Getting Near Christmas 

My favorite “sad” Christmas song – James Taylor’s version of Joni Mitchell’s – River

Christmas Week

It’s Christmas week, 2025.  This week is always a time of family, food, Great Lakes Christmas Ale, and fun. (I think we bought out the local supply of Ale).   But it’s also a week of reflection, on last year, and on what the future will be.  

It’s Christmas week, and ICE has come to Columbus.  A hundred or more ICE “officers” are staying at the Airport hotels for the next three weeks.  I don’t wish ill on anyone, but their actions seem especially heinous in the Christmas season.  Families of mixed immigration status will need to hide in their homes, hoping for help with food from those willing to risk “aiding and abetting”.  Some of them will still have to go to work (pay taxes, add to the economy) at risk of detention and removal. ICE showed up at a Columbus high school last week.  It’s was the “joyous” last day of school before Christmas Break, now it is remembered by students as the day that masked, anonymous, military men threatened them and their classmates.  

It’s Christmas week, and the Department of Justice flaunts the law.  The House, the Senate (by unanimous consent) and the President signed a law requiring ALL EPSTEIN FILE materials turned over to Congress by Friday, December 19^th.  But the Deputy Attorney General simply said, “No”.  Instead, he turned over thousands of already released documents, hundreds of totally redacted pages, and some actual new material. Many of those were pictures of known Democrats with or around Jeffrey Epstein.  The Department of Justice has a very different understanding of the word “ALL” then do the rest of us.  And a different meaning of the word “Justice” too.  The law enforcers are now scofflaws.

Un-Doing

It’s Christmas week, and we are still murdering men in boats in both the Caribbean and the Pacific (nearly one hundred).  We are threatening war with Venezuela, and we are bombing Syria. (Of all that, the Syrian bombing makes the most sense, since an ISIS remnant recently killed three Americans).  Oh, and Donald Trump has added his own name to the “top line” of the Kennedy Center.  Credit where credit is due:  gas prices are down.  But the literal “cost of Christmas”, buying food and presents and decorations and everything else, is higher than ever.  It’s getting near Christmas.

There is so much to undo.  In the eleven short months since Donald Trump assumed the Presidency, our Nation has become nearly unrecognizable.  We now have a  “secret police force”,  called ICE.  We have rolled back protections for minorities, particularly people of color.  Our Nation is in the process of real indoctrination, what the Right has always accused supposed “lefty” public education of doing.  Now, even the State of Ohio has listed the “Christian” elements that should be taught in public school.  

There are raging measles and whooping cough epidemics already.  We will soon add other “childhood” diseases to the list.  Like the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services no longer worries about Health.  Instead, it is pursuing the political agenda of extreme anti-vaxxers.  The vaccinators have become the vaccine skeptics.  And the National Park Service wants the authority to sell park land to private owners.  Those who remember reading George Orwell’s 1984 in high school are having flashbacks.

The List

The infamous Project 2025 is a nine hundred page list of changes the Right-wing Heritage Foundation wants to do to the American Government.  It is the blueprint for the Trump Administration, from DOGE to ICE to disbanding the Department of Education.  The Plan short circuits the Constitutional system.  Instead of the “Schoolhouse Rock” version, laws first passed by Congress then signed by the President; Project 2025 depends on their own interpretation of executive authority.  They “believe”, almost in the religious sense, that the President has the ultimate and singular authority to make all and any decisions for the unitary executive branch. 

All of the “checks and balances” within the branch are short-circuited.  Even the massive reform of the 1880’s, civil service, is threatened.  (As a reminder:  in 1881 President James Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled office seeker.  Garfield’s successor, Chester Arthur, got the the civil service act  through Congress in Garfield’s name. It required that the vast majority of government jobs be filled based on merit and ability, rather than political loyalty.  But this non-partisan workforce is a threat to the Project 2025 plan.  The authors call Civil Service the “Deep State”, and intend to destroy it.) 

Executive orders are put in place of laws, and are supposed to obeyed with the same alacrity.  And those executive orders have the added “bonus” of exactly fitting with a newly Supreme Court created Presidential “power”.  The President is now immune from criminal responsibility for any of his “official” acts.  And, since executive orders are “official”, he now can do almost anything with impunity.

Project 2029

We in the “opposition” have a lot to do.  First, we need to start clawing back power.  That’s happening:  in the elections held since Trump took office, Democrats are winning overwhelmingly.  We still have eleven months until the mid-term elections, when Democrats may be able to wrest back the House and Senate.  Then, we need to put the Administration under a microscope, and fight to protect the balance of power.

And we better be starting a list of what we have to “undo” from the Trump Administration.  There is so much damage done, both here in the United States, and worldwide.  It’s going to take a Democratic President more than just his or her eight years to rebuild the “guardrails”, now no longer in “norms” but in law.  I suspect we already have more than nine hundred pages of things to fix.  Call it “Project 2029”. 

It’s getting near Christmas, 2025.  At least Santa Claus gets to start a fresh list on December 26.  Our list will just get longer, and uglier, until we finally get to deliver for the American people.  There will be plenty of time to “check it twice”.