The following is the speech I believe a member of Congress must now deliver.
“Dear colleagues, my fellow Americans, I have thought long and hard before standing here before you to utter these words. Long and hard because there is a certain profound sadness that accompanies what I feel as an urgent need to speak out loudly and clearly about the danger to the very existence of our democracy that we now face. And the need for all of us, regardless of our political party or affiliations, to unite in protecting it.
“We are on the cusp — indeed, we are well past the cusp — of a threat to our democratic system and our humanistic values such as I never imagined I would see in this great nation during my lifetime. We are in the midst, rather, of a frontal attack on our system of government, our democratic values, our openness to diversity and to civilized discourse, and to our relationships beyond our own borders. And all this, clearly and undeniably, can be traced to the fact that the man, and the administration, we have democratically and freely elected this past November is attempting to destroy and undermine the very freedoms that brought him to this elevated position.
“My friends, we are at a place in which, in a deep and compelling sense, it is no longer relevant whether you are pro- or anti-immigration; pro- or anti-abortion; whether you do or do not believe in man-made climate change; and whether you support the Palestinians or the Israelis; the Ukranians or the Russians. We are, rather, in a place where the only thing that matters is whether or not you value the 250-year-old democracy created in this nation that has been the envy of both the free and the repressed throughout the world. Where the only thing that matters is whether — Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, Black or White or Hispanic or Asian — you treasure the values embodied in our Constitution that have made this country both the envy of, and the model for, the entire free world.
“This, my friends, is no longer a time for timidity. It is not even, sadly, a time for all that much civility. The incivility, arrogance, hubris and megalomania we, and the entire world, are now confronted with in the person of the man sitting in the White House as our 47th president negates civility. This, rather, is a time for only one thing: a single, and unified, resistance to what is rapidly becoming an irreversibly autocratic American government, bent on destroying our separation of powers, on undermining the corrective powers of our judiciary, and on belittling, insulting and, yes, expelling from our borders those it disagrees with.
“No less a great American — an immigrant from the impending evils of Nazi Germany—than Albert Einstein wrote that ‘The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.’ I myself — and I don’t believe that anyone in this chamber or on the streets of our nation — do not wish to be counted among those who saw such evil and failed to act in the light of it. I do not wish to aid and abet the realization of the late Pearl S. Buck to the effect that ‘when good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.’
“‘The battleline between good and evil,’ the great Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, in a protest against the Russian autocracy and dictatorship, ended his life as an American citizen, wrote, ‘runs through the heart of every man.’ It runs, unimpeded, through my own heart, and it runs through the heart of every decent American, no matter what party or what issues he or she is affiliated with.
“This, my friends, is not a time for timidity. It is not a time for cooperation or acquiescence, or for compromise. It is, rather, a time for all of us, for every single American dedicated to the fundamental values of our Constitution and of our democracy, to say a resounding ‘No!’ to every step taken by this administration to destroy and undermine our traditional values, and to vote a resounding ‘No!’ to every bill or law or attempt by this president to weaken our democracy in favor of his own unhampered, and fundamentally illegal, powers.
“It is a time, my fellow Americans, to decide what kind of America we truly want, what kind of people we truly are, and to do everything in our power to reverse — in the name of democracy and in the name of freedom — the tragic choice that too many of our fellow citizens made on Nov. 5, and take back our dignity and our freedom. Thank you.â€
