Tompkins Weekly

The Democratic View: Keeping the Lights On



By Kathy Zahler

My daughter is in Washington, D.C., this summer, interning at a major department of the federal government. It is a strange time to be in Washington. When she first arrived, she toured her department and saw numerous vacant offices waiting for appointed personnel to take up shop. Most are still unoccupied.

It cannot be easy to work for years as a civil servant and suddenly find yourself toiling for an administration whose stated goal is to eliminate your job. But Olivia reports that the wheels keep turning. Workers keep their heads down and do their jobs, and the People’s work gets done.

If you keep one eye on your newsfeed, it soon starts to look as though government has collapsed entirely. We have a Republican-dominated House and Senate that cannot craft or pass legislation. We have an Executive Branch that is wholly dysfunctional. We’ve survived six months of this, and there’s no end in sight.

But in the buildings along the Mall, and in the statehouses, and in the county buildings and town halls, life goes on. The usual work is being done, and on top of that, some state and local governments are doing their best to counter the worst of the federal administration’s decisions or executive actions. The best example of that may be the “climate mayors” who vow to honor the commitment to the goals of the Paris Agreement, along with the governors who formed the US Climate Alliance. But there are many, many examples of our smaller governments pushing back against the foibles of our federal government.

Since the inauguration, we have seen our county Legislature chairperson condemn divisive rhetoric and praise our county’s diversity and the contributions of immigrants. As a pushback against Congress, the Tompkins County Legislature approved a resolution opposing a repeal of the Affordable Care Act without an acceptable and adequate replacement. The City of Ithaca passed a resolution to become a sanctuary city, and the county passed a parallel “Public Safety for All” resolution. The recent jail study encourages expanding substance abuse treatment and incarceration alternatives, in direct opposition to Attorney General Sessions’s reversal of Obama-era criminal justice reforms.

All too often, Democrats ignore local politics in favor of the Big Issues of national politics. After the 2016 election, most Democrats in our area called immediately for a change in our Congressional representation. That’s fine, but it’s not the whole picture. Those of us in the trenches of local committee work have seen how important the closer-to-home politics of village, city, town, and county can be. At a time when Congress is broken, local legislators are picking up the pieces and making sure that what we love about where we live isn’t destroyed by people who live elsewhere.

And so we find the town board in Dryden working diligently to attract and support environmentally friendly commercial and residential development. We see the town board in Ulysses working with the IDA to negotiate a PILOT for a large solar project and the county Legislature adopting a local law to prohibit the sale of personal care products containing microbeads.

Determining whom we will elect to hold those local positions has taken on new meaning. The 2017 elections start to loom large when you consider what your community might do to counteract bad actions from Washington.

There was a time when I thought that having local boards push out resolutions on national issues was self-indulgent and futile. I’m starting to think that it’s a critical part of our resistance. I firmly believe in the importance of our federal government, because overarching national rules such as those that safeguard civil rights or protect us from tainted food or medicine are vital to our parity and safety. But when the national government fails to reflect the people who put it in place, it’s gratifying to know that we can rely on our civil servants and local legislators to keep the wheels turning and the lights on until we can replace the damaged figures at the top.
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Kathy Zahler is director of communications for the Tompkins County Democratic Committee.

 

 

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