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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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.

Office of Impeachment

We're running out of time to impeach Bush, although I don't know that the symbolic gesture would really be a bad thing. The breaches of ethics and law that he seems to have done go far beyond the trivialities for which Clinton was brought up on charges. But it would take a long time to assemble the case, and then he'd be gone.

And soon there will be a new President that some group of people will probably think needs impeachment.

I sometimes wonder if there should be a regularly scheduled vote halfway through the term to determine if there's confidence in how things are going and whether we as a nation should just cut our losses and get a whole new administration early. Perhaps not. Sometimes it takes a while for someone to settle into office, and it might be disruptive to change too often for no good reason. The populace tries to pretend it can oversee these details, but that oversight comes at great cost and is error-prone if not everyone is keeping up, and costly in any case because of the energy put into it.

On my whimsier days, I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to just have an office of impeachment that just begins on day one of a presidency by building a case against the President. The two could run in parallel and if the impeachment office ever got enough to work with, it would kick in. I don't suppose that would work either, since its power might come to be abused. But I do like the idea that there could be some independent agency with the power to review what is going on in the Presidency and make sure it is really doing what it claims. It could have the power to subpoena documents and to review them in secret in cases of clear breach of authority. It could even censure or remove the President when he's gotten off track,

I know! Maybe we could call this agency a Congress. Perhaps we should amend the Constitution to have one of those. Then we'd have four branches of Government instead of the current three (Presidency, Supreme Court, and Cheney). Well, since I'm just speculating aloud anyway, why don't I go all the way and suggest replacing the oversight we've been getting from the Cheney department with a Congress instead. That would keep things simpler in a way. And it might remove the messy and redundant nature of the Cheney department, which I don't think has been entirely positive (no offense to the founders' intent intended).

Ok, I admit it, I'm just really hoping we get a working Congress with today's election. Not just one that passes laws. One that engages seriously in the issue of oversight. Not one that tries to run everything as if it were the Executive. Not a partisan entity. Just a group that takes its obligation to be an independent thinking entity seriously. A co-equal partner in the administration of the country, as it were.

A lot of the problems we've been in the practice of blaming on Bush for the last few years, while they were his fault, could have been substantially ameliorated if Congress had done its job. It's hard for it to do its job because it has a lot more people in it and they each tend to view themselves as separate people with separate agendas. But they have to get past that and work together. Because regardless of what either candidate for President has promised us, without a working Congress, it's going to be hard to deliver.

 

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Author’s Notes:

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This post began as a post titled “Office of Impeachment” which appears in my blog's feed in a snapshot of Open Salon taken by the Wayback Machine in 2009, but clicking on the link in the Wayback Machine says they did not save a snapshot of that post. So I have reconstructed it from my personal history of what I submitted on that date. Alas, this loses any commentary from readers, but at least it captures the spirit of the thing.

Original Keywords: politics, 2008 election, cheney, dick cheney, congress, oversight, executive branch, supreme court, senate, impeachment, office of impeachment, working together

in Much later (3-Sep-2026), the included image was generated with help from abacus.ai's with Claude Opus 4.8 (ChatLLM), original rendering by GPT Image 1.5, and edits by GPT Image 2 (Edit). Light post-processing in Gimp to reduce the resulting image in size for faster web download.