CONGRESSIONAL BAD ACTORS: CAN THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH POLICE ITSELF?

As President Biden pursues his agenda, Congress finds itself distracted by the behavior of

some of its Republican members. Democrats fear some Republicans may incite violence or even threaten their personal safety. Resolutions that would expel or censure Republican members have been introduced in both houses. A bipartisan vote stripped one GOP representative of her committee assignments because of her outrageous statements. The situation grows tenser by the day. 

Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that threats “from within” exist in the House of Representative. 

Some Republicans want to take guns onto the floor and have refused to go through metal detectors installed outside the House chamber.     Danger from outside forces remains. Capitol police propose making permanent the fencing installed around the Capitol grounds for

the presidential inauguration. Meantime, the investigation into the January 6 insurrection seemingly turns up new and disturbing evidence every day.

The Greene Case

Freshman Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia got elected after suggesting the

execution of Pelosi, making threats against other Democrats, claiming that September 11 never happened, and denying the truth of school shootings, including the Parkland, Florida carnage in which 17 people died and 17 others were injured. Greene, an adherent of the QAnon

conspiracy movement, made other outlandish statements, including that lasers controlled by a Jewish-run company started wild fires in California.

Democrats urged that House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy strip Greene of her education and budget committee assignments, but he declined. Despite saying she regretted some of her statements, Greene lost her committee assignments on a vote of 230-199, with all Democrats and 11 Republicans voting in the affirmative.

“Disorderly Behaviour”

Article 1, section 5 of the United States 

Constitution gives each house of Congress power to regulate the conduct of its members. Both the House and the Senate can discipline members who engage in “disorderly Behaviour.” Punishment can include expulsion from Congress, though more often both houses have “censured” members for bad conduct. Expulsion requires a two-thirds vote, while a censure resolution needs only majority approval.

Fifteen senators have been expelled, the last in 

1862. Six were thrown out in 1797 for treason in connection with inciting participation of Native-American tribes in a British invasion of Florida. The other nine, kicked out in 1861 and 1862, supported the Confederacy in the Civil War.

Nine senators, most notably Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, have been censured

for conduct that brought the Senate into dishonor and disrepute. Expulsion and censure cases have been prosecuted for abuse of office, fighting in the senate chamber, financial irregularities, sexual misconduct, and other bad acts. Very often, especially in recent times, senators brought up for expulsion or censure have resigned before senate action. Three members facing such sanctions since 1980 all resigned first.

In the House, 23 members have been censured, five since 1966. The House has expelled five members, two in the modern era. Michael Meyers was kicked out in 1980 on a 376-30 vote after a bribery conviction. James Traficant got his walking papers in 2002 by a vote of 420-1 following

convictions for conspiracy to commit bribery, defrauding the United States, obstruction of justice, and filing false tax returns. Three previous expulsions from the House, all in 1861, involved disloyalty by fighting for the Confederacy.

What’s Enough?

While it’s clear Congress can regulate its membership, the history of expulsion and censure raises the question of whether Congress needs criminal convictions before taking action against misbehaving members. In the House, that appears to have been the case, at least recently. Both expulsions in the 20^th and 21^st centuries came after convictions for real law breaking. The constitution doesn’t say criminal convictions must precede expulsion or censure, but Congress, especially the House, seems to have needed that in recent years before acting.

The Senate history presents a different picture, but one relevant to today. The 15 senators thrown out participated in inciting violence against the United States or its interests.  Given the events of January 6, Congress now may have to decide if threatening a member rises to the necessary level for action. 

How Did We Get Here?

Former President Donald Trump and compliant,

cowering Republican leaders justifiably get much of the blame. While we’d guess the impeachment trial won’t result in a conviction, we also believe the likely surge of civil and criminal cases against Trump will reveal the depth of his seditious behavior. Those cases, probably not tried until 2022 and 2023, should reveal just how far he stooped and how close the United States came to becoming a dictatorship, not a democracy.

But blaming Trump and his enablers isn’t enough. His rise to the presidency indicates a fundamental sickness in our society it may take years to eradicate. Because much of his appeal rests on anger and white supremacy, which have been with us since the beginning of the republic, it’s possible we won’t rid ourselves of this problem in the lifetime of anyone alive today. 

The congressional response to the threat of violence from both inside and outside the Capitol could say a good deal about the resolve of the nation to eliminate the abhorrent behavior that plagues so much of our politics. Things we could have never imagined now seem normal. Congress

can throw out members who make violence and the threat of violence part of their portfolios. History, however, shows senators and representatives have only reluctantly used that power. Now, it appears, we live in different times – times that call for a more aggressive use of that authority. 

CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS, STATUTES, AND INCONVENIENT TRUTHS: SLAVERY, JIM CROW, AND ADOLF HITLER

A debate that sometimes flares into violence now rages in the United States over Confederate monuments and statues. The deaths of African American men and women in police custody like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have provided new urgency to an already invigorated movement for removing such monuments and statutes from city streets, government buildings, and college campuses. We stand squarely with those who would destroy or relegate such structures to museums or other places that can put them into proper historical context.

We acknowledge an arguable distinction between monuments honoring Confederate officials and military officers and symbols of the Confederacy on one hand and those recognizing founding fathers of the nation who enslaved people, but did not rebel against the United States.  Monuments honoring Thomas Jefferson and George Washington require a different conversation and we defer that to another day. We concern ourselves now with people who took up arms against the country.

We fear supporters of keeping Confederate monuments prefer forgetting inconvenient truths about what those monuments represent. Today we remind them.

It was About Slavery

The War Between the States, as supporters of the Lost Cause like calling it, was fought about one thing: The South’s desire to preserve slavery and expand it into the western territories. In the early 1800s, as Americans marched westward and new states sought admission into the Union, the South realized it had a problem. If those territories entered as free states, soon the South would find itself out gunned in Congress. The number of representatives and most importantly, senators, from free states would outnumber those from slave-holding states. The South would lose its hold on power in the national government. The South couldn’t have that, since it risked the end of slavery.

Too many Americans have forgotten (or never knew) two things about slavery -- how brutal it was and how important it was economically. When we wrote recently about the movement that would make Juneteenth a national holiday, we identified museums that tell the story of slavery’s horrors. We’ve noted before how

Professor Edward Baptist’s book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism provides a thorough understanding of both slavery’s brutality and its economic dimensions. The book describes in chilling detail murders, rapes, and physical abuse that went along with slavery and explains the relationship between the peculiar institution and development of the United States as a world commercial power. It will disabuse any reader of the notion the Civil War (its proper name) was about anything else.

The Monuments and Jim Crow

Advocates of keeping Confederate monuments glossed over when most were

erected. It wasn’t immediately after the Civil War when supporters of the Lost Cause might have focused on memorializing their heroes. Only a few went up in those years. In fact, many monuments went up after reconstruction as part of an organized campaign against recently freed enslaved persons that promoted Jim Crow segregation and, later, resistance to the civil rights movement.

       

 

Richmond, Virginia, for example, installed a statue of  Confederate President Jefferson Davis on its famous Monument Avenue in

1907. The statue of Robert E. Lee removed in 2017 from a street in New Orleans went up in 1884. The Lee statute in Charlottesville, Virginia that sparked violence in 2017 was installed in 1924. South Carolina began flying the Confederate battle flag above its state capitol in 1962, as a protest against school desegregation. USA Today reported thirty-five Confederate monuments erected in North Carolina after 2000.

These historical facts suggest erecting monuments to Confederate leaders had more to do with intimidating blacks and the civil

rights community than with preserving “heritage” as monument supporters so piously claim. Students of history know context means everything. Context in this instance speaks volumes about the message the monuments were established to send.

Hitler?

Yes, Adolf Hitler. Frankly, we’ve been surprised many people appear hesitant about comparing

the  memorializing of confederates who fought against the United States with German and Japanese leaders during the Second World War. Well, we’re not. We’re not because we don’t see a distinction. No American city or university would erect a statue of Hitler. The United States military wouldn’t name a base after Erwin Rommel, the general who

commanded German forces resisting the D-Day invasion at Normandy. How about a monument honoring Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor?

Yet, statues in cities and on college campuses and the names of military bases honor defeated, treasonous Confederate officers. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Braxton Bragg, and other Confederate battle commanders fought as hard against the United States as Rommel and Yamamoto. Davis sought destruction of the United States just as Hitler and Japanese Emperor Hirohito did. A distinction is artificial and intellectually dishonest.

If we have made harsh pronouncements on

this issue, so be it. Some principles require expression with moral clarity and certainty, unadulterated by diplomatic or cultural nicety. For us, this is such an issue.

We stand by our assessment. None the less, we remain interested in contrary views. We’ve stated ours, so let us hear from you about yours.