Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates—who warned Trump's White House about former national security adviser Michael Flynn and refused to defend Trump's Muslim ban—sees trouble ahead for our republic and she's enlisting the American people to help us survive this particularly perilous time in our nation's history.
"Over the course of our nation’s history, we have faced inflection points — times when we had to decide who we are as a country and what we stand for. Now is such a time," Yates writes.
Yates acknowledges that America hasn't always been faithful to the spirit of the vision our founding documents articulated for our country.
When the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal, hundreds of thousands of African Americans were being enslaved by their fellow Americans.
Not so long ago, all across the Jim Crow South, our country’s definition was defiled by lynchings, the systematic disenfranchisement of African-American voters, and the burning of freedom riders’ buses. And still today, we have yet to realize fully our nation’s promise of equal justice.
Yet, she says, "these principles have remained if not fully who we are, at least who we seek to be."
We are in the constant process of forming a more perfect union, now more so than ever. But that ideal is very much in jeopardy as the Trump administration threatens the foundational principles of our country, one of which is the rule of law.
The rule of law depends not only on things that are written down, but also on important traditions and norms, such as apolitical law enforcement. That’s why Democratic and Republican administrations alike, at least since Watergate, have honored that the rule of law requires a strict separation between the Justice Department and the White House on criminal cases and investigations. This wall of separation is what ensures the public can have confidence that the criminal process is not being used as a sword to go after one’s political enemies or as a shield to protect those in power. It’s what separates us from an autocracy.
And there is something else that separates us from an autocracy, and that’s truth. There is such a thing as objective truth. We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications.
We do not have the luxury of standing by while Donald Trump and the Republican Party that remains loyal to him no matter what he does takes a wrecking ball to the walls our founding fathers erected to protect our republic from tumbling into a dictatorship.
We are not living in ordinary times, and it is not enough for us to admire our nation’s core values from afar. Our country’s history is littered with individuals and factions who have tried to exploit our imperfections, but it is more powerfully marked by those whose vigilance toward a more perfect union has prevailed.
So stand up. Speak out. Our country needs all of us to raise our collective voices in support of our democratic ideals and institutions. That is what we stand for. That is who we are. And with a shared commitment to our founding principles, that is who we will remain.