From a Google Image Search - The Daily Beast
We dutifully elect neighbors to represent us in Washington. Sometimes we elect them over and over, election after election. We do this because we recognize their name, or they seem to have clout, or they bring home earmark dollars for projects in our district or state. We may vote without careful thought or research. We may vote on autopilot for a traditional family party. We may vote for whoever had the slickest ads.
Regardless of how our representatives get elected "we the people" expect them to legislate for us; to understand our needs and to try to address them. We probably don't expect them to exaggerate our needs by playing mind games to make us fearful so that we believe that awful things will happen if we don't reelect them. The current crop of terrible consequences, they tell us, will involve out-of-control crime rates, murderous immigrants who will take our jobs and kill us in our streets, and economic disaster. Some representatives tell us that our right to bear arms is more important than our fears about being randomly killed or losing loved ones (even our children) in a mass shooting event. Some tell us that racist speech or hate speech must be protected or we will lose all rights to free speech. Doesn't it seem as if we have gotten a bit off-track from having our real needs met, our actual issues addressed?
The run-up to the 2024 election is a perfect time to consider how well Congress is working for "we the people". Donald Trump vowed to uphold our Constitution, but in his heart, he harbored fascist tendencies and held our democracy/republic in low esteem. So, he killed negative stories about sexual dalliances and used his skills at obfuscation to turn our minds into pretzels. He called the new president of Ukraine (the brave defender of his nation, Volodymyr Zelenskyy who had a bully at his border salivating to annex his country) and tried to blackmail him by withholding weapons the US had already promised unless Zelenskyy would say that Hunter Biden was a criminal, and that, by association, so was his father, Joe Biden. Such behavior is surely distasteful at the very least. Where do we find blackmail given to us as a tool in our Constitution? What may have been "the art of the deal" in corrupt real estate deals is not de rigeur in our politics.
When Trump was informed that he lost the 2020 election he called Raffensperger, the Secretary of State in Georgia, and asked him to find votes for him (votes that were not real votes). He encouraged or even fomented an insurrection on January 6, 2021. He allowed his allies to create panels of fake electors in swing states hoping to fudge the Electoral College votes.
We have in our Constitution certain protections which Levitsky and Ziblatt called guardrails in their book, How Democracies Die. Yet our representatives blew through every guardrail our Founders gave us. Checks and balances became untenable when Republicans chose obstruction. Trump's AG Bill Barr buried the Mueller Report and brought up the false narrative that American presidents have absolute immunity, now up for grabs in the Supreme Court. We saw that Trump's personality was not a match for our republic/democracy. He threatened to take us out of NATO to squeeze money from our allies -- a strong-arm move we usually try to make through diplomacy (if at all). We contemplated using the 25th Amendment but waffled about our right to judge anyone's psyche. After Trump fomented the insurrection, we could have used the 14th Amendment to prevent him from running for office, but again reticence held us back, even after the compelling and talented presentations of the January 6th Committee.
We knew the Republicans planned to stuff the courts including the Supreme Court, but our representatives would not/could not stop them. We used impeachment twice, but Republicans ignored the Constitution, sneered at the Democrats, and would not convict. They had their power-hungry reasons.
We are fresh out of guardrails. all our paid representatives failed in their duties. Perhaps we don't need them anymore - all those Representatives and Senators. We have computers. We could all vote from home. Of course, there are representatives who consult research sources, talk to experts, write complex bills and budgets. Some elected officials still do their homework. Some on the Republican side of the aisle have farmed it out to special-interest conservative groups and think tanks that provide an inflexible party line that must be adhered to.
In any case, the neighbors we sent to Washington to represent us may have used their positions to become millionaires, but they have left it to "we the people" to clean up their mess and save our democracy/republic. It's not at all clear if we can do that. Whatever happens, vote anyway.