My hope is that as daunting the anticipation of undertaking the task of holding accountable those who Abuse Freedom of Speech will not cause us to just throw up our hands and shrug and not even attempt a solution
The parameters of which I dream is that anyone being paid by tax payer dollars or engaging in candidacy for such office will be held accountable for lying to voters and lying to us the employers who pay their salaries, benefits, health care for life in the case of Congressional members!
I have been employed for “eons” and within many corporate or government entities.
There is a slippery slope problem with exempting lying from the First Amendment, not the least defining exactly what a lie IS and whether a statement fits whatever definition we would come up with. Whole books have been written about the problem.
At a minimum, lying has to be a demonstrably false statement of fact known to be false by the speaker and intended to deceive others. Some theories require it also be intended to cause people to change position based on the lie, though 'changing position' can be as simple as modifying an belief or as serious as investing money based on a falsehood
We can often instinctively recognize when a statement is not true, but that is a broader issue than an actual grounds for punishing the speaker. Is obvious hyperbole a lie? Ingle's statement is an example; stupid, we all know it's not true, but does he REALLY think that people will believe it? As it is framed, it is also an arguably an opinion: even under defamation law, a statement of opinion is usually not considered an actionable lie. Nor do I think that if he WERE under oath, this would qualify as perjury. For all we know, he is so blinded by adoration that he thinks the statement is TRUE--a lot of what trump himself says is comes under that heading.
For some things, the idea that they should be treated as being "under oath" when spoken by a government spokesman would be one measure. But we would need to think very hard about which things would be thus covered.
Overall, I think it is more important to concentrate on finding ways to hold government folks accountable for what they DO, not what they say. Our federal courts at the District Court level are doing a really good job at analyzing actions in the context of the laws that govern those actions.
All that being said, the court of public opinion can decide for itself whether something is a false, even a lie. Our MSM could do a way better job of pointing it out. And the way we "punish" them is to vote them out. Our system has turned out to be not very good at getting rid of someone as corrupt as those in--and heading--this administration. There are lots of things that can be changed once a sane administration is back in power. I could go on for hours about this, but here is not a good place to do it.
Even more disturbing are all of these Executive Orders that trumpf is signing. On a recent one, he asked his aide, as he was about to sign, what he was signing and whose idea was it!!!! That is why I am forcefully in favor of Article II, Section 4; the entire cabal has to go. Here´s a refresher on that article:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the U.S, shall be removed from office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Of course they should all be removed but how do we address the toxic venality or fear of retribution that has officials in a chokehold preventing them from doing the right thing for the common good? I would like to think that for these officials to do the right thing would be reward in itself, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Along with venality and fear of retribution, you can’t fix stupid.
Here's the basic premise in the founding of the Enlightenment Model of the US: Rights were given to you by your Creator, not by your government. Your government didn't give them to you so, they can't take them away. Furthermore the 9th Amendment to the Constitution makes these guarantees explicit. If any person in the government tries to take them away anyway, despite lacking any authority to do so, they are traitors to the citizens and must be treated as such.
A common misconception regarding the US government is that it is not the case that they start with total power and authority and the Constitution then subtracts from those powers. Under the Constitutional Principle of Enumerated Powers and despite common wisdom, the government actually starts with zero power. Powers are then granted (Enumerated) by the Constitution. This means that our Natural Rights such as the right to Privacy or the right to Free Speech do not need to be explicitly granted to the populace - we have them by default. (The Bill of Rights, while unnecessary, is a constant reminder of these exquisite qualities as well as an invaluable educational tool.) What it does mean is that the government cannot violate those rights unless the ability to do so is explicitly granted by the Constitution - which in those cases it is not.
Every last person in the Federal Government works for us and they’ve collectively, abjectly invalidated themselves by abrogating their duties, for breaking and trampling all over every oath of office, for committing every crime we have a law for, and for subjugating us—meaning we do not have legitimate leadership and instead have a bunch of criminals masquerading as our government.
For too long we've sat back, relaxed, and let the government police itself, and by doing so have given the wolves the keys to the hen house while naively expecting - in our blissful ignorance - for the Chickens to be in good hands...
Those Chickens have been and are being slaughtered, and the time has come for us to put those wolves in prison and to take back what is ours. (Here’s how.)
Despite what the government at every level wants badly for you to believe, you do not serve them. They serve you.
We are living inside Orwwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm all at once. Every accusation is projection. Every complaint is a confession. Every “dominance display” is insecurity and fragility revealed.
With all that said the latest mess with propping up aging, inefficient, and polluting coal plants is a microcosm of the general rule. I have been working in power and gas for 30 years. Coal plants emissions can be controlled, albeit at a very high cost, but the disposal coal ash remains an ever present danger unless done properly. But all this administration does is roll back those environmental protections in the hope it will make these aging beasts more competitive. But they are not. Owners off these facilities want to retire them because they are no cost-effective to run and frankly not as reliable as they administration would have us believe. Coal plants have the highest forced outage rates of any kind of power generating type at 3 to 4 times higher than new state of the art gas units. Coal plants require far more time off line for planned maintenance than other than other dispatchable technologies. They are also highly inflexible in their operations with start up and shut down cycles that are lengthy and can ramp only slowly compared to gas or batteries.
We have made enormous progress in technology over these past 30 years that have benefited not only energy consumers, but also the environment with lower emissions asa well as lowering the use of increasingly scarce water resources. Finally, from a national security perspective, this is counter productive as gas, batteries, wind, and solar untie us from supply chains that we do not control at much lower costs if we look to electrifying transportation (can anybody say Middle East?)
In short, this administration wants to drag us back 75 years to 1950 not just in attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, and racism, but also with our entire energy system.
Not to mention taking us back to pre-Civil War days by reversing civil rights legislation at the behest of a criminal-based Supreme Court. All this winking and nodding at their unsupported decisions is driving us crazy.
Can’t argue with that. To be purposefully flippant, 77 million voted to get utterly shit faced drunk and become a third rate country all be aide they were either greedy or fatally insecure like the orange idiot.
My ethical compass is spinning. The one directing Congress is broken. Trump and his administration have flushed theirs down the golden toilet. I feel like The Boy in the Bubble…I can see but am walled off from what used to be democracy.
“MacArthur Park is melting in the dark, all the sweet cream icing melting down…someone left the cake out in the rain, I don’t think that I can make it, cause it took so long to bake it…”
Yesterday afternoon I received my weekly update from our state senator, Roger Marshall, of KS. The last paragraph stated: "On an exciting note, the energy around America's 250th birthday is starting to build. In one month, America turns 250. President Trump is making sure our nation's capital looks worthy of the occasion, and the July 4th celebrations are going got be something special."
Looks worthy of the occasion..........................my jaw hit the floor with that one. Even though it is not a direct lie, in my humble opinion he's lying to me and telling me my lying eyes do not see what I see in and around the WH.
We fellow Kansan's are working on Roger's replacement now...................and that's no lie.
Yes, many Ameircans are fools. They were fooled when President Bush said the Cold War is over, and we won. They were fooled when Trump flat out said "I have no connections with Russians." And they were fooled, when Trump and his armed buddies attacked the Capital in an attempt to overthrow the government - TREASON by any name. These same 'fooled" people voted him back into office in 2024.
We have Russian Organized Crime across the U.S. They are doing Trump's dirty work: fires in California because the state has a Democrat Govenor, bombing of an explosives factory in Tennessee where 16 people died - this plant sends ammunition to Ukraine, a judge's home burned to the ground because she refused to give the DOJ voting registration infromation for South Carolina, a Mormom Church burned in Michigan because they sent funds to Ukraine, and perhaps worst of all the kidnapping and possible murder of Nancy Guthrie. Trump did a televized interview with Savannah Guthrie, and afterward called her deranged. In the last 18 months, Trump has identified over 400 individuals for retribution and Guthrie was on his "hit list." On top of that, the kidnapper asked for payment of $6 million in bitcoms. There have been over 200,000 kidnappings in the U.S. and not one asked to be paid in bitcomes. At the same time, the bitcom business that he and his sons started was experiencing a stock fall of $82 million in loss.
If anyone in the U.S. thinks that Trump is not led by Russians, he/she is a fool.
Do I think that the 2026 elections will be the year that Trump trips and falls, the answer is a big MAYBE. He is obviously physically ill, and is fighting a disease of somekind. But he has managed to survive the last ten years by fooling the American public.
Although we think that PT Barnum said it best, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time,” it actually was attributed to Abraham Lincoln. It’s certainly true of our society today. The key word here, though, is “fool”, and there are many fools among us who need a big head slap to wake them from their misplaced revery.
If your “we” in the question refers to the we being the American populace as a whole, then the answer seems to that the public has a never ending tolerance for Trump and his sycophants. The people just keep taking it and taking it and taking it.
I certainly hope that the midterms put a halt to the madness that is America at the present. Its the only way that anything will get accomplished. I sincerely believe that.
“How much more lying will we take?” Until we the people decide that it is too much to accept. Until then, we will continue to allow the lies to define us and to consume us.
Remember all who died for for us 82 years ago today (on D-Day) on the beaches of Normandy: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Sword, Ruby, men who risked and gave their lives for us and our freedom from tyranny and oppression. Unless and until we stand with them, we betray their honor.
“Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted, when we tolerate what we know to be wrong, when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy or too frightened, when we fail to speak up and speak out, we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice.” - Senator Robert F. Kennedy. https://tinyurl.com/mr244p7u Today and every day we must choose to let his words guide us to act for ourselves and for each other or acquiesce and thereby validate them. RFK died on June 6, 1968, 58 years ago today. It is time to hear him.
It isn't the first time that men who express reverence for democracy in public have violated the values of democracy in practice. The secret government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and super patriots, who for a variety of motives operate outside the legitimate institutions of government. Presidents have turned to them when they can't win the support of the Congress or the people, creating that unsupervised power so feared by the framers of our Constitution.
All this -- the contempt for Congress, the defiance of law, the huge markups and profits, the secret bank accounts, the shady characters, the shakedown of foreign governments, the complicity in death and destruction -- they did all this in the dark, because it would never stand the light of day. Secrecy is the freedom zealots dream of; no watchman to check the door, no accountant to check the books, no judge to check the law. The secret government has no constitution. The rules it follows are the rules it makes up.
Our nation was born in rebellion against tyranny. We are the fortunate heirs of those who fought for America's freedom, and then drew up a remarkable charter to protect it against arbitrary power. The Constitution begins with the words, "We the people." The government gathers its authority from the people, and the governors are as obligated to uphold the law as the governed. That was revolutionary. Listen now to the voices of some people who believe the fight for freedom isn't over.
I think we are nearing an inflection point. However, we'd do well to keep in mind that the psychological defense of 'denial' is one of the most deeply embedded ways that people deal with things that feel too threatening to bear. A close cousin is 'avoidance' or looking the other way, which leads to passivity. Anyone working in journalism right now would do well by the public if they kept hammering the point that clear seers understand: this president is immoral, physically failing, ignorant, lazy and corrupt. If all that doesn't mean he's unfit for office, what would? Eating a live baby on the south lawn of the White House? Oh, wait, there's a cage fighting arena on the south lawn. Okay, then, how's about watching Trump lose control of his bladder while greeting a foreign dignitary? We've already seen him lose control of his mouth any number of times.
The Republicans have perverted the process and the Democrats are doing little to prevent it. The people need to take back our government because we are quickly getting to the point of no return.
It feels like we’re living in a movie we’re sorry we watched!
Hi, Steven
Yes lying is an abuse of Freedom of Speech
I’ve been collecting some information.
We should legislate against candidates for public office, elected officials, public employees- lying.
-It is or has been addressed in several other countries: Wales, Austria, Singapore
We vote based on the claims candidates state.
We pay the salaries of elected officials and government employees.
They should be held to high standards and be held accountable for abuse of Freedom Speech.
Government official statements should be held to the same standards as being under oath.
Yes!!!!!! Excellent!!!
Simple
Logical
Concise
💙👏💙
I started writing about this may I include your comment if I publish here on Substack, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, BlueSky, Denver Westward?
I would attribute it to you, if you agree.
I volunteer. So no fees to share.
Feel free to use it. No need to attribute it to me. I heard that from someone else so it's not original.
Excellent assessment
My hope is that as daunting the anticipation of undertaking the task of holding accountable those who Abuse Freedom of Speech will not cause us to just throw up our hands and shrug and not even attempt a solution
The parameters of which I dream is that anyone being paid by tax payer dollars or engaging in candidacy for such office will be held accountable for lying to voters and lying to us the employers who pay their salaries, benefits, health care for life in the case of Congressional members!
I have been employed for “eons” and within many corporate or government entities.
None Zero Zilch -
tolerated any deception.
So I dream I search I speak I propose …. ☺️
We must find a solution
Thank you
Interesting discussion
💙👏💙
There is a slippery slope problem with exempting lying from the First Amendment, not the least defining exactly what a lie IS and whether a statement fits whatever definition we would come up with. Whole books have been written about the problem.
At a minimum, lying has to be a demonstrably false statement of fact known to be false by the speaker and intended to deceive others. Some theories require it also be intended to cause people to change position based on the lie, though 'changing position' can be as simple as modifying an belief or as serious as investing money based on a falsehood
We can often instinctively recognize when a statement is not true, but that is a broader issue than an actual grounds for punishing the speaker. Is obvious hyperbole a lie? Ingle's statement is an example; stupid, we all know it's not true, but does he REALLY think that people will believe it? As it is framed, it is also an arguably an opinion: even under defamation law, a statement of opinion is usually not considered an actionable lie. Nor do I think that if he WERE under oath, this would qualify as perjury. For all we know, he is so blinded by adoration that he thinks the statement is TRUE--a lot of what trump himself says is comes under that heading.
For some things, the idea that they should be treated as being "under oath" when spoken by a government spokesman would be one measure. But we would need to think very hard about which things would be thus covered.
Overall, I think it is more important to concentrate on finding ways to hold government folks accountable for what they DO, not what they say. Our federal courts at the District Court level are doing a really good job at analyzing actions in the context of the laws that govern those actions.
All that being said, the court of public opinion can decide for itself whether something is a false, even a lie. Our MSM could do a way better job of pointing it out. And the way we "punish" them is to vote them out. Our system has turned out to be not very good at getting rid of someone as corrupt as those in--and heading--this administration. There are lots of things that can be changed once a sane administration is back in power. I could go on for hours about this, but here is not a good place to do it.
Even more disturbing are all of these Executive Orders that trumpf is signing. On a recent one, he asked his aide, as he was about to sign, what he was signing and whose idea was it!!!! That is why I am forcefully in favor of Article II, Section 4; the entire cabal has to go. Here´s a refresher on that article:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the U.S, shall be removed from office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
The last four words are provable and appropriate.
Of course they should all be removed but how do we address the toxic venality or fear of retribution that has officials in a chokehold preventing them from doing the right thing for the common good? I would like to think that for these officials to do the right thing would be reward in itself, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Along with venality and fear of retribution, you can’t fix stupid.
Here's the basic premise in the founding of the Enlightenment Model of the US: Rights were given to you by your Creator, not by your government. Your government didn't give them to you so, they can't take them away. Furthermore the 9th Amendment to the Constitution makes these guarantees explicit. If any person in the government tries to take them away anyway, despite lacking any authority to do so, they are traitors to the citizens and must be treated as such.
A common misconception regarding the US government is that it is not the case that they start with total power and authority and the Constitution then subtracts from those powers. Under the Constitutional Principle of Enumerated Powers and despite common wisdom, the government actually starts with zero power. Powers are then granted (Enumerated) by the Constitution. This means that our Natural Rights such as the right to Privacy or the right to Free Speech do not need to be explicitly granted to the populace - we have them by default. (The Bill of Rights, while unnecessary, is a constant reminder of these exquisite qualities as well as an invaluable educational tool.) What it does mean is that the government cannot violate those rights unless the ability to do so is explicitly granted by the Constitution - which in those cases it is not.
Every last person in the Federal Government works for us and they’ve collectively, abjectly invalidated themselves by abrogating their duties, for breaking and trampling all over every oath of office, for committing every crime we have a law for, and for subjugating us—meaning we do not have legitimate leadership and instead have a bunch of criminals masquerading as our government.
For too long we've sat back, relaxed, and let the government police itself, and by doing so have given the wolves the keys to the hen house while naively expecting - in our blissful ignorance - for the Chickens to be in good hands...
Those Chickens have been and are being slaughtered, and the time has come for us to put those wolves in prison and to take back what is ours. (Here’s how.)
Despite what the government at every level wants badly for you to believe, you do not serve them. They serve you.
We are living inside Orwwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm all at once. Every accusation is projection. Every complaint is a confession. Every “dominance display” is insecurity and fragility revealed.
With all that said the latest mess with propping up aging, inefficient, and polluting coal plants is a microcosm of the general rule. I have been working in power and gas for 30 years. Coal plants emissions can be controlled, albeit at a very high cost, but the disposal coal ash remains an ever present danger unless done properly. But all this administration does is roll back those environmental protections in the hope it will make these aging beasts more competitive. But they are not. Owners off these facilities want to retire them because they are no cost-effective to run and frankly not as reliable as they administration would have us believe. Coal plants have the highest forced outage rates of any kind of power generating type at 3 to 4 times higher than new state of the art gas units. Coal plants require far more time off line for planned maintenance than other than other dispatchable technologies. They are also highly inflexible in their operations with start up and shut down cycles that are lengthy and can ramp only slowly compared to gas or batteries.
We have made enormous progress in technology over these past 30 years that have benefited not only energy consumers, but also the environment with lower emissions asa well as lowering the use of increasingly scarce water resources. Finally, from a national security perspective, this is counter productive as gas, batteries, wind, and solar untie us from supply chains that we do not control at much lower costs if we look to electrifying transportation (can anybody say Middle East?)
In short, this administration wants to drag us back 75 years to 1950 not just in attitudes, beliefs, prejudices, and racism, but also with our entire energy system.
Not to mention taking us back to pre-Civil War days by reversing civil rights legislation at the behest of a criminal-based Supreme Court. All this winking and nodding at their unsupported decisions is driving us crazy.
Can’t argue with that. To be purposefully flippant, 77 million voted to get utterly shit faced drunk and become a third rate country all be aide they were either greedy or fatally insecure like the orange idiot.
My ethical compass is spinning. The one directing Congress is broken. Trump and his administration have flushed theirs down the golden toilet. I feel like The Boy in the Bubble…I can see but am walled off from what used to be democracy.
“MacArthur Park is melting in the dark, all the sweet cream icing melting down…someone left the cake out in the rain, I don’t think that I can make it, cause it took so long to bake it…”
Yesterday afternoon I received my weekly update from our state senator, Roger Marshall, of KS. The last paragraph stated: "On an exciting note, the energy around America's 250th birthday is starting to build. In one month, America turns 250. President Trump is making sure our nation's capital looks worthy of the occasion, and the July 4th celebrations are going got be something special."
Looks worthy of the occasion..........................my jaw hit the floor with that one. Even though it is not a direct lie, in my humble opinion he's lying to me and telling me my lying eyes do not see what I see in and around the WH.
We fellow Kansan's are working on Roger's replacement now...................and that's no lie.
We are done; how to reform this broken government?
Yes, many Ameircans are fools. They were fooled when President Bush said the Cold War is over, and we won. They were fooled when Trump flat out said "I have no connections with Russians." And they were fooled, when Trump and his armed buddies attacked the Capital in an attempt to overthrow the government - TREASON by any name. These same 'fooled" people voted him back into office in 2024.
We have Russian Organized Crime across the U.S. They are doing Trump's dirty work: fires in California because the state has a Democrat Govenor, bombing of an explosives factory in Tennessee where 16 people died - this plant sends ammunition to Ukraine, a judge's home burned to the ground because she refused to give the DOJ voting registration infromation for South Carolina, a Mormom Church burned in Michigan because they sent funds to Ukraine, and perhaps worst of all the kidnapping and possible murder of Nancy Guthrie. Trump did a televized interview with Savannah Guthrie, and afterward called her deranged. In the last 18 months, Trump has identified over 400 individuals for retribution and Guthrie was on his "hit list." On top of that, the kidnapper asked for payment of $6 million in bitcoms. There have been over 200,000 kidnappings in the U.S. and not one asked to be paid in bitcomes. At the same time, the bitcom business that he and his sons started was experiencing a stock fall of $82 million in loss.
If anyone in the U.S. thinks that Trump is not led by Russians, he/she is a fool.
Do I think that the 2026 elections will be the year that Trump trips and falls, the answer is a big MAYBE. He is obviously physically ill, and is fighting a disease of somekind. But he has managed to survive the last ten years by fooling the American public.
Although we think that PT Barnum said it best, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time,” it actually was attributed to Abraham Lincoln. It’s certainly true of our society today. The key word here, though, is “fool”, and there are many fools among us who need a big head slap to wake them from their misplaced revery.
If your “we” in the question refers to the we being the American populace as a whole, then the answer seems to that the public has a never ending tolerance for Trump and his sycophants. The people just keep taking it and taking it and taking it.
I certainly hope that the midterms put a halt to the madness that is America at the present. Its the only way that anything will get accomplished. I sincerely believe that.
“We” will. “They” will do everything they can to undo the results of our votes. Predictable. Preventable?
“How much more lying will we take?” Until we the people decide that it is too much to accept. Until then, we will continue to allow the lies to define us and to consume us.
Remember all who died for for us 82 years ago today (on D-Day) on the beaches of Normandy: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Sword, Ruby, men who risked and gave their lives for us and our freedom from tyranny and oppression. Unless and until we stand with them, we betray their honor.
“Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted, when we tolerate what we know to be wrong, when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy or too frightened, when we fail to speak up and speak out, we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice.” - Senator Robert F. Kennedy. https://tinyurl.com/mr244p7u Today and every day we must choose to let his words guide us to act for ourselves and for each other or acquiesce and thereby validate them. RFK died on June 6, 1968, 58 years ago today. It is time to hear him.
=====
Bill Moyers, November 4, 1987; The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis; https://billmoyers.com/api/ajax/?template=ajax-transcript&post=1531
It isn't the first time that men who express reverence for democracy in public have violated the values of democracy in practice. The secret government is an interlocking network of official functionaries, spies, mercenaries, ex-generals, profiteers and super patriots, who for a variety of motives operate outside the legitimate institutions of government. Presidents have turned to them when they can't win the support of the Congress or the people, creating that unsupervised power so feared by the framers of our Constitution.
All this -- the contempt for Congress, the defiance of law, the huge markups and profits, the secret bank accounts, the shady characters, the shakedown of foreign governments, the complicity in death and destruction -- they did all this in the dark, because it would never stand the light of day. Secrecy is the freedom zealots dream of; no watchman to check the door, no accountant to check the books, no judge to check the law. The secret government has no constitution. The rules it follows are the rules it makes up.
Our nation was born in rebellion against tyranny. We are the fortunate heirs of those who fought for America's freedom, and then drew up a remarkable charter to protect it against arbitrary power. The Constitution begins with the words, "We the people." The government gathers its authority from the people, and the governors are as obligated to uphold the law as the governed. That was revolutionary. Listen now to the voices of some people who believe the fight for freedom isn't over.
Someone in the room should have shouted "wake up!"
No Sh##! So you are asked to leave…speak the truth for goodness sake!
I think we are nearing an inflection point. However, we'd do well to keep in mind that the psychological defense of 'denial' is one of the most deeply embedded ways that people deal with things that feel too threatening to bear. A close cousin is 'avoidance' or looking the other way, which leads to passivity. Anyone working in journalism right now would do well by the public if they kept hammering the point that clear seers understand: this president is immoral, physically failing, ignorant, lazy and corrupt. If all that doesn't mean he's unfit for office, what would? Eating a live baby on the south lawn of the White House? Oh, wait, there's a cage fighting arena on the south lawn. Okay, then, how's about watching Trump lose control of his bladder while greeting a foreign dignitary? We've already seen him lose control of his mouth any number of times.
The Republicans have perverted the process and the Democrats are doing little to prevent it. The people need to take back our government because we are quickly getting to the point of no return.