Executive Orders (and Memoranda)

I heard on the local talk radio show today that Barack Obama made five executive orders during the first two weeks of his presidency; Donald Trump has made six seven. I decided to look up what they were. I am thankful every day that the internet makes such research easy.

Obama's First Executive Orders:

1. January 20th, 2009: 120-day halt on "legal proceedings" for prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
2. January 22nd, 2009: Orders Guantánamo Bay facility to close within a year.
3. January 22nd, 2009: Requires interrogators to follow the methods in the Army Field Manual (same article as #2). In other words, to not torture people. The two psychologists who cooked up the questionable methods used at Guantánamo Bay are still on trial. [link]
4. Before January 26th, 2009: Ends ban on federal funding for international organizations that encourage or perform abortions (pro-choice opinion article; could not find original source in search function). It was reversed by President Trump in 2017 -- in other words, any organization that so much as mentions abortion gets their funding revoked.
5. Soon after January 24th, 2009: Lifts ban on federal funding for stem-cell research. Obama was "expected to" do this when the article was written.

Trump's First Executive Orders:

1. January 20th, 2017: Announcing plans to dismantle (and rebuild?) Obamacare.
2. January 24th, 2017: "Expediting Environmental Reviews and Approvals For High Priority Infrastructure Projects." I understand that this is aimed at expediting the Dakota Access Pipeline and similar projects.
3. January 25th, 2017: Promises to enforce strict immigration laws, especially on self-declared "sanctuary cities." Couches it as a security measure.
4. January 25th, 2017: "Immigration Enforcement Improvements." With the U.S.-Mexico border.
5. January 27th, 2017: "PROTECTING THE NATION FROM FOREIGN TERRORIST ENTRY INTO THE UNITED STATES." This was the thinly-disguised anti-Muslim travel ban. Also, the title was entirely in caps.
6. January 28th, 2017: Lobbying restrictions. Not sure who this is aimed at. I do not have time today to seek out that information.
7. January 30th, 2017: Budget restrictions. He appears to want the agencies to not spend more than in previous years. If one program costs more, cut another to balance it out. This would probably throttle sections of government he and his cabinet members disapprove of.

While I was searching for info, my partner directed me to this article from MSN / The Washington Post about how, technically, not all of Trump's recent declarations are executive orders (commands to a whole department to do things a certain way), but executive memoranda (presidential suggestions). The orders are numbered and published in the Federal Registrar. I guess the memoranda are tracked in press releases?

Now that I've found the Trump Administration's website, I'm going to be visiting it a lot. I...would rather not, but it is the best source for official announcements.

My First Protest

Events are happening faster than I can write about them.

On Friday, January 27th, Trump signed an executive order than placed a 90-day travel ban to the U.S. for people from six mostly Muslim countries: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. The order also suspends the refugee program for 120 days. Syrians, for some reason, are barred indefinitely -- even refugees. This command went into effect on Saturday the 28th. I read that a federal judge challenged it, and managed to eliminate the part about sending these people home...but implementation was uneven. Also it did not address the core problem.

So, what happened to people who were unlucky enough to be in transit yesterday? They were "detained" at the airports. They were effectively arrested because of their country of origin. Scientists, students, permanent residents with green cards, refugees who had been waiting in a bureaucratic queue for years...All criminalized. This is deeply wrong. So wrong, that after about twenty minutes of struggling with my own cowardice, I decided to travel to my local airport and join the protest forming there.

In the past I have viewed protests as largely futile. Stand around, wave signs, yell simple slogans. Make a scene. Make people uncomfortable. I had missed an important component: disruption. If you have enough people, you can physically block employees and customers from doing what they need or want to. That forces the higher-ups to listen, to placate you, if only to get you out of their hair.
I felt sorry for the everyday travelers and workers who could not (directly) make the changes we were demanding, but were still inconvenienced. Yet, that's the whole point.

Before I even left I read through people posting on Facebook that the light rail that ran to the airport was not letting off passengers at that station. So, my girlfriend and I had to get out at the previous stop and walk at least 1.5 miles to our destination. Thankfully, we were physically up to the task. Bus service was restricted, too. One blew past us as we were jogging to catch it....and the driver also ignored a very confused woman with a suitcase waiting at the bus stop proper. I hope she got a ride eventually.

When we arrived, we met up with my partner's sister and her boyfriend. A crowd was sitting or standing, blocking a security checkpoint. Other groups blocked the rest, but ours was the largest. A handful of people seemed to have taken charge of the event, leading chants and such. I quickly learned that communication across a large, loosely organization group of people was nearly impossible; this distressed me. But a brilliant person came up with a solution: yelling, "Mic check!" and waiting for a response. They did this a few times until the answer was strong and the murmur of conversation had quieted. They then dispersed the information in small clusters of words, pausing so that the crowd could repeat it and thus ensure more people understood. Runners spread news between the pockets of protesters. Mostly, they informed us that police had started intimidating the smallest knot of people at the farthest gate, and asked for reinforcements. They made it clear that those who moved risked being arrested. I was not that brave. I know that several were arrested while I was there. Police used pepper spray at one point -- so said a runner. The Seattle Stranger's blog reported that tensions rose throughout the night, with the last resistors forced out at around 2:30 in the morning. I left some time after 11:00. Thankfully, we had secured a car ride home.

It seems that large-scale civil protests, no matter how peaceful they begin, always go sour. The pattern goes like this:

1. Protestors make a scene and/or block access to a place.
2. Police arrive to "keep the peace."
3. Only there can be no peace with the protestors there, so the police eventually start intimidating them.
4. Police push for the protestors to leave, so the protestors resist; police push more, sometimes using things like pepper spray, until eventually...
5. The protestors display "disorderly conduct" and are arrested and/or are forced to flee.

Antagonizing someone until they snap and then claiming self-defense is despicable behavior. I anticipate I will see much more of it in the coming months, directly or not. My involvement in physical protests will probably continue to be small -- I have to make sure to not burn out, after all -- but I will continue to try to keep pace with current events online.