Our daily news cycle constantly features district court, appeals court and Supreme Court decisions about actions taken by our executive branch of government. We are a government fighting amongst ourselves.  White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt regularly answers questions starting with the phrase “The President has a legal right to do this.”

Lost in this wrangling over the legality of this administration’s actions is a principle I think goes to the core of who we are as Americans:  Despite legalities is the action fundamentally right or wrong?

It is wrong for a president to incite an insurrection and to stir up doubt in Americans about the legitimacy of their democratic elections. It is wrong for citizens to violently overpower policemen, vandalize our Capitol and threaten our Congress while it is performing its sworn duties. It is wrong to pardon people lawfully convicted of such violent actions.

It is wrong for masked men to snatch people off of the streets and secretly transport them to prisons in foreign countries. In essence, they are imposing a life prison sentence for unspecified and unproven crimes. There is no difference between a citizen and undocumented immigrant committing a violent crime. Our justice system can use the same tools – arrest them, prove your case in a court of law, and then imprison them for a specific time period in a place accessible by their family and their lawyer.

It is wrong to cancel student visas for free speech protected by our First Amendment, however much we might disagree with their speech. It is wrong to extort universities, law firms and private corporations for initiatives they implement in a free market to address chronic and historical discrimination.

It is wrong to terminate employees by an impersonal email. It is wrong to claim terminations are due to poor performance without meeting with an employee and explaining where performance is lacking.

It is wrong to withhold the funding for government initiatives approved by Congress. It is wrong to eliminate the staffing of such initiatives to stop the spending. It is wrong to withhold funding that was promised and on which citizens made investment decisions.

It is wrong to have televised meetings with foreign heads of state and belittle or embarrass them. It is wrong to abandon treaties and commitments of support. It is wrong to abandon trade deals we participated in creating.

While employed in government, it is wrong to leverage your personal brand identity to enrich yourself through crypto meme coin sales. It is wrong to sell access to the President. It is wrong to sell visas. It is wrong to accept lavish gifts. It is wrong to constantly announce different tariffs then take advantage of predictable stock market swings.

It is wrong to lie.

You may be thinking I am being judgmental to write this. I disagree. We are taught from birth about what is right vs. wrong by our parents, our teachers and our faith. Right vs. wrong is as self-evident as the truths Thomas Jefferson wrote about in our Declaration of Independence. It’s not that complicated. You can act legally yet still fail to meet the higher accountability of man to do what is right. 

Our Founding Fathers fought a war and won our independence because it was wrong to be governed without representation.  They didn’t need a constitution to know this. We fought a bloody civil war because slavery was wrong, even though our Constitution recognized its legality.

We used civil disobedience to stop a war our government wrongly persisted in continuing in Vietnam, a war our defense department knew was unwinnable. We used civil disobedience to fight racial, sex and religious discrimination, righting wrongs that had persisted for centuries in our country despite our Constitution.

Virtually every person in our government knows that all of the above I listed is wrong. Our Congressman, Mike Bost (R-Murphysboro), knows the difference between right and wrong.  The only one who may truly not understand right vs. wrong is Donald Trump, pathologically mired in his narcissism.

We have a feckless and cowardly Congress that refuses to govern and stand up to everything wrong going on around us. We have multiple judges compromised by their personal political ideology, paralyzed by uncertainty about what to do if our president refuses to follow their orders.

You may feel powerless in our current situation.  You are not. You have a voice. A mystic chord that binds us as Americans is our instinct for protest and civil disobedience. Our revolution was founded on this and it is unique in mankind’s history.

We have a knack for harassing and pestering our government until they do what is right. Let’s do it.