Weekly Member Update - August 11, 2025
We start this week’s update with our old friend, America’s sweetheart, UN Ambassador Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. Since being unceremoniously dumped by her favorite President for her coveted role as UN Ambassador and the $16 million penthouse residence that came along with it, Representative Stefanik has kept a low public profile, avoiding town halls and other appearances in her North Country District in favor of raising record amounts of special interest money in anticipation of her expected run for Governor in 2026. Back in May, Elise returned to her Capital Region roots to raise money for Albany County Republicans and we were there to greet her. Now, we’ve come to learn that she’ll be in Albany again this coming Saturday evening to receive a Congresswoman of the Year award from the New York State Young Republicans. Well, we’ve missed Elise nearly as much as the North Country constituents she’s left in the lurch, so we’re going to be on hand to greet the Congresswoman once again to counterprogram the Young Republicans by protesting Elusive Elise as our Traitor of the Year. Join us at 6:00 on Saturday August 16 outside the Albany Marriott on Wolf Road.
Our Elusive Elise protest fittingly coincides with the Fight the Trump Takeover Day of Action being organized by a host of progressive organizations in Texas. And make no mistake, the Orange King is absolutely trying to remake this nation in his own authoritarian image. This past Monday, progressive oracle Rachel Maddow opened her show with the following warning:
“Life in the United States is profoundly changing. It is profoundly different than it was even six months ago. Because we now live in a country where we have an authoritarian in charge. We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country.”
If you are familiar with the rise of dictatorships across history, or if you’ve merely been keeping up on your One Million Rising training sessions, you know that the United States is unquestionably in the midst of a period of authoritarian breakthrough. The hallmarks are all there. Are there official investigations being undertaken against Administration critics? Well, just last week, Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice announced criminal investigations against both New York AG Letitia James and California Senator Adam Schiff. Has the Administration engaged in retaliatory actions against aspects of civil society that stand in potential opposition to Trump? Ask the law firms and universities being extorted by the federal government, or the museums forced to rewrite history or change their curations to correspond with Donald Trump’s personal vision of history and art. Has the authoritarian begun to deploy the military domestically? We all watched as US Marines were deployed to Los Angeles upon manufactured grounds earlier this summer and, just this morning, Trump announced the federalized militarization of law enforcement in our Nation’s Capital – despite plummeting violent crime rates – with a promise to criminalize homelessness and incarcerate the unhoused. To paraphrase Maddow, authoritarianism is no longer a hypothetical or a postulation about the coming future; dictatorship is here now and the only question is what each one of us is willing to do – whether you are a sign-waving protestor or an elected Democratic official – to impede and obstruct the totalitarianism from taking permanent root.
The ongoing battle over redistricting provides a particularly crucial point of focus in terms of rising American authoritarianism and the fight to resist it. In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats retook the House of Representatives and promptly erected a direct impediment to Trump’s expansion of Presidential power during his first term, including two separate impeachments and reinvigorated Congressional oversight of the Executive Branch. Trump is dead set to avoid a repeat of 2018 and to make sure that Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress in 2026. Simply put, the future of the Nation hangs in the balance with the 2026 midterms; either Republican control of both houses will persist and Trump will have no impediment to consolidating his power, perhaps permanently. If, on the other hand, Democrats retake the House, Trump and his cadre of enablers will have a direct check on their power, complete with an Oversight Committee helmed by the likes of Robert Garcia, Melanie Stansbury and Jasmine Crockett.
Unfortunately, Republicans have a decided advantage in the redistricting fight. While many Democratic states have internal procedural and constitutional barriers to redistricting, Republican-led states like Texas, freed from the restrictions of the Voting Rights Act by the United States Supreme Court, can engage in redistricting as they please, eliminating majority-minority districts to insure that King Trump gets what he is “entitled to.” Although Governor Hochul has issued a lot of tough talk about fighting fire with fire, the reality is that New York cannot lawfully engage in mid-decade redistricting in the absence of a state constitutional amendment, meaning that New York’s Congressional districts cannot be redrawn before 2028, at the earliest. Thus, while blue states like Illinois and California may engage in tit-for-tat redistricting if Texas and other Republican-led states are able to move forward on their redistricting schemes, the reality is that the fight for Democratic control of Congress will need to overcome Republican cheating with grassroots organizing and better candidates. In other words, we cannot game the system to eliminate the Mike Lawlers and Elise Stefaniks from Congress, we just need to beat them.
Keep an eye on our events calendar for an ever-expanding list of upcoming events. We hope to see you at the Elusive Elise event this coming Saturday evening, and at our Monthly Member Meeting tonight!