58% of the country find President Trump embarrassing.  I guess the other 42% just pretend they don’t know who he is.

Sean Spicer said our relationship with Mexico is “phenomenal.”  That one doesn’t even need a punchline.

 

I’m anticipating participating in my first protest march on April 15th, a national demonstration demanding that President Trump release his tax returns.  Even though Kellyanne Conway says nobody cares about his tax returns, I anticipate millions of us will contradict her.  In my state, we are also promoting a ballot initiative that would require all state and national level candidates to release the last 5 years of taxes before being allowed on the ballot.

I got to thinking about the meaning and history of peaceful political protest in this country, and the current efforts to undermine our First Amendment rights.  The First Amendment to the Constitution protects citizens’ rights to assemble and protest.  In our history, there have basically been two types of protests – peaceful marches and assemblies, and civil disobedience.

An early peaceful American demonstration was the Woman Suffrage parade of 1913, in which approximately 8,000 women marched in the District of Columbia to advance the cause of women’s right to vote.  This milestone will soon be honored on the redesign of the U.S. ten dollar bill.  Perhaps the most famous demonstration was the Civil Rights March of 1963 at which 200,000 peaceful orators and musicians championed equal rights for all, and Dr. Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.  In 1969, 500,000 people marched in Washington to protest the Vietnam War, and we know that this eventually led to the downfall of President Lyndon Johnson.  Of course the Women’s Marches of January 2017 are now legendary, with over 4 million participants nationwide.

The other protest type is civil disobedience, which was a term coined by Henry David Thoreau in his refusal to pay the state poll tax which was meant to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law.  Civil disobedience is the deliberate refusal to obey governmental laws that one feels are immoral, and it is therefore subject to legal consequences.  Examples of this type of protest are the Boston Tea Party, Rosa Parks’ refusal to go to the back of the bus (which was then breaking the law), and numerous civil rights sit-ins.

Of course, my intention is to participate in peaceful marches.  However, Republican legislators in 28 states are attempting to blur the distinction between the two types of protest.  Proposed legislation ranges from levying five years in prison for interfering with traffic to permitting the government to seize protestors’ assets under a racketeering law meant for organized crime figures and terrorists.  These proposals are blatant attempts to block the Constitutional right of assembly and our right of dissent.

The good news is that there are millions and millions of us who will continue to peacefully protest, and fortunately legal experts unanimously agree that such attempts would not survive a Constitutional challenge.  Just in case, though, I hope some of my Facebook friends could come up with some bail money.