America’s new traitors: Republican Congressman imperil American democracy
By: John Jacobs
Tags: American Dictatorship, Congress, Political Idiocy, Treason

Just about the best historical comparison for today’s Republican leadership is to the southern politicians in the House of Representatives and the Senate in the weeks and months leading up to the American Civil War. But the things that motivated those pre-Civil War politicians were matters of great concern. The issue today is simple, whether to accept the will of the American people, follow the United States Constitution and ensure a peaceful transition of leadership. This should be no big thing. We’ve been doing it for several hundred years now. But the failure of our Republican congressional leadership to do this simple thing threatens the future of American democracy.

Slavery, or permanent human bondage, had come to be seen by the majority of people throughout the world as being deeply wrong. In the years leading up to the Civil War slavery and the slave trade had ceased to be of economic importance to the northern coastal states; but, for the South it supported the entire economy.

The designers of the United States left quite a bit of flexibility in the founding documents. The most egregious being, what exactly was the United States? Was it a unitary creature consisting of independent and separate but cooperating states? Or, were those states dependent divisions voluntarily engaged in a federated government? This mattered because of the issue of slavery, but it was an existential question that faced the leadership of the then United States.

Finally there was the question of where did your personal loyalty lie; which was faced by the politicians and the citizens of these of regions and perhaps more painfully faced by those officers and men who had served in the United States’ Army and Navy for much of their lives. The choice of were you to be loyal to the United States or were you to be loyal to the state of your birth and upraising had not been raised prior to this time.

While today, we generally understand that the choices made by the Americans who accepted the reasoning that led to the Confederacy was wrong, you cannot argue that the issues that were being debated in their minds were trivial.

On the other hand the single issue that today’s Republican leadership grapples with is that of whether to retain Donald Trump as president of the United States, in contravention of the results of an election that showed both through popular vote and in the Electoral College count, that the American people rejected Mr. Trump’s presidency. In refusing to acknowledge that Mr. Biden has won the presidency the Republicans are calling into question the entire constitutional structure of American government.

Refusing to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s election is not derived from issues of constitutional importance nor does it reflect conflicting moral judgments. Refusing to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s election appears to be motivated solely by pusillanimous fear of Mr. Trump’s political anger and the danger it poses to these Republicans’ future careers in government.

It is unlikely that Pres. Trump will be able to circumvent the Electoral College, ignore the popular vote, and retain his office. It is, however, an unfortunate reality that the support given to his shenanigans by the Republican congressional membership lends weight to his efforts. The servile allegiance of these gentlemen and ladies to Pres. Trump, as opposed to the American Constitution to which they swore allegiance, is more likely than not to have dire consequences in the future no matter how this current contest works out. And, if the unthinkable occurs and Pres. Trump is successful in holding onto his office; Republican Congressman will be complicit in a major step towards turning the United States into a dictatorship.