The three Minneapolis police officers who said and did nothing while officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck and killed him have themselves been rightly indicted for aiding and abetting a murder.

What, then, should we do with Republican members of Congress, who for 3½ years have said and done nothing while Donald Trump has attacked and severely shaken the guardrails of American democracy? (Only Sen. Mitt Romney, who has forthrightly spoken out, deserves exclusion from this indictment.)

In their book “How Democracies Die,” political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point out that not all democracies fall to populist authoritarian leaders. Belgium, Britain, Costa Rice and Finland have all managed to keep authoritarians out of power – and not, as one might think, by the wisdom of the electorate alone.

In each case the leadership of the authoritarian’s party denounced their candidate and openly urged citizens to vote for the opposition candidate. In short, they declared, “Better to have democracy than our party’s candidate.”

Republican congressional leadership, to say nothing of that party’s membership save Sen. Romney, has failed their responsibility to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Voters in November must, therefore, eject from office the manifestly incompetent president and all Republicans who have aided and abetted him by their silence and inaction.

Mark Love
Falmouth

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