Message from the County Chair
Marc Meyer
Next week we will have a new President. Not one that I personally respect, but we will have a new commander in chief to lead our government. And it makes me nauseous to think about it.
A list has been circulating Facebook about the Federal Week in Review. The list can be found here. Here are some thoughts on a couple of the points:
1. Trump mandates all politically appointed ambassadors to leave by inauguration day: While not as unprecedented as some would like to make it, it does raise a question for certain critical nations, such as Britain and Germany. They could be without ambassadors for months depending on the nominating process. Another good question – are they going to move all of the career foreign service officers that are ambassadors, too?
2. The House reinstated the Holman rule, an archaic and unused rule that allows the House the ability to propose amendments to appropriations bills to target individual government employees or programs: This is a serious threat to civil service, which is the backbone of professionalism in government and could reduce every employee to essentially a political appointee as any government employee can be targeted. It is kind of humorous that the right-leaning Washington Examiner is trying to tout it as helping to “improve” civil service. The implications, especially given some of the other actions of the Trump transition, concern me as it seems to be a way to get rid of ideological dissent.
To read my comments on the other six issues, a larger article will be published on our county website. If this is just one week of what the Republicans can do, then just think about the next four years. The time to get active is now, especially with local elections coming soon and the 2018 election cycle starting to warm up sooner than you might think.
I’d like to recognize that we have some new “partner” groups. I know many of you are members, and the local party has been assisting where we can to help with grassroots action. The first is Pantsuit Republic-Spring/Woodlands Chapter. The second is a Facebook group called Living Liberal in Montgomery County. There are actually two groups that split over some tactical reasons, but they share many members in common. Both are focusing on raising awareness and direct action at this time and may provide us with some potential candidates for the upcoming elections. For the hidden LLMC page as well as the PSN page, you will have to be invited by another member.
We have some of our old partner groups that seem to surging now with the orange one entering office. First, there is the Democrats and Progressives of Montgomery County, which meets at Fuddruckers in the Woodlands. I visited with them in December and hopefully we will get another couple of candidates from that group as well. We also have the Kingwood Area Democrats, who are meeting the evening that I am writing this. They are important to us as that group covers part of Senate District 4, and we interact with them to some extent on the state level. Finally, the Spring Area Democrats are also active just to the south of us in Harris County. They’ve had some success with turning parts of north Harris County a little more blue than before. We want to work well with all of these partner groups and recommend that those in those areas visit them when they have meetings. We will try to include information about those meetings as they are available.
An important reminder – May elections are coming up. The first date to file will be January 17th and the last date is February 17th. Montgomery ISD and Magnolia ISD have positions open. The following cities will hold municipal elections: Magnolia, Montgomery, Oak Ridge North, Panorama, Shenandoah, Willis, and Cut and Shoot. If you are interested in running, please call us ASAP – we have training and resources available and want to help Democrats and Progressives get elected, even in deep red Montgomery County.
