Congressional Cowardice

I am unforgiving of GOP Congressional cowardice. They pledged an oath to support and defend the Constitution. They have historically sent millions into war, the sometimes-tenuous justification being a need to defend our way of life. There is now a coup afoot and it falls to Congress itself to defend us.

Any in Congress sustaining the coup because they fear for their job, their safety or the safety of their family are committing treason.

Protecting and defending the US is not optional, something to do if it's convenient. It is a sworn duty.

Their paid job is to represent the citizens who elected them—not party, not billionaires, not the President.

Why may Congress be more selfish than soldiers they send to battle?

Why are their families entitled to protection at the expense of our nation?

We know they speak privately of being afraid, but we citizens are afraid, too, and we have no recourse.

These people swore to act on our behalf.

These treasonous cowards of the GOP Congress, by their corrupt, selfish, and dishonorable action and inaction are, at every opportunity, unilaterally surrendering the Constitution they swore to protect, willfully ignoring that it leads us inevitably to authoritarian rule.

The cowardly GOP Congress plainly hope that passively turning a blind eye to a coup, ignoring their oath and instead pledging fealty to a would-be dictator, will leave them spared his wrath.

Yet dictators need neither Congress nor Courts. They make their own laws and brook no checks on their power.

We are all afraid. I do not forgive the GOP Congress their fear. I expect them to rise above it. Selfish action now is beyond shameful, beyond corrupt. Traitorous. No better than a deserter, AWOL from a post at a time when necessity and duty requires defending the Constitution and the nation.

If the GOP Congress won't do their job, they should step down and go cower in their basement as private citizens.

Even an empty seat could change the balance of power, allowing others to do THEIR job, tipping things enough to save us from autocracy.

Please, do at least that for the Constitution.

 

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Author's Notes:

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This post originated as a thread on BlueSky. I've done very light editing of content and formatting, but the essential content is mostly unchanged.

The image of the Constitution is in the public domain, and was obtained from Wikipedia. The flames overlaid on it were added by me using Gimp. The flames were created from Abacus.ai using Claude Sonnet 3.5 and Flux 1.1 Ultra Pro, though I had such great difficulty getting it to give me a real-looking Constitution, without confabulating other text, that I had to just ask for the flames and merge things myself.

Congressional Pardons

Perhaps Congress should allocate itself the power to both grant pardons and/or to review&veto Presidential pardons.

I see it as a misdesign that the President has an exclusive, unchecked power to pardon, and without a corresponding power held by the people. In a Democracy, an unstated meta-rule is that a consensus of the people through its representatives in Congress, its consensus body, should always dominate decisions by the Executive.

The Executive is just one person, and subject to whim. As I see it, we grant them power not because we think it safer to put all that power in one place, but because we fear Congress might not achieve consensus fast enough or at all in some cases, and we might find ourselves crippled and unable to react fast enough for everything that comes up in the world. However, in any matter of disagreement between Congress and the Executive, if Congress does muster consensus, it seems to me that's generally preferable as a statement of what We The People should want.

A “review and veto” power would be useful as a check just in case there was ever a lawless President promising collaborating criminals a Get Out of Jail Free card. Whether or not one agrees that Congress should always win every contest of wills with the President, it's clear that the unchecked power to pardon fellow criminals must be reconsidered in at least some way.

As for issuing pardons directly, I'd not expect Congress to issue a lot of them itself because each would require a lot of politicians to agree about a single individual, and usually it would not seem worth the risk. But in the case of malicious prosecution by the DOJ, consensus of We The People should ‘trump’ executive power.

It might also have occasional value in other situations. For example, if Congress decides that marijuana possession, use, or even sale should not be criminalized after all, perhaps regretting that it ever was, then along with a change in the law, it could order blanket pardons of those convicted under prior law, rather than waiting for the Executive or the courts to sort that out, and assuring a more uniform application of new social understanding.

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Author's Notes:

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The essay which became this post started as a tweet thread by me earlier today.

Our much-touted checks and balances have proven slow and ineffective at fending off attacks on the Constitution and our system of Democracy. We need to find ways to strengthen the power of the people against tyranny. That begins with discussions like these.