Photo by Kelly Sikkema, Unsplash
Photo by Kelly Sikkema, Unsplash
Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, and those like him in your party don’t understand why voters have handed you back the seats of power you ceded to Republicans: we want you to collectively grow a pair.
Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz
Congratulations.
You did it.
We did it.
Together, we have engineered one of the greatest political comebacks in our lifetimes. We’ve averted a hostile fascist coup, neutralized a wannabe dictator, and stabilized not just this nation but the entire planet.
You deserve a great deal of credit. You placed incredible candidates, you mobilized and messaged well, and you got out of your own way.
And though you may have benefitted from the abject incompetence and violent overreach of your opponents, as well as the scalding rage of the American people in response, you did what you needed to do, and there’s no way of overstating how important your landslide victory is to this nation.
Now, you can’t screw this up, and we’re worried you might.
Yesterday, possible Speaker Hakeem Jeffries responded to a question on MS NOW’s Morning Joe about the Democrats’ incoming agenda and the possibility of impeachment of Donald Trump by saying, “The American people don’t want us to get even.”
Jeffries is already signaling that he and Chuck Schumer, and those like him in your party don’t understand why voters have handed you back the seats of power you ceded to Republicans: we want you to collectively grow a pair.
We want affordability and accountability, and we should and do expect our leadership to be capable of attending to both things simultaneously. We have no desire to see you stake out some namby-pamby moral high ground of inaction that sacrifices legal reckoning on the altar of ceremonial niceness.
And the fact that the GOP’s illegalities and malfeasance are precisely the cause of the economic ills we’re currently infected with seems to be something you don’t understand, but we do—and we want their feet held to the freakin’ fire.
Donald Trump is a felon, serial sexual abuser, insurrectionist, and war criminal.
He has repeatedly and unrepentantly committed the highest offenses against this nation while in office.
He has weaponized ICE, the Military, and the Department of Justice against the people in the United States and around the world; a trail of bombs and beatings and premature deaths.
He and his henchmen are responsible for the extermination of untold numbers of human beings throughout this planet, as well as the needless suffering, starvation, and sorrow of hundreds of millions more.
And if your position is that the American people’s desire for legal accountability for all of this amounts to some misplaced and wasteful desire for revenge, you’re gonna lose the influence you’ve been gifted with in a few Scaramuccis.
We aren’t looking for our pound of flesh here; we’re demanding justice, and if you can’t discern the difference or you aren’t willing to engage the pushback that will come from the very party who’ve been aiding and abetting this felonious, traitorous mobster, you’re not gonna survive another election cycle.
We have entrusted you with this golden moment, and we don’t want you to screw this up, so let us lay it out for you:
- You’ll screw this up by treating Donald Trump and his murderous collaborators with kid gloves and not prosecuting them.
- You’ll screw this up by making Chuck Schumer Majority Leader and Hakeem Jeffries Speaker, men clearly not up for the moment voters have given you.
- You’ll screw this up by not divesting from Israel and its genocide.
- You’ll screw this up by not bringing every Epstein predator to justice.
- You’ll screw this up by not dismantling ICE.
- You’ll screw this up by not prioritizing free healthcare for everyone.
- You’ll screw this up by responding to war crimes with strongly-worded letters.
- You’ll screw this up by retreating to polite decorum and bipartisan niceties and the business-as-usual banality that lost you this platform to begin with.
We’re not naive or stupid. We know Trump and the Republican Party are leaving you with a trail of corruption, destruction, and political malpractice that will take decades to fully reverse.
We don’t expect you to perform miracles, but you damn well better know that we expect you to get your hands dirty, to make sure this cadre of criminals pays for the bloodshed and death they’ve trafficked in, and to do the will of the people who’ve handed you back the keys to a kingdom you’ve largely squandered for decades.
The biggest mistake you can make right now is underestimating how bold and creative and pissed off the American people are telling you they are. We’ve been brutalized and gaslit and robbed blind by our elected leaders. We’re exhausted and weary—and yeah, we’re greedy, and we want it all.
We want affordable groceries, and we want masked thugs off our streets.
We want a living wage, and we want to be free from tyrants and domestic terrorists.
We want clean drinking water, and we want to see traitors rot in prison.
We want food that doesn’t poison us, and we want war tribunals.
We want our taxes to fund healthcare and education, not ethnic cleansing and concentration camps.
We want to go to the hospital without having to default on our mortgages.
We want human and civil rights for everyone.
We want foreign governments and militaries out of our own.
We deserve all of this, and you owe it to us to make sure we have it.
Throughout this nation this week, voters have shown that they are capable of evolution, of electing people who don’t look or sound like them, and are willing to give you another chance to govern unimpeded by thugs and grifters and Christian nationalists.
Please meet the moment and listen to your constituents, all of them.
Have courage, show strength, do the difficult things.
You’ve been entrusted with America, Dems. Don’t screw it up.
Sincerely but seriously,
The American People
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
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