By Lauren Burke
BlackPressUSA
As congressional Republicans prepare to make $1.5 trillion dollars in budget cuts – cuts that will include government assistance to low-income Americans – the Rev. William Barber traveled to the U.S. Capitol to push back against them–and was arrested for his efforts.
The trip to speak out against what he views as economic injustice and unfairness was not his first to Washington. It is unlikely to be his last.
In a statement before his arrival, Rev. Barber – a prominent minister and anti-poverty activist – stated that “his urgent action comes as Congress considers devastating cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, and housing—threatening millions of children, seniors, and people with disabilities.”
When Donald Trump began his second term as president 100 days ago, he promised austerity and a smaller government. So far, Trump’s approval ratings are at a record low — lower than any other president of the United States in the modern era. However, Republicans in Congress continue to walk in lock step with the White House, and are planning to cut $1.5 trillion dollars from the budget. One of the programs that would certainly be on the table is Medicaid.
“It’s a time for us to first move in any nonviolent type of protest. [But] first of all, you have to get your facts so that you’re not focusing on personality, but policy and the real problems. And second of all, you have to make sure, as we did on Ash Wednesday, that your adversary actually knows what’s bothering you. You don’t just start doing things,” Rev. Barber said as he spoke after his protest in the U.S. Capitol.
Barber, along with the Rev. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Steve Swayne, director of St. Francis Springs Prayer Center, took turns reading scripture and praying, often chanting together: “Against the conspiracy of cruelty, we plead the power of your mercy,” the Religious News Service reported.
“When we cannot depend on the courts and the legislative power of human beings, we can still depend on … the power of your love and your mercy and your truth,” Barber said in the Rotunda near a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As the trio prayed, however, Capitol Police hovered. About a dozen officers issued verbal warnings, before ushering everyone in the Rotunda out, closing the doors then arresting the praying protestors, though they were only briefly detained.
Their effort to stop over one trillion in budget cuts is likely to be unsuccessful, however.
“You actually have to have the kind of redemptive hope that you believe if you show the folk the facts they would change, and you can’t be frivolous about that. They may not [change] but you have to believe in that possibility, because if you give up on humanity then you’re doing the same thing they’re doing,” said Rev. Barber, founder of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, where he also teaches. “Part of what it means to be in a nonviolent movement is that if I didn’t believe in the possibility of my worst enemy becoming my best friend, I’d stop preaching. I wouldn’t put on robes and crosses and stuff … wouldn’t be any need.”
This week members of Congress are in markups and budget talks as the details on the final proposals of what will be defunded slowly emerge.