Next meeting: Monday June 2, 2025 @7pm (skipping next Monday for Memorial Day)
Christ Lutheran Church
1701 Arroyo Chamiso Road, Santa Fe
STAY POSITIVE! In the flood of lies and chaos, it can be hard to keep a calm center of positive energy. Seek out what gives you joy and peace; those doses will recharge you and sustain you for the long game ahead of defeating not just Trump but the whole autocratic mindset that seeks to divide and conquer. A few positive gems to remind us of the glimmers:
Scott Dworkin
I also had the pleasure of talking to Lois Lipman, the producer of First We Bombed New Mexico, at the Santa Fe International Literary Festival last weekend and she mentioned that her film is being shown in Albuquerque on Thursday. If you can, check it out.
Donovan Kolbly
Heard around the Internet
The Big Bad Billionaire's Bill
Instead of saving money, the Big, Beautiful Bill actually blows the budget deficit wide open by extending the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. [...] The Democratic Women’s Caucus has dubbed the measure the “Big Bad Billionaire Bill.”
— Heather Cox Richardson, May 18 Letters from an American
Heather Cox Richardson
The Trumpian kleptocracy approached full flower this week. As the president took the first major foreign trip of his second term, heading to the Middle East, the brazenness of his corruption repelled even his most ardent supporters
— May 16, The Democracy Index on The Contrarian
Joshua Kolb
And how about a little comic relief 😂
Michael de Adder
Upcoming Events
Donovan Kolbly
Donovan Kolbly
In the News
How Trump is affecting New Mexico this week
Daniel J. Chacón dchaconsfnewmexican.com
Morgan Lee The Associated Press
Happening Around New Mexico
Check out the web calendar of grass-roots events from around New Mexico. Filter by Santa Fe or your area of interest!
Rise for Freedom is putting on trainings Thursdays 6-8PM. This week, May 22: Advanced Organizing Skills - picking the tactics you want and making a plan.
Stay in touch with us
We are continuing to build out our following on social media accounts, currently primarily Bluesky and Facebook. You can help out with this effort by following us and liking and re-posting our messages. Help us get the word out and expand our digital presence!
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And if you want to reach out to your representatives, check out https://resist.bot/ - a handy chatbot tool to make it easy to let them know what you think!
And we are hoping to leverage the HUGE June 14 No Kings protest to also boost our enrollment. Many hands make light work, and with enough hands we can restore power to the people! Read about Scott's campaign here:
Scott Romans
Indivisible National
(published Monday, May 19 2025)
| This week, Ezra revisits how we beat a MAGA reconciliation bill in 2017 -- and lessons for beating the Republican Tax Scam today. Plus, we have several ways you can help stop the cuts, a call to block Trump’s crypto corruption, and more in our weekly updates. |
So far, Trump has operated mostly through unilateral executive orders, not the Republican Congress. The deportation forces, the tariffs, the dismantling of the Department of Education and other agencies – all of that has been Trump and his underlings in the White House, while Congressional Republicans happily stood aside.
That’s about to change. Let’s talk about reconciliation.
Reconciliation is the main legislative maneuver used to pass bills in the Senate with just 51 votes, instead of the 60 normally needed to overcome the filibuster. It essentially lets the party in power push bills through without bipartisan support. It’s how George W. Bush passed two rounds of tax cuts for the rich in 2001 and 2003, how Trump passed his original tax scam in 2017, and how Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act.
And it’s now how Trump plans to pass his legislative agenda. That agenda is, in short, a massive tax cut to the rich that also kicks 14 million people off Medicaid and other healthcare, defunds reproductive care clinics like Planned Parenthood, and slashes food assistance for kids, veterans, and seniors. If you want a brief on the policy, read this. I’m going to focus on the politics and what we can do about it.
Here’s the current factional dynamic on Capitol Hill:
- The MAGA faction wants more cuts to Medicaid and other programs.
- The pro-billionaire faction wants more tax cuts for billionaires.
- The vulnerable GOP frontliners don’t want anyone to notice that they’re supporting this.
- Democrats are unified against it.
What happens next? Republicans try to make the sausage. Mike Johnson doesn’t have the votes yet. On Wednesday, in an effort to fully win over the MAGA and pro-billionaire factions, he’s going to make the bill even worse and even more unpopular. If they then manage to bring MAGA and pro-billionaires together without a revolt from the vulnerable frontliners, the bill will pass the House and go to the Senate -- as soon as this week.
The Senate will make their own amendments to the bill, some of which will piss off the House MAGA, pro-billionaire, and/or the frontliners. Mike Johnson will then present that Senate bill as “the best we can get” and hope the GOP caucus accepts it. They would like to get this done in June -- far later than they originally planned -- but more likely, even an optimistic timeline stretches to July.
Or maybe the sausage just doesn’t get made. Maybe the House fails to pass their bill. Or, after passing the bill, maybe the Senate fails to pass their version of the bill. Or, after the Senate passes their bill, maybe Mike Johnson can’t unify his caucus. Or maybe the whole thing just drags out until September, when Congress faces a funding cliff and complicates the negotiations even further.
The bottom line here is that the Republican agenda is not guaranteed -- and this uncertainty gives us an opportunity for action.
Learning from the last failed Republican reconciliation bill. Reconciliation is powerful, but it’s not a guaranteed win for the ruling party. Indivisible’s first major legislative campaign in 2017 was around a reconciliation bill -- the attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. During this months-long campaign we had a simple strategy:
- Delay.
- Toxify the bill with public opposition.
- Target pressure on the weakest parts of the MAGA coalition.
Back then, Republicans thought repealing the ACA would be easy. But as we and others amped up grassroots pressure across the country, they struggled. After months of infighting, failures, and delays, the House finally managed to pass its reconciliation bill repealing the Affordable Care Act in May of 2017 (yes, 8 years ago exactly). The sausage was made! Or was it?
The reconciliation bill then went to the Senate, where we targeted pressure on Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Jerry Moran, and John McCain, among others. Week after week, we hammered Republicans for their support in the press and on the streets, and Senate Republicans could not show up in public without massive public pushback.
And then… the sausage didn’t get made. The Senate tried various different versions of a repeal but they couldn’t get the votes. The reconciliation bill was delayed until it was defeated. The Republicans would go on to pass the Trump Tax Scam with reconciliation, but the Affordable Care Act survived.
What we need now. There isn't a congressional district in this country where cutting Medicaid has more than 15% support. This is a bill that Members of Congress should be politically scared to support. This is a bill that should drag out because lawmakers are getting cold feet. This is not a bill that should pass quickly, quietly, or without mass opposition.
We need a unified Democratic opposition. We need Democrats zeroing in on the GOP plan, and not muddying the message by getting behind an unrelated, corruption-friendly crypto bill this week instead -- I’m looking at you Mark Warner, Kirsten Gillibrand, Angela Alsobrooks, and Ruben Gallego.
We need Democrats to link arms in a focused fight against this, and we need Republicans to understand there will be political hell to pay if they go through with it.
This is a live fight. Republicans would like it to be easy. We can guarantee it won’t be. But it’s up to us to do it -- so please read on to this week’s actions!
In solidarity,
Ezra Levin
Co-Executive Director
Indivisible
Your weekly to-dos
- Call your Republican representative on Tuesday, May 20, to help melt GOP phone lines and stop the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. This Tuesday, we’re joining Public Citizen and Americans for Tax Fairness to lead a national call-in that overwhelms GOP phones in opposition to their reconciliation bill! Need a reminder? Add your phone number here to get a text from Indivisible when it’s time to call.
- Call your senators -- Republicans AND Democrats -- to demand that they oppose a cryptocurrency bill enabling Trump’s corruption. Indivisibles recently helped derail a toothless bill that would’ve let Trump keep profiting from the presidency via his crypto investments. Now, that bill is on the move again, and we need to let our senators hear us so we can defeat it for good.
- Join our “Fight Back with Friends” training on May 27 for new tools to help get your friends and family off the sidelines! We all know someone who wants to join our fight but isn’t sure where to start; Fight Back with Friends is a new program designed to break down that barrier. Our monthly call next Tuesday, May 27, will give you everything you need to get started!
- Sign up for a No Kings protest to defy Trump’s tyranny and ruin his self-serving birthday parade on June 14. As Trump hosts his un-American military parade in DC, we’re rising up everywhere else to show him and our fellow Americans what real power looks like. Don’t see a protest near you yet? More events are added every day, so please check our map again soon or use our toolkit to host your own event!
- Join a “What’s the Plan” call (Thursdays, 3pm ET / 12pm PT) to ask Leah and Ezra your questions about reconciliation, No Kings, and more! Each Thursday, our co-founders jump online to break down the news, draw inspiration from Indivisibles’ work, and answer your questions directly. Come be part of a free-flowing, interactive chat about what’s next in our fight for democracy.
P.S. It’s a key week in our fight to stop the Republican Tax Scam, and we’ve rolled out billboards, phonebanks, door knocking, digital programs, and more! Grassroots giving has already helped expand our efforts in big ways, but if you can spare it, you can chip in today to fund billboards and nationwide organizing to defeat the Medicaid-killing MAGA agenda.
This week's update on the Republican Tax Scam
Ezra covered the state of play in-depth in his introduction above, but we’ll summarize it again very quickly: Speaker Johnson wants to pass the reconciliation bill* through the House and into the Senate** ASAP, so he’s granting concessions to his party’s MAGA faction hand-over-fist in an effort to speed things along.
All that rush and all those concessions to the far-right are making the bill even nastier, more harmful, and more politically toxic. We need to pounce on that by applying more pressure than ever to vulnerable House Republicans who are terrified to vote on this bill.
 | We’re overrunning capitol phone lines in opposition. Thousands of Indivisibles are calling their GOP representatives this week about opposing the Republican Tax Scam -- especially during the national call-in day on May 20. Click here to call your GOP representative on Tuesday, May 20 about stopping SNAP and Medicaid cuts. |
 | We’re putting up billboards in key GOP districts. We’re placing outdoor ads that highlight SNAP and Medicaid cuts in nine of the most narrowly divided districts in the country, and thanks to overwhelming grassroots support, we’ve already been able to DOUBLE the number of billboards secured! You can chip in here to fund even more billboards and other outreach to stop the cuts. |
 | We’re knocking on doors to sound the alarm. Our Neighbor2Neighbor program allows folks in four states and eleven key districts to knock on doors and educate like-minded neighbors about the GOP Tax Scam on their own time. Click here to see if Neighbor2Neighbor canvassing is available in your area. |
 | We’re calling, texting, and empowering our neighbors. Through our new Fight Back With Friends program, we’re helping folks across the country connect their friends, families, and broader communities with tools to join the fight. Sign up for our next Fight Back With Friends training on May 27 here. |
The House could vote on the Republican Tax Scam this week! Use the links above to take action right away, or click here to check out our “Stop The Cuts” toolkit for more information on all the ways you can join this fight!
*You might also see this called the megabill, Republican tax scam, GOP tax bill, or even “Trump’s big, beautiful bill.” They’re all different names for the same plan to gut Medicaid, food assistance, and other programs in order to fund tax breaks for billionaires. **Passing this bill in the House does NOT mean Republicans have won. They’ll still need to pass it in the Senate, and if the upper chamber changes even one word, the House needs to debate and vote all over again. You may remember it was the Senate that sunk Trump’s first reconciliation bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017. |
Where you can protest Trump’s tyranny June 14
With over 700 events on the map and more launching daily, we have the opportunity to make June 14 -- the day of Trump’s military birthday parade -- one of the biggest days of mass protest of our lifetimes! But to maximize the power of our resistance, we need everyone who’s able to show up to do so and bring friends.
IndivisiWIN of the week
Over 15,000 activists signed up to form a human chain from Chicago to Aurora, IL in an effort to shine light on Trump’s illegal and authoritarian actions! At least nine Chicago-area Indivisible groups and their local allies partnered to lead this weekend’s massive “Hands across Chicagoland” protest that stretched nearly thirty miles.
Follow Indivisible national on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads to keep up on the latest information, and text “INDIVISIBLE” to 59798 to opt-in to our text messaging program, where we send rapid response actions a few times a month.
