There are times when activating conscience in our surroundings is the most important thing we can do. This is one of those times.

Just over 9 months ago, two American citizens were summarily executed while peacefully exercising their unalienable right to bear witness to the victimization of more vulnerable neighbors. Alex Pretti and Renee Good were murdered in the streets of Minneapolis, by agents of their own government, while embodying the decency they believed lives in all of us.

Minnesotans responded to violence with charity, prayer, song, and love. Their example reinvigorated popular commitment to universal and unalienable human rights—our national purpose.

Modest reflection raises a question of deeper horror: Their deaths were part of a much wider pattern of cruelty, lawlessness, and mass killing.

• Dozens more innocent people have been killed in the streets or in custody by an unconstitutional program of warrantless detention and arbitrary violence, posing as immigration enforcement.
• More than 200 people have been murdered in illegal missile strikes on civilian craft in international waters.
• More than 150 civilians, mostly children, were killed in a missile strike on a girls primary school in Minab, Iran.
• It is estimated more than 800,000 people lost their lives in the first 12 months after USAID was illegally seized, defunded, and dismantled. Their deaths were forewarned, preventable, and the result of intentional criminal abuses of office.

The President of the United States has come to believe that he is above the law—though the text of the Constitution clearly states that he is not. He holds this view, because of two words in a Supreme Court ruling that created dangerous confusion: “absolute immunity”.

That term has the legal effect of narrowing—not expanding—presidential immunity. Absolute immunity can apply only under a very narrow set of conditions, which almost no Presidential actions can meet. “Absolute immunity” applies only to those actions which are:

1. core Constitutional responsibilities of the office of the Presidency (so they must be enumerated powers, written explicitly into the text of the Constitution);
2. this means the actions must be lawful in nature;
3. “conclusive”—meaning those lawful and Constitutionally prescribed actions are the final word on that particular matter of public policy (almost no actions have this characteristic);
4. “preclusive”—meaning those lawful and Constitutionally prescribed actions have the effect of precluding any action by the Legislature or the Judiciary (almost no actions have this characteristic).

An action that begins with illicit intent—to subvert the Constitution, commit high crimes, harm innocent people, violate fundamental rights, override checks and balances, take innocent life, establish a pay-for-services racket through the exercise of presidential authority, seize money for a purpose not assigned by the legislature, direct prosecutors to carry out personal vendettas (to name but a few of those we have seen over the last 21 months)—meets none of these conditions and carries zero immunity.

The founders of the American democratic republic were skeptical of political parties. The reason was simple: Every person should exercise their vote according to the honest findings of their conscience; political parties ask you to reject the other side as a matter of habit or policy. Voting that way deprives you of the freedom to fully exercise your conscience.

No two people are exactly alike. No two minds work the same way when facing the same challenge. Even if you wish to advance a personal moral code or ideological tendency, assuming all people connected to a political party or movement are inherently virtuous surrenders your moral agency and neutralizes your ability to act morally or ethically.

Sadly, what we have witnessed since January 20, 2025, is that most of the lawmakers and cabinet officials linked to the President by party affiliation have been unwilling to stop this lawless cruelty, widespread intentional rights violations, mass killing, and open corruption. That is the fact of how the Congress has operated during this second presidential term of Donald Trump.

Though Congress has, in a bipartisan way, refused to eliminate more than a small percentage of USAID funding, it has not ordered the reconstitution of USAID or held the Administration to account for violating federal law and core Constitutional provisions, or for seizing and refusing to deliver life-saving aid. Republican Party leadership has consciously chosen to, at least for now, forfeit the proper Constitutional role of the legislature in overseeing the Administration.

It is now a daily question: How can we steer our country, and our culture, back to fairness, democracy, decency, and a workable trust that political leaders will not use violence or coercion to expand their power and enrich themselves and their friends?

Start with this: Take away any partisan or ideological filter from your way of engaging with political news and the electoral process. Most people not aligned with the current President have adjusted to this way of seeing, recognizing that many conventional yardsticks for measuring a particular candidate’s worthiness are now less important than whether they will act to restore decency, honor, and the rule of law.

If you are a Republican, pretend for a moment you are not, then ask yourself, seriously: Will this candidate oppose these brazen acts of violence and criminality? Will this candidate, if elected or returned to office, work with others not of his or her party to oppose the President’s violent abuses of power and restore sanity to American life?

As Americans, it is our shared duty to make sure our national legislature, and our state and local governments, uphold the Constitution and oppose the lawlessness of the current Administration. We all have a duty to require that anyone holding office refuse to accept abuses of power, especially when committed by their own political allies.

Democracy lives when we honor its core values in practice. Imagine what we can achieve if everyone casting a vote chooses to bring conscience and human decency back to our politics.