A candidate for President of the United States, over the course of their campaign, might speak in front of thousands of people. They might publish hundreds of pages of proposals. They might make dozens of campaign promises. But, if they win, they will take only one Oath.
The requirement that a President take this Oath, and the words that the President is to speak when making it, are written into the Constitution:
Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:—“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
When you look at the document itself, these words sit between the description of who may become President and what powers that President will exercise. It is no accident that they should be placed here. They are a bulwark – the Founders would not bring forth the powers of the President until they had established an Oath that would bind the person who held those powers.
There is no question that Donald Trump broke that Oath after the 2020 election. Having lost that election, he sought to subvert, frustrate, and defy the Constitution. In the immediate aftermath of January 6th, everyone short of an avowed insurrectionist or tin-foil hatted conspiracist recognized that fact. Counted among those who saw that Oath breaking clearly were most of the Republican members of Congress.
The Constitution also requires that members of Congress take an Oath. Reflecting the Founder’s greater trust in the Congress than in the Presidency, the Constitution does not set out the words that are to be used in the Oath, finding it sufficient to state that members “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.” The text of the Oath was drafted by Congress itself in the 1960s:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) 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; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
The second impeachment of Donald Trump provided a test of that Oath. The Republicans failed that test. A mere ten (of the two hundred and eleven) Republicans in the House of Representatives and seven (of the fifty) Republicans in the Senate voted in a manner consistent with their Oath. The rest simply chose to break it, because it was expedient to do so. Mitch McConnell is the synecdoche for them all, saying “If this isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is” but choosing not to uphold his Oath, noting that “I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference.”
And that brings us to We, the People and to the choice in front of us.
The Constitution leaves a lot to our discretion. We can decide to elect a President and a Congress with any manner of economic policies, any manner of security policies, any manner of theories about whose interests the government should serve. We can decide to elevate any number of interests we may have ahead of almost all others. But the Constitution demands these Oaths from our leaders, and, in so doing, the Constitution demands something specific of us.
All oaths contain two messages. There is the message at the surface – by binding the speaker to some course of action, the oath of course is telling us that the action is vital. But there is always a second message, and although the message at the surface may vary from one oath to the next, this second message is always the same – “we are an honorable people.” For an oath is meaningless without honor – in some sense an oath is a distillation of honor – for nothing else will give an oath expression in the world. Without honor, an oath is merely theater, a costume that can be shrugged off whenever it begins to feel restrictive.
What becomes of a nation without honor? What becomes of a people without honor? A dishonorable nation, a dishonorable people, can nonetheless amass power and wealth – for a while, at least. Indeed, our experience provides ample evidence that dishonor often offers the shortest path to both. But no nation can be good without honor. Honor is what distinguishes the devout from the zealot, what directs power toward justice. And no nation of many peoples and many faiths and many ideas can long endure without the guarantee offered by honor. There is no set of laws with sufficient breadth and precision to prevent a party in power from abusing that power; instead, we rely on the restraint of honor. Without that restraint and the trust it engenders, politics loses its ability to mediate the conflicts that arise between those groups.
The Founders knew what they were doing when they required a would-be President and a would-be Congressperson to take these Oaths. They were taking steps to preserve the most fundamental elements of our nation, not only in our leaders but also in our own souls. They were leaving a statement about who we must be, what we must defend ahead of all other interests, what we must defeat if the need arises. These Oath Breakers are the test of who we are as a nation. They are a test that each of us will take when we vote. They are a test that we — that you — must not fail.