01/27/25

Good morning! It’s Monday, January 27th.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It was chosen on this day because on January 27th, 1945, the Red Army, the Soviet military, liberated Auschwitz.

On accident!

They happened upon it!

Happened upon one of humanity’s greatest horrors.

The day before the troops arrived, 56,000 prisoners were sent on a death march, which meant there were only 7,000 prisoners in the three main camps: Auschwitz, Monowitz, and Birkenau.

And so, on this day, we honor the six million Jewish people who were killed in a genocide.

But we also need to understand that the Holocaust didn’t just happen. For the first six years of Hitler’s rule, the Nazis changed Germany from a multi-party republic to a single-party dictatorship. Jews were not just murdered. First, they were made to be seen as outcasts. They were banned from politics, journalism, and most schooling. Books seen as un-German were banned and burned.

They hosted the Olympics.

German passports held by Jews were invalidated until they were stamped with the letter J.

Jewish-owned businesses were closed.

And look, this is the cold open of the news so I’m not going to go point by point into how this horror came to be, but I do want to remind you that this was a horror that unfolded in steps.

And we can’t know what was in everyone’s mind at that point, but I’m sure there were people who considered themselves to be good people. Who were horrified to see what they were seeing, but kept saying it wouldn’t get worse. It wouldn’t go further.

Who couldn’t imagine what was happening.

Who couldn’t believe their eyes. Who couldn’t believe what they were literally seeing.

But as Edmund Burke said, “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing.”

And, as Mark Twain said: “History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

And now, the news.

Third Term for Trump?

-via House.gov

On Thursday, just four days into Trump’s presidency, Andy Ogles, a Republican House member from Tennessee introduced a bill that would allow Presidents to run for up to, but no more than, three terms.

Yeah.

And lest all of us call President Obama at once, the proposed amendment reads as follows: ‘‘No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.’’

So this literally only applies to Trump, whose first two terms are nonconsecutive.

And look, will the pass? Probably not.

As a reminder, in order for an amendment to make it to the Constitution, the proposed amendment must either be passed by two-thirds of both the House and Senate, and then ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states or if two-thirds of the state legislatures ask Congress to call a Constitutional Convention.

But the fact that this was even proposed is news. Is it surprising that so many Republicans are rolling over to show Trump their little kitten bellies? Not even a little bit! Do we need to stay paying attention to what they’re doing?

Absolutely!

They want to overwhelm us. They want to exhaust us.

You are stronger than that. You are better than them.

We are going to stay in it.

Idaho Bill to Overturn Same-Sex Marriages

-via NY Times

Okay, remember just a couple seconds ago when I talked about staying in it?

Part of that is fighting for ourselves and part of that is fighting for others. And seeing the big picture.

In Idaho, a State House committee passed a resolution to compel the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell, the landmark case that gave same-sex couples the right to marry.

And the sponsor of the measure called it a statement on, you guessed it, state’s rights.

Now, it is a statement on state’s rights. But it’s also a statement to the LGBTQ+ community, in Idaho and anywhere that supports the measure. And that statement is one of hate and unwelcome.

Which, before I go on… that’s not true. They may believe that, they may have hate in their heart, but very obviously, to quote Lin Manuel Miranda: “And love is love, is love, is love, is love, is love, is love, is love, is love. Cannot be killed or swept aside.”

Now, what I can say is this – there is no legal weight behind this action.

University of Pennsylvania law professor Tobias Wolff said this: “I will leave it to others to judge what impact it might have as a political matter, but the Supreme Court will no more respond to a letter from the Idaho Legislature than they would a letter from me.’’

And Idaho can say this is about state’s rights all they want but an amendment to the state’s constitution in 2006 limited marriage to being between men and women. So it’s not about state’s rights, but limiting the way Americans are allowed to live and love.

Midnight Firings

-via CBS News

On Friday night, around midnight, long after I was already resting my little head, President Trump fired seventeen federal inspectors general.

Although he called it “a very common thing to do,” it is unprecedented and possibly illegal.

Federal law requires the White House to give Congress a month’s warning, as well as case-specific details, before firing a federal inspector general.

We don’t yet know why we did it, or, like I said, whether this is even legal, but I think Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was right when he said this: "These firings are Donald Trump's way of telling us he is terrified of accountability and is hostile to facts and to transparency."

This is one of those business business business pieces of news that I’ll keep an eye on.

Columbia Tariffs

-via AP News

After Columbia refused to take two US military planes carrying migrants, with the president of Columbia saying they would not accept flights carrying migrants until there was a plan to treat them with dignity (a news video showed migrants that were reportedly being sent back to Brazil being walked on the tarmac with their hands and feet retrained), Trump said he was ordering tariffs and visa restrictions against the country. The tariffs were set to 25%, and he says they’ll be raised to 50% in a week.

In retaliation, Columbia’s president announced 25% tariffs.

So… things are going well. Making friends everywhere we go!

And that’s it. That’s the news.

I was going to talk about how Trump said California needs to impose a voter ID law in the state before it gets the full amount of federal support for the fires but honestly even saying that sentence has raised my blood pressure and it hasn’t actually happened yet, who knows if it’ll happen at all. So here’s the rule – we’re not going to raise our blood pressure over things that haven’t happened yet.

They want us to be so exhausted that we never stop fighting.

We aren’t going to let them.

And because I know you won’t. Because I know you’re in this… I’m proud of you.