Republican lawmakers, where are your consciences?

Some time ago, I expressed guarded optimism that politics in this country had hit bottom and that there were signs of a turnaround. In my limited experience I had never seen anything like Sarah Palin or her fellow ignoramuses. It seemed to me that some of the population was taking notice and getting involved in pushing back.

But all this was before Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a danger to our country on the international stage, and he spends a lot of his time making personal attacks on the personal enemies of the moment on Twitter.

Meanwhile, the House and Senate Republicans are taking advantage of the president's outrageous behavior to divert public attention from their attempts to kill their constituents while lining their own pockets and those of their billionaire patrons.

President Trump has demonstrated, since well before his election, that he is mentally unable to discharge his duties. Rather than defending the Constitution, as all presidents swear to do, he complains of its inconvenience. In fact, many Republicans of the Tea Party persuasion are not at all fond of constitutional restraints on their power.

But, really, Trump's danger to America and the world ought to be enough to scare even the benighted members of the so-called Freedom Caucus and their ilk. If there were another Katrina or another 9/11 on this president's watch, I fear that our government could not mount a response. Not even the feeble response of George W. Bush. Absolutely no response at all.

Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution would allow the government to limp along with Mike Pence as acting president while Donald Trump alternately plays golf and tweets. But I would prefer impeachment. The line of succession in that case is horrible (Pence, Ryan, Hatch, and it keeps getting worse from there), but any one of them is more competent than our current president.

Congresspeople and Senators, how alarmed are you? How much do you love our country? Can you please remove this man from the White House?

The legislative battle of conservative and progressive theologies

Jack Jenkins, a writer for Think Progress, published an article on June 9, The strange origins of the GOP ideology that rejects caring for the poor, contrasting conservative and progressive theological approaches to poverty.

Politicians are backing up their ideologies with scripture. Republican legislators will cite Jesus's assertion that "The poor will always be with us," and Paul's admonition to the Thessalonians that "if a man will not work he shall not eat." Progressives push back with cases in which Jesus charged his disciples with helping the poor.

Jenkins: Conservative theology bad, progressive theology good.

What is not addressed in his opinion piece is the question of why, in our secular government, in the 21st Century, any legislator is using the Bible to prove anything, as though the Bible has any internal consistency as a moral guide, as though nobody has written anything more useful and reliable in the intervening centuries, as though the Bible were really the Word of God.

Conservatives are trying to prove, with scripture, that the poor deserve to be poor and are not favored by God; that the poor, to a man, do not want to work; that government assistance creates a class of people who are dependent on that assistance (although the poor already existed before the helping hand was extended), and that religious charity somehow does not have the same result.

Let us answer these questions by actually examining conservative and progressive approaches by looking at their results. We humans can figure out these human problems by ourselves. Scripture is no help. After all, scripture was once used to justify slavery. If you back up your arguments with scripture, you can justify any horrible human act.