From the Code Pink House to the Halls of Congress

A pink cake was given to Paki Wieland in gratitude for her wonderful hospitality at the Code Pink House where we stayed during this year’s ANA DC Days. From left: Alex Rose, Ariel Gold, Kina Thorpe, Paki Wieland, Robin Lloyd and Janice Sevre-Duscynska. Photo (selfie) by Alex Rose.

By Robin Lloyd
Co-Chair, Disarm/End Wars Issue Committee

Last weekend I travelled with two young women, Alex Rose and Kina Thorpe, staff members from the Peace and Justice Center in Burlington VT, to attend the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA) DC Days, held May 19-22, 2019. We stayed at the Code Pink House in NE Washington, DC, which is not only pink, but orange and red and purple. Activist Paki Wieland is the concierge and host, and she drives people everywhere and gives them whatever medication they need when their feet or heads hurt.

At the Code Pink House everyone was going to the Venezuelan protest. The next evening it was a drive out to John Bolton’s house to protest his warmongering. Very enticing, but we were there with a mission, to attend an issues training on nuclear weapons and cleanup and waste on Sunday, and to do lobbying on Monday and Tuesday. At times there seemed to be a conflict between two worldviews of how to be an activist: in the streets or in the halls of Congress.

Left: Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA) activists from Vermont meet with Tim Reiser, Senator Leahy's staffer on the Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations. From left: Tim Rieser, Alex Rose, Robin Lloyd, Kina Thorpe. Photo by Paul Martin.

But there we were on Monday walking the halls of Congress. It was very quiet considering that we were at the center of where the news is made 24 hours a day on MSNBC. Somewhere, a hearing was considering subpoenas against another confidante of Trump. Elsewhere, house committees were weighing Trump’s modernization of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Since the purpose of the House is to allocate the people’s taxes, and since 53% of those taxes go to the military, does that mean 53% of office space, interns, committee meetings, etc., are devoted to sending money to the military? It’s appalling to think about it that way.

The genius of ANA is that it is made up of people who live in the shadow of the nuclear octopus: near Savannah River (GA) where Trump is trying to expand the production of plutonium ‘pits’; or Rocky Flats (CO) or Hanford (WA), now closed but facing unresolved issues around nuclear cleanup; or Livermore (CA) and Los Alamos (NM) where the bombs are built. These people have lived with the damage and the tragedy of the nuclear fuel cycle for decades. And they know Congress: they know which staffer of which Congressional representative on the subcommittee dealing with, say, the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, who needs to be told all the facts making Yucca Mountain an impossible site for storage.
I was deeply impressed with the careful planning and organization this poorly-funded nonprofit pulled off this weekend.

We went to a hearing of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and there we found Barbara Lee proposing “Repeal of the Authorization for Use of Military Force” (H.R. 1274), and it passed 30 to 21. All Democrats voted for it, and all Republicans voted against it. AUMF was passed after 9/11 and is used as an excuse to go into Somalia and Yemen and other countries.

It was interesting to have this experience. We were able to see the frail but courageous pushback against the military-industrial-congressional complex. It gives one hope that the new spirit in Congress will shift the battleship of our economy around, slowly, to justice and peace.