by Ady Barkan
I called up Jennifer Flynn Walker, a veteran organizer who had cut her teeth as an AIDS activist in New York City using transgressive tactics to help drug users and homeless people win unlikely political victories that dramatically improved their lives. Jen was responsible for leading the work at the Center for Popular Democracy to fight back against the Trump administration, so she had spent much of the past year traveling around the country, training newly politicized folks in disruptive protest techniques, and had spent the rest of it bringing those people to Washington, D.C., to throw sand into the gears of the Republican machine. Throughout the summer, she and her army engaged in asymmetric warfare against the occupying forces, using pointed questions and cell phone cameras as their primary weaponry. Everywhere the Republican members of Congress went, they were confronted by constituents decrying their agenda and demanding answers to impossibly simple questions. “My son is twenty-three and cannot find a job that provides health insurance. Why are you promoting a law that would kick him off of mine?” “My daughter has asthma and I have diabetes. Do you really think that the health insurance companies should be allowed to deny us coverage because of these preexisting conditions?” “I rely on Medicaid to keep me alive. Why are you trying to destroy the program?”
All around the country, activists trained by Jen and others like her were turning themselves into bird-doggers, hounding politicians at town halls and other public places and sharing videos of their encounters with local news and social media. In July their hard work had paid off and Trumpcare had gone down to an unlikely defeat. But now, in early December, it looked like the K Street lobbyists had successfully circled the wagons around the entire Republican Party and were about to score a multitrillion-dollar tax cut windfall at the expense of the 99 percent of us.
I told Jen I was ready to enlist in her campaign, and she told me she was planning a day of action on December 5. Come to D.C., she said, and let’s go after some vulnerable Republicans. Speaker Paul Ryan enjoyed a twenty-three-seat majority in the House, so if Democrats stayed united in opposition, he could afford to lose some but not too many of his members. Our strategy was to target the Republicans in swing districts who were facing serious challenges in the midterm elections, which were eleven months away. Many of these were from suburban districts in California, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey that Hillary Clinton had won and that would actually see their taxes go up under the Republican plan. We decided that I would help target Orange County’s Darrell Issa, a two-time convicted carjacker who had profited nicely when his business burned down only weeks after he had boosted his fire insurance by 400 percent; he was now the wealthiest member of Congress.
I bought my plane ticket and asked my father and brother to join me in D.C. for the day. It was going to be an important first for me: in over fifteen years of activism I had never engaged in civil disobedience. It was embarrassing, frankly, like being a film critic who had never watched Fellini, or a chef who had never poached an egg.
On the chilly morning of December 5, about two hundred of us gathered in a public park a mile south of the Capitol, where Jen and two other organizers split us up into groups and gave us marching orders. We hopped on buses for a short drive and then calmly filed through security at one of the House office buildings. We then began paying visits to Republican members of Congress, occupying the hallways, using the human mic to tell personal stories about how the tax scam would make our lives more difficult and dangerous. I walked through the hallways slowly, leaning on my cane and holding my father’s hand. My voice was already getting softer and slower, so I saved my breath and let other people do the mic checking. At one early stop I pointed out to my father a hijabi Palestinian-American woman who was being taken away in handcuffs. “That’s Linda Sarsour,” I said, pointing out one of the cochairs of the Women’s March, an unapologetic Brooklynite who had helped forge Communities United for Police Reform. “She is probably the most prominent Muslim activist in the country.”
By midafternoon our numbers had dwindled to about twenty-five people; the rest had either already been arrested or had gone home. I was slated to be our final arrestee. So, after walking about three miles through the various halls and passageways, I found myself standing in front of Issa’s office, mic checking with a small company of comrades. My six-foot-four-inch, twenty-two-year-old brother, Muki, gave me all the amplification I needed, bellowing out my comments over the heads of everyone else. My father stood fifteen feet back, nervous about how the cops might treat me but grateful to be part of the action. Next to me stood our field commander, Jennifer Flynn Walker; my Fed Up partner Shawn Sebastian; one of my longest-serving CPD coworkers, Julia Peter; and an old ally from my access-to-medicine days, the Yale Law School professor Amy Kapczynski. Live-streaming it all was MoveOn.org’s Washington director, Ben Wikler, a pal with whom I had shared many strategic bull sessions over the years.
The police were very patient with us, letting me and Jen speak for fifteen minutes before our chanting and banging on Issa’s office door became too much for them to tolerate. They gave us three warnings, during which everyone who didn’t want to be arrested was directed down the hallway. And then, one by one, my comrades were placed in plastic handcuffs and escorted to the elevators. The police had a harder time knowing what to do with me, because without a free hand to hold my cane, I wouldn’t be able to walk. After consulting with his supervisor, my arresting officer simply walked beside me. Ben’s video showed me wobbling down the hallway like an al dente linguine. “Show me what democracy looks like!” shouted the chant leader. “This is what democracy looks like!” replied our supporters. As I passed Ben and his camera, I tried an advanced move, holding my cane up victoriously without breaking stride, hoping that I wouldn’t pay for the image with a painful fall.
I was put in a paddy wagon along with the other civil disobedients and driven to a vehicle repair garage in the back of a police station that had been repurposed to process mass arrests. The mood inside was jubilant. We had come from all over the country to resist our government’s greed and racism, and we basked in the warmth of righteous solidarity. About two hours later I paid a $50 fine and was released onto the street, where my father was waiting along with a small welcoming committee. We walked just one short block back to the Capitol Skyline Hotel, which Jen Flynn had cleverly made our base of operations. Outside the hotel, I stood and spoke to Megan Anderson, whom I had met earlier that day. She had traveled from Cincinnati to be there, an effort all the more impressive because she was almost completely paralyzed below the neck from spinal muscular atrophy, a motor neuron disease related to ALS. We talked about how moving the day had been. I finally allowed myself to get emotional, to acknowledge the tragedy that infused my activism that day. “There is a higher purpose,” Megan said. “I think you will see that there is a reason you are here today.” The spirituality of her comment was foreign to me (and I bristled at the idea that there was some purposive intentionality behind my ALS), but it reminded me of my aunt Deb’s comment a year earlier that I would “make meaning” out of my disease. Megan and I shared some tears, and then I went inside the lobby, where I promptly tumbled to the floor. I was unhurt but in definite need of food and rest.
The next day I was flying home to Santa Barbara, with a transfer in Phoenix. I did not know that it would be the most consequential flight of my life.
I sat in the lobby of the Capitol Skyline Hotel, peeved that Amanda Shanor was already an hour late. She was an old friend and mentor from law school—the one who had first advised me to go get a job at Make the Road New York—and we were supposed to be catching up a bit before she took me to the airport. She finally arrived and put my suitcase in her sports car as I carefully maneuvered down the steps out of the hotel. My frustration only grew as we drove south to DCA, because she was insisting on holding her cell phone, looking at Waze, and driving stick shift, all at the same time. I begged her to let me do the damn navigation, but she refused. As she misse
d one turn and then another, my bemused outrage turned genuine. She was going to make me miss my flight! She dropped me off curbside with about forty-five minutes to go before takeoff. I didn’t want to schlep my bag through two flights and a transfer in Phoenix, so I shuffled toward the bag drop as quickly as was prudent, regretfully avoiding the moving walkway because I was worried it would trip me up. The agent at the counter tagged my bag and said that I had made it with only thirty seconds to spare. Flashing my cane, I jumped to the front of the line at security and scurried down to my gate. They were in the middle of boarding, and I again walked up to the front. The gate agent signaled for me to stand in front of a woman with large sunglasses and a stylish coat with a puffy collar.
She was talking on the phone with charisma and confidence. “Yeah, look, I’m disappointed, too. I definitely thought we could make it go viral. It’s a great video. Sometimes Twitter works in mysterious ways.”
I love eavesdropping. After she hung up, I shamelessly started bragging to her. “I had my first viral moment on Twitter yesterday,” I told her.
“Oh?,” she said politely.
I told her that Ben Wikler’s video of my arrest had gotten 2,000 retweets and tens of thousands of views.
“Very cool! My friend Linda Sarsour got arrested protesting yesterday as well,” she said. We made the obligatory comment about what a small world D.C. is, and then she said something very interesting. “You know, Jeff Flake is on this flight.”
My eyes lit up.
Flake was a conservative Republican senator from Arizona who had never met a corporate tax cut that he didn’t love. But he was one of the few Republicans who had dared to criticize Trump during his first year. There was a glimmer of hope that he might vote against the tax scam.
“You should talk to him about it,” the woman said.
“Okay,” I replied, “but you have to film it.” She eagerly agreed and told me that he had already boarded ahead of us. As we walked down the gangway toward the plane, she filmed me introducing myself to the camera and explaining why I was in D.C. and what I was about to do. “On this plane is Arizona senator Jeff Flake, who voted for the tax bill even though he said he cared about the deficit and he cared about working people and people like me. So when I get on, I’m gonna ask him: Why did he vote for the tax cut bill?”
As I walked down the aisle of the plane toward my seat, I saw him sitting in the first row of economy. His bronze tan and perfectly coiffed hair stood out among the sea of regular travelers. I stopped, stuck out my hand, introduced myself, and asked him why he was planning to vote for the tax bill (after it was revised to match the House version). He said it would help economic growth. I explained why I disagreed. Sixty seconds passed. A flight attendant walked up to me, asked me if I was okay, and told me that I had to take my seat because they needed to board the plane and I was blocking the whole aisle. I told him I wasn’t okay: I was very sick and I needed to get answers from the senator about his vote. Flake offered up a solution. “I’ll come back and talk to you. How’s that?” he offered.
I found my seat near the back of the plane. My new friend showed me the video she had shot of me hunched over Flake, leaning on my cane, making him increasingly uncomfortable. It was a solid piece of bird-dogging, but more important was the promise he had made to keep the conversation going. And now we had time to prepare!
We asked the man seated next to me if he would be willing to exchange seats with her and he happily traded up for her window seat. Then she sat down and we started introducing ourselves properly. Her name was Liz Jaff and she was a Democratic Party political operative. She had grown up in South Africa and had been in college in Cape Town when Senator Barack Obama visited the country in 2007. She had interviewed him for her student newspaper and had fallen in love, so she emigrated to the U.S. and showed up uninvited at his Iowa headquarters. She was so warm and enthusiastic that they let her staff the front desk, greeting volunteers and other visitors. Later she worked in Obama’s White House and then got involved with the effort to modernize the Democratic National Committee’s tech systems. I told her about my work, which triggered recognition: Liz’s fiancé was a policy wonk, and he had told her about my Fed Up campaign. We played the name game, comparing notes on mutual acquaintances, both surprised that we had never crossed paths before.
And then we got down to work. We needed a strategy for my conversation with Flake, and we were only going to get one take. Liz logged onto the on board Wi-Fi and started texting with her friend Winnie Wong, a socialist activist with a solid Twitter game. Liz came up with a brilliant hashtag on her first try: #FlakesOnAPlane. Working with Winnie, we started trying to build anticipation about our upcoming conversation. My coworker Shawn Sebastian tweeted out enthusiastically “This is kismet. @AdyBarkan, who has ALS, is on a flight with @JeffFlake and he’s asking how Flake could vote for a tax bill that will take healthcare away from 13 million people and cut Medicaid. Stay tuned!” I’d never heard the word “kismet” before. I looked it up. Destiny. The stakes were high, and I didn’t want to disappoint Shawn.
On Twitter, I solicited ideas for what questions I should ask Flake and what arguments I should make. A young immigrant asked me to push Flake on his support for DACA, the program that allowed undocumented youth to obtain work permits and authorization to stay in the country. Flake was a supporter of the program, and we wanted him to use his leverage over the tax scam to force Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and/or Donald Trump to renew DACA, either through legislation or executive action. Liz and I were both worried about getting good-quality audio, so we tested different options and figured out that if she held up the microphone on her earbuds near my mouth, my words would be quite clear. An hour passed and Flake still hadn’t come by. We agreed to give him another hour and then go up and talk to him.
Pushing Flake on his vote seemed worthwhile because he was one of the only Republicans who had expressed serious concerns about the tax bill. In order to defeat it, we needed to find three Republican no votes. He had been giving noble speeches recently about American democracy and good governance and had decried the opaque and rushed process by which the Republican leadership had authored the legislation. Could I convince him to make his vote match his rhetoric? Could I marshal all of my policy expertise and my emotional personal story to sway this hard-line conservative “deficit hawk” into voting with the Democrats? In high school I had been a champion debater and an award-winning thespian. But this was no weekend tournament. Millions of Americans would lose their health insurance and thousands would die if this bill became law. I sat quietly and laid out in my mind all of the different arguments that might appeal to him.
Thirty minutes later, after the drinks cart had passed, the senator walked down the aisle and stopped at my row. Liz began to film on her phone, holding the mic as far as she could into our conversation to try to overcome the loud jet-engine background noise. I began our conversation as I usually do when I’m talking to a powerful person who can give me what I want: by sucking up. I told Flake that we all admired his bravery in criticizing Trump and the secretive Senate bill-writing process. Then I summarized for him my personal story and asked him why he would put my health care at risk for the benefit of millionaires and billionaires. Because the tax cut would dramatically increase the federal deficit, it was going to trigger enormous automatic cuts to Medicare and other crucial programs; these cuts would be allocated by a White House official who had repeatedly expressed his disdain for Medicare disability funding. This bill, I told Flake, would put at risk my access to a ventilator and the other medical care that I would need if I wanted to stay alive to watch Carl learn to read or shoot a basketball. He tried to assuage my fears by pointing out that Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan had promised to waive these automatic “paygo” cuts. I laid out the many times that those two men had already lied about the tax bill, claiming it would be deficit-neutral and wouldn’t raise taxes on anybody. He correctly noted that paygo had been
triggered many times in the past but never actually implemented. We were descending into seriously esoteric debates, and I could sense that I was missing an opportunity to land an emotional gut punch. So I pivoted to a new topic.
Why not use this tax vote as an opportunity to demand a solution for Dreamers? I asked him. He explained that he was working hard on finding a fix and was confident there would be one by March. I told him that it was a mistake to give up his leverage now in exchange for promises of future action. He was unwilling to take a hard negotiating stance, he said. He thanked me for the conversation and tried to end it. I wouldn’t let him. I asked him about the Children’s Health Insurance Program. I asked him if he was happy with the process by which the tax bill had been written. “No, none of us are happy with the process. It’s a lack of regular order that’s been going on for years now. It’s been pretty dysfunctional, the whole Senate,” he replied. I had finally broken through, found an argument that resonated with him. I decided to press my case.
“So why not take your stand now?” I pleaded, my voice becoming more intense. He smiled with embarrassment, leaning back, unable to respond. I pushed. “You can be an American hero; you really can. If the votes match the speech . . . Think about the legacy that you will have for my son, and your grandchildren, if you take your principles and turn them into votes. You can save my life.” (I’ve thought about that sentence some, since of course even by voting no on the tax scam he could not actually keep me alive. But if he did vote no, saving many other lives, he would be giving my life the kind of purpose we are all seeking.)