Congress Shall: The Off-Ramp Is Behind Us
A second open letter to the conservatives of America, and a renewed Citizens’ Petition for Articles of Impeachment
The Letter
In January, I wrote to the Republican Party about a last off-ramp. I said history records votes and public action, and that a choice still existed. I asked the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan to choose the Constitution over a man. In the same week, this publication issued a Citizens’ Petition for Articles of Impeachment — a rule-of-law maneuver, lawful and nonviolent, placing Congress on notice that its constitutional duties were being monitored by the people it represents.
Six months have passed. Let me tell you what happened on Thursday, July 9th, because it is the answer to both documents.
The President of the United States fired the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission — the only federal agency devoted solely to helping states run elections. Two commissioners, both Democrats, were terminated by email. The lone remaining Republican was permitted to resign. The fourth seat was already empty. The agency that maintains the national voter registration form, certifies voting machines, and distributes federal election funds now has no one in it. Four months before a midterm election.
This did not happen in a vacuum. The Federal Election Commission — the body that enforces campaign finance law — has been unable to act for over a year, its quorum broken, one of its commissioners fired by the same President without cause and without replacement. And ten days before the EAC firings, the Supreme Court overturned ninety-one years of precedent to hand the executive branch the power to remove the leadership of independent agencies at will.
Follow the sequence. The Court removes the guardrail. Within two weeks, the President empties the agency that stands between the White House and the machinery of the vote. And the election that machinery will serve is the election that determines whether his party retains the Congress — the same Congress that holds the sole constitutional power to remove him.
And the vote is only half of it. In February, the President launched a war against Iran without a declaration, without authorization, without so much as a full legal accounting to the handful of leaders he notified hours before the bombs fell. In June, for the first time in the fifty-three-year history of the War Powers Resolution, both chambers of Congress passed a directive ordering him to stand down absent their authorization. Within days, he ordered new strikes. Hold both facts in your hand at once: a President who empties the commissions that watch his elections is the same President who bombs through the recorded objection of the Congress that could remove him. The pattern has one author and one subject, and the subject is accountability itself.
We have been here before, and the party flinched. Twice the House impeached this man. Twice the Senate had the evidence and the oath, and twice it looked away — the second time under the direction of Mitch McConnell, the ghoul of the Senate, figurative then, rather more literal now, who admitted on the floor that the President was “practically and morally responsible” for the events of January 6th and then voted to leave the reckoning to courts he had spent a career packing against reckonings. McConnell had the brake in his hand and passed it to history’s most dangerous driver. Every firing this month, every emptied commission, every email termination sent four months before a national election, is the compound interest on that vote. The men who saved him from conviction did not spare the country a trial. They only rescheduled it, and moved it to a venue where the defendant appoints the judges.
And consider what the defendant did with the venue. On his first day back in office, he pardoned some fifteen hundred people convicted of or charged with attacking the Capitol on his behalf — including those who beat police officers with flagpoles and fists, including those convicted of seditious conspiracy. Then he went further: the prosecutors who tried those cases were fired, and the Bureau was made to produce lists of every agent who had touched them. The officers held the line for the Republic on January 6th; the officers who investigated it did their duty to the American people. He freed the men who attacked them and punished the men who defended them. There is a word for a leader who rewards violence done in his name and avenges himself on the law that answered it, and the word has never been president.
I want to be precise about what this is, because precision is what the moment demands. A man facing judgment has begun dismissing the people appointed to render it. In any courtroom in America, we would recognize this instantly. A defendant who fires the jury has told you his verdict on himself. My grandmother had a plainer way of putting it. Grammina used to say a man who won’t step on the scale has already read the number. She was talking about my uncle and a county fair, but she was right about presidents too.
Some of you will say the EAC was a weak agency, underfunded, prone to gridlock. True, and beside the point. Congress designed it as a bipartisan body — four members, no more than two from either party — because the authors of that statute understood something the current moment has forgotten: the referee must belong to neither team. The weakness of the agency was never the danger. The danger is a President who looked at even that modest, hobbled, bipartisan referee and decided it could not be permitted to exist while his fate was on the ballot.
In January I told you Democrats cannot stop this alone, and that remains true. They can litigate. They can campaign. They can win seats, if the elections remain honest enough to win. What they cannot do is restore the legitimacy of a republic whose governing party stood by while the scaffolding of the vote was carried off piece by piece. Only you can do that. That was true in January. It is true now, with less time on the clock.
The Principle
The United States is governed by law. When law is selectively enforced, delayed for political convenience, or ignored outright, the legitimacy of every public office weakens — the executive’s, and Congress’s with it. If Congress expects citizens to comply with statutes, rulings, taxes, subpoenas, and regulations, Congress shall demonstrate that the law applies upward as well as downward. No office sits above it. No administration is exempt from it. No Congress is relieved of enforcing it.
The remedy for an executive who turns the powers of his office against the process that holds him accountable has existed since 1787. Impeachment was written for precisely this officer. The framers included it because they had read enough history to know that some men, given power, will use it to make certain power is never taken back.
I hear the counsel of patience. Wait for the courts. Wait for the midterms. Wait for the party to right itself. Consider what those counsels now ask of you: they ask you to trust the outcome of an election overseen by a government that just removed everyone whose job was to oversee it. Patience assumes the process holds. The process is what is being dismantled.
Conservatism, as I understand it and as I have argued for it in these pages, is the defense of inherited institutions against the appetites of the moment. There is no institution more inherited, more fought-for, more paid-for in blood than the American ballot. A conservative who will not defend the vote has conserved nothing. He has merely obeyed.
The Maneuver
Citizens do not possess the power to impeach. Congress does. This Petition exists to invoke that power and to document Congress’s response — or its refusal to respond.
What follows is a coordinated act of civic instruction: citizens submitting written Petitions for Articles of Impeachment to Members of Congress and relevant offices, asserting three things. Congress is constitutionally obligated to conduct oversight. Credible, documented events require investigation. Silence in the face of both is abdication.
This is a rule-of-law maneuver. It presumes no guilt beyond what courts have already adjudicated, dictates no verdict, and bypasses no constitutional process. It insists on process itself — because a republic survives by its procedures being honored even when they are inconvenient, and especially when they are inconvenient to the powerful.
And it travels by paper, deliberately. Digital outrage is easy to ignore. Paper creates records, labor, and accountability. Each Petition is an individual constituent entering a formal notice into the institutional workflow of Congress. Volume matters. Persistence matters. Documentation matters. Every envelope forces an institution to acknowledge that citizens are paying attention, documenting inaction, and preserving evidence of compliance or refusal.
Take Action
1. Download the Petition. The Comprehensive Revision of the Citizens’ Petition is available below. It consolidates and supersedes the January edition, and it enumerates fourteen grounds for inquiry across six sections: interference with election administration and oversight; unauthorized war and defiance of Congress; obstruction of justice and abuse of the clemency power; use of federal power against perceived adversaries; adjudicated personal conduct, including the President’s felony conviction; and foreign entanglements and self-enrichment. Where courts have ruled, the Petition cites their findings as adjudicated fact; where matters remain contested, it demands investigation, testimony under oath, and resolution on the public record. The grounds are enumerated deliberately and in full, in each successive revision, because a grievance withdrawn is a grievance abandoned — and these are not abandoned. Submit it as written or add your own statement. If you disagree with ours, write your own. Make your voice heard.
[Citizens’ Petition for Articles of Impeachment — Comprehensive Revision, July 2026] [Download]
2. Print and sign. Complete the signature block in full, with your legal name and current address. Unsigned or anonymous submissions are routinely disregarded by congressional offices.
3. Mail it. First-Class Mail, one recipient per envelope, and retain a copy for your records. Send to:
- Your U.S. House Representative — The Honorable ______, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC 20515
- Both U.S. Senators — The Honorable ______, United States Senate, Washington, DC 20510
- Chair, House Committee on the Judiciary — 2138 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515
- Chair, Senate Committee on the Judiciary — 224 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510
- President of the United States — The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500
- Office of the White House Counsel — The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500
- Clerk of the Supreme Court — 1 First Street NE, Washington, DC 20543 (informational notice only)
This routing ensures all three constitutional branches receive formal notice that citizens are documenting and asserting the rule of law.
Closing
So I write to you a second time, knowing the first letter went unanswered. I write because the record matters. When your grandchildren ask what you did when the President began firing the referees of his own election, “I waited to see how it turned out” will be a confession. History does not judge republics by how passionately their citizens argued online. It judges them by whether lawful institutions were allowed to decay without resistance.
The off-ramp I wrote about in January is behind us now. What remains is the brake.
Congress shall act.
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