Our leadership is not failing us—it has failed us. We cannot wait for party leadership to protect our community from serious harm tomorrow—the serious harm is here today. Our leaders need to feel our anger and take action today.
On Monday, President Donald Trump's acting budget director ordered federal department and agency heads to halt critical forms of financial assistance at 5:00pm the next day. This included organizations that provide services including HIV prevention and treatment, community-based healthcare, and dozens of other programs that mean the difference between life and death for millions of Americans, including members of this club. This follows a flurry of other executive orders that have decimated dozens of policies protecting transgender Americans, including those housed in federal facilities and serving in our armed forces, and another targeting trans youth.
Even though the initial funding freeze has been reversed by the White House, the order itself is, like nearly everything this administration has done since taking office, illegal and unconstitutional.
Here's how Democratic leadership responded: silence, then some tweets, and then 23 Senate Democrats (including Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer) voted to confirm the president's latest cabinet nominee at the Department of Transportation, whose qualifications include working for FOX and being a former reality television star. Afterward, the caucus declared that they'd convene for an "emergency" meeting . . . the next day. Maybe.
At this point and after everything we’ve seen, that any Democratic lawmaker is showing any willingness to confirm the president’s nominees, let alone actually vote to confirm them, is unconscionable. As it stands, the GOP-led Congress is nothing more than a puppet of the White House, rubber-stamping an authoritarian assault on American democracy and the rule of law. It's kabuki theater; a sham; a fig leaf over what is a naked constitutional crisis where laws are treated as suggestions. And yet, while we devolve into Weimar, our party insists on clinging to norms and decorum, as if that makes them the adults in the room.
It does not.
Democrats won supermajorities in 2008. Barack Obama won the popular vote by nearly 8%. What did the GOP do? Soul search? Work toward "unity?" No. They locked arms and blocked President Obama’s entire agenda. They did as they have since the days of Lee Atwater: broke our government to make the case that our constitutional system does not work—and still the Democratic Party invited them to collaborate on legislation, invitations which they happily accepted. They watered down healthcare reform, financial regulation and critical infrastructure projects—and then voted against that same legislation for the sake of scoring political points. Instead of harming them, this ugly partisanship laid the foundation for the power they have today.
Sixteen years later and we have learned nothing. After a loss of 1.5% in the popular vote, our leadership has rolled over and surrendered to this blitzkrieg toward oligarchy and authoritarianism.
This is not a game. The GOP-led Congress and the White House are neither operating in good faith nor working to our benefit. The media as an institution has crumbled. Outlets are either paralyzed by fear of reprisals from Trump and his allies or owned by some billionaire administration collaborator. What content isn’t compromised is filtered through big tech algorithms or perverted by AI slop.
We need our leaders to stand up now more than ever. While the lone Republican in Brooklyn’s congressional delegation is hardly worth engaging (looking at you, Nicole Malliotakis!), our Democratic members have open minds and are actually in positions of leadership.
Senator Schumer, a Brooklynite, is the Senate Minority Leader and Representative Hakeem Jeffries is the House Minority Leader, also a Brooklynite, and potentially a future Speaker of the House.
Call them, and call the rest of our Brooklyn congressional delegation—Representatives Nydia Velázsquez, Yvette Clarke and Dan Goldman. Tell them to cut it with the norms, the decorum, the press release–speak, the old way of doing communications and “message discipline,” all of that. Tell them that your vote hinges on them rising to the challenge with righteous fury and direct action. Tell them to stop with the cutesy memes about golf and to stop trying to re-create the “tuna melt” moment from 2020.
Tell them to be real—to be authentic, mad, human.
Demand that they recognize that we are on the precipice of ruin, and that the LGBTQ community—our community—faces devastation. We know we—as it always has been and always will be—are among the first in the crosshairs, but never the last.
I demand that our leadership stop collaborating with the House and Senate majorities. I demand that they start boycotting votes and start taking a stand. I demand that they use every procedural tool in the books, norms be damned, to protect us: force quorum calls, vote no on all motions for cloture, deny unanimous consent—whatever it takes. I demand that they stop legitimizing this regime.
Join me in demanding more.
Joseph Jourdan is the president of Lambda Independent Democrats of Brooklyn, an organization that has been elevating queer voices in New York City politics for nearly 50 years.
