Make America Legal Again. It Only Takes 3 GOP Members of Congress
To Republican Members of Congress:
A few questions on behalf of the large, mostly angry crowds who are filling your town halls.
As a member of Congress, you have attended meetings, read extensive research documents, and questioned expert witnesses. You have spent long hours in committees debating and arriving at consensus about which programs serve the public’s interests and how much taxpayer money should be used to support them.
This is the job you were elected to do, and 118 Congresses before yours performed without interruption, even during the Civil War.
Why, then, instead of being on the House or Senate floor defending your authority, are you behaving as spectators in the gallery while a small group of non-experts, with no legal authority, uses a chainsaw to rip apart programs you and other members, past and present, have carefully created?
Allowing this to happen is complicity in a crime. Nearly every court that has weighed in on whether you can cede your power this way has declared it illegal. You didn’t work so hard and sacrifice so much to win election just to become a bystander while others make know-nothing decisions that do serious harm to children, the elderly, veterans and others who trusted you, and voted for you.
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An epidemic of lawlessness
Seventy-four of you, Republican members of the House and Senate, are lawyers. Does it bother you that the president is punishing lawyers for representing clients he doesn’t like? How can you remain silent while private law firms are told they can only take what amounts to state-approved cases?
In the Venezuelan immigrants case, in clear violation of the Constitution and hundreds of years of settled law, Trump claims the courts have no right to stop him from making arrests and deciding on his own who’s guilty and how they should be punished. King George held the same view. In post-revolutionary America we venerate personal rights. Innocent until proven guilty. The right to confront an accuser in a fair trial. The right to legal counsel. Even for suspected ax murderers.
How can you as members of Congress, and not just lawyers, fail to speak up when such basic rights threatened? Your oaths do not come with an escape clause that absolves you from responsibility when the exercise of that responsibility is politically difficult.
The Urgent Need to Defend Democracy
I know enough about the current state of U.S. politics to understand how risky it is not to bow to Trump on demand. Liz Cheney, Jeff Flake and others have had their elective careers ended. Many have endured vicious harassment and personal threats. It’s ugly in the political world Trump’s created. But silence and complicity wins you only the need to bend your knee further with each passing demand—and eventually the scorn of history when this nightmare ends, as it likely will, and sooner than most expect.
“What can one person do?” you ask.
One person, not much. But with the current congressional divide it would take just a few of you, as few as three members of the House and Senate, to steer America away from the rocks of legal, economic and political ruin.
No more than three members who vote to protect their own values, not change them.
No more than three votes willing to join Democrats to go back to the Constitutionally prescribed way taxpayers’ money is spent and personal rights are protected and those in the White House are held to the limits of their authority.
The fact is that our government, our economy, our security and our future are in jeopardy because most of you are behaving like the school guards who lack the backbone to intercede while a gunman is loose in a classroom.
This has nothing to do with policy differences. It has everything to do with defending America from devastating consequences.
If you’re not persuaded by this message I encourage you to look at yourself in the mirror and honestly conclude you like what you see. And then look into the eyes of your children, and grandchildren and ask yourself whether Trump’s America is what you would be proud to leave them as an inheritance.
America is better than this. Are you?
Comments? Criticism? Contact Joe Rothstein at jrothstein@rothstein.net
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