Nov 11: Indivisible Santa Fe Newsletter

National purpose with local action

Next meeting: November 17 at 7:00pm (🗣️Amanda López Askin)
Christ Lutheran Church
1701 Arroyo Chamiso Road, Santa Fe

Searing Hot Incandescent Rage 🔥😡 Like a lot of people, I was pretty upset Sunday when I heard about the 8 democrats who caved on standing up for affordable health care. Since the beginning of the shutdown, Schumer has dropped one demand after another and now they dropped even the demand for a one year extension of the ACA credit (the original demands had been for a permanent extension, restoration of Medicaid funding, and more controls on authoritarian moves). And after the elections last Tuesday, Democrats held a very strong hand – a strong showing against Republicans and polling showing that Republicans were overwhelming being blamed for the shutdown. And yet the Democrats caved. 😡

I am optimistic that either a new party or new leadership will bring energy and political power back to progressive voices. (See the Baristas v. Billionaires opening, below – an inspiring case of young voices standing up for progressive values – go see it! 🍿). For now, this fight is not completely over. Indivisible is hoping to save the party by replacing the leadership, and launching a Democratic primary program:

The weakness we saw yesterday from these Democrats is one of the factors that brought us Trump. Full stop. The people—including Democrats, Independents, and even Republicans—made it clear last Tuesday that we don’t want kings in the United States and that the authoritarian regime must be resisted at all times. The people voted for fighters.
-- Ben Meiselas, MTN

Upcoming Events

Opening Nov 14: Baristas vs. Billionaries

A century ago, the labor movement revolutionized how workers relate to industry. But that movement has not kept up with shifts in the industry that drive our economy. In this time of powerful people on both sides of the aisle failing to fight for the common people, this movie is an inspiration for what it looks like for people to put themselves out there in solidarity to defend what's right.

Baristas vs. Billionaires tells the story of the Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) union drive which started in Buffalo, NY in 2001. One of the things that makes the SBWU campaign, and the film, special is that the vast majority of the union organizers are young people.

I would call it a millennial and Gen Z uprising for the workplace.
-- Lakota, SBWU organizer in Memphis

Over the past four years they’ve unionized 600+ coffee shops across 45 states, with more than 10,00 members. Starbucks corporate response has been what Sen. Bernie Sanders called “the worst union busting in modern American history”. But the baristas are not backing down. Last week their union announced if they don’t have a fair contract by November 13, they will be striking against Starbucks in 25 cities until they get one.

Baristas vs Billionaires is the kind of uplifting movie we need for these dark political and economic times. Everyone should go to see it while it’s at CCA for two weeks; I highly recommend it 🎥 One of the producers, Glenn, will be at the Nov 14-16th weekend showings in person to present the film and for Q&As.

The timing of this movie release is spot on, since unionized Starbucks baristas voted to authorize a strike if a contract is not finalized by Thursday.

Nov 15: Speakers' Corner 📣

Next Saturday (Nov 15) the Speakers' Corner will be at the usual location – the Railyard Park next to SITE Santa Fe, 10am - 11am. This is the last one scheduled for the season.

I wrote up the recap from the November 1 Speakers' Corner:

Nov 17: Amanda López Askin

At next Monday's meeting, Amanda López Askin will be speaking. She is currently the County Clerk down in Dona Aña County, and is running to be NM Secretary of State.

Nov 17: Ambassador Michael McFaul

Michael McFaul is a professor at Stanford University, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and a news analyst for NBC and MSNBC. He is frequently featured on MSNBC to provide his expert analysis on international relations, particularly concerning Russia, China and U.S. foreign policy. –

He'll be speaking at the New Mexico Military Museum (1050 Old Pecos Trail) on Monday November 17 from 5:30 to 7:30 as part of a book release on Power in a Changing World: America, China, and Russia.

At a time when democracies are under threat around the world, I want to engage all Americans in a conversation about why global leadership—not retreat—best serves our national interests. In the book, I argue that the path forward for the U.S. lies in renewed international engagement, strong democratic leadership, and a clear recommitment to our economic and military strength.

– Michael McFaul

Details and registration >>

Nov 22: Steph & Donovan's Excellent Postcard Party

Steph and I are hosting a Postcard Party for Blue CD2. David Hollenbach will be distributing postcards next week on Nov 17, but we are going to get a batch so all you have to do is bring yourself and your commitment to helping keep New Mexico blue 💙

Party is November 22 from 3 to 5:30. We'll have all the materials as well as snacks and adult beverages. Sign up on Mobilize, spaces are limited!

Protests and Rallies

Showing up with the Body Politic

Also, check out the web calendar of grass-roots events from around New Mexico. Filter by Santa Fe or your area of interest!

New Mexico Grassroot Events

In the News

What folks are saying, of interest around here and elsewhere

Mass Blackout Action

Black Out The System is coordinating a national boycott Nov 25th - Dec 2nd. It's a stay at home, don't fuel the economy time. If you must spend, use cash and support small local business.

Silent Santa Fe ICE Abductions

ICE is abducting people quietly in Santa Fe. Unlike the very public, visible, made-for-TV abductions happening in Portland, LA, and Chicago, the abductions are happening here under the radar. One wonders if that's part of the strategy – by making ICE actions loud in some places, we might assume since we don't hear about it, that it's not happening here. Well, it is.

One solution we're borrowing from Chicago is to use whistles to make ICE actions audible. Scott talked about it at the last Speakers' Corner.

Furthermore, Scott is hosting a whistle-kit making parting this coming Saturday, November 15th from 3-5pm (with snacks and adult beverages!). Contact Scott at communications@indivisiblesantafe.org if you're interested in attending; he's looking for a total of 8 people.

Dispatches from the Indivisible Santa Fe desk

Healthcare Stories

On Monday, Jane S gave a readout on what the healthcare committee is preparing for the upcoming legislative session. Since the exact bills aren't known yet, the actions are limited at the moment.

But David Linke is still collecting stories of people's problematic interactions with the healthcare system in New Mexico. If you have a story to tell, reach out to David at (505) 501-0445 or by email at david.l.linke814@gmail.com. These stories will help provide tangible, anecdotal data for the legislature when it convenes in January.

Stay in touch with us

Check out our resources page with lots of links to useful information, constantly being updated as we find new web resources to help fight for democracy and the rule of law.

You can help our effort to expand our digital presence, including social media on Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram by following us and liking and re-posting our messages, or sharing our website with people who might be interested – they, too, can sign up and get this newsletter! 🎉 Help us get the word out!

Support Indivisible Santa Fe!

Indivisible National

Hi friends,

If you haven’t seen, Senate Democrats surrendered. What I am about to write may sound calm and collected, but know that I am channeling my searing hot incandescent rage in an effort to explain what went down, and what it requires of all of us next.

1. This was a surrender.
We didn’t just get a “bad deal” -- we got essentially nothing. The original Dem demands were threefold:

Permanent extension of the ACA subsidies
Medicaid funding restored
No more blank checks for the regime (rescission/impoundment restrictions)

Democrats dropped the Medicaid funding demands immediately after making them. They then stopped talking about rescission and impoundment. They dropped from “permanent” to “multi-year” to, finally, “one year” of ACA subsidies this week. A one-year extension -- Schumer's offer on Friday -- is actually the same demand as front-line Republican House members scared about reelection. But they couldn’t even hold the line there -- they surrendered without even getting that.

2. The vote itself was a bit of Kabuki theater.
Conveniently for them, none of the eight Senate Dems who voted for this are up for reelection next year. That’s by design. There’s going to be a lot of well-deserved anger directed at those specific eight Dems, but make no mistake -- this vote was stage-managed.

The way this works is that a critical mass of Dems within the caucus decides they’re going to surrender, they look at the number of votes they need to do it (eight), and they agree on eight Dems who don’t have to face voters anytime soon. That’s why Senators like Mark Warner can vote against it, even though they were widely known to be drivers behind the surrender.

This is not true of literally every Senate Dem -- we know that a bunch of folks, like Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy, Bernie Sanders, and Chris Van Hollen were arguing strongly against it behind closed doors. But many who voted no publicly helped engineer this surrender privately.

3. Schumer and Dem Senate leadership broadly failed.
Chuck Schumer, Brian Schatz, and Kirsten Gillibrand all voted for the March surrender, but voted against this surrender. Is that a meaningful shift? No.

Even aside from the Kabuki theater aspect of all this, it's the leadership's job to unify the Dem caucus to fight the fascists. That’s it. Their individual votes are irrelevant. If the Dem caucus fractures and fails to unify against the Bad Republican Bill, then that’s a failure of both the individual senators who caved and leadership for failing to lead the caucus.

We do not know now and will never know for sure if Schumer orchestrated this (my suspicion) or if he simply lacked the leadership skills to prevent it (also possible). But we don’t have to know the reason -- it is just factually true that he and the rest of the leadership team failed to hold their own caucus together.

Combine #3 with #2 above, and it leads here: If you’ve got a Senate Dem who is not calling for new leadership, they’re part of the problem. We should no longer trust Senate Dems who decline to come out against the leadership that led us here. Until proven otherwise, we should assume they were in on the game to fool their own supporters. It is easy to disabuse us of that assumption -- they just have to publicly make the popular call for new leadership.

4. This is bad policy.
The Republican budget guarantees that healthcare premiums will continue to skyrocket, rural hospitals will close, more people will go without healthcare, and more people will die. It does nothing to stop Trump from treating the federal budget as his personal piggybank.

The “win” some Dems are claiming is bullshit. They got a pinky-promise agreement from Republicans for a vote on ACA subsidies 40 days from now. They do not have the votes to win on that with serious concessions in both the House and Senate. It’s fake.

5. This is bad politics.
Senate Democrats surrendered when they had maximum leverage and were winning the fight. This surrender came weeks after the largest protest in American history, and days after the best election night in a decade or more. The public opinion polling showed Democrats were winning the fight, and the party’s own approval ratings were rising in response to them keeping up the fight.

We know where Indivisibles were on this. We polled them after last week’s "What’s the Plan?"call asking if Dems should take a GOP deal to reopen the government, or if they should continue fighting for ACA subsidies. 98.67% wanted to continue the fight!

This week, for the first time all year, Democrats were riding high. The regime was on the ropes. We had just clobbered them last Tuesday -- crushing the regime electorally everywhere. To surrender now is a message to all rank-and-file Democrats: "We don’t care that you want us to fight." I agreed with Brian Beutler’s take last night: the surrender in March felt like a reflection of “poor morale and low self-confidence.” This surrender is “throwing the fight.”

If the Senate leadership’s goal was to demobilize and depress rank-and-file Democrats, they could not have played their cards better.

6. The surrender will embolden the regime to do more damage.
The threat from Trump and Republicans is real and existential. They are violently attacking our communities, looting our services to serve their billionaire buddies, and shredding the Constitution. They’re behaving like they won’t ever be out of power again, because that’s their plan. There is nothing more urgent than ensuring they do not succeed.

By surrendering so utterly and completely at a moment of their maximum leverage and momentum, Senate Democrats teach Trump and his cadre an important lesson: do enough damage, and your opponents will buckle. This is an extremely dangerous lesson for Trump to learn as he ramps up his attacks on blue states and cities and prepares to steal the midterm elections. Because of this surrender, our democracy is more imperiled now than it was before.

7. The only path to a real opposition party is through a cleansing primary season.
We have spent a year now trying to convince the Democratic Party to unify and fight back. It started as a lonely fight shortly after the election, but our numbers grew. We’ve seen some Democrats lead from the beginning, some come around, and some do their best to at least perform resistance. There’s been real progress -- in large part because of our collective work.

But at some point, you gotta either change your leaders’ minds or you gotta change your leaders. And the time for changing minds is over.

After this week, we should expect more fecklessness unless we demand a change. You don’t demand that change in a general election -- you do it in primaries. And conveniently, primaries are right around the corner.

This all leads to one big announcement. Today, Indivisible is launching the largest Democratic primary program we’ve ever run.

This isn’t about left vs right. This is about fighting back vs losing. The regime’s threats are too real and the stakes are too high to settle for the feckless, loser version of the Democratic Party we saw this week. As we head into the midterms next year, we need a Democratic Party that inspires and instills pride. In this moment when the fascists are on the march, we need a Democratic Party with a spine.

Our primary program will include both the House and Senate. We will work with Indivisible groups to identify key races, provide support on the ground, and tap into movement energy across the country to boost candidates with a spine. One thing we can say for sure: We will not back any Senate primary candidate unless they call for Schumer to step down as Majority Leader.

And after the primary, whatever happens, we will rally behind the winner, and crush the regime electorally in the midterms just like we did this last week.

There will be much more to announce soon, but here are a few things we’ll ask you to do right now:

If you’re as pissed as I am and this all resonates with you, sign up to be part of this campaign to rebuild the Democratic Party today.
If you’ve got a Democratic Representative in the House, call them today and tell them not to be a party to this surrender -- or we’ll remember it next year. Yes, Republicans can likely pass this through the House without Democratic votes, but Dems don’t need to make it easier for them or put their names on a bill that betrays their constituents.
If you’re raring to do even more, you can also chip in to help us get this primary project off the ground. We’re going to be counting on grassroots supporters to fund this, but there will be many, many ways to get involved, so only give if you can.

We get the party we demand, and we intend to demand one that fights -- a Democratic Party with a spine.

In solidarity,
Ezra Levin
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible

Follow Indivisible national on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads to keep up on the latest information, and text “INDIVISIBLE” to 59798 to opt-in to their text messaging program, where they send rapid response actions a few times a month.