Tag: Congress

Hey, Congress! Are you dead?

Dear Congress,

I am asking you the question that a popular Chinese app asks users as a check for proof of life: “Are you dead?”

The United States is in crisis. Donald Trump is turning the nation’s immigration enforcement and border control agents into his personal murderous Gestapo. Americans are increasingly seeing the federal executive as an enemy of the people. Tensions are growing nationally toward a violent eruption of outrage. In all of this, where are you, the Congress?

I don’t know whether you are aware of certain uncharitable rumors about you that are making the rounds. Many people are saying that for the entire first year of Donald Trump’s second term in the presidency, you were missing in action, that you checked out, that you were just phoning it in. That’s what some people say. Other people have far worse to say. Those people say that you, and by “you” they mean Trump’s fellow Republicans who are in control of both chambers of Congress, are either complicit in an enormous crime or are base cowards who know that the president is doing great wrong but dare not do their constitutional duty and check him.

What say you, Congress? Are people telling lies about you?

I’ll tell you how I see things. First of all, I have to ask: Are you with us? That means: Are you awake? But it also means: Do you stand in solidarity with those of us who are committed to American democracy as it is expressed through our traditional constitutional order and the rule of law? What I see with my own eyes is that you, the Republican Congress, are, with scant exception, failing in your duty to the United States.

That is how I see things. And you may ask me what evidence I see to justify such an accusation. I see a president who is clearly mentally ill in a very dangerous way and is being abetted by most congressional Republicans, by commission or omission, as he destroys the underpinnings of democracy at home and shatters our most precious international security alliances while empowering some of the worst elements on the global stage.

You congressional Republicans have been nearly uniformly silent as Trump unilaterally and unlawfully demolished the East Wing of the White House to build an obscenely gigantic ballroom, a monument to his diseased ego. You have been silent as he defiled the nation’s living tribute to an assassinated president by slapping his own name on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. That monument was created by a previous and perhaps nobler Congress, and Trump has no right in law to profane it with his name. Your silence at his perverted use of the Kennedy Center condemns you. What about the United States Institute of Peace, another of Congress’s noble creations on which Trump has imposed his name even as he is in court against the rightful overseers of the institution who are suing to wrest it back from his grasp.

Anti-Republican messaging in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., seen on Monday, Jan. 26, 2026.
Photo by Gilbert Dunkley

You have been silent as Trump, the most lawless American president in my lifetime, builds the twin agencies of Immigration and Customs Enforcement/Customs and Border Protection into his own secret police. Are you awake? Are you seeing what is happening in our country? Have you read any world history at all? Will you be silent until Bokassa decides that even you are not pure enough for his regime and his masked men come for you? When they drag you out of your homes and hustle you into their unmarked vehicles, your newly discovered voices and your outrage will count for nothing.

He has threatened Iran with war to protect Iranian protesters against their government’s violence, but here at home, he is threatening to answer Americans protesting his excesses by invoking the Insurrection Act and unleashing the U.S. military against citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. Congress, have you anything to say about this?

What Trump is conjuring up in this country is an old problem from hell, a murderous chaos that has plagued the world throughout the ages despite being entirely foreseeable. Congress, will you not stop him and the terrible trouble that is coming? Short of a general — and wholly unpredictable — rising of the people, only you can restrain him. Will you not see your duty and do your duty? If you leave him to his own impulses, he will push and destroy and destroy and push until everywhere is war. And because he is an old man whose time among us is short anyway, he will not be around to live alongside us in the wreckage his actions will have produced.

If you want more evidence of Trump’s mental disease, just look at his fevered desire to have the Nobel Peace Prize. He and his acolytes ran a nakedly disgraceful campaign for him to get it. He claimed idiotically to have ended multiple wars. When the prize went to Venezuela’s María Corina Machado for her leadership in the opposition to the dictator Nicolás Maduro, Trump announced that Machado had told him that she dedicated the prize to him. No shame. Did you notice that, Congress?

Then came another shameful act in the play. Machado, recognizing Trump as the prostitute that he is, offered him her Nobel medal as she visited him here in Washington after he had ousted Maduro. She was obviously hoping to buy Trump’s blessing for her to become Venezuela’s president. Trump merely took the gift and posed proudly with her and it for a photo op. She got a compliment and so far nothing else of substance.

But Congress, the question for you is this: What sane and normal man would accept someone else’s prize as his own? Would a sane and decent man not have thanked Machado for her gesture and politely declined the offer? Not Trump. He could not even summon the momentary decency to ask, like murderous MacBeth, “Why do you dress me in borrowed robes?” The least that you, the Congress, could have done was to pass a resolution of disapproval of the president’s behavior. But no. Apparently what people are saying about you is true.

You are complicit in the squandering of the greatest gift that this country has given to humankind and bequeathed to posterity: the American model of liberal democracy. If there is such a thing as divine retribution, your portion will be bitter, indeed.

And you are silent as the world laughs at the United States as never before because of the unhinged behavior of our president. Just look at his performance last week in Europe and in relation to Greenland. He publicly said that because “Norway” did not give him the Nobel Peace Prize — the prize is not the Norwegian government’s to award — he was even more minded to pursue control of the Danish territory of Greenland. But Congress, Western Europe’s long-suffering leaders finally set you an example of how to deal with Trump: They told him to go off and pleasure himself. They stood up to the bully, and, suddenly, he lost his appetite for Greenland.

In the meantime, though, because of Trump’s madness, much of the world is reordering its affairs to work around the United States, which is now widely seen as the rogue nation that we used to accuse other countries of being. Trump is destroying the U.S. brand globally, and our country’s wellbeing and that of Americans out in the world are being put at material risk. What are you doing about it, Congress?

In our domestic and foreign affairs, things are falling apart in dangerous ways, and all because of one man: Donald Trump.

Congress, get off your ass! Do your duty! Stop Trump!

Sincerely,
A deeply distressed citizen

Democrats, stand firm on shutdown!

As of midnight, we have been in a partial shutdown of the federal government because of an impasse in the U.S Senate over a continuing resolution to fund the government until Nov. 21. The measure cleared the Republican-controlled House on Sept. 19 on a vote of 217 to 212. In the Senate, under that chamber’s special rules, the measure needed 60 votes to pass, but Republicans do not have that number in their own conference and so need Democratic votes to pass the measure. Competing Republican and Democratic versions failed in the final hours before the shutdown deadline of midnight on Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

What’s the holdup? Changes to Medicaid are involved, but the main issue is that Democrats insist that an extension of expiring subsidies for Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) health insurance premiums be included in the continuing resolution. Republicans promised to engage in a discussion of the ACA premium subsidies and other health-care-related matters at a later date. Democrats held out. No continuing resolution was passed by the deadline of midnight Tuesday looking into Wednesday, and now, on Wednesday, we’re in a partial government shutdown that could drag on.

Bravo, Senate Democrats! Do not give an inch in this fight; the outcome here is crucial to the health of about 24 million Americans.

The federal subsidies for premiums on health insurance purchased through the ACA marketplace were to have expired several years ago, but these subsidies were twice extended via major bills passed in Congress during the Biden administration. To be clear, these subsidies are funded by taxpayer money, and some critics of the program loudly disparage the subsidies as socialism. But they are no more socialistic than the federal government subsidies that are included in every Farm Bill to help keep American agriculture in business. Nor are they any more socialistic than the $28 billion fund set up during the first Trump administration to help farmers who lost export sales as a direct consequence of the tariff wars that Trump started.

As far as I am concerned, the federal subsidies for ACA health insurance premiums are a righteous use of public money.

And as for Republicans’ saying they are willing to discuss ACA subsidies at a later date but not now, that is a crock. The emergency is now. Annual open enrollment for health insurance begins on Nov. 1, but in a matter of days from now, health insurers will be sending their customers notifications about the premiums those companies will charge for coverage in 2026. To set their pricing plans for 2026, the companies need certainty now, not in two weeks or later.

The question of ACA premium subsidies must be resolved now, not later. If no extension of subsidies is passed in the short-term spending bill — or continuing resolution (so named because it continues federal funding at existing levels in the absence of a proper appropriations bill) — health insurance premiums for the approximately 24 million Americans now covered via the ACA will rise steeply. The consequence will be that millions of Americans will no longer be able to afford health insurance and will drop out of coverage.

One cannot reasonably forecast how many people now covered by insurance purchased through the ACA would give up the coverage because they decided they just could no longer afford it, but surely the number would be in the multiple millions. The great danger, of course, is that people with chronic ailments such as heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, respiratory diseases and various mental illnesses will suddenly stop taking their maintenance medications. Use your imagination. No good can possibly come of such a situation.

But despite the public harm caused unaffordable health insurance premiums, Republicans would have made progress on one of their cherished objectives: destroying the Affordable Care Act. You may recall the Republican reaction to the legislation when it was signed into law by President Barack Obama in March 2010, with then-Vice President Joe Biden being caught on a hot microphone telling Obama, “This is a big fucking deal!” Republicans were dead set against it, and I always thought that their opposition was in large measure rooted in racism.

The right-wing white Republican establishment despised Obama — not just for himself but also for what his election signaled about the future direction of the country — and that establishment recognized that a program that would help millions and millions of uninsured Americans to afford health coverage would be a legacy achievement for the nation’s first black president. The very thought of it incensed those Republicans no end, and they set out to destroy what was by then well known as “Obamacare.”

Enter this appalling man by the name of Donald Trump. In addition to his regular 2016 campaign boast that he would build a southern border wall for whose construction Mexico would pay, he repeatedly pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better. I do not recall that he ever clearly articulated what was wrong with the ACA, but he would produce something better than it, he declared.

When this malignant racist became president in January 2017, he began his legislative assault on the ACA, the proudest domestic work of his black predecessor, via his pet Republican conferences in the House and Senate. He failed, most spectacularly when Sen. John McCain — a Republican, we should remember — gave that famous thumbs-down on the Senate floor in July 2018, driving the fatal stake into the heart of the GOP’s best attempt at repealing Obamacare.

Republicans have not given up on their hope of seeing the death of Obamacare. What they have given up on is any pretense that they intend to offer an alternative. They never had one in the days of Trump 1.0 when they were pretending that they had such a plan; and there is no longer any talk of producing something better. Under Trump 2.0, the Republican agenda across the federal government is simply to dismantle and destroy, and nothing is being created that is not a tribute to the diseased ego of Mad King Trump.

So we return to the present test facing congressional Democrats. For leverage in the standoff, Trump has threatened to fire vast numbers of federal workers rather than furlough them during the shutdown, as would be normal. Democrats should ignore this threat. The ACA question is a red line from which they must not retreat. If they fold here, they will surrender any credibility and usefulness they could have had in the necessary resistance to the madman.