So help me God
Ido solemnly swear 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.
This is the Oath of Office that all elected officials, state and national take with some wording changed for different branches of the government. The first part of this oath is not changed. It is the most important of all. “I do solemnly swear I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.”
To me, this says it all. My father was a military man. My siblings and I were taught about this oath and about our government…how it works. I was always interested in it from the time I was a kid. I knew our government was a democracy. As I grew into adulthood and became an educator — and especially when I became involved in adult education — I learned how little citizens knew about the government of the United States. And it was dismaying.
When I asked my students what our system of checks balances were, no one in the class knew. These were people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond who looked at me with a blank expression. When asked what the three branches of the government were, silence.
This is when I knew, or at least I felt, it was my duty as an educator to educate these students who were working their way toward a GED ( General Education Diploma) and beyond. Every American should know about how their government works. It’s their duty to know this.
First of all, the United States is a democracy, so what does this mean? A simple definition from Merriam-Webster Dictionary is that it’s a form of government in which political control is exercised by the people, especially the rule of the majority in which the supreme power is vested by the people directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.
The three branches of our government are the executive — the president and his or her cabinet; the legislative — the Congress with the Senate and House of Representatives; and the judicial — the court systems with the highest being the United States Supreme Court. These three branches are in place so that no one branch has higher power than the other. It is a protection of sorts so that no one branch will be able to be in total control. In other words, the president is not the supreme power. Congress can override something the president might propose and the Supreme Court can override this situation also. Which is what they did recently.
We have a president who through his actions simply does not know how this government works. He has complained about the Constitution, which is the law of the land. This current administration has attempted to undermine this recent election by constantly making frivolous lawsuits, which have all been thrown out. This administration has tried to get an election by the people of this country overthrown as being a fraud. Members of this administration, elected by the people, have broken their oath to this country to support and uphold the Constitution. This administration has repeatedly encouraged the Republican states to overthrow the election.
The Supreme Court threw out all the lawsuits. The people in this country voted. Nothing was found to be amiss. This is how a democracy works. Yet, the current administration continues to try to undermine the will of the people.
Here’s the thing, and this is important to note. This outgoing president got a lot of votes. He won several states, but a presidential candidate wins by the electoral college votes. In 2016, he won by 306 to 232. He readily accepted this even though he didn’t get the popular vote. This didn’t make him happy, but no matter.
We come to the 2020 election. The majority voted for Biden, and he received 306 electoral votes with the out going president getting 232. Kind of ironic isn’t it? And the outgoing president immediately cast allegations of voter fraud and has been pitching fits and not governing this country since he lost.
When it’s all said and done, our country’s democracy will be upheld as it should be. We need our country back. We need elected officials to take their oath of office seriously. We are not a third world country with a leadership of threats, innuendoes of fraud and temper tantrums. We are a democracy. So help me God, we are.