President Donald Trump has very effectively used his [non-Muslim] travel ban and inflammatory statements to distract Americans from everything else happening in Washington, and a right-wing Congress has done virtually nothing to reel him in because the distractions serve their interests.

During a U.S. Education Department press conference on civil rights a year ago, Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, explained that the country survived Reagan-era assaults on education and civil rights because even though funding for programs was lost, “we figured out how to protect the structure of the laws.”

There are many ways to lose laws, besides the Supreme Court finding them unconstitutional. Congress can repeal laws or refuse to fund them. It can reject the rules and regulations that federal agencies promulgate to implement them. Or it can terminate the agencies responsible for seeing that the laws are enforced.

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In just the three weeks since Trump’s inauguration, Republican members of Congress have introduced legislation to:

  • terminate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (H.R. 861);
  • terminate the U.S. Education Department (H.R.899); and
  • terminate the Election Assistance Commission, which is “charged with supporting state and local election officials in their efforts to ensure accessible, accurate and secure elections.” (H.R.634)

Until EPA can be gotten rid of entirely (or in case that doesn’t work) several other pieces of legislation would seriously curtail its authorities. Rep. Sam Johnson, R-Texas, has introduced legislation (H.R. 958) that would “eliminate certain [unspecified , since the text of the bill is not available yet] programs” of the EPA.

Climate change is denied by presidential order and eliminating the term from the EPA website, which is still partly blocked, as well as proposed legislation. The No Tax Dollars for the United Nations’ Climate Agenda Act (H.R. 673) prohibits the U.S. from paying for any activities of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Green Climate Fund. The Stopping EPA Overreach Act of 2017 (H.R.637) prohibits EPA or any other federal agency from regulating GHGs. And legislation is pending to reject several recent EPA regulations.

Congress is also planning to use the option of rejecting agency regulations to gut the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, whose main purpose is to ensure equal education for American Indian, Alaska Native and other minority children. Representatives introduced and the House passed within a week legislation that rejects the accountability (H.J.Res. 57) and teacher preparation (H.J.Res.58) provisions of ESSA.

With or without a Department of Education, federal education money is likely to be focused on private and charter schools through vouchers, tax credits and/or tax deductions. Examples of the proposed legislation are the Enhancing Educational Opportunities for all Students Act (H.R. 716), Empowering Parents to Invest in Choice Act of 2017 (H.R. 675) and H.R.610, a bill “to distribute Federal funds for elementary and secondary education in the form of vouchers for eligible students and to repeal a certain rule relating to nutrition standards in schools.”

The U.S. Department of Energy isn’t on the chopping block yet, but legislation has been introduced that gives states control over “the development and production of all forms of energy on all available Federal land” (S.335) and regulation of hydraulic fracturing on federal lands within the boundaries of the state (H.R. 928). On the other hand, DOE has a big role in legislation (H.R. 590 and H.R. 589) supporting the restart of the nation’s commercial nuclear reactor industry. The bills were introduced January 20 and both have already passed the House.

Sen. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has introduced legislation to replace the Affordable Care Act (S.222), and several other bills would so cripple the program as to make it unworkable, such as H.R. 849, which would get rid of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, the Preserving Access to Medicaid for Americans Act of 2017 (H.R.682), which establishes a voucher program for Medicare, and the Health Coverage State Flexibility Act of 2017 (H.R. 710), which says you lose your health insurance if you miss just one payment.

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Trump has brilliantly managed to keep the Supreme Court out of the discussion by not appealing the 9th Circuit’s ruling on his travel ban and promising to issue a new executive order, which means not only will Trump avoid another embarrassing courtroom loss, but the people and organizations that oppose the ban will have to find the financial resources and public will to start all over again. And that will take time and energy to do and ink to report. It will keep those who opposed the Trump administration occupied – just as a magician directs his audience’s attention away from what Trump is really doing.

In the meantime, Congress will carry on its assault against more than 50 years of social, educational, environmental and civil rights advances. This time around, we are in real danger of losing the laws.

As Edelman said, “We have got some tough times ahead, but we are up to it. You might as well just hunker down and do your crying at night and on the weekend. We are not going backwards.”

Tanya H. Lee is a journalist who has been writing about issues of importance to the Native American community for almost 20 years. Having served as managing editor of the Navajo-Hopi Observer and Native American Journal, she now freelances for ICMN and other publications. Lee lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.