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U.S. at risk of being ruled by thieves

Recently I have been listening to the candidates for Congress in the Democratic primary and have met a couple of them. Nice people. I’m a 72-year-old retired pastor, having served congregations for 45 years. I like nice people and try to be one. Our most recent candidate event, however, was like a conversation about what drapes to hang while the building’s foundation was cracking apart.

I believe that our liberty is being compromised, that we could easily follow the example of Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, Hungary and other nations who, in the past decade, have become false democracies ruled by mobsters. The fancy term for that is kleptocracy — rule by thieves. Our current president admires every one of those tyrants and is dependent for his extravagant lifestyle in part on Russian money. For us to become a full-on kleptocracy would be a betrayal of every great patriot from Washington and Jefferson, through Lincoln and Grant, to the Roosevelts and Reagan. I am deeply worried that my teenaged grandchildren may spend much of their lives stripped of their rights as citizens.

I believe this election for Congress is critical. Usually midterm elections aren’t, but this election is. Here’s why I think that:

In my training for ministry, I spent the summer of ’73 in Washington as a chaplain in a reformatory. Our instructor realized that we were hopelessly naive about how gangs work, so we couldn’t deal with the residents. He further saw we couldn’t see the dynamics of gangs because our inmates were overwhelmingly black and we were overwhelmingly white. So he arranged for us to go to the Watergate hearings in the Senate and study the white guys in the gang known as the Nixon White House. I sat and watched Sam Erwin and others confront those criminals. My most vivid memory of that ordeal was when Sen. Erwin asked Erlichman why he thought he could take away Daniel Ellsberg’s Fourth Amendment rights. Erlichman feigned surprised and wondered why the senator would say that he had violated someone’s Fourth Amendment rights. Erwin slapped his hand on the table and said, “Because I understand the English language, sir! I learned it at my mother’s knee.” He had read that Constitution, and he loved it.

Later I spent 13 wonderful years in Austin, Texas, often flying in and out of the Barbara Jordan airport. There’s a marvelous bronze statue of her in her wheelchair in the center of that airport. I remember her from Watergate also. When the Judiciary Committee of the House prepared the impeachment of Nixon and it came her turn to speak, she fiercely said, “My faith in the Constitution is whole.”

I don’t believe our current representative, who acquiesced in her committee’s whitewash of the Trump campaign, has that faith in our Constitution. I am listening for that faith in the other candidates. I’ve lived through a minor version of the massive corruption now facing us. I remember well how difficult it was and what courage it took for members of Congress and the special prosecutors to deliver us from that earlier errant president. When the glare of history is on you, you need real spine. I believe we need deeply patriotic representatives who understand both our history and our high calling as a nation. In the coming confrontation between the executive and the legislative branches, we need someone in Congress with the moral clarity to, in the Preamble’s great phrase, “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

The Rev. Jeff Black lives in Saranac Lake.

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