Vote Them *All* Out

Our representatives swore an oath to uphold the Constitution. They didn’t keep it.

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; 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.” – United States Federal Oath of Office

When unelected health officials called for the complete subjugation of citizens’ rights to their vain, absurdist attempts to control a respiratory virus, how many of our representatives stood up to support and defend the Constitution?

When those same unelected officials demanded extension after extension of an indefinite state of emergency, how many of our representatives showed true faith and allegiance to our nation’s principles by putting a stop to them?

With the US midterm elections days away, I believe this simple question is more than enough to determine whether our gaggle of elected representatives deserve another term: How many of them lived up to their oath of office?

Did any of them uphold their oath? What was stopping them? And what really would have happened to them if they did?

If they couldn’t even speak up in support of those Americans who were demonized for defending their rights, then who exactly were they “representing”? If they couldn’t defend the principles of the Constitution due to a bit of pressure from media tycoons and political machines, how could they credibly ask young men and women to fight for those principles abroad? If they hold the Constitution so cheap as to stand up for it only when personally convenient, how can they claim to represent a government built by those who gave their lives for it?

As the mainstream left is now belatedly realizing, the lockdowns of 2020 were a policy catastrophe for the ages, leading to the excess deaths of tens of thousands of young people in every country and failing to meaningfully slow a virus that had already begun spreading undetected by fall 2019 at the latest—while terrifying the public into believing the virus was hundreds of times deadlier than it really was—triggering an indefinite state of emergency that continues to this day. The downstream effects of lockdowns in the developing world were even more severe, leading, predictably, to a global recession, widespread hunger, and a decades-long setback in the global struggle for human rights and the end of poverty.

Do our so-called representatives have any intention to find out how this policy catastrophe happened? Do they even care?

On the contrary, our current caste of elites have made it abundantly clear that, on balance, they’d prefer if the public did not know how the response to Covid came about—at least, for the remainder of their careers. But this is a serious problem, because truth is the only standard by which power can be held to account. A common acceptance of truth is foundational to any government based on democratic principles. Without truth, the west cedes its moral authority entirely.

Contrary to popular perception, authoritarian regimes don’t typically begin with malignant villains plotting to enslave their subjects. Rather, authoritarian regimes most often begin with fanatical leaders who become obsessively devoted to the success of failed policies, rationalizing exception after exception to their opponents’ rights as being necessary to serve some higher goal, when the goal was never actually obtainable to begin with. As the regimes’ crimes multiply nearly as quickly as their failures, the leaders grow increasingly fearful of what their opponents might do, and they’re forced to devote more and more government resources to the suppression of dissent—until all that’s left is an endless war on their own people and an interminable campaign of propaganda to sustain the myth of the regime’s original ideals which are now belied by all of its actions.

Thus, for our elites to tie their careers to the prevention of scrutiny about the response to Covid-19 is a position inherently incompatible with democracy, because the entire response to Covid-19 has been a lie.

This is no ordinary policy dispute, and it can’t be viewed in terms of ordinary party politics. If the machine gets its way, then Republicans will get a few more seats in Congress, the pandemic profiteers will get their spoils, the countless millions who’ve forever lost their time, their livelihoods, and even their lives will get nothing, and Xi Jinping gets to laugh as his pet policy of lockdown is grandfathered into international “public health” guidance.

Nor is it enough just to vote on party lines. The only force that can credibly bring about the political class’s disavowal of the response to Covid and the officials who instigated it is the threat of a populist groundswell so intense that the machine couldn’t anticipate it. For that reason, any and all political support must be conditioned on admission of the crimes that have occurred in the name of Covid-19 and endorsement of a real inquiry into how they came about. So far, only a handful of Republicans meet these criteria. No Democrats do.

The federal oath of office isn’t a mere policy preference—it’s a baseline expectation. And during the response to Covid, few if any of our elected representatives lived up to it. Vote them all out.

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Michael P Senger is an attorney and author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World. Want to support my work? Get the book. Already got the book? Leave a quick review.