The quisling caucus

Good day, and welcome to my rant.

We all know that Felon47, the alleged human occupying the office of President of the United States right now, is contemptuous of the Constitution, the rule of law, the concept of truth, and basic decency. That's made clear on a daily basis, and it's equally clear that he is beyond redemption, implacably corrupt and heinous. Less understood is the nature of his enablers, the Republican caucus of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Felon47 needs these enablers. They are the only reason he remains in power—if even a handful of Congressional Republicans respected their oaths of office, both Felon47 and Reichsleiter Vance would have been removed from power long before now. He retains his office at their collective will. So why do they kowtow to him when they have the real power?

Sure, brand loyalty accounts for some of it, but that only goes so far when the guy heading the brand is a corrupt totalitarian thug. Stupidity? No doubt there are plenty that fit this bill, some mind-bogglingly so. Cowardice? This is a big one, I suspect, given how much Felon47 has always valued blackmail as a tool, how rabid the MAGA base of voters can be, and how craven a lot of these people are when it comes to proximity to power.

Then there's the third category: the True Believers.

The Republican party has operated a long con on the American public. After the disgrace of Watergate and the outrage at the lack of accountability demanded of Richard Nixon, you'd think the GOP was headed for a fallow period of disfavor. But no, the party and their Hollywood-made figurehead exploited opportunities created by (a) lingering effects of their own economic policies from the Nixon/Ford years and (b) an Iranian regime willing to cut deals with the opponent of the sitting president to kick off a decades-long campaign to both inflame the bigotries and resentments of conservatives and fool a huge chunk of the electorate into voting against their own interests.

As cons go, it's been remarkably successful, as even Democratic administrations have supported reforms tailored to please conservatives (the Clinton welfare reforms, the "Defense of Marriage Act," tepid tax initiatives, even the Affordable Care Act was based on a Republican model) rather than lead Americans into a more progressive style of politics—which was largely pragmatic, acknowledging the limitations of what one could do when the electorate had been so expertly manipulated since 1980 (and before, really, going back to the Nixon "southern strategy"). The GOP Congressional majority of today is largely a product of the long con. Candidates who got the gigs by continuing, exploiting, and supercharging the tactics of the con started by Lee Atwater and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich and Ed Rollins. Lauren Boebert and Clay Higgins don't get elected without that foundation.

A lot of them don't. Looking over the roster of House Republicans, I see more than 20 names—including that of the Speaker—that are true believers in the cause of shredding the Constitution in favor of totalitarianism. I see half a dozen that are known to be corrupt. I see one that has a modicum of integrity.

One (Massey).

Granted, there are a lot of names on that list that I have no specific familiarity with, so there may in fact be more than one House Republican with a modicum of integrity, but that modicum apparently isn't enough to sway them away from being collaborators in the overthrow of our Constitutional Republic.

This all is on my mind today because I heard Speaker Mike Johnson talking about due process and how inconvenient it is and how we shouldn't have it. Talking to reporters about the House debates on measures proposed by Democrats regarding DHS/CBP/ICE, the actual, real-life SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES said this:

[Democrats] want to have a judicial warrant on top of the immigration warrant. We can't do that. ... Imagine if we had to go through the process of getting a judicial warrant to go and apprehend people who we know are here illegally. How much time would that take? ... It would take decades, probably, to do that.

Not content with that, Johnson went on to claim that Democrats don't want there to be any immigration law at all (got to get those incendiary lies in) and then this:

We've got to apply reason, we do have to apply the Constitution, we have to respect it, and those parameters need to be determined. But we are never going to go along with ... judicial warrants. It cannot be done and it should not be done.

So: Fuck due process, it's a nuisance. It can't and shouldn't be done.

Here's the thing, though: it can and has been done. For many, many years. The Obama administration deported an average of 340,000 undocumented migrants per year. The Biden administration deported 150,000. None were done without due process.

Further, Speaker Johnson, you don't have a choice in the matter. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution says so. It lays out parameters that in no way need to be determined because they're right there, in place for 250 years.

Johnson is claiming that administrative warrants issued by agencies that have demonstrated themselves to be wholly lawless and ethically bankrupt are somehow just as good as a court order (they may as well be signed "Epstein's mother"). He's making the case that it has to be that way because otherwise it's just too hard. And we'll never go along with it.

Just to drive the point home: The Speaker of the House said, on television, recorded for all to see and hear, that he and by extension his caucus in the House of Representatives, will never go along with what's in the United States Constitution.

That alone should be grounds for expulsion from Congress, and that's just on this one issue; there are countless others that Johnson and his caucus of quislings betray their oaths on. The First Amendment in particular has been treated like so much toilet paper by this Republican party. The emoluments clause is violated routinely. Article IV (section 4) even guarantees protection against "domestic violence," meaning violence perpetrated by domestic forces, something now happening every day in Minnesota and elsewhere. In a reality where the public is aware and engaged, anyone behaving like Johnson and his caucus do would face extreme pressure to resign and the ethics committee would be under extreme pressure to expel them.

Article III Section 3 defines treason as "levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to [the nation's] Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Eventually, this president will be recognized by authorities as an enemy of the United States, possibly as having levied war against it depending on how we're defining terms, and Mike Johnson along with each and every Republican in Congress that supports him will be properly labeled as treasonous.