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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
House Republicans narrowly adopted a budget proposal last week to cut as much as $2 trillion in spending over a 10-year period, in part to fund Trump’s tax cuts. A new analysis by the Congressional Budget Office shows the proposed budget would require massive cuts to Medicaid spending. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has warned the U.S. government will go bankrupt without his Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, which is working to slash a trillion dollars from the deficit.
This week, hundreds of faith leaders gathered to mark the Christian holy day of Ash Wednesday on Capitol Hill and to protest the impact the proposed cuts could have on the poor and the vulnerable. This is Bishop William Barber speaking at the protest Wednesday.
BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: If an unelected technocrat can delete the financial commitments of a government established for the people and by the people, and we don’t say anything, we betray our moral commitments to liberty.
AMY GOODMAN: Faith leaders also shared findings of a new report Wednesday called “The High Moral Stake: Our Budget, Our Future,” which details how President Trump and the Republican Party are taking more essential services and money away from working people while cutting taxes for the wealthiest. It was authored by Institute for Policy Studies, the Economic Policy Institute and Repairers of the Breach.
For more, we’re joined from North Carolina by Bishop William Barber, president and senior lecturer at Repairers of the Breach, national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. He’s co-author of the new book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy.
Bishop Barber, welcome back to Democracy Now! on this 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when voting rights activists marched — tried to march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, led by John Lewis, and were beaten down by Alabama state troopers. Five months later, the Voting Rights Act would be signed by President Johnson. Your thoughts on putting history and this moment together, and what you were demanding on Wednesday?
BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, thank you so much, Amy.
As I was listening to that song, “We Shall Overcome,” there’s another line that says, “We are not afraid.” And I want to thank Representative Green for his courage and showing the way of courage. He’s a dear friend of mine. He’s exactly right: You cannot wait until a dictator is in charge. You must challenge the way toward that dictatorship.
And we must remember, on this day 60 years ago, we did see that Bloody Sunday, but for nearly 40 years, Amelia Boynton, who was also beaten that day, a woman that John Lewis held in his arms, they have been working against voter suppression in that particular city. They also connected the issues of voter suppression and voter denial to economic injustice. Remember, the voting piece was supposed to be a part of the Civil Rights Act of ’64 along with raising the minimum wage to a living wage, and those things were gutted out of the ’64 Civil Rights Act, which made the ’65 march and the ’65 Voting Rights Act necessary.
At the end of that march, when they finally did reach Montgomery, Dr. King gave an amazing sermon. And he chose not to just talk about voting rights, but he chose to connect voting rights to economic injustice. And in that sermon, he said that the greatest fear of the greedy oligarchs in this country was for the masses of Black people and poor white people to join together and form a voting bloc that could fundamentally shift the economic architecture of the nation, and that every time this possibility becomes possible, the forces of extremism and the forces of division sow that division to keep it from happening.
I think we see that here today, what’s going on with this Congress. And it’s amazing to me, for instance, that they would censure Representative Green. They didn’t censure our sister out of Georgia. They didn’t censure the man who called Obama a liar on the floor. It’s a strange time that — the cheering, the applauding. But I think we are in a crisis of civilization, really, not just a crisis of democracy. It’s going to call people to have to stand, regardless of where they are.
So, what we’re dealing with right now, Amy, before I even talk about the specific policy, is this immoral philosophy that’s at work. Number one, they are operating off of the deliberate attempt to use executive orders as a way of intentionally violating the Constitution, thereby creating enough confusion to distract people from what’s going on in the Congress, because what happens in the Congress has the weight of the law, and EO doesn’t have the weight of law.
Number two, we are seeing the tyranny of technology and the dehumanization of people.
Number three, we’re seeing the attempt to make people justify their existence, which has its roots in racism, apartheid and Nazism.
Number four, we’re seeing the denial of equality on every front.
Five, we’re seeing the outright violation of freedom of speech, due to the process — due process and equal protection under the law for all persons, and an attempt to end birthright citizenship.
Number six, we are seeing the outright betrayal of liberty.
Number seven, we are seeing the idolatry of the certainty of white supremacy, that some people can decide who’s in, who’s out, who’s right, who’s wrong.
And number eight, we’re seeing the misuse of religious Christian nationalism in an attempt to falsely claim that their immoral actions are moral.
This is what is underneath, if you will, what we see going on. It is dangerous. It leads us to dictatorships and worse. And we must be courageous in this moment. I think that what you saw happen with Representative Green is just the tip of the kind of pushback we’re going to see as the weather gets warmer and as people see more and more the kind of damage that’s being suggested by this current budget and this current Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, Bishop Barber, I put this question to Congressman Green, as well, asking about his Republican colleagues and whether they’re concerned about Medicaid privately, if he’s speaking to them privately. You are co-author of the book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. This is an absolutely key point, that they are representing so many people, for example, on Medicaid, so many people, that if these kind of support services are done away with — and it’s way beyond support services — it’s their constituents, as well, who will deeply suffer. Can you talk about that and the report that —
BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — you all came out with?
BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: Well, you know, that’s one of the things we ask in our book: What mythology can cause you to stand against your own self? And these extremists who call themselves Republicans have been quite ingenious, quite shrewd in camouflaging, making people think that, say, Medicaid and Medicare are for lazy people, Black people and Brown people. But that’s going to be the rude awakening as they see these cuts. Right now they’re just talking about cuts, but when they start seeing that these cuts are going to reach inside of your home, whether you’re Republican or Democrat or independent, whether you’re from Alabama or Texas or Georgia or North Carolina, that’s when the rubber’s going to hit the road.
Take, for instance, Medicaid expansion. Many of them, all of the Southern states except for two, have blocked Medicaid expansion. But it has now caused so much fervor in, say, Mississippi that there was a poll that 60% of Republicans now want Medicaid expansion among the people, because they basically were told a lie that this really doesn’t impact you.
The fact of the matter is, what they’re considering right now would cost coverage — would take millions — not hundreds and thousands, but millions — of people away from Medicaid. We’re talking about $880 billion in cuts over 10 years. We’re talking about 72 million people — 72 million people — enrolled in Medicaid. And another 7 million were enrolled in the Children’s Health Insurance Program. We’re not talking about Black people or Brown people alone; we’re talking about all people.
And the fact that these congresspersons are going along with this for their own means, for their own funding, or whatever they’re doing it for, for their tax cuts, for their rich friends, the truth is going to come off. The cover is going to come off. There’s no way you can do the kinds of cuts they’re talking about — it’s mathematically impossible — without touching Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And the more and more people start seeing who this is hurting — 36 million people, Amy, could lose their coverage — 36 million people — from what the House is doing.
This is why we did this study, because what people need now is an analysis, not just an announcement of a protest, but an analysis. And so, Repairers of the Breach joined with the Institute for Policy Studies and others to say, “Let’s tell the truth. Let’s let people know.” We’re talking about 39% of the enrollees in Medicaid are white, 18% are Black, 29% are Latino, 4.7% are Asian. Thirty-nine percent, almost 40%, are white, and many, many of them in the South, because one-third of all poor and low-wage white people are living in the South.
This is going to be a moment of reckoning. Before, they just talked tax cuts. They just said what they were going to do. But now, as they actually begin to do it, people, as it is implemented, are going to feel the pain. And that’s when you’re going to see protests and other things like that before. My fear is that that energy and hatred of what has been done is going to go somewhere. And there are those of us that must say, “Yes, we must protest and use every nonviolent tool at our exposure, but that it doesn’t turn into something violent,” because people are going to be hurt. They’re going to feel like they’ve been lied to, it’s been distorted. People that they trusted — this president that they trusted actually was and has become their worst enemy as it comes to their daily lives.
AMY GOODMAN: Bishop Barber, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Bishop William Barber, president of Repairers of the Breach, national co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign — we have 30 seconds — also leading the new Center for Public Theology of Public Policy at Yale Divinity School. As the head of the Poor People’s Campaign, the co-chair, are you leading another one? So significant as it resonates back with Dr. King leading a Poor People’s Campaign directly to Washington. We know that the first march — on the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday — King was not there. He would try to lead the next one, and ultimately successfully the third. Your thoughts, 60 years later, on the kind of action you want to see happen?
BISHOP WILLIAM BARBER II: We believe that legal action, protest action, legislation action, moral action, preaching in pulpits, standing, sitting in, sitting in, praying in, standing in, all are on the table.
Hundreds of clergy came together yesterday to do the first step toward a nonviolent civil disobedience and action. And that is to inform your adversary, to inform the persons that you’re challenging, why what they’re doing is wrong, why it is unconstitutional, why it is immoral. I can tell you that those clergy people had a glint in their eye, their faces set like flint. They are serious about where we are. We abdicate our own call and our own moral capacity if we walk away from this moment. And we’re not going to walk away from this moment. We will bring the people and the clergy in diverse form of every race, creed, color, because the times require that we do this.
This is an attempt to totally unravel and tear apart not just this democracy, but the hope and the health of this country, and we cannot stand down. The only way a king becomes a king is if you bow. And we cannot bow. Bowing is not in our DNA. We have to stand in this moment. And we will see more and more and more intensification and emboldening and agitation, but it will be done in the deepest depths of our nonviolent, love, justice traditions.
AMY GOODMAN: Bishop William Barber, I want to thank you so much for being with us, speaking to us from North Carolina.
Coming up next, veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody on Nicaragua, from the terror of the U.S.-backed Contras 40 years ago to the abuses of the Ortega government today. Back in 30 seconds.
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AMY GOODMAN: “2000 Blacks Got to Be Free” by Fela Kuti and Roy Ayers. Composer, musician and producer Ayers passed away this week at the age of 84.
