you are hereA friend asked me last night if I was going to submit a question to the Presidential debate at Yearly Kos. I had to think about it for a minute, then I realized that my question isn’t so much for the whole group of candidates, but rather for the four who are currently U.S. Senators.

So, here’s my question:

Senator Biden, Senator Clinton, Senator Dodd, and Senator Obama, why the hell are you here and not in Washington doing your job? I understand that campaigning is important, but the election is nearly a year and a half away. The primaries are still six months away. Is all this glad-handing really necessary?

If you really want to prove to me that you should be the next U.S. President, then cool it with this pas de deux you’re locked into with the media and act like you actually care about your current job. The people who elected you are still counting on you to be their Senator, and the people of the U.S. are counting on you to help do something about the current, miserable state of affairs in our nation’s capital.

It’s like Jane said yesterday:

The events of recent weeks have freaked a lot of people out. We have President who has devolved into utter lawlessness and nobody with the power to stand up to him is doing so.

She quotes Jack Balkin, who says:

If the NSA program and the Torture Memos were examples of the second round of constitutional hardball, the Libby commutation and Harriet Meiers’ refusal to testify before Congress are examples of the third round. Although his Presidency now seems to be a failure, Bush’s third round of constitutional hardball may be every bit as important as the first two. That is because if Bush is never held accountable for what he did in office, future presidents will be greatly tempted to adopt features of his practices.

Jane:

I don’t know if this thought scares the daylights out of anybody else, but it has plagued me of late — that if nothing is done to stop Bush, if he pays no price, we’re looking at the future of the United States because there is nothing for any President to fear. And that’s a pretty bleak picture.

This is crucially important. With a flash and a bang, George Bush has disappeared up his own asshole to dispassionately muse about what his “legacy” will be with regards to history. The people of the United States and our elected representatives need to be thinking just as long and hard about how history will see us, the Americans who sat on our hands and enabled the most criminal regime in the history of our Republic to loot the treasury, savage a nation who never attacked us, and lard our national political structure down with a bunch of Regent Law School deadbeats and other partisan hacks.

The president is openly flouting the law now. He’s daring us to do something about it, counting on the fact that the American public doesn’t have the stomach for real, bare-knuckles accountability, and that the elected Democrats are too scared of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to openly defy a Chief Executive who has openly defied them, the American People, and the Constitution.

Senators, we need you to attend to your duty, all hands on deck. If you want to make passionate speeches, make them on the Senate floor. If you want to show us that you have the gumption to lead this country and turn things around, don’t tell me about it. Show me. Roll up your sleeves and get to work. There will be plenty of time to kiss babies and shake hands with strangers this winter in the run-up to the primaries.

I don’t care who has the biggest war-chest. I don’t care who Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones have endorsed. I care who is willing to bring the fight the Republican Dead-Enders who still support an indefinite, open-ended commitment in Iraq. Thousands of people die every month that we delay. Human lives are being fed into the furnace of souls that is the Iraq War, and you guys are swanning around Iowa and New Hampshire like there’s no Constitutional emergency back in DC, “Oh, that? We’ll get around to fixing that whenever we’re in office.”

No. That’s just not good enough.

If you love this country, if you care about more than just the acquisition of more power, then get your rich, pampered asses back to Washington and get to work. Harry Reid showed a lot of guts today, forcing the Republicans into an up-or-down vote on ending the war. You should have been a part of that. We need to see your faces and hear your voices in this debate. We need that a whole lot more than we need to see you standing behind podiums and mouthing platitudes at each other about what you’d do if you were president.

Don’t tell us. Show us. Now is the time for action. Show us that you can lead. Show us that you really care about what happens to this country.

“Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.” (Goethe)

This is not the time for Business as Usual. This is the time for Taking Care of Business. You can campaign on your own time. Right now, you still work for us.

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