The Reasons Why — The Truth Matters, Now More Than Ever

🛡 The Broken Oath: How Republican Congress Surrendered the Constitution

Every member of Congress — House and Senate, Republican and Democrat — raises a right hand on the first day of a new Congress and swears the same oath. It is short. It is unambiguous. It is set out in Article VI of the Constitution and codified at 5 U.S.C. § 3331: “I do solemnly swear… that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.” Their oath is not to a person. Not to a party. Not to a president. It is to the document that gives them their job. One year into Donald Trump's second term, the Republican Senate and House majorities have treated that oath as a meaningless formality — a piece of stagecraft to get sworn in, then forgotten. What follows is a record of that betrayal.

📜 What the Oath Actually Requires

The oath sounds ceremonial. The Constitution treats it as one of its most important commands. To understand what's been broken, you have to understand what was sworn.

The oath is not a tradition. It is a requirement. Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution states: “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned… and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.” (Constitution Annotated)
The current text was forged in the fires of the Civil War. The original 1789 oath was simple. After Confederate sympathizers nearly destroyed the Union from inside the government, Congress added the words “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.” The Senate's own historian explains: those words were “drafted by Civil War-era members of Congress intent on ensnaring traitors.” (Senate.gov / U.S. House History)
The oath obligates a member to the Constitution, not to a president. James Madison, in Federalist 44, wrote that requiring the oath was “the completion of the Supremacy Clause” — a guarantee that no officer in any branch could place loyalty to a leader above loyalty to the founding document.
The Constitution gives Congress specific duties that cannot be delegated to the President: declaring war (Article I, § 8), appropriating funds (Article I, § 9), regulating commerce, confirming officials, conducting oversight, and impeaching when impeachable conduct occurs. A member of Congress who refuses to perform those duties — or who casts votes designed to surrender them to the executive — is not interpreting the oath. They are violating it.
The Constitution also contains a remedy for officers who actively betray the oath: Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars from office any officer who, having sworn to support the Constitution, then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” A New Mexico county commissioner was disqualified under this clause in 2022 for his role in January 6. (CREW)

Sources: Constitution Annotated — Article VI • U.S. Senate — Oath of Office • U.S. House History • CREW — 14A Section 3

⚖ The Surrender of Article I — Congress Hands Over Its Own Powers

Article I of the Constitution is Congress's article. It enumerates the powers that belong exclusively to the legislative branch — the powers the Founders deliberately kept out of the President's hands. Over the past year, the Republican-controlled Congress has voluntarily surrendered nearly every one of them.

The power of the purse. The Trump administration has openly defied congressional appropriations — freezing funds Congress voted to spend, dismantling agencies Congress voted to create, firing officials whose terms Congress voted to protect. The Republican majority's response has been silence. As GOP Rep. Darrell Issa told NOTUS about the broader pattern: “Is it another potential passing of authority from Congress to the other branch by benign or not-so-benign neglect? Yes… But who are we to blame but ourselves?” (NOTUS)
The power to declare war. Article I, Section 8 reserves the power to declare war to Congress alone. The 1973 War Powers Resolution requires a president to obtain congressional authorization within 60 days of initiating hostilities. Trump launched the war on Iran on February 28, 2026. As of late April 2026 — nearly two months in, past the 60-day mark — Congress has not held a single public hearing on the war. (TIME / The Conversation)
Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker publicly said he would “hope to” hold a hearing “sometime in May” — after the statutory deadline had already passed. House Armed Services Republicans postponed an April 21 hearing on the war by an entire month. (TIME / The Conversation)
Senate Majority Leader John Thune declined to hold any public Iran-war hearing. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) explicitly opposed oversight, telling TIME: “I don't know if that's necessary. I'm not sure what it would achieve, just give the Democrats an opportunity to cheerlead against America.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) called Democratic requests for hearings “politically motivated.” (TIME)
In January 2026, the Senate defeated a war powers resolution that would have required Trump to seek congressional authorization for any military action against Venezuela — where the Trump administration was simultaneously bombing boats and abducting the country's elected leader. Only Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, and Susan Collins broke ranks to support oversight. (Al Jazeera)
The power over tariffs. The Constitution gives Congress, not the President, the power to lay and collect duties. In September 2025, the House voted to block any challenges to Trump's global tariffs through March 2026 — voluntarily disarming itself of its own authority for six months. Speaker Mike Johnson, asked whether Trump had overstepped, told Fox Business: “I'm a jealous guardian of Article 1 of the Constitution… but I don't think the president has overstepped his bounds. I think he's used that tariff authority wisely.” (NOTUS)
Confirmation duty surrendered. Republicans confirmed Emil Bove to a federal judgeship despite credible reporting that, as a senior DOJ official, he had told department lawyers to tell federal courts “f*** you” when judges issued orders the administration didn't like. They confirmed Pam Bondi as Attorney General after she publicly promised to prosecute Trump's political enemies, and Kash Patel as FBI Director after he had publicly published an enemies list. The Senate's “advice and consent” role under Article II, Section 2 has been reduced to rubber-stamping.
Renaming federal buildings without authorization. The Trump administration unilaterally rebranded the Department of Defense as the “Department of War” and renamed the Kennedy Center the “Trump Kennedy Center” — both prohibited by federal statute. Rep. Mike Simpson, rather than enforcing the law, introduced an amendment to rename the Kennedy Center Opera House after Melania Trump. (NOTUS)

Sources: NOTUS • TIME — Iran War Oversight • The Conversation • Al Jazeera — Venezuela WPR • CNN

🏻 The Worst of the Worst: Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

Some Republicans have surrendered the Constitution by silence. Lindsey Graham did it on tape, on the record, and bragging. The senior senator from South Carolina — a man who, in 1999, prosecuted the impeachment of Bill Clinton on grounds that lying violated the presidential oath — spent 2026 actively engineering an unauthorized war and openly admitting it.

Graham personally manipulated the President into war. In a March 2026 Wall Street Journal interview, Graham bragged that he had spent months getting Trump to agree to launch the Iran war — including playing a “word-association game” with the President to plant the idea, and beginning the campaign over a round of golf right after Trump won the 2024 election. A senator privately steering a 79-year-old president toward an unauthorized war is not oversight. It is the opposite of oversight. (Daily Beast / Politico)
Graham said the quiet part out loud. On Fox News, asked why the U.S. was attacking Iran and threatening Venezuela, Graham said: “When this regime goes down, we are going to have a new Middle East, and we are going to make a tonne of money… Venezuela and Iran have 31 percent of the world's oil reserves. We're going to have a partnership with 31 percent of the known reserves.” A sitting U.S. Senator publicly framing two undeclared wars as resource extraction operations is not a defense of the Constitution. It is a confession. (Al Jazeera)
Graham then pretended to discover concerns. Once the war was already underway and the ceasefire was being negotiated, Graham — who had personally lobbied for the strikes — suddenly demanded “congressional review” of the peace deal. (PBS NewsHour) The man who deliberately bypassed Congress to start the war wanted Congress to approve ending it. The reversal was not principle. It was political cover.
The Iraq War credibility test, failed. Graham was one of the loudest Senate voices for the 2003 Iraq War. He has since acknowledged it was based on faulty intelligence and cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. He learned nothing. He has, by his own admission, spent his career “backed almost all the military interventions in the Middle East in the past two decades.” (Al Jazeera)
The 1999 receipt. As a House manager during the impeachment of Bill Clinton, Graham argued on the Senate floor that violating the presidential oath was itself an impeachable offense — that “you don't even have to be convicted of a crime to lose your job in this constitutional republic if this body determines that your conduct as a public official is clearly out of bounds in your role.” By that 1999 standard — Lindsey Graham's own standard — Lindsey Graham has disqualified himself from his current job many times over.

Sources: Daily Beast — Graham Manipulating Trump • Al Jazeera — "Tonne of Money" • PBS NewsHour • The Hill — Graham Backs Iran Ultimatum

🏻 The Worst of the Worst: John Kennedy (R-LA)

Senator John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana cultivates the persona of a folksy country lawyer with a degree from Oxford he likes to mention. The persona obscures the record. Kennedy holds an Oxford BCL, a Vanderbilt BA, and a UVA JD — he is among the wealthiest members of the Senate, with an estimated net worth of over $12 million. He knows exactly what he is doing. Which makes it worse.

The racist rant from the dais. In a May 2023 Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing — an official proceeding — Kennedy told the DEA Administrator that without the United States, Mexicans “would be eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback.” The Mexican Foreign Ministry filed a formal protest. Mexico's ambassador wrote: “I don't think the people of Louisiana feel represented by the vulgar and racist word you used.” Kennedy never apologized. (NOLA / Gambit Weekly)
The Trump apologetics on race. When Trump called Haiti and African nations “sh--hole countries,” Kennedy went on WWL-TV to say Trump “is not a racist” and that “we throw around this allegation of being a racist a little too casually now.” When Trump told four Congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they came from, Kennedy called the remarks “a poor choice of words” that Trump had “clarified” — a clarification Trump never made. (NOLA / The Advocate)
The performative complaint that changes nothing. In October 2025, Kennedy went on the Pod Force One podcast and said he had personally told Trump to “tweet a little less” because “you can't just say everything that comes into your head” — comparing Trump's social-media output to “eight steaks at one time.” The same week, he told the same podcast: “The American people get it… this is the way most Americans look at it today.” Privately ask the President to be less unhinged; publicly defend his presidency. This is not oversight. It is theater. (Daily Beast / Yahoo)
The roving cable-news lawyer. Kennedy's Senate role consists overwhelmingly of producing viral hearing-room clips for Fox News. Videos of his observations, by his office's own counting, draw hundreds of thousands of views per month. The hearings serve no oversight purpose — they generate content. A senator whose primary work product is YouTube clips is not performing the duties of his office. (NOLA)

Sources: Gambit Weekly • NOLA — Mexico Demands Apology • Daily Beast • The Advocate

🥈 Other Egregious Offenders by Name

The collapse is not limited to Graham and Kennedy. Across both chambers, specific Republicans have committed specific acts that any reasonable reading of the oath would treat as betrayals. The record is public.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). The man third in line for the presidency — who personally voted to overturn the 2020 election results on January 6 — publicly told Fox Business he “doesn't think the president has overstepped his bounds” on tariffs, war powers, or appropriations. As Speaker, he has refused to allow floor votes on War Powers Resolutions, refused to enforce subpoenas against the executive branch, and used the Speaker's chair to shield Trump from oversight. The Speaker's primary constitutional duty is to defend the institutional powers of the House. He has done the opposite. (NOTUS)
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD). Has refused to schedule any public Iran-war hearing. Has refused to bring Trump's clearly unconstitutional impoundment of appropriated funds to a vote. Has presided over the Senate's transformation from a body of advice and consent into a body of acclaim and consent. (TIME)
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) — Senate Armed Services Chair. The chairman of the committee with primary jurisdiction over the war scheduled the first public hearing on the Iran war for “sometime in May” — after the 60-day War Powers Resolution deadline had passed. Six weeks into a war his committee oversees, Sen. Adam Smith (D-WA) noted: “We still haven't gotten a public briefing from anyone in the administration about the war.” (TIME)
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). Called Carr's FCC threat against Jimmy Kimmel “dangerous as Hell” and compared Carr to “a mafioso” — then voted for every Trump nominee, every Trump appropriations bill, and against every War Powers Resolution. Said Democrats wanting hearings on the Iran war were “politically motivated.” Knows better. Does worse. (TIME / The Hill)
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI). Publicly opposed holding any public hearings on the Iran war: “I'm not sure what it would achieve, just give the Democrats an opportunity to cheerlead against America.” The chairman of one of the Senate's primary oversight committees says oversight is unpatriotic. (TIME)
House and Senate members who voted to overturn the 2020 election. Eight U.S. senators and 139 House Republicans voted to reject certified state electoral votes on January 6, 2021 — after a violent mob attacked the Capitol attempting to do exactly that. CREW, the Brennan Center, and dozens of constitutional scholars have argued that a credible case exists under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment for disqualifying officials who gave aid or comfort to that insurrection. Most still hold office. Several have been promoted to Speaker, committee chairs, and cabinet positions. (CREW / The Hill)
Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID). Rather than enforcing the federal statute that prohibits renaming the Kennedy Center, introduced an amendment to rename the Kennedy Center Opera House after Melania Trump. A member of Congress whose response to a presidential violation of federal law is to codify the violation has, by definition, abandoned the oath. (NOTUS)

Sources: NOTUS — Congressional Authority • TIME • CREW • The Hill — Disqualification Clause

⚖ What Accountability Actually Looks Like

“Holding members in contempt” and “bringing charges” sound like floor-pounding rhetoric, but the Constitution and federal law actually provide several real, lawful tools for holding oath-breakers accountable. Congress has chosen not to use them. Voters can.

Expulsion. Article I, Section 5 gives each chamber the power to expel a member by two-thirds vote. The Senate has expelled 15 members in its history; the House has expelled 6. The standard is not criminal conviction — it is conduct unbecoming. A two-thirds threshold means expulsion of MAGA Republicans is unrealistic in the current Congress, but the tool exists and the precedent is clear.
Censure. Each chamber can censure a member by majority vote — a formal record of disapproval that becomes part of the historical record and the member's reelection campaign. The Senate has censured 9 members; the House has censured 27. Not a single censure has been issued for the Iran war, the appropriations defiance, or the Bove confirmation.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The Constitution itself disqualifies from office any officer who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it, or gave “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” A New Mexico county commissioner was successfully disqualified under this clause in 2022 for his role in mobilizing the January 6 mob. The clause has not been pursued against any sitting member of Congress — despite 147 of them voting on January 6 to do exactly what the mob was demanding. (CREW / The Hill)
Criminal charges — where actual crimes occurred. Violating an oath of office is not, by itself, a crime. But specific underlying acts can be: seditious conspiracy (18 U.S.C. § 2384), obstruction of an official proceeding (18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2)), conspiracy to defraud the United States (18 U.S.C. § 371). Hundreds of January 6 rioters were convicted under these statutes. Members of Congress who coordinated with them have, to date, faced none of them. Trump's January 2025 mass pardon of January 6 defendants didn't just free the rioters — it foreclosed the prosecutorial path that would have reached the members of Congress who coordinated with them.
Civil suits and ethics complaints. The House and Senate Ethics Committees can investigate financial misconduct, abuse of office, and unbecoming conduct. Members can be referred to the DOJ. Both chambers' ethics committees have been effectively dormant under Republican control.
The most powerful remedy: the ballot. Every member of the House faces voters every two years. One-third of senators every two years. The 2026 midterms are the only realistic mechanism to enforce the oath that 147 sitting members of Congress took, and have spent the past year systematically violating. The Constitution provides the structure. Voters provide the consequence.

Sources: Constitution Annotated • CREW — Section 3 Disqualification • Deseret News

The oath is not a slogan. Its current text was written by men who had just watched their country nearly torn apart by officials who placed loyalty to a faction above loyalty to the Constitution. They wrote the words “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” — and the words “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion” — specifically because they had seen what happens when officeholders treat the oath as a formality and the President as a king. That is what is happening now. Lindsey Graham personally engineered an unauthorized war and bragged about the oil money. John Kennedy delivers racist soliloquies from a Senate dais and tells the President in private to please post less while defending him in public. Mike Johnson surrenders the House's Article I powers from the Speaker's chair. Roger Wicker delays the oversight hearing on a war past the deadline. Ron Johnson says oversight is unpatriotic. One hundred forty-seven members of the current Congress voted, on January 6, 2021, to do exactly what the mob attacking the Capitol was demanding — and most of them are still in office today, with several promoted to its highest ranks. None of this is normal. None of this is what they swore to do. Holding them in contempt — in the moral and political sense — is not partisan. It is the only response left to Americans who still take the oath seriously, even when the people who swore it do not.