Why Run For Congress?

This is an essay on why it is that the Congressional Oath of Office should be taken seriously (that is, honored by acting on it) and what I see are the consequences directly flowing from our Members of Congress (MOCs) failure to honor those oaths. And why, therefore, I chose to run.

We all should note that this is the ONLY oath our MOCs take before they can be seated in Congress. The President takes a different oath, the words of which are set out in the Constitution itself — suggesting that the authors and ratifiers of the Constitution took it seriously.

The Acting President (Richard B. Cheney) copied the same Presidential oath of office, though that is not a requirement set out in the Constitution. The Vice President should merely take the same oath that MOCs take, as President of the Senate. But then, Cheney no doubt intended to be the Acting President of the country, not the senate, right from Day One I and Day One II (that is, Jan. 20, 2001 and Jan 20, 2005 at or about High Noon). Although for a time, Cheney claimed he was not a member of the Executive Branch, but rather of Congress, as Senate President, so as to avoid the requirements of making public any of his war plans and other illegal plots now stored in the three or so stand-up Mosler safes in his office. However, when Rep. Rahm Immanuel filed a bill to strip Cheney of all Executive Branch perquisites, or "emoluments of office," Cheney quickly found himself enabled to ascertain that he was indeed a member of the executive branch. At least for the purposes of receiving taxpayer money, avoiding subpoenas and of testifying under oath. Again I digress.

I'm not running for President or Acting President. I'm running for Congress from the 7th District of Massachusetts. Which, perhaps in the best traditions of Elbridge T. Gerry, comprises these towns and cities (cities in italic):

Arlington, Belmont, Everett, Framingham, Lexington, Lincoln, Malden, Medford, Melrose, Natik, Stoneham, Waltham (where I live), Watertown (but they call it a "town" anyway — this is Massachusetts, where if you don't know where you are, you don't belong. Road signs (what road signs?) don't help; they're not meant to),  Weston, Winchester, Woburn, Revere, Winthrop, and Precinct 2 of Wayland.

So let's start from the beginning. Again. What is the Congressional Oath of Office? What do the MOCs swear to (or affirm)? Here it is:

House: As required by Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, Members of Congress shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support the Constitution. Representatives, delegates, and the resident commissioner all take the oath of office on the first day of the new Congress, immediately after the House has elected its Speaker. The Speaker of the House administers the oath of office as follows:

I, [name of MOC], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic [e.g., Bush, Cheney, Rice, Gonzales, etc.]; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God. [emphasis added.]

MOCs do not have to hold a holy book in their left hand; they may in fact hold anything that is of particular significance to them: perhaps their wife's or husband's hand, the hand(s) of their children, a teddy bear or Linus blankie that has served them well throughout their lives, a rabbit's foot, service medals, etc. 

I'm not being facetious. The idea is that, in taking a solemn oath — one that is absolutely no easy thing to honor in these "parlous times" — MOCs be able to cling to something that has the greatest personal significance to them as they make these solemn promises. 

And in this country, albeit somewhat less here than in other countries, but as the older 0f us have all seen, possible nonetheless, defending the Constitution of a country— not the citizens of it, not the military, not the Acting President or the titular Unitary Liar-In-Chief, not any particular group, no matter how powerful, can get you killed. As someone has said, dead fish find it particularly easy to "go with the flow"; but people, especially people with significant power delegated to them by their constituents, who go against that flow far too often get killed. One might say, perhaps too lightly, taking on the office of MOC is not tiddlywinks.

Speaking of life-threatening matters, I offer this comment about service medals. 

While it may be easier for me to say than for others, but because I didn't dodge the draft, have a Vietnam Service medal, and was also a member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War when I returned from Qui Nhon — my GI benefit checks "got lost" after a VVAW "petition for redress of grievances" was published in the NY Times in September of 1968 after the March on The Pentagon, with my name and those of some 80 or so others), going into a combat zone is also not tiddlywinks.

By the way, most folks don't know this, but, while "grunts" (drafted or enlisted individuals) take an oath both to support and defend the Constitution and obey their superiors, Commissioned officers swear ONLY to support and defend the Constitution. In other words, support and defense of the Constitution is placed above obedience to orders of the Unitary Liar-In-Chief, or ULIC (that would be Geo. Bush), the Acting President Cheney (or APC), the Secretary of War, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chiefs of Staff for each branch of the military, and any other officers superior in rank to them. 

Just imagine what courage it would take for a high-ranking military officer to say, to any of those enumerated above, "Sir, with all due respect, your order for me and our military to invade Iraq without ourselves having first been attacked, without the direct permission of the United Nations Security Council and the UN Charter, without a definitive declaration of war by our MOCs as required by the US Constitution, is illegal, and I refuse to obey it. In fact, all of us high ranking military men (and they're all men) are placing you, the Acting President and the War Secretary under arrest for breach of your respective oaths of office." It would certainly have brought the Iraq invasion to a screeching halt. But instead, concern for their and their families' well-being, their pensions, their record and reputations, the members of our military officer class merely resigned. Theirs was a costly capitulation to our messianic ULIC and Machiavellian Acting President. 

But we all should take citizens' notice that there are not all that many MOCs now sitting who've served their country in combat, and that may be why they seem to place essentially zero value on human lives other than their own or those of their family members. Ditto, in spades, for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, the Kristols, pere et fils, Rice, Libby, Harrington, Yoo, et al. All of the "capture the Middle East Oil; set up (14+) huge, permanent (or "enduring") military bases; defend Israel at all costs, in money and lives" crowd.

Is this an unjust charge? I don't think so. As Dick Cheney famously noted about all his multiple Vietnam draft deferments, "I had other priorities." And, as we all now know, he damned well did, didn't he?!). Again, I digress — chalk it up to fury that's difficult to sequester about the [pick your pejorative] conduct of our Executive branch, our judicial branch, and our MOCs.

Back to our topic.

The MOCs' solemn oath, that promise, is made to US, individually, to US collectively as their constituents, and to US generally, as citizens of The United States of America.

They are undertaking , by the MOCs who are supposed to be OUR agents, acting on OUR behalf, supporting OUR Constitution, OUR government and the purposes we and our predecessors set out for this government. This Mission Statement is the first sentence of our Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to:
1. form a more perfect Union,
2. establish Justice,
3. insure domestic Tranquility,
4. provide for the common defence,
5. promote the general Welfare, and
6. secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,
do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I like to put the 52-word sentence in "list order," with numbers added, because it's easier to memorize, shows a nice mnemonic device (FEIPPS, the beginning letter of the beginning word of each clause) and because it shows that anyone claiming that "the first job of government is to protect your children and yourselves" is flat wrong. "Common defence"(sic) comes FOURTH, after perfect union, establishment of justice, and domestic tranquility. I think all school kids, municipal, state and federal officials should recite the Preamble before each school day and at the commencement of every official meeting. (And no one will call it "unconstitutional," I'll bet.

Neither APC nor ULIC have contributed, in any way, to furthering the first three responsibilities of our government, never mind what they've done to many other provisions of "that damned piece of paper," as ULIC apparently called it during one of his temper-tantrums.

Here's what I believe has followed, as  day follows night, knight follows dragon, lawyer follows ambulance, Schumer follows camera, when our MOCs ignore the promise they made, the oath they swore (or affirmed) to "support and defend" the US Constitution. 

First, the actors in the matter, Bush and Cheney and others, have breached their own oaths of office, and to do so is surely a "high misdemeanor" within the meaning of the Constitution. If they are not constrained by their own oaths of office (perhaps they "took the obligation with mental reservations and for the purpose of evasion"), then who will stand against them to defend the Constitution? Certainly not the Judiciary, which cannot act on its own without being presented with a "case or controversy." Without Congress intervening, the criminal conduct continues.

Second, the Members of Congress, by failing to intervene, are now themselves complicit in the criminal conduct of the Administration and our military, etc. MOCs, by their oaths, are supposed to keep the executive branch, and others, from destroying the Constitution. To do nothing in the face of such notorious and flagrant criminal and unconstitutional conduct, is to foreswear their oaths of office. They, too, are now candidates for impeachment.

You must consider that the Cheney/Bush administration was ripping at the Constitution from at least their first full day in office, January 21, 2001. As documents later obtained from participants in Cheney's "Energy Policy Panel" revealed, Cheney's big oil buddies and he were divvying up the Middle Eastern oil patch, in preparation for the illegal Iraq invasion. Cheney, in his vice-presidential debate before the election, spoke about the need to invade Iraq for 8 or 18 minutes. So an Iraq invasion, even before the election, sounds like a plan, doesn't it?

I have very little doubt that the Iraq invasion plans inhabit the interior of Cheney's clutch of Mosler safes. The administration had probably "fixed its vision" on the use of WMDs to politically terrify Congress into going along with the plan. I call it "political terrorism," and suggest that we put the White House on the list of international terrorists. This would make them eligible for arrrest. Congress would need to freeze all their finances, and barricade them inside the White House or any particular "unknown location" or Naval Observatory mansion or other spider hole that Dick Cheney might have holed up in.

 Few Democratic members of Congress were willing to stand up to the Cheney/Bush threat of political blackmail — being called "cut-and-runners," cowardly on defense, no balls at all, wusses, sissies, etc. And all of the Republicans, with the exception of Paul and Hegel, were quite comfortable with following the Cheney/Bush administration into a war for oil and bases for "the projection of power" in the oil-rich Middle East.

 All of this "cowardice" mud coming from chicken-hawks, people who had themselves "cut and run" from combat duty in Vietnam, like Cheney, Wolfowitz, Addington, Bush, Rice, Rove — or who "had other priorities," which were, no doubt, seen by Cheney as his own "personal virtue," rather than personal cowardice. We should not be surprised at this apparent contradiction of the cowards calling the heroes and patriots "weak" or "unpatriotic." It is an old, tried and true, and very simple propaganda technique: Tar your opponents with your own weaknesses before they can reveal them. Then, any attempt they make at cleaning off the mud you've slung can be labeled "defensive" or "retaliatory." 

Anyone looking for proof that the Democrats, as the opposition party, had foresworn their oaths of office need look no further than their worry that they would be made to appear "soft on defense" by the Cheney/Bush/Rove slime machine. 

Had these stalwart members of Congress been engaged in carrying out their responsibilities, they would have had no time to worry about their own political skin — they would have been about the business of saving the Republic from the frontal assault on it launched from the White House.

Which is why, I believe, Nancy Pelosi said she was "taking impeachment off the table" in 2006.

   She and her fellow Democrats had no place to stand from which to take on their duty to defend the Constitution. Pelosi had already been "briefed" that torture was being carried out by the US Government, as a matter of official, "approved by the President" policy. She had already been "briefed" that the White House was illegally eavesdropping on US citizens in America, just as in the good old days of "Tricky Dick" Nixon. But on a far, far grander scale, what with all the glories of modern technology, a "wired world" and "splitter rooms" in all the major telecommunications carriers in the United States.

(That is, with the one exception of US West, or Quest Communications, because the president of that outfit said "No, it's illegal," to the FBI or CIA or NSA or DIA — whoever it was who approached him and demanded access to every single one of the company's customers' communications. It might be just a coincidence, but after the US West CEO refused the government's illegal demand, the Securities Exchange Commission, and a prosecutor from the highly politicized Justice Department, charged the US West president with stock fraud of some sort and tried to put him in prison. A nation of men using laws to control other men, not a nation of laws, keeping all men to an equal standard. That is, fascism.)

Our members of Congress, starting with Pelosi and Reid, were so complicit in aiding and abetting the administration's sabotage of the Constitution that they would have had to impeach themselves as well, as accessories after the fact, had they ever dared bring on impeachment proceedings. I think that's the concept behind the "made man" requirement in the mafia. That is, to gain admission to the most evil, base level of the organization, you have to kill someone so that the rest of the princes of darkness "have the goods on you," just as you have the goods on them. This serves as a deterrent to tattling. And the principal seems to have worked reasonably well over the years. It's not "omerta," or a "code of silence." It's the simple, prosaic fear of being murdered, imprisoned, or both.

So we have the spectacle of an administration subverting the Constitution, breaking international treaties, breaking US laws, destroying provisions of the Constitution, completely ignoring the limits of their delegated powers.  And a complicit Congress doing nothing to stop these marauders, who were intent upon having total sway over the Middle East and the United States, Canada, Mexico and the rest of the world, wherever there are bases "from which to project our power."

It's not the kind of country I want my four children and two grandchildren to grow up in.

Congress has let the Cheney/Bush administration turn the US into a rogue nation, a pariah throughout the world, with very few governments to dare even speak ill of the US.

My conclusion is that the nation is in the terrible shape we find it in now because none of our elected Congressmen, senators and representatives alike, have performed the single most important duty we directed them to discharge: to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. 

Which is why I'm making a run for Congress. It seems to me that despite any one Member of Congress's exemplary record on various bits of legislation, and for however long their service has been,  all of their efforts are come to naught because they have let the very foundation of the country — our Constitutional Republic — be destroyed. And they have let this destruction take place with hardly a squeak of opposition. 

They have put their own political careers ahead of their duty to their country and their constituents.

I don't think this should stand.

Unless the citizens of this country make an informed decision to ignore these high crimes and misdemeanors, to ignore the tolerance by Congress of these high crimes and misdemeanors, then the government cannot stand.

And there is no way the citizens can make an informed decision without having the information on which to base it.

Which is why I decided to run for office.