Against all odds
Thousands of activists and average Americans banded together to beat Trump and save Obamacare. They say they can do it again
WASHINGTON— The cable guy was fussing around in her living room. Her goddaughter was polishing a resumé in her dining room. Her 8-year-old was antsy. Christy Judd, a West Virginia high school teacher, had to run out of town. Her “war” was calling. She got Ethan into the back seat of the car. She packed his ventilator and his suction machine and his stroller. And she began the two-hour drive east from Inwood, population 3,000, to Capitol Hill, where she would have an hour to try to convince her Republican senator that her son’s life was worth protecting.
Judd, 40, urged students in her government classes to be informed and involved, but she had never taken political action herself. Then came Trumpcare, the Republican health-care proposal that would have slashed funding for the Medicaid program Ethan needs if he is going to thrive with a neuromuscular disease.
Fighting for her kid suddenly meant fighting the United States Congress.
“In this fight,” she said, “we don’t have a choice. This is the fight of our lives. We are soldiers at war for our kids.” A mom she knew from a Facebook forum had started an advocacy group, Little Lobbyists, to elevate the profile of kids with complex medical issues like Ethan’s. On a Tuesday in late June, her 50-pound boy made his debut as a Washington activist.
Judd was furious that Sen. Shelley Moore Capito wouldn’t meet with them herself. But her young aide seemed at least mildly moved. A month later, in late July, Capito was one of seven Republican senators to vote against their party’s proposals to repeal Obamacare without a replacement.
The next night, three Republican senators voted against the party’s last-ditch replacement proposal, and that was that.
In the end, it was an astonishing failure: the party that controls the presidency, the House and the Senate was unable to deliver on its signature campaign promise. And it was an astonishing success: regular people were a big reason why.
Facing odds that seemed insurmountable, thousands of average Americans threw themselves into action to protect Obamacare. Taking cues from the conservative Tea Party movement and from seasoned liberal organizers, the activist “resistance” helped to make repeal seem riskier than doing nothing at all.
They helped to save the insurance coverage of an estimated 16 million to 32 million people, likely preventing thousands of early deaths. They helped to deal a severe blow to President Donald Trump’s young administration. And they created a people-power playbook on how to stop Trump from doing anything significant through legislation.
This, Ben Wikler thought. This scene from 1989, preserved in grainy news footage on YouTube, was what they had to manufacture in 2017 to save Obamacare. It did not seem likely. By the time the Republicans’ “repeal and replace” push collapsed last month, the idea was so unpopular that defeat seemed almost inevitable. But in the weeks following Trump’s victory in November, when Wikler, Washington director for the progressive group MoveOn.org, began to talk to activist allies about how to challenge the unexpected president on Obamacare, there was a “pervasive sense of doom — that maybe this fight wasn’t even worth joining.”
“Because it was so clear that Republicans would be able to repeal the Affordable Care Act,” said Wikler, 36. “We honestly thought they were going to pull this off in January as they planned to do.”
Wikler began looking for cases where activists made the impossible happen. He read about the citizen fury that led to the 1989 repeal of a law that taxed seniors to try to prevent medical bankruptcies. One congressman was caught on video being chased out of his car by a fist-shaking horde of old folks.
Wikler sent the clip around. What activists needed to do, he said, was make repeal “so politically toxic that Republicans are literally running away from it.”
Their best early chance was the February recess when legislators would be holding town halls. MoveOn made a website, ResistanceRecess.com, to urge supporters to swamp the meetings. Seeking viral moments like the ones that hurt Democratic lawmakers during the 2010 summer recess, the leaders of Indivisible, a network of more than 5,000 local groups founded to oppose Trump, told supporters to film everything.
“If it doesn’t get recorded,” said co- founder Angel Padilla, “it doesn’t happen.”
The footage was dreadful for Republicans. Across the country, they struggled to quiet angry crowds. More importantly, they had no good answers for constituents who confronted them with stories about how Obamacare had helped them with their own problems. The clips rocketed around Facebook, changing the public focus from insurance prices to human suffering.
The longer the process took, activist organizers thought, the more time they would have to get the public riled up, and the more political capital Republicans would have to waste. Pushing for delay, Indivisible briefly turned its sights on one of its key Democratic allies, Senate leader Chuck Schumer, announcing sit-ins to pester him into using a procedural tactic to slow the process. Schumer relented.
As activists fought Republicans, they were also fighting silence. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan to pass the bill in stealth was being aided by the unceasing parade of sensational revelations about Trump and Russia. The liberal drumbeat helped create “new” news journalists could write about.
“We knew that if health care didn’t get back to the front pages of the major news outlets, we were going to lose this fight,” Padilla, 34, said. When Republican legislators weren’t at home to be pummelled, activists flooded them with phone calls using scripts provided by national groups and tailored to each particular state. (“This bill would cause 17,200 Alaskans to lose their Medicaid coverage . . . how could Sen. Murkowski support that?”) At one point, MoveOn supporters alone were making more than 30 calls every hour to the offices of key undecided senators.
Many of the activists did more than call. Every single Tuesday for seven months, even during snowstorms, the members of RESIST Central Maine, a new anti-Trump group mostly composed of women 55 and older, stood outside the Lewiston office of Republican Sen. Susan Collins, holding messages like “Healthcare not wealthcare.”
Minutes after Christy and Ethan Judd arrived in Washington, RESIST founder Pat Fogg, a 78-year-old retired psychotherapist, took her spot on the Lewiston sidewalk for their cheekily named “Lunch With Susan.” Collins was never there, but the activists signed in at the office to make sure she knew they were.
And Maine’s Planned Parenthood leaders made sure Collins heard from its patients.
The Republican plan would have stripped funding from the popular provider of abortion and reproductive health services for a year. Its response was to confront senators like Collins, a consistent supporter, with the faces of people it has helped.
Collins became the most steadfast Republican voice against Trumpcare. Under attack from the White House and its allies, she was visibly buoyed by the Mainers cheering her for standing strong.
Activists couldn’t claim all the credit for the triumph. Also factors: Trump’s ineptitude, old Republican divisions, conservative activists’ indifference.
But there was no question, on any side of the debate, that the citizen pressure was essential.
“Your voice matters. Your story matters,” said Nicole Clegg, vicepresident of public policy for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England.
“People’s real-life experiences, and talking about them publicly, were incredibly powerful and persuasive.”
There’s a joke Mike Oxford tells about his disability-rights activist group. ADAPT is so ignored, Oxford says, that it would not get media attention if it started a fire on the same street as the White House.
On June 22, to his shock, ADAPT became a media phenomenon.
Led by Oxford, a veteran Kansas rabble-rouser who uses a scooter because of his spinal condition, more than 60 people with disabilities staged a “die-in” at McConnell’s Capitol office. Many of them got out of wheelchairs to lie flat on their backs. Then, as news cameras rolled, they were physically dragged away by police officers and arrested.
Their intent was to create a disturbing enough scene to make people pay attention. This time, the attention was national. The wave of coverage was a “crucial turningpoint moment,” Wikler said, that cemented the public perception that Trumpcare would hurt the disabled.
“The right thing at the right time at the right moment,” Oxford said. “We had no reason to believe that was going to happen.”
Five days later, McConnell delayed the vote until after the July 4 congressional recess.
Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran was one of the few Republicans to hold a recess town hall. Two weeks after he was detained, Oxford, 58, drove four hours across Kansas to attend.
Oxford sat in a strategic location by a door. As Moran tried to leave, Oxford grabbed his arm. Moran stopped, then bent down to listen.
Oxford has known Moran for years. He told him why Trumpcare’s Medicaid cuts would hurt Kansans with disabilities who rely on home and community-based services.
Ten days later, Moran came out publicly in opposition to the replace- ment plan, sending the effort on the path to ultimate disaster.
Wikler was five hours into yet another Capitol rally when he got the news by text. They had won. Somehow, they had won.
Senate Republicans cycled through various versions of their plan, each less ambitious than the last, until their last attempt was defeated 51-49. The senator who provided the decisive late-night vote had not been treated by activists as a primary target: Arizona’s John McCain, who complained more about the rushed legislative process than the contents of the bill.
Activists’ success was not total. Collins was a No on every plan, as was Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Capito, though, ended up voting Yes on two of the three final versions, as did Moran.
But the activists did enough, just enough. And they believe they have figured out a rough formula for outfoxing Trump. It involves relentless pressure, direct action, human stories, strategic co-ordination, a focus on community activism that might make the local news, and a firmer grasp of policy than this president has.
They are now trying to replicate their Trumpcare success. On Thursday, groups including Indivisible and MoveOn revealed a new “Not One Penny” campaign against Trump’s push for tax reform that would benefit the rich.
This war will be harder. Republican legislators, and donors, are more united in favour of tax cuts. Tax rates do not lend themselves as easily as health insurance to emotional made-for-TV moments.
But the activist base is fired up at a moment when it should have been deflated. As Trump takes a 17-day vacation and Washington takes a much-needed breath, people involved in the Trumpcare fight are still pestering their representatives to keep the proposal dead.
Wednesday was Christy Judd’s 14th anniversary, and she wanted a pedicure before dinner. Instead, she drove past her house and on to Capito’s closest office, asking the senator one more time to meet with Ethan. One in a continuing series on grassroots activism against the president.