Constitutional Suicide

In a gathering of the RNC this week Republicans agreed that the January Sixth “insurrection” was an exercise in “legitimate political discourse.” This is equivalent to when your child, standing in front of you with cookie crumbs all over his face, says that he did not eat any cookies. But it has consequences that affect our entire nation, not just the future ethical behavior of one child.

If we do not hold Senators and Representatives who are involved in an insurrection against the certified results of the 2020 election and against the peaceful transfer of power in the US accountable; if we don’t enforce the powers we are given in the US Constitution, then we are committing governmental suicide or perhaps murder. We are killing the documents that back up our democracy/republic by leaving these founding documents and the pursuant laws weak and unenforceable. We are tempting defiance because there are no consequences.

We have the power to evict members of Congress who have betrayed their oath to the Constitution, who have offered aid and comfort to enemies of the US Constitution, and who show more loyalty to an ex-president than to the Constitution. We need to use the power given to the US Government in the Fourteenth Amendment to hold the Senators and Representatives named below responsible for breaking their oaths of office and aiding an insurrection. These people are no longer legitimate members of Congress.

Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3, “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office , civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State Legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of 2/3 of each House, remove such disability.

Section 5: The Congress shall have power to enforce by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. (It does not specify 2/3, so this could be done by a simple majority vote if it were possible to get one.)

The following data is from an article entitled “Here are the Republicans Who Objected to the Electoral College Count, by Barbara Sprunt, NPR, January 7, 2021.

There are nine Senators seated in Congress right now who signed a document intended to overturn the results of a free and fair election and interfere with the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 and 2021 by questioning the votes of the Electoral College designees in several of these United States. These nine Senators signed a document that requested a committee be formed to investigate fraud in the 2020 election, which several courts had already declared a valid, fairly run election, to back the Big Lie of the defeated candidate, Donald Trump and at the expense of taxpayers.

Their names are:

Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin)

Senator James Lankford (R-Oklahoma)

Senator Steve Daines (R-Montana)

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Indiana)

Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyoming)

Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas)

Senator Bill Hagerty (R-Tennesee)

Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama)

Several of these are junior senators which means they have to be more extreme than their senior senators to avoid being primaried by their own party.

Six Senators voted to back the Arizona challenge to the Electoral College votes even after they had to hide out to avoid possible harm from an insurrection they may have helped foment. Most likely these senators knew that they were helping back up Trump’s Big Lie to declare himself a winner in an election he lost fair and square, and to interrupt the peaceful transition of power so important to the stability of America. These six Senators are:

Josh Hawley (R-Missouri)

Ted Cruz (R Texas)

Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Mississippi)

Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama

John Kennedy (R-Louisiana)

Roger Marshall (R-Kansas

Here are the names of 121 Representatives in Congress who sustained the objection to Arizona’s Electoral College results via Caroline Amenabar/clerk/house.gov

Evicting these bad actors and taking away the privilege of running again would open up many new seats in the midterm elections and send a message to states who are also backing Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. New evidence shows how far Trump was willing to go to stay in office illegally. Seven states made arrangements for alternate slates of Trump-friendly electors to replace those duly certified in those seven states. Fortunately, the National Archives knew the fake from the real certifications and turned the fakes away. We also learned that Trump tried to have election machines confiscated by the US military and other official arms of government, orders that were not carried out. The Constitution barely scraped through the last election intact and it may not make it through the next one. We need to figure out how to enforce our laws without requiring the consent of the guilty.

At the very least we need to create advertisements for the midterms that explain what Republicans did to back Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and supply the ads to Democrats who will run against any of these oath breakers in the midterms.

We also need to figure out how high the bar should be set for proving officials or citizens guilty of sedition against the government. What amount of proof is enough? It seems that signatures to a seditious document should suffice. It seems that fomenting an insurrection and then watching it unfold on the media while safely tucked away in another building should suffice. What more does our Justice Department, or the January Sixth commission need to prove sedition? Are we not able to decide to act because we are afraid it will tear the country apart and begin a cycle of more violence? Sadly, we might have to go there if we want to keep our Republic.