Austin, Texas – Democracy Forward President and CEO Skye Perryman joined the Texas Tribune Festival to address issues affecting the American people and democracy. Moderated by MS NOW’s Rosa Flores, Perryman spoke to an audience on a panel titled “A Democracy, If You Can Keep It.” The Texas Tribune Festival highlights ideas that shape the future of technology, safety and security, culture and the arts, education, the economy, energy, and healthcare, and more — with those driving decisions in Texas and across the nation.
Perryman’s remarks were centered on how the American people can respond to rising threats of autocracy. She highlighted the role of the courts enforcing compliance with their rulings, how to build broad coalitions in the face of rapid attempts to bring the nation into autocracy, and the way in which Democracy Forward and its partners are providing people and communities legal representation. During her remarks and in response to audience questions, Perryman issued a warning about the normalization of the government not complying with court orders and the importance of American people mobilizing into court:
- “The ability of people to initiate litigation against their government is a critical tool, whether in state and local communities or at the federal level.”
- “This administration’s ignoring court orders across this country should not be normalized. Court orders at the local level keep people safe. And we need to also be focused on that…We are litigating every day to enforce court orders… It is important that the vast majority of the American people, the vast majority, including, by the way, many conservatives and many who have been aligned in the past with the president, believe that the government should follow [court] orders.”
- “The American people are showing that the emperor has no clothes…There is great opportunity in the president’s overreach and there is a way that this crisis can be a catalyst for true change. Not putting Humpty back together again on… a wall that was not built to hold us. But to rebuild and reimagine in this moment and to do it while fighting for people, because lives are on the line every day.”
- “One branch of government cannot check another branch of government without broader mobilization. And so it is time for Congress to wake up. It is time for the American people to demand that Congress wake up… And that’s not just Congress, it’s us. It’s mass mobilizations. It’s learning again how to strike and how to boycott and how to say that the people in this country still get to be in charge. We are going to have to learn to build those muscles.”
- “If you talk about the shutdown, at the beginning of the shutdown, the president was claiming that he really wanted to feed 42 million Americans, but that he couldn’t do it? That’s what he was claiming. He didn’t have a legal authority to do it…We went into federal court with the Rhode Island Council of Churches, with the Service Employees International Union, because workers need SNAP too, with grocery stores, with food providers, with food banks, with the largest coalition we’ve seen since inauguration on these cases. And through a range of court orders, every single court that looked at this said that not only did the president have the authority to pay SNAP benefits, he had the obligation… People did see it for what it was, which was the president that was weaponizing the federal government against the very people that it is intended to serve.”
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Democracy Forward is a national legal organization that advances democracy and social progress through litigation, policy, public education, and regulatory engagement. For more information, please visit www.democracyforward.org.