To paraphrase a great speechifier: If there is anyone out there who still doubts whether a little teamwork makes all things possible; who still wonders if our collective democratic actions truly influence our elected officials; who still questions the power of grassroots climate activism, today’s letter drop to Ben Cardin was your answer.
Today we dropped by Capitol Hill for our second big delivery of letters to Senator Cardin. Our first delivery of 250 handwritten letters a few weeks back clearly earned us the Senator’s respect, because today the Senator dispatched none other than his top legislative adviser, Michael Burke to receive our latest batch of 260 letters. Letter team leaders Ellen McGovern (Silver Spring), Susan Stewart (Greenbelt) and Sunita Pathik (Burtonsville) headed up the delivery ceremony as immortalized in the picture below.
Mission accomplished; a job well done. But the best moment was yet to come.
After the delivery, we decided to stick around to catch part of the climate policy hearing Senator Cardin’s Environment and Public Works committee was conducting. That turned out to be a very smart move. Twenty minutes or so into the hearing, Senator Cardin showed up and delivered a really fantastic speech on the economic benefits of climate action. But that’s not all. His oratorical fireworks concluded, the Senator stood up from his chair, and proceeded to make his way back through the packed hearing room until he was standing right in front of us with a stack of our letters in his hand.
As the heads of journalists, lobbyists and other Senators turned to see who Senator Cardin was talking to, the Senator graciously thanked us for our hard work, told us he’d received the last stack as well, and left us with some new marching orders: “It’s important that you keep up the good work,” he told us, “the opposition is not going to stop and neither can you.”
If that’s not a vindication of the true power of grassroots action, I don’t know what is. Working together, doing democracy, our climate community has accomplished something truly amazing: we’ve won the attention and respect of a Senator who is a major player in a legislative effort that could very well determine our global future.
And now it’s critical that we follow Senator Cardin’s new marching orders and keep up the fight for a stronger bill! For if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past week it’s that the Senator is right: the opposition will stop at nothing to derail federal climate action. They’ll even send congressional leaders forged letters like the clean coal lobby did last month. We’ve got to fight back with all we’ve got. We’ve got to keep the flow of genuine letters coming.
Please help us. Be a part of history. Contact me today (keith@chesapeakeclimate.org) to join a local letter collecting team in your area.
