Like many legacy government IT systems, Social Security's systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper, Wired says.

 

As recently as 2016, Social Security's infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages, the agency’s inspector general found. 

 

Social Security's core programmatic systems and architecture haven’t been “substantially” updated since the 1980s, according to the 2017 Social Security modernization plan.

 

Social Security's core “logic” also is written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, says a former senior Social Security technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer. Even minor changes could lead to cascading failures across programs.

 

“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” says the technologist. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”

 

It’s unclear when the code migration would start, Wired says.

 

I’m seeing suggestions online to download your Social Security records. You can create an online Social Security account here.  

Trump’s legislative branch majority moves to shrink power of judicial branch

Angry about court rulings against the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress are proposing to limit the reach of the federal judiciary's rulings, cut funding and even impeach judges, tightening the GOP’s grip on government, says The Associated Press.

 

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said on Tuesday that “desperate times call for desperate measures,” without mentioning impeachment. 

 

“We do have authority over the federal courts,” Johnson said. “We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts, and all these other things.”

 

House GOP leaders met Tuesday with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which is to hold a hearing on the issue next week. 

 

The House also is expected to vote next week on a bill by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., that would limit the geographic reach of certain federal rulings, to prevent temporary restraining orders from being enacted nationwide. 

 

Passing Issa’s legislation on the House floor would be a less severe response than pursuing impeachment of Judge James Boasberg, a move called for by right-wing lawmakers and President Trump over the judge's rulings on the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador.

 

“No federal judge has been impeached strictly for the outcome of a case,” says longtime New York Times congressional reporter Carl Hulse. “And even if the House were to summon the necessary majority to impeach a judge, persuading the required 67 senators to convict and remove a judge over a ruling would be highly unlikely.”

 

Fifteen federal judges have been impeached in the United States, and eight have been convicted and removed, mainly for criminal acts like bribery and conflicts of interest, Hulse says.

 

As far as cutting funding for the courts, the appropriations subcommittee that oversees that spending bill is chaired by Rep. Dave Joyce, R-Ohio, a former prosecutor, self-described pragmatist and one of the more moderate members of the House GOP conference, says NBC News.

 

And even if House Republicans managed to pass a defunding bill, the Senate almost certainly would reject it, NBC News says.

Why ‘Trump voters love him more than before’

This is the online headline of a New York Times opinion article involving four of its conservative columnists — David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David French and Bret Stephens.

 

They were asked why more registered voters think America is on the right track than at any point since 2004, according to a recent NBC News poll (90 percent of Republicans like his performance; 4 percent of Democrats do).

 

Here are some excerpts:

 

David Brooks says: “Sixty percent believe ‘the system is broken.’ Sixty-nine percent believe the ‘political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people.’… They get this from media consumption. ... If those are your priors, then you’re going to be happy with a president who wields a wrecking ball.”

 

“Trump policies are not 100 percent wrong; they are just overreactions. Destroying an agency rather than fixing what is wrong and saving what is right.”

 

“As a matter of principle, Democrats should be screaming bloody murder about Trump’s threat to the Constitution. As a matter of political tactics, I think they’re better off emphasizing Trumpian incompetence. Determining the constitutionality of some act requires a law degree, but incompetence is something we all recognize — and there is a lot of it.”

 

Bret Stephens: “The sort of inside-the-Beltway moves that feel like political earthquakes to a certain kind of Washington insider leave Trump voters somewhere between indifferent and pleased.”

 

Ross Douthat: “This sense of things may change as Trump pushes the envelope of presidential power or as the right embraces its own forms of censoriousness. Indeed, already you can see some factions that aligned with Trump because they were anti-woke start to break away or critique MAGA excesses.”

 

David French: “There’s a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other, and many Republicans (sadly!) want their opponents to suffer. They’re actually happy to see people lose their jobs or to see nonprofits lose funding if those people are perceived as part of the ‘deep state’ or RINOs.”

 

“Many Republicans dislike foreign aid. Or loathe elite universities. Or hate big liberal law firms.”

 

“If you’re watching Fox News or other right-wing outlets, you’re hearing a lot of stories about strange, ‘woke’ programs funded by USAID. They don’t know about the lives that are saved or the lives that are at risk.”

 

“I sincerely doubt that most Republicans think or believe that Trump has done anything illegal so far. Right-wing media is full of legal talking heads telling their loyal audiences that the various district judges are lawless. The right is even attacking Amy Coney Barrett, calling her a grifter or a RINO for exercising her independent judgment.”

“That means they won’t know, much less care, about any given political controversy until it affects them personally.”

 

“If the economy tanks, MAGA will stay with Trump, but we know from the 2020 election that enough voters will step off the Trump train to swing the balance of power back to the Democrats.”

Legal scholars on whether there’s a constitutional crisis or not

After the Trump administration ignored a federal judge’s order not to deport a group of Venezuelan men, longtime New York Times legal reporter Adam Liptak contacted legal scholars on whether the clash between President Trump and the judiciary amounts to a constitutional crisis.

 

“If anyone is being detained or removed based on the administration’s assertion that it can do so without judicial review or due process,” says Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia, “the president is asserting dictatorial power and ‘constitutional crisis’ doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation.”

 

Trump raised the stakes Tuesday by calling for the impeachment of the judge who issued the order, James Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington, describing him on social media as a “Radical Left Lunatic.”

 

An Associated Press profile of Boasberg says his reputation among colleagues is “as a principled jurist with bipartisan respect — he was appointed to the federal bench in 2011 by President Barack Obama but was named a decade earlier to a seat on the D.C. Superior Court by President George W. Bush.”

 

A few hours after Trump’s statement, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a statement saying, “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

 

Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, says assessing whether a given development is a constitutional crisis is “generally unhelpful.”

“I think it’s more useful to say that this is moving us into a completely different kind of constitutional order, one that’s no longer characterized by laws that bind officials and that can be enforced,” Huq says. “The law, in other words, becomes a tool to harm enemies, but not to bind those who govern. That is a quite different constitutional order from the one that we’ve had for a long time.”

 

Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, wrote in the right-leaning National Review, “It’s all right to complain bitterly about court orders, but they are not to be ignored, much less knowingly flouted.”

The administration has chosen a different path, McCarthy wrote: “The government seems to be intentionally instigating fireworks. That seems like a terrible legal strategy, but it may be winning politics ... at least for a little while.”

 

Asked whether the United States has reached a tipping point plunging it into a constitutional crisis, Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, questioned the premise. “‘Tipping point’ suggests a world in which things are fine until suddenly they’re not,” she says. “But we’re past the first point already.”

 

Greene, the Columbia professor, says, “An executive branch that operates without internal legal constraint but solely on the basis of its ability to get away with things, whether politically or legally, is itself sufficient to produce a constitutional crisis. A president who does whatever he wants until someone stops him is a constitutional crisis whether or not he is sometimes stopped.”

Trump wrote on social media last month: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

The fracas over Schumer’s move to keep the government open

The Constitution gives Congress the primary power to control government spending, and the narrative at the beginning of last week was that Democrats would stand together to preserve the separation of power by rejecting the House GOP bill to fund the government through September.

The GOP lawmakers supporting the bill and Democrats opposing it gave the same reason, The New York Times noted. They said the stopgap bill gave President Trump latitude to continue his campaign to dismantle and defund major pieces of the federal government through Elon Musk’s DOGE.

On Tuesday, March 11, the House passed the GOP bill with the support of all but one Republican and just one Democrat. 

But also on Tuesday, Wired reported that Musk actually “wanted a government shutdown — an aim that runs contrary to the White House’s stated desire to avoid one — in part because it would potentially make it easier to eliminate the jobs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, essentially achieving a permanent shutdown.”

On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor that Republicans lacked the 60 votes needed to get to debate on the House bill and called for a bill to keep the government open for another month to give Congress “time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass.”

On Thursday, Schumer said on the Senate floor that Republicans had rejected his proposal for negotiations. And that he would oppose a government shutdown, backing passage of the House-passed bill.

There was a “torrent of frustration and anger” after Schumer’s announcement, including calls that he be primaried in 2028, says The Associated Press.  

The most detailed explanation of Schumer’s reasoning that I’ve seen is what he told Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Saturday:

“I think it was a very, very difficult decision between two bad options, a partisan Republican C.R. [continuing resolution] and a shutdown that Musk and Trump wanted. For me, the shutdown of the government would just be devastating and far worse than the Republican C.R. Let me explain: A shutdown would shut down all government agencies, and it would solely be up to Trump and DOGE and Musk what to open again, because they could determine what was essential. So their goal of decimating the whole federal government, of cutting agency after agency after agency, would occur under a shutdown. Two days from now in a shutdown, they could say, well, food stamps for kids is not essential. It’s gone. All veterans offices in rural areas are gone. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. They’re not essential. We’re cutting them back. So it’d be horrible. The damage they can do under a shutdown is much worse than any other damage that they could do.

“One of the Republican senators told us: We go to a shutdown, it’s going to be there for six months, nine months, a year. And by then, their goal of destroying the federal government would be gone. And finally, one final point here, and that is that right now under the C.R., you can go to court and contest an executive order to shut something down. Under a shutdown, the executive branch has sole power. So, in conclusion, I knew this would be an unpopular decision. I knew that. I know politics. But I felt so strongly as a leader that I couldn’t let this happen because weeks and months from now, things would be far worse than they even are today, that I had to do what I had to do.

“We’ve had government shutdowns before, but never against such nihilists, such anti-government fanatics as Trump, DOGE, Musk. They’ve given us a playbook, by the way. [Russell] Vought has already has written what he wants to shut down if he got a shutdown. Trump wanted a shutdown. Musk wanted a shutdown. Ask yourself why.

“For weeks and months, we had said a shutdown is awful. And by the way, every Democrat, no matter how they voted, wanted to make sure there was no shutdown. We thought there could be a bipartisan plan, and I talked to Hakeem regularly during this period. We didn’t think that [Mike] Johnson could get all his votes. He did. When it came to the Senate on Tuesday, our hope was that Patty Murray could negotiate with the Republican senators and get that 30 day C.R., a bipartisan plan. She couldn’t. So we were faced with two awful choices. The choice has been made, but I think the whole Democratic Party is united on what I mentioned in the earlier broadcast, showing how bad Trump is in every way. We’re organizing this week and next week in Republican districts. We’re having rallies to not give tax breaks to millionaires, and we’re succeeding. We’re succeeding, Lulu. We’re bringing his numbers down.”

Steve Dennis, a Bloomberg reporter who’s a former colleague of my husband, said on Bluesky: “Schumer tells me Republicans might try to jam Democrats again in September, but thinks Trump will be less popular then and Republican appropriators might be more willing to stand up to him. He said they refused to do so now.”

A Times article says: “Many Democratic lawmakers continued to express deep frustration at Senator Chuck Schumer on Sunday for having broken with most of his party to allow a Republican spending bill to pass, as the Democratic base increasingly demands stauncher resistance to President Trump’s far-reaching agenda.”

We can’t know whether a government shutdown or no shutdown would, in fact, be more damaging. But personally, I’m willing to give Schumer the benefit of the doubt.

What citizens need to know about government shutdown votes this week

House Republicans unveiled on Saturday a bill to fund the government at current levels through Sept. 30, “daring Democrats to oppose it and risk being blamed for a government shutdown that would start after midnight Friday,” says The New York Times.

 

While conservative House Republicans in the past have opposed such spending bills, forcing Speaker Johnson to rely on Democrats to keep the government open, President Trump has called on Republicans to unite and push this bill through so he and Republicans on Capitol Hill can focus on their new budgetary and tax-cutting plans.

 

“Great things are coming for America, and I am asking you all to give us a few months to get us through to September so we can continue to put the Country’s ‘financial house’ in order,” Trump wrote on his social media site on Saturday after Republican leaders unveiled the bill.

 

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., who has voted against these bills throughout his career, told reporters that he was “open” to possibly supporting this one after Trump reassured him that DOGE would implement cuts.

 

Leaders of the congressional spending committees had been in bipartisan talks to find a way to pass the traditional spending bills, which would give Congress more say in how federal funds are spent and test how far the Trump administration was willing to go in defying lawmakers on spending issues.

 

But as the March 14 deadline has neared, Johnson and administration officials have made the decision that it would be to the White House’s advantage to freeze funding for the year and push through whatever changes they could convince Republicans to accept on mainly party-line votes.

 

House Democrats aren't expected to help pass the bill this time, The Washington Post and other media report. 

 

Democrats are worried that a long-term funding patch will give Trump and DOGE more control over how money is spent, The Post says, citing multiple lawmakers and aides.

 

“Congress — not Trump or Musk — should decide through careful bipartisan negotiations how to invest in our states and districts — and whether critical programs that support students, veterans, families and patients get funded or not,” says Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

 

So Democrats are standing up.

 

What citizens can do:

 

The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. But Republican lawmakers appear to be too afraid of Trump to follow through on their oath to protect the Constitution and check presidential power. 

 

Yet DOGE isn’t popular, according to a PolitiFact article being run by Texas’ Austin-American Statesman newspaper.

 

Olivia Troye, a first-term Trump White House official who broke with him and spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, says about former members of the “Never Trump” movement:

“We’re in a moment when there’s self-preservation, and I don’t blame people for that. But we need to remind ourselves that we have the power. The only reason that they have the power and are continuing to do what they do is that people are going silent.”

 

But members of the public are protesting nationwide. Reporters are reporting. Current and former officials are speaking up. For example, In a letter to lawmakers last week, five former defense secretaries who served under Republicans and Democrats — Lloyd Austin, Jim Mattis, Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel and William Perry — condemned Trump’s firing of senior military leaders last month and asked that the House and Senate hold “immediate hearings to assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.”

 

“We the people,” who the Constitution put in charge — can weigh in this week by calling and emailing our lawmakers. We can let those lawmakers who are standing up know that we support them and encourage them to do it more.

 

And we can urge the others to defend the institutions they pledged to defend.

 

If you type your address in this form on the Congress.gov website, you’ll get the contact information for your House representative and your two senators.

 

Here are other ways to help, from Robert Reich, author, professor and former secretary of Labor under President Clinton, including contacting the White House at 1-202-456-1414 (switchboard) and 1-202-456-1111 (comments).

 

Here are more suggestions from Reich.