Calling Out Congress

Did you listen to Cory Booker calling on Congress to step up and do something about the authoritarian regime they are supporting?  It's worth taking the time to listen to his words.  He says what I've been silently screaming.

Senator Chris Coons said it very plainly this afternoon - these kinds of action are what leads us into forever wars.

Remember the "no wars" president FFOTUS promised us.  I know. I know. His promises are like vapor vanishing into the ether, but that was one I thought he might keep.  Silly me.

Flooding Congressional phones with protests probably won't sway any elected officials' positions.  Those who are beholden to him are chained to the situation, those who oppose him are powerless.

Yet the Constitution sits there, with its insistence that wars are declared by the people's body, not the person inhabiting the White House.  All those who were voted into power by their constituents last year or two years or four years or six years ago did so with their hands on a significant tome (loving Mamdani's Quran if for no other reason than that it annoyed so many).  

They swore, just as I did when I became president of the school board, to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.  There is very little doubt that FFOTUS and friends are waging a frontal assault on that document (attacking birthright citizenship, interfering with the States' rights to hold free and fair elections).  Those who are not speaking out are breaking that solemn vow.

That oath does not expire.  I'm still bound by what I said in the last century.  Although the audience laughed when I waved my gavel, I was dead serious then and I am dead serious now.  

I pledged to protect my country.  I am bound by that, today and yesterday and forever.  So I make phone calls and I vote and I write letters to the editor in service of that promise.  There isn't much more that I can do.  

But our elected officials have more power than I do.  Kudos to Senator Booker for calling them to action.

January 6th was the darkest day in our history.  But for Mike Pence refusing to get into a car driven by the Secret Service, for Nancy Pelosi insisting that the certification would continue, for Capitol Police redirecting rioters away from the chamber where Congress was hiding, we might be living in a very different world right now.

There was no budging FFOTUS while he was flinging ketchup on the walls of the dining room, and that was when there were some human guardrails in the building.  There is no one there to do that now.  

There is only Congress.  

Here's hoping they grow a spine.