Finding Hope, Taking Action
Hope Is a Verb: What Protest Wins and Congressional Losses Mean for Us This Week
Readers,
Today I’m providing action items to take this week, followed by two stories that are giving me hope.
Action Items
On Thursday, the House passed a budget resolution, which sets the blueprint for a budget bill that would make massive cuts to Social Security and Medicaid. The resolution is not the budget bill that would actually cut funding, but rather the framework establishing debt limits and the contours of what could be included in the bill. Pressure on Democrats and GOP members of Congress should continue as they might be swayable come time to vote on the bill, especially those that are most vulnerable in 2026.
Additionally, House reps have passed a bill that would make voting more difficult (the SAVE Act) (4 Democrats voted for the bill). The bill would require proof of citizenship prior to voting by providing the state with a passport or birth certificate. 84 percent of women who marry change their surname, meaning as many as 69 million American women do not have a birth certificate with their legal name on it and thereby could not use their birth certificate to prove citizenship. And passports are expensive, leading to the potential disenfranchisement of low-income voters.
The House has also passed a bill to limit the ability of the federal judiciary to issue nationwide injunctions on the executive branch. Our federal judiciary is the top check against the Trump administration right now and we must protect it at all costs. Limiting judicial power by banning nationwide injunctions on presidential actions would be devastating for our system of checks and balances.
It is unlikely these bills would pass in the Senate, because in order to pass they need some support from Democrats. But we cannot risk losing any Democrats in the Senate on these votes. And clearly, as is evident from the four Democrats that voted for the SAVE Act in the House, losing Democrats is possible. It is increasingly important that we keep the pressure on our Senators, Democrats and GOP alike.
This week you should (1) check if your House Rep has a town hall scheduled during recess and attend and (2) call your offices to ask that they:
Vote NO on a budget reconciliation bill that cuts funding for critical federal programs like Social Security and Medicaid (House and Senate)
STOP DOGE from dismantling SS from the inside (House and Senate)
Vote NO on the SAVE Act (Senate only)
Vote NO on a bill to limit nationwide injunctions (Senate only)
Attend the second Hands Off protest this Saturday, April 19th – follow @5051movement for details
Stories that are giving me hope
It’s critical for our own sanity and activism to find stories that give us hope and keep us going. So today I wanted to share two stories that are inspiring me.
In order to win, we need just 3.5% of the population to protest, and good news is: we’re on our way to meeting that threshold
The first story comes from several news outlets and is one that I’ve seen floating around on Instagram – it's a story about the findings from research led by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, which says that nonviolent protest is the most powerful way of shaping world politics and that just a small percentage of the population is needed to achieve desired outcomes.
In her study, Chenoweth performed an extensive review of the literature on hundreds of civil resistance and social movements from 1900 to 2006 – a data set corroborated with other experts in the field. The movements primarily considered attempts to bring about regime change. A movement was considered a success if it fully achieved its goals within a year of its peak engagement and as a direct result of its activities.
Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact circumstances depend on the factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.
“There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event,” says Chenoweth.
3.5% of the population in the United States is 11 million. The Hands Off protest on April 5 is estimated to have brought out 3 million people, but organizers’ goal is to get 11 million people out on the streets to reach the 3.5% rule. Their next protest is April 19th.
Power in numbers is the reason for protest success – with such massive numbers, it’s hard to deny the people are upset, and won’t be backing down. It’s also a lot harder to arrest people when there are too many people on the streets for law enforcement to handle.
Be sure to get yourself to the protests on April 19th to help us get to 11 million – we might not reach that threshold on April 19th, but the point is to continue building momentum!
Protests in Sacket Harbor bring migrant family home
The second story I wanted to highlight is one about a mother and three children that were swept up in an ICE raid but are now returning to their town of Sackets Harbor, New York as a direct result of local protest.
The mother and three children, who don't have legal status, were taken during a nighttime raid on a dairy farm, and they were sent to a detention facility in Texas.
Last weekend, one thousand people in the town of Sackets Harbor, a town of 1,300 (well over 3.5% of the town’s population) protested their removal. Sackets Harbor happens to be near the town where the Trump administration's border czar, Tom Homan, grew up. And protesters over the weekend actually marched past Homan's vacation home there. As a result of the protests, a Republican lawmaker got involved as did NY Governor Kathy Hochul. The administration then conceded to returning the family. This is a perfect example of why protest matters, and how it’s working.
Some days it is hard to find hope but it’s the tenacity of others that fuels me. And so I will return to these two stories, and others as they come in, to keep me going.
Until next week,
Grace