Congressman Fitzpatrick:
“These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman” were words written by an American patriot Thomas Paine in times of great crisis at the birth of our democracy. What you fail to realize is that these are not ordinary times in the life of our nation, but rather we are in times of great crisis that is presenting a deep threat to the very existence of the precious noble experiment of democracy that Thomas Paine’s words help ignite in 1776.
On Thursday, October 3, 2019, the president of the United States spoke on national TV from the lawn of the White House and publicly invited a foreign power to interfere in our 2020 presidential election. He had previously, in response to a whistleblower complaint, issued a transcript of his own conversation with the president of a foreign power that also indicated an invitation and threat for the foreign power to interfere in our 2020 presidential election. The evidence that this president, at the very least, deserves the opening of an impeachment inquiry against him is obvious to the soul of any American who cares for our Constitution, our democracy, and the rule of law. And yet, you, like so many other Republican leaders, deny the existence of this evidence that is in plain sight before your eyes and thereby become complicit in the president’s fundamental attack on our democracy. These should be the times that try your souls, but based on the words and actions of you and your Republican colleagues, I am led to believe that you and your colleagues have lost the ability to exercise moral judgment concerning this crime against our democracy and that, in a sense, you have lost your political and moral souls. When leaders like the president, who put personal political gain over the public good which their constituents had entrusted to them to further, there is no moral concern for the welfare of the people, but only a crass craven selfish base desire to illegally use the powers, which the people provided to them to further the public good, instead for the perpetuation of their for power, prestige and pecuniary advantage. So what is motivating you, Congressman, as you sheepishly refuse to challenge this presidential usurpation of power? Why do you fail so miserably in rising to the occasion of this crisis as you refuse to use the constitutional power of impeachment our founding fathers entrusted to you from long ago when the inspiring words of Thomas Paine were written, but which you now fearfully and selfishly refuse to enjoin?
Let me remind you what some of our founding fathers had to say about impeachment. George Mason described the president as the "man who can commit the most extensive injustice." James Madison thought the president might "pervert his administration into a scheme of oppression or betray his trust to foreign powers." Governor Morris of Pennsylvania worried that the president "may be bribed by a greater interest to betray his trust and no one would say that we ought to expose ourselves to the danger of seeing him in foreign pay." James Madison said that in the case of the president, "corruption was within the compass of probable events … and might be fatal to the Republic." William Davie of North Carolina argued that impeachment was "an essential security for the good behaviour" of the president; otherwise, "he will spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself re-elected."
You can see that they feared that a president could arise who would abuse the power of his office, betray his trust to foreign powers and spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself re-elected. Our president by virtue of his own very words and also with respect to unfolding details of how he enlisted the aid of the Departments of State and Justice in his scheme to further his re-election is the very kind of president the founders had in mind when they incorporated the impeachment power into Congress at the birth of our nation.
Yet you continue to shirk your Congressional responsibility. You say the president's actions do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses, while refusing to countenance even an inquiry into the facts. You spuriously yearn for an extra-Congressional legal investigation that you know will never occur, while shirking the only remedy that is within your political power to execute; namely that of the impeachment process. You are no longer an FBI agent; you are a Congressman. You need to use the political power invested in your current position and not be afraid to use it during this time of crisis. Why is your political and moral soul silent during this crisis?
Yet you will say you have spoken out. Yes, I heard you on National Public Radio where you absolutely and cowardly refused to denounce the president’s lies about this crisis. The radio announcer Marty Moss-Coane was confounded by your refusal to state the obvious and at one point said “I don’t want to put words in your mouth , but…” You did state based on your experience in Ukraine that the removal of a Ukrainian attorney general was not due to his willingness to investigate the president’s political rival, but was due to the indisputable fact that he was not investigating corruption enough! Yet you refused to denounce the president’s continual assertion of the exact opposite even after repeated attempts by the moderator to encourage you to speak the truth. So you made the bad moral choice to allow the huge megaphone that the president wields to spew forth lies to the American people when you could have used your admittedly smaller megaphone to speak the truth about the lies the president is saying to assault the American public every day. Good things often come from small voices showing the courage to speak loudly and forcefully to those in power. You chose not to. Where was your political and moral soul?
You also spoke to an assembly of high school students later in the week when you could have exhibited true moral and political leadership. Instead you piously spoke about “both-sides-ism” and “the need to listen to diverse points of view” which echoed what our president said in about Charlottesville when he asserted there were good people on both sides when on one side were neo-Nazis and KKK members. Again, Congressman, these are not ordinary times. This is a time of crisis. It is not the time when reasonable men and women, who have the sincere interest of the public good in their minds, gather in a conference room to discuss various methods for solving a common public problem such as how to improve the mass transit system. This is a time of extreme crisis where the executive side of the table is corrupt,unconcerned with the public good, and is willing to use all powers at its disposal to undermine our democracy. It is not the time to prevaricate, dissemble, and delay. It is time to see the situation with moral clarity and act.
What if it were 1859 and you were faced with the issue of slavery? How does your principle of “both-sides-ism” work there? Would you take a fact-finding trip to the southern states and ask for a lengthy non-political investigation of whether slavery was a good or bad institution? Would you speak softly and kindly to your “reasonable” southern state legislators as you ignored the cries of slaves being flogged, raped, abused, and their families being separated by sale for punishment? Would your political and moral soul be blind to that crisis too? Oh wait, I remember you did make a trip to our southern border recently and expressed great concern about the guards in the internment camps being overworked, but expressed doubt about media reports about the horrid conditions in the camps and not too much about the state-sponsored kidnapping of children from innocent parents which to this day has not been rectified.
Yes, Congressman, these should be the times that try men's souls, if only you and your Republican leaders still had them.