Resistance Report: D.C. bar sues Trump for unfair competition from his hotel

D.C. UNCORKED. President Trump’s business interests are ruffling feathers in the District of Columbia business community. “Cork Wine Bar owners Khalid Pitts and Diane Gross filed an unfair competition lawsuit against Donald Trump and the Trump International Hotel in DC Wednesday night, alleging that the president’s continued affiliation with the government-owned property puts competing businesses at a disadvantage,” reports Washingtonian. “Scott Rome, one of Cork Wine Bar’s attorneys, says government officials, lobbyists, foreign dignitaries, and others seeking political influence — part of the restaurant’s clientele — now ‘feel pressure’ or an ‘obligation’ to frequent the hotel. ‘If they have a party to book, they’re going to book it there first, whether to gain influence with the president, to gain influence with the administration,’ Rome says. ‘And he shows up there on weekends, so you get personal face time by going there. It seems to us to be a clear situation in which he’s using his office of the president to get a financial gain at the expense of local businesses.'”

Alan Garten, a Trump Organization lawyer, called the lawsuit “a wild publicity stunt completely lacking in legal merit,” according to NBC News.

THE EVOLUTION OF GAG RULE POLITICS.

One of the two Wednesday protests in Washington on International Women’s Day involved an array of speakers pushing back against one of Trump’s earliest presidential memoranda, which banned U.S. funding for any foreign organization that even talks about abortion services. This so-called global gag rule is an expansion of the one that has been U.S. policy off and on since 1984.

As Michelle Goldberg noted in Slate after Trump signed the executive order, the administration’s new version of the rule represents a massive expansion from earlier versions: “In the past, the global gag rule meant that foreign NGOs must disavow any involvement with abortion in order to receive U.S. family planning funding. Trump’s version of the global gag rule expands the policy to all global health funding. According to [reproductive health organization PAI’s Suzanne] Ehlers, the new rule means that rather than impacting $600 million in U.S. foreign aid, the global gag rule will affect $9.5 billion.”

And yet at the rally, the speakers seemed surprisingly optimistic that the rule could be repealed. I asked Serra Sipple, president of Change Global Center for Health Equity, the lead sponsor of the protest, about it after the rally concluded in Lafayette Park. The level of pushback against the rule this year is as novel as the extent of the measure itself, she said.

“On the global gag rule, the Congress does have the power to repeal it. And I think already we have some 200 members of the House and Senate who have signed onto bills [to repeal it] — they signed on, like, two days after the global gag rule was reinstated — and that’s unprecedented. We have, one, we have data. We have evidence today that we didn’t have during the Bush years, during the Bush global gag rule … that it’s failed, that it harms,” said Sipple.

“So that’s different and new in what we have here. And our global health programs have changed, frankly. So when the presidential memorandum came out that said it was going to expand to global health programs, I mean, that’s huge, because we have integrated health services on the ground. So it’s not like family planning can be separated out from HIV or maternal health or even malaria. So now we have global health organizations that are really concerned and are also going to fight back. So we have evidence and we have a broader base of support from global health organizations that are going to fight this, so we have a stronger army this time around. So I’m hopeful.”

The protest was co-sponsored by more than 40 other groups, from the National LGBTQ Task Force to the National Abortion Rights Action League.

WHY THEY STRUCK. The other big International Women’s Day protest in D.C. was sponsored by Eve Ensler’s One Billion Rising group and focused on the needs and concerns of low-wage women. Starting with a protest outside the U.S. Department of Labor, it continued with a rally in John Marshall Park on Constitution Avenue that mixed speeches, music and spoken word performance. I asked some of the women there if they were striking, and why. This is what they said:

“You know the Guerrilla Girls? In the art world, women are not paid as much as men. And I get asked all the time to do work for free because I’m just supposed to help people. It takes a lot to have to stand up for myself and demand to be paid for my work.” — Lisa Marie Thalhammer

“I’m striking in solidarity. I think it’s important.” — Sarko Sarkodie

“I wanted to be here to be counted — more as a show of support for other women than a strike. It’s getting harder and harder not to show up. I don’t think any of us can just show up for our own interests any more. That’s why we have people in power who only care about their own interests. We need to show up for each other.” — Deborah Press

A LOSS FOR BLACK LIVES MATTER IN ST. LOUIS. The Black Lives Matter movement didn’t start in Ferguson, Mo., but the situation there put the region’s problems in the national spotlight. Translating that activism in the Ferguson-St. Louis area into electoral change has been slow going, however, and in Tuesday’s St. Louis Democratic mayoral primary, it was dealt a setback.

“If there was a nexus between the Black Lives Matter movement and the pussy-hat-wearing, International Day of Women post-Trump-election movement, it should have been the St. Louis Democratic primary for mayor on Tuesday,” reports the Root. “St. Louis has never had a female mayor, and the top two candidates were Lyda Krewson, a 64-year-old white alderman with the endorsement of the problematic St. Louis Police Department, and Tishaura Jones, a 44-year-old black incumbent city treasurer active with Black Lives Matter since the Ferguson, Mo., uprising. In a city that is majority black, somehow Jones lost to Krewson by a mere 888 votes (30.4 percent to 32 percent), less than a city block. Her loss shines the light on how sexism, racism and incompetence by black political leadership continue to stymie black progress even in this age of ‘resistance.'”

If any of the trailing male candidates in the race had dropped out, it might have helped Jones consolidate the black vote, the Root reports: “When Jones, whose prominence as St. Louis city treasurer skyrocketed because of her outspoken activism post-Ferguson, jumped into the race, conventional wisdom said that the top four black candidates would cancel one another out, allowing Krewson to win. As Jones gained in the polls, especially after ethering the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for systematic racism, and once she got the powerful endorsement of former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, one of the other black candidates, all of them men, needed to go. It was the only chance for St. Louis’ black residents to finally get progressive representation. It didn’t happen.”

FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA. The states of Washington and New York are joining the legal battle against the new iteration of Trump’s travel ban. “Washington Attorney General Robert Ferguson will ask a Seattle federal judge to impose a temporary ban on President Donald Trump’s latest executive order barring citizens of six Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. starting March 16,” reports Bloomberg News. “New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, another Democrat, announced in a statement that he will join Ferguson’s lawsuit against the new travel ban.”