[I haven’t decided whether to publish this also as my op/ed in the newspapers the weekend before the inauguration, in my very red congressional district (VA-06).]
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That oath is something we Americans should revere. Our Founders put it in the Constitution for an important reason: it requires every President to swear to protect and defend the order our Founders were creating with the Constitution. So long as those who took that oath honored it, generations of Americans to come could remain a free people.
All those who are granted – only temporarily – the powers of the state are required to commit as solemnly as possible to protecting that constitutional order from any threats. (As well as to using those powers use it in strict accord with the Law and the Constitution.)
History gives no guarantees about the course the future will take. But the oath was one more barrier — along with “checks and balances,” etc. — to lawless power taking over.
The oath protects us from tyranny by committing those wielding the powers of the state to defend the structures of Democracy and the Rule of Law.
The Oath is supposed to mean something!
But now we face an unprecedented problem: the President-elect, Donald Trump, took the presidential oath in 2017 and then proceeded to violate it in more ways and more profoundly by far than any President in our history.
(He was repeatedly lawless as President. When Trump tried to overturn the 2020 Election – to seize power against the will of the people -- he violated his oath even more dramatically than when he tried to extort an American ally, to get illegal help for his personal quest to stay President and thereby damage American national security.)
So what do we do? Do we just go through the usual ritual of the President being sworn in and ignore Trump’s having already shown his “sacred” promise is worthless, given in bad faith? (And even now, expressing intentions that would also violate the oath.)
The usual inauguration has the President Elect putting his hand on the Bible and swear an oath that ends with “So help me God!” The defense of the Constitution, our Founders were saying, is a “sacred” task.
To pretend that Donald Trump is performing a sacred American rite, when he’s already shown that his oath-taking is a farce and a lie, would dishonor the oath, and thus the Constitution, and thus what’s sacred.
Do we want to ignore that Trump’s oath means nothing? Or do we insist that something sacred shouldn’t be made into a farce and a lie.
Trump must be awarded the office of the Presidency, to which he was elected by the people in a legitimate election. (The people have the right to make their choice, however ugly,)
But while the election was legitimate, and so requires “the peaceful transition of power,” the process by which he is made President should not show indifference to what the oath-taking is about.
Design a ceremony that transfers the office, but contains no mockery of the oath our Founders gave us.
It is our duty, as Americans, to pay attention to the threatening moment we find ourselves in as a nation, with a President-elect who threatens the survival of American Democracy and the Rule of Law.
He is the enemy of what we should all be wise enough to defend: a free society where the rulers the people choose are limited – by law and by Constitution -- in what they do with their power.
