Now more than ever, I’ve been wondering how much longer our republic will survive.
I hate to sound like a Democrat crying about how “our democracy is under attack” every time they lose an election or fail to advance legislation. But, I believe there are legitimate concerns that our republic is getting weaker and that we’re much closer to its demise than its inception.
For example, in the Senate, we’ve seen long-established rules changed purely for short-term political advantage. While in the minority, Democrats abused the filibuster to block President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. The late Senator Ted Kenney (D-Mass.) was reportedly the architect of this strategy, and its consequences have outlived the former Lion of the Senate. Then, highly qualified nominees were blocked for no reason other than politics. Fast forward to 2013, when Barack Obama was president and Democrats had a non-filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, Republicans gave Democrats a taste of their own medicine, and then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid changed longstanding filibuster rules to block the GOP minority in the Senate from filibustering Obama’s judicial nominees.
In response to this rule change, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned the Democrats they’d come to regret the move. “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think,” he said on the Senate floor. And he was right. When Trump was elected, he took office with majorities in both houses of Congress, and Democrats were powerless to stop him from nominating and confirming judges—which he did at a record pace.
Our republic faces other problems as well, namely the rapid expansion of unconstitutional abuses of presidential power. The powers of the presidency have certainly grown gradually over the years, but the Obama years saw shocking abuses that went unchecked by Congress or the judiciary. Obama felt entitled to his agenda, even if it couldn’t pass Congress. When the DREAM Act failed to pass, Obama issued an executive order creating DACA, an executive-branch version of the DREAM Act. Obama literally bypassed Congress, changing U.S. immigration law via executive pen to appease his pro-open-borders base.
In addition to legislating via executive action, he also unilaterally entered the United States into treaties that the U.S. Senate hadn’t ratified, as the Constitution requires: the Paris climate treaty and the Iran nuclear deal. Trump may have gotten us out of them, but Joe Biden got us right back in these illegal treaties. Sadly, nothing has been done about it, effectively establishing the precedent that presidents no longer require Senate ratification to enter into treaties.
As much as Democrats turned a blind eye to Obama’s abuses of power, they were ready to convict Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors before he even took office. In fact, the same day he took the oath of office, the Washington Post reported that “the campaign to impeach Trump” had already begun. Democrats would go on to impeach him twice, over the weakest of accusations in a shocking abuse of impeachment powers, just because they could because they had the majority.
Now, as Democrats are widely anticipated to suffer huge losses at the ballot box in the 2022 midterms, Democrats are looking at other ways to abuse the power they have while they have it. For example, Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) has introduced a resolution to “investigate and expel the members of Congress who helped incite the violent insurrection at our Capitol.” Of course, the idea that the riot was an insurrection has long been debunked—in fact, none of the rioters have even been charged with insurrection. Yet, Bush’s legislation, which is backed by 54 other House Democrats, calls for the House Ethics Committee to “investigate, and issue a report on, whether any and all actions taken by members of the 117th Congress who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election violated their oath of office to uphold the Constitution,” and potentially remove them from office.
This comes after prominent Democrat lawyer Marc Elias predicted such a move would happen before the midterm elections. “My prediction for 2022: Before the midterm election, we will have a serious discussion about whether individual Republican House Members are disqualified by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from serving in Congress,” Elias tweeted last week. “We may even see litigation.”
Democrats have claimed that Trump’s speech on January 6 incited the riot, though all available evidence has proven that not to be true. So, what exactly constitutes House members violating their oath of office and meriting expulsion from office?
“I believe the Republican members of Congress who have incited this domestic terror attack through their attempts to overturn the election must face consequences,” Bush said when she announced her resolution. “They have broken their sacred oath of office.”
In other words, if you had legitimate questions about the integrity of the 2020 election, you were inciting an insurrection (that wasn’t even an insurrection) and, therefore, should be expelled. Imagine if it were so easy to make up absurd reasons to justify expelling members from Congress. This sounds an awful lot like a roundabout way to keep Democrats in the majority as they face a politically devastating election that could keep them out of power for the foreseeable future.
This is how Democrats operate. Abuse the rules for political purposes, change the rules for short-term gain, and if you can’t beat them at the ballot box, find ways to boot them from office. Democrats have so little respect for our Constitution and the rules that have dictated how our government operates that it seems like there’s only so much time before our government can no longer handle the stresses of partisan manipulation. In addition to everything else, this year Democrats have tried to federalize elections to keep them in power forever–and will undoubtedly never stop trying.
Our republic is hanging by a thread, not because Democrats lose elections and can’t get their unpopular agenda through Congress, but because they feel entitled to power and have no qualms about doing anything necessary to keep it, even at the expense of the Constitution.
Also read: Is Western Civ on the Way Out?
