How The House Should Be Draining The Swamp

Alan Keyes

by Dr. Alan Keyes: In an article published last month, WND's Bob Unruh reported that Amazon.com is acting on information provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to subject people to the deprivation of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States. Now comes this further report:
The vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee is asking Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to stop the retail giant's "sale of literature and music published by entities identified as 'hate groups' by the Southern Poverty Law Center."

While the letter from U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., later specifies concern about "neo-nazis and white nationalist writers," his opening, sweeping statement about SPLC-designated "hate groups" should be cause for alarm, writes Jihad Watch Director Robert Spencer.... SPLC has been challenged for applying the "hate group" label to groups with broad support such as the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, which have ended up on SPLC's list because of their advocacy for traditional marriage, opposition to abortion and other conservative causes.

Spencer writes that in the letter, SPLC's "hard-left bias and determination to destroy legitimate conservative groups by lumping them in with neo-Nazis and white supremacists is nowhere recognized."The parties involved in these reported demands and activities appear to be collaborating to violate federal laws "designed to protect the civil rights of all persons – citizens and non-citizens alike – within U.S. territory" (FBI – "What we Investigate"). Unfortunately for the future of civil liberty in the United States, this unlawful behavior follows a pattern seen in Facebook, Instagram, and other such corporate entities. While accusing others of criminal practices, these self-appointed enforcers of viewpoint suppression openly vaunt their own unlawful behavior. They are apparently not the least bit concerned that they will be called to account for their prejudiced violations of the rights of the public, to whose activities they pretend to offer equal accommodations.

During Barack Obama's tenure in the White House, these elitists had little to fear from thus openly practicing these unlawful abuses. But I know that conservatives who profess to be champions of the God-endowed rights of life and liberty the U.S. Constitution exists to secure expected to see an abruptly different environment once the Trump administration got well underway. In this, as in other areas more extensively noted and discussed in the media, Attorney General Jeff Sessions' tenure at the Justice Department has proved to be a disappointment.

While the thought-controlling mentality of Alinsky-Gramsci minded techno-geeks moves these corporate giants to suppress anyone who advocates and relies upon America's founding principles, public attention focuses on the personal dramas of Justice Department and FBI officials intent on minding everybody's business but that of the American people. In part, this reflects the historic failure of leadership in the U.S. Congress. Its leaders continue, in dereliction of their allotted constitutional responsibility, to allow the Executive branch to sink further and further into the morass produced by the insanity of allowing its officials to be judges of their own cause. Given this defiance of both common sense and the Constitution, the sucking sounds emitted by D.C.'s bureaucratic swamp swells more loudly with each passing day.

Particularly as the prelude to the midterm elections, the Constitution gives the House of Representatives the power of impeachment. It's their responsibility to identify the key swamp creatures and rally support for the effort to call them to account for their high crimes and misdemeanors. The power of impeachment offers Congress the opportunity to turn every midterm election into a referendum targeting elements of the national government who oppose and seek to sabotage the mandate voters gave to a new administration.

By using this power of accusation, the House leadership is supposed to prepare the grounds on which to rally the constituency that supported a change in national leadership. Every bill of impeachment becomes a means of focusing the political will of voters, renewing their sense of duty in support of the change they themselves previously demanded. If the House does its job, there would be no drop-off in support for the changes voters asked a new administration to achieve. The same people who voted to put a president in would turn out in force to kick the impeachable scoundrels out. If only congressional leaders worked to fulfill their constitutional responsibility to let the people know just who those scoundrels are.

When the president and the House of Representatives are committed to the same goals, the House's failure to use its impeachment power makes it much harder for the president's political appointees to get the job done. In the awkward position of being judges of their own cause, they can find it hard to call resistant elements of the bureaucracy to account. We are seeing proof of this every day in the controversy that dogs every aspect of the current special counsel probe. The Constitution clearly does not intend for the business of investigating high crimes and misdemeanors in the Executive branch to be the work of the Executive branch. The office that deals with such offenses should be under the supervision of the House – lock, stock and barrel.

Among other things, this would allow the president and his appointees to get on with the business of fulfilling the expectations of the American people, whose action or inaction put them into office. But the investigative apparatus it requires would also have the warrant to look into the dereliction of Executive branch officials who are failing to do their duty in light of the priorities the people supported with their votes. It could, for example, look into the FBI's failure to properly investigate the violations of civil federal law by corporate entities collaborating to deprive people under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the law and Constitution of the United States.

The House leadership's dereliction of its responsibility for the impeachment power may thus be contributing to the nonchalantly overt private and quasi-public (501c3 and c4) corporate collaboration now underway to suppress the civil liberties of the very voters who elected a majority of present House incumbents to office. Congressional leaders make a show of eliciting testimony from one or two such collaborators. Meanwhile, they do nothing that even minimally yanks the impeachment chain the Constitution provides. It should be used to pull the plug on Executive branch officials derelict in their duty to enforce the laws that forbid ongoing and planned corporate violations of the people's constitutional rights and freedoms. The Constitution equips the U.S. House, as it were, with the necessary boot. Why don't they use it to kick-start such derelict officials into action?
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Alan Keyes was Asst Secretary of State for International Organizations and an Ambassador to the UN Economic and Social Council under President Reagan. Keyes ran for president in 1996, 2000 and 2008, and was a candidate for the U.S. Senate for Maryland in 1988 and 1992 and for Illinois in 2004 against Barack Obama. He writes for Renew America where he first shared this article and blogs at LoyaltoLiberty.com.

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