LOYALTY VS FEALTY

Isn’t the GOP Congress tired of being bullied into submission? Loyalty is important. But an elected official’s loyalty should be to their country and the constituents they took an oath to serve. When loyalty is given to one leader, who proceeds to radically disassemble the very thing they were elected to serve, that political loyalty should stop at the cliff’s edge. Fealty is not loyalty. Our military has loyalty to the country. But what happens when we have a commander-in-chief who abuses that loyalty to country for his own personal agenda? An agenda that he insists is for the good of the country? An agenda that wreaks havoc on the people and society? Our judicial system is loyal to the law. The law is what keeps America, America. But what happens when the chief law enforcement agency in the US seems to have loyalty only to the president? And bends the law in adherence to his wishes rather than what the law should allow? Elections really do have consequences. And America is living through those consequences right now. But we the people also have the expectation that the people we elect to office will take care that the power of the executive is not allowed to go unchecked. And that they will preserve the systems that serve our country, regardless of political affiliation. We are not seeing that responsibility being taken by the majority in Congress. Trump just signed an EO targeting activists and nonprofits as part of what he called a “terror network.” It makes responsibility collective, enabling the government to target everybody. Titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” the memo alleges that “common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” An Executive Order cannot create new crimes. But this EO defies the basic tradition of American liberty and law. To the contrary, it starts from a premise that the “world is governed by mysterious, invisible entities to which individuals can be arbitrarily associated by the power of the government, thereby making those individuals guilty and subject to prosecution and punishment.” Authoritarians always say the country is facing an emergency and that their opponents are “terrorists.” And it’s a cliché to say there’s a mysterious, bottomless, organization that we have to chase to the ends of the Earth and break all the rules to find. That’s what they always say. We the people want to know where GOP loyalty lies. And if it will stop at the cliff’s edge. On a happier note, looks like the newly-elected Dem from AZ will provide the final signature on a discharge petition to demand a floor vote in the House over releasing all the government files on Epstein.