Should Congress Stay or Should They Go?

Should I stay, the Clash asked, or should I go?

When I was a kid, during and following Watergate, the tortured politico’s answer to that existential question was the latter. Occasionally. During the 1973 “Saturday Night Massacre,” Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus refused to obey Nixon’s order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor and resigned. Gerald Ford lost his Press Secretary Jerald terHorst the following year, because Ford pardoned Nixon but not Vietnam draft dodgers. In 1980, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance quit after Jimmy Carter ignored his advice to pursue diplomacy and sent the military on a hostage rescue mission to Iran, which turned into a fiasco.

Vance was the high-water mark of quitting over a policy disagreement. Indicating either the triumph of cynical careerism over personal integrity, or an extraordinary run of ideological alignment between presidents and their hirelings, or both, the high-profile political Resignation on Principle vanished into deep hibernation for more than four decades.

A dozen mid-to-senior level diplomats and staff stepped away from the State Department to protest Biden’s support of Israel’s 2023-2025 genocide in Gaza, but it took Trump’s second term to reanimate the beast.

So far this year, Joe Kent left his job running the National Counterterrorism Center over Trump and Netanyahu’s war against Iran, RFK Jr.’s spokesman Rich Danker quit over the Department of Health and Human Services’ decision to re-legalize child-friendly fruit-flavored vapes, and top Treasury lawyer Brian Morrissey split because the Trump Administration created a $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for right-wing MAGA allies of the White House.

At some point in your life, you will have a choice to make. Do you overlook ethical and/or legal wrongdoing, and remain at your job/in your organization, thus making you complicit? Or do you resign/depart, minimizing your guilt while removing yourself from the authority/standing that might allow you to stop or mitigate that evil? Purist outsider who blows everything up, like Daniel Ellsberg? Or tainted saint, quietly working for change from the inside like Oskar Schindler?

Should I cool it, the Clash sang, or should I blow?

Sometimes (and these are some of those times) the breadth of evil is so enormous, and the failure of established checks and balances so pronounced, and the prospect for reform within the establishment so hopeless, Resignations on Principle by government officials—even en masse—are insufficient. As Americans witnessed during Nixon’s final year as president, a change of personnel does not create a change of policy, especially when a regime is in crisis and its leader is so cornered that all he can consider is short-term survival.

While it is the Trump Administration that is out of control—in the last few months, it has kidnapped a foreign president and his first lady, gone to war at the behest of an outlaw ally, lost that war and tanked the global economy, called for a 50% increase in war spending that ought to have been slashed 90%, unleashed ICE goons on U.S. city streets, announced that the president does not care about the economic pain caused by his pointless wars, and announced the slush fund—the failure of government institutions constitutionally created to rein in such excesses is enabling it. A supine Supreme Court, a gutted news media, and an impotent Congress are unwilling and unable to exercise oversight.

That includes Democratic politicians.

Calling Trump’s “anti-weaponization” slush fund “most depraved,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it was “corruption happening in broad daylight.” In what passed for a response, 100 Democratic politicians filed a federal court motion/amicus brief asking for Trump’s lawsuit against the Justice Department to be dismissed—the same day as Trump had already moved to withdraw it. The Democratic motion, symbolic at best, stands no chance of abolishing the slush fund.

Given Republican control of the White House, narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress, and the fund’s structure as a transfer from the permanent, indefinite Judgment Fund appropriation, there is little Democrats can do to stop it until next year, when they will likely regain control of Congress, and when the debt ceiling will need to be lifted again. Even then, Democrats will not have the two-thirds majority required to overturn a presidential veto. Bottom line: Democratic Representatives and Senators can sit and watch Trump’s mayhem on the slush fund, the war and a million other outrages—but they can’t do anything to stop them.

If I go, there will be trouble, the Clash noted. And if I stay, it will be double.

It is time for Congressional and Senatorial Democrats to consider quitting. All 257 of them.

Just leave.

As I once told a boss who ordered me to do something I considered highly unethical and probably illegal, “you can do whatever you want, but you will do it without me or my help.” Years later and more eloquently, an assistant attorney general refused to carry out Trump’s order to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams: “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me,” he wrote Trump.

Mass exits have worked before. Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s Nationalist Party (BNP) rigged the 1994 elections in Bangladesh. In response, nearly all opposition members of parliament—147 out of 154 from the main opposition alliance (primarily the Awami League, and the Jatiya Party)—resigned en masse from the 330-seat Bangladeshi parliament. The opposition demanded that Zia’s government resign immediately, followed by free and fair elections. It led general strikes, street protests, and blockades to paralyze the country.  A prolonged political crisis ensued, and the opposition held firm, also boycotting the 1996 elections (which the BNP won with tiny turnout and no international legitimacy).

Two years later, the BNP caved. They passed a constitutional amendment institutionalizing a non-partisan caretaker government system for future elections. New elections were held under this framework in June 1996, and the Awami League won.

Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, Thailand and other nations where, as in the United States, popular trust in institutions is low, have seen similar extra-parliamentary protests.

Warmongering, genocidal Republicans who don’t care about the American people want to do whatever they want without negotiating with Democrats. Why should Democrats legitimize fascists?

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)