Bernie 2025

How we can force Congress to end the madness now and secure the Blessings of Liberty + AOC 2028

No Kings Day was a smashing success, not just because of the public protests (which are, of course, an inextricable core component of this), or because of the optics (which were excellent and did a lot to puncture the illusion of total maga power), but because:

1. The threat of suppressing protests through overwhelming force proved empty, eliminating a deterrent in the minds of future participants who may have been afraid of participating this time but could be willing next time after seeing how much support there is. Furthermore, the opposition is too geographically widespread to be suppressed by concentrating on a single central location as we saw with Occupy Wall Street and the anti-NAFTA protests in Seattle.

2. The Army was protesting, too. If one looks at the soldiers marching in drills the day before, one can see that they are perfectly capable of marching in step and in formation. If Trump had wanted a recreation of Triumph of the Will and the Army had been willing to give him one, there would have been soldiers goose-stepping in perfect swastica formations on the national mall and I would be well frightened. Instead, they engaged in widespread malicious compliance. They didn't march in step, they did the Foxtrot Delta Tango shuffle as they passed the review stand. They made the drone look ridiculous, they barely bothered to even pull off a half-assed salute of their own Commander-in-Chief. They even made sure the water jug had no cups. Perfection.

The whole parade was a one-finger salute to Spanky McBonespurs and I suspect the entire military knows it. If the regime tries to govern by force, it will backfire. Imagine that sort of malicious compliance being applied to something else the troops don't want to do, such as suppressing protest. "Oops, sorry Mr President, but the quartermaster accidentally issued the wrong caliber rounds," and other such things repeated in other individually small but cumulatively significant actions.

I'm not surprised if the army is against him. People don't like being objectified and that is what happens when a draft-dodging billionaire acts as if real people who have chosen to serve are nothing more than his tin soldiers to be used as props and enforcement muscle while being offered nothing in return. They used to have pensions. The pensions were taken away long ago and replaced with 401(k)s. How do you think such people would feel about carrying out an illegal, unpopular order against their own countrymen purely to serve a billionaire who devalued their retirement savings in order to enrich himself and a bunch of other robber-barons? Especially when these soldiers know that the regime wants to make them obsolete and replace them with drone swarms while also cutting whatever's left of the social safety net their friends and family depend on at a time of rising job-losses.

Oh, and also they don't want to be sent to another pointless foreign war likely the one he is trying to start with Iran. Most Trump voting soldiers voted for him thinking he'd keep them out of such a war .he betrayal cuts deep. Right now, the Powers that Be are trying the same type of propaganda Bush used before invading Iraq. Many fell for it then.They are seeing through it now.

If I were in the White House, I'd think very carefully about trying to double down on authoritarianism right now.

This gives us an opening to act but up util now there has been the unanswered question of what specific process the action should be directed towards. There needs to be a step-by-step path out of this.

I think I've found one.

Simply toppling one bad administration is not enough - the resulting power vacuum and chaos could ruin everything. We do not want to repeat what happened in France in the 1790s where the Constitution of 1793 was never put into force and there was instead a Reign of Terror, Thermador, and an undemocratic Directory giving way to Napoleon's takeover.

No, if this is to succeed in actually improving our situation, we will need our current movement to not just be No Kings — we don't want a Napoleon or Cromwell to replace Trump, and definitely not another puppet of Peter Thiel and his band of technofascists — though No Kings is still (and should be) a good rallying cry and a straightforward two-word message.

In short: we know what to say no to, but to what should we say yes?

Policies? We have plenty of them but need a channel for their implementation.

How about a demand to put a specific person in power now: someone who is highly popular and has widespread support all over the country.

Bernie Sanders is our man for that, and his popularity comes with something even better: realness.He is the real deal. I think we can rely on him to not turn corporate the way Obama did upon taking office.

How to make the change: the role of Congress and public pressure.

Did you know that Congress can make almost anyone President any time they choose?

To do this, they simply have to make that person Speaker of the House, then impeach and convict the President and Vice President together. No delay. Don’t bother with hearings and investigations and trials. No, we all know what’s happening, and that will only buy the regime a dangerous amount of time. Just: *boom*, pass two impeachment articles as one resolution; *boom*, deliver the articles to the Senate; *boom* 2/3 vote guilty; *boom*, Bernie is sworn in seconds later. The whole process should take no more than 30 minutes if done right. With the Presidency and Vice Presidency vacant, the office then passes to “such officer as Congress may specify by law”. Since 1947, the Speaker of the House of Representatives has been the officer so specified.

This can be done, though it will not be easy. We likely do not have the luxury of simply waiting for the next elections, though, so we might as well give this a try.

We should start by holding Bernie 2025 signs at protests, chanting "Bernie, Bernie, Bernie" at every member of Congress we encounter, and openly talking about this with our friends and families. Start printing and selling Bernie 2025 shirts and stickers (or painting/embroidering them ourselves).

We should make the demand heard and make sure every Republican in the House and Senate feels pressure. On protest days in future, anti-tTrump should become pro-Sanders by default.

Here's another tool we can use:

A Tennis Court Oath for Our Time

Although we should avoid repeating the many mistakes of the French Revolution, we can stiil learn some useful lessons from it and apply them here.

During the proceedings of the Estates General in 1789 (held for the first time since 1614 to address France's fiscal crisis), the delegates to the Third Estate were met with attempts by conservative hard-liners to suppress them. After an impasse over the issue of organization (whether the three orders should remain separate and vote separately or combined with voting by head, with the latter option being the popular one), the Third Estate began attracting delegates from the First- and Second- and called itself the National Assembly.

The King was torn several ways on this issue and presented with conflicting advice. It was advised to him by some that he should recognize the National Assembly and be hailed by his people as a reformer while the ultra-royalists argued that he should dissolve the National Assembly.

Louis XVI was indecisive but he eventually listened to the ultra-royalists. He attended the National Aseembly and there declared its decrees void, commanded the orders to be re-separated, and ordered the hall where they met closed. When soldiers arrived to close the assembly hall, the delegates of the National Assembly went to the only other place they could find to meet, which happened to be the Royal Tennis Court at Versailles. There they made the following oath:

Considering that it has been called to establish the constitution of this realm to bring about the regeneration of public order, and to maintain the true principles of monarchy; continuing its deliberations in any place it is forced to establish itself; and, finally, the National Assembly exists wherever its members are gathered.

Decrees that all members of this assembly immediately take a solemn oath never to separate, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require until the constitution of the realm is established and fixed upon solid foundations; and that said oath having been sworn, all members and each one individually confirms this unwavering resolution with his signature.

We swear never to separate ourselves from the National Assembly, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require until the constitution of the realm is drawn up and fixed on solid foundations.

This refusal to be separated, even by force, was impossible for the king to manage and suppress. Seven days later, Louis XVI formally recognized the National Assembly (and, in doing so, was not hailed as an enlightened reformer the way he would have been had he endorsed the plan from the beginning and came to be seen as a weak tyrant who had been pressured to relent, further emboldening his opposition).

I propose that, given recent events, we should find places to implement Tennis Court Oaths of our own: town halls.

Whenever an empty-chair town hall is held for a Senator, Representative, or other official, the attendees should vote on resolutions declaring themselves Citizens’ Assemblies for a seat: e.g., the Citizens’ Assembly for North Carolina's 9th Congressional District (who ought to choose Richard Ojeda as their presiding officer), the Citizens’ Assembly for the Governor of Texas, &c.

The assemblies should decide upon and swear oaths declaring that these bodies are open to all persons living in their districts/states/etc, that these assemblies exist wherever their members are gathered and that they shall reassemble wherever and whenever necessary to establish democracy and reestablish accountability to the citizens of their districts.

Perhaps some of these oaths could be sworn in actual tennis courts, just to add poignancy.

Each such oath should be a reflection of the assembly that produced int, and so I leave it to the assemblies to decide upon what specific text they should use.

The assemblies should begin convening daily or weekly, or sitting in permanent session, as conditions require, in a physical location and with online access open to all constituents of their respective politicians.

Ideally, there should be one for every office from US Senate down to municipal sanitation board, but GOP congressmen are a good initial target, along with Dems who are overly compliant.

Democrats or Independents who support public oversight should encourage their town halls to become Citezen's Assemblies as well and should be ready and willing to cooperate with them.

The CA for a certain Senate seat in Vermont, should focus on pressuring their reluctant Senator to accept this plan.

The assemblies should be used as organizational centers to deliberate over what collective actions they should take and how they should go about them, form & coordinate mutual-aid operations and plan protests, collect voluntary contributions from their members & vote on how to spend that money, appoint persons to perform certain tasks (such as organizing cybersecurity), to correspond with other assemblies, and anything else their members decide is worth doing.

Strike organizing is another thing they should do. Automation and AI are rapidly advancing, but we remain within a narrow window in which withholding labor still holds hard power. Use this power.

Above all, I think these assemblies should submit the following demand to eveery last member of Congress: Bernie 2025.

Keep mounting the pressure. Dare them to try and shut you down, and continue relentlessly making that same demand especially at Republican Senators.

Eventually, and especially if attempts at repression backfire, these assemblies should make the lives of Republicans in Congress so miserable that they see Bernie 2025 as their only way out of the nightmare.

Once he's in:

Once Bernie is in office as President, he'll have a lot of work to do and much opposition to contend with, especially to his legislative agenda.

He will have been backed by some temporary alliances as well that may have decided keeping him in office temporarily (but powerless) will be a good way to mollify the public and go back to business as usual.

That is not enough. We cannot afford another repeat of what happened when Obama took office.

It's time for change: REAL CHANGE, not just the word "Change" printed on campaign merch in a cheerful font by politicians who all serve the same corporate lords.

Getting that change to happen will require more escalation still.

We will need the Citizens’ Assemblies to go from organizing and leading anti-administration actions to organizing and leading pro-administration actions, this time with Presidential backing. When a Senate Democrat says Medicare for All needs to be watered down into another ACA, we will need to down tools, flood the streets, and bang pots and pans demanding these clowns stop messing around and start doing the people's business. We will need to demand justice and real accountability, too, with not just investigations and prosecutions of the MAGA inner circle, but also serious work to dismantle the surveillance state and corporate oligarchy behind it.

We will need to open the Palantir Files and put Peter Thiel and his co-conspirators on trial for their crimes. We will need to disassemble Palantir and other tools of digital enslavement, then repurpose their components in a way to permanently entrench democracy and make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

Those last few sentences will probably make me the target of some smear campaign if this becomes a genuine threat to their power. So I tell you: don't believe or care about any ad-homonim attacks designed to distract from the topic at hand.

Passing the Torch for real this time:

Bernie's old. Even if he were able to be elected to a second term in 2028, he'd likely be unwilling to and would want to avoid falling into the same trap as Joe Biden. Bernie Sanders knows that a new generation is needed, and he seems to (rightly) recognize AOC as his nearest younger equivalent.

In the near term, I think we should agitate to have her made Speaker of the House as soon as Acting President Sanders takes office. Then, I think if Bernie can have a successful 3-year term and endorse AOC in the 2028 primaries, she could win and would likely make a great President as well. If that happens, we can finally destroy what's left of Establishment power within the DNC and start having real democracy in this country.

But first: Bernie 2025.

Let's get to work on this.