Show up. Stand up. Speak up.
Citizenship is hard in practice, like most forms of faith, religious or otherwise.
But citizenship is not so hard to think about — to imagine, to understand, to articulate.
This is the United States of America.
Unless all civic education and all patriotic feeling fails us, we know what the country is supposed to be and where our duty lies.
You may dislike bloated government, or public debt, or politicians who lie, or “the global economy,” or a hollowed out rural Ohio.
I dislike all those things.
I dislike the abuse of power, all power but especially presidential power because there is so much power there, more.
I dislike the jailing of people, who are in the United States legally, in an El Salvador gulag, more.
I dislike the random, amateurish, and chaotic dismantling of the federal government, more.
Because, though there may be waste there, and a deep state, too, the flip side of the deep state is expertise. And the expertise of federal workers keeps us healthy and safe — from the skies, to our pharmacies, to our coal mines.
So I condemn the timidity and quiescence of so many Democrats in Congress in the face of what we face.
I think they are scared of the country.
More scared of confronting what they fear may be the reality than they are of Donald Trump.
(It’s the opposite with Republicans. They fear their own voters. But they fear their leader more.)
And I don’t understand the press. They always take the Trump bait.
A third term for the Donald? The press covered Trump’s musings about this notion like it was a real story. They gave it four times the attention of the warnings of Sen. Chris Murphy, Sen. Cory Booker, and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, about oligarchy and autocracy, combined.
The latter’s rallies with Sen. Bernie Sanders, were treated as the side show that the third-term nonsense actually is.
And only passing reference was made, in the third-term stories, to the total and blatant unconstitutionality of such an idea.
That is the real story. Linking third-term talk to an overall disregard for constitutionality and law: It’s illegal. It’s covered, spelled out, in the Constitution. (The 22nd amendment.)
Just like birthright citizenship.
THAT’S in the Constitution. (The 14th Amendment.)
A president cannot make law or abrogate the Constitution with executive orders.
So, when Senator Murphy says we are already in a constitutional crisis and that we are sleepwalking our way into authoritarianism, he is not being hyperbolic but precise.
Since the deportations are not massive and not aimed principally at illegals or hardened criminals, it is reasonable to suppose that they are actually a test of authoritarian power: The power to deport and/or imprison anyone the current regime wishes to deport or imprison.
That’s what’s really going on.
And Democrats want to wait and see what happens? Keep their powder dry? Pick and choose narrow battles? Or poll and run focus groups?
Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Democrats gather data.
And the press ignores those who do speak up and covers the absurd and outrageous as though it were normal governance.
Joe Rogan, whom liberals and the press disdained, even as his popularity grew (because he is a normal guy with a wide curiosity and a sense of decency), has moral clarity about the El Salvador prison camp.
But not the Democratic leaders in Congress.
It’s fear again. They fear that most Americans don’t care. Show them the pictures of people shaved, shackled, and sent to a hell on earth and they will shrug.
No due process.
No courts.
No humanity.
And they will shrug.
I disagree.
When they saw Abu Ghraib, and evidence of American soldiers and CIA agents torturing prisoners in Iraq, they were, like Rogan today, enraged. And it was a turning point.
The task of leadership is to make people aware and make sure they care.
War crimes in our name? In the name of the United States. Of you and me?
No.
Show up. Stand up. Speak up.
I also dislike tanking the economy for no real reason, other than, “well, I can.”
Tariffs are a tool. One, limited tool. Not a comprehensive economic policy.
And someone who would wipe out a great grandma’s life savings AND her Social Security, well that person is unpardonable — cruel enough to put an innocent man or woman in a Gulag.
There is little worse than stealing from the elderly and the poor.
Unless it is intentionally jailing the innocent.
These are sins that only the Almighty can adjudicate.
But we who are living through all this can at least be clear eyed about what is happening. What all of these acts — dismantling NATO, the Justice Department, Health and Human Services, the universities, our friendships with our neighbor counties — are about is absolute and arbitrary power: The right of the leader, and the state, to do anything the leader and the state please, at any time, to any one.
For no reason but whim.
That’s what’s going on.
That’s what we’re facing.
We must put down the polls and open our eyes.
Keith C. Burris is the former editor, vice president, and editorial director of Block Newspapers.
Contact him at burriscolumn@gmail.com.
First Published April 6, 2025, 4:00 a.m.
