“The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.” That’s what Fredrick Douglass said in 1885 and is true today.

In 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy was conducting an investigation claiming that the United States Army had Communist sympathizers in leadership. The army was defended by Joseph N Welch as chief counsel. At one point in the hearing, Senator McCarthy attacked a young lawyer in Welch’s firm as a communist sympathizer. Welch was outraged and responded: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness… Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” We might ask our political leaders the same question today. The Roman philosopher Seneca has pointed out that: “The last step in moral degradation is the loss of the sense of shame.” What has happened to this nation’s sense of shame, the state of decency, and respect for law in the United States under this Administration?

The most recent example of blatant rejection for our Constitutional mandates was the demand by President Trump that the state of Texas manipulate its voting districts in order to guarantee five more Republican representatives would be added to the House of Representatives, thereby assuring a continued Republican House majority. The Republican Governor of Texas and the Republican legislators immediately rubber-stamped this unconstitutional subterfuge.

It is well established that the manipulation of voting districts in order to ensure a biased political voting outcome is illegal and prohibited by constitutional provisions. The US Supreme Court in Wesberry v. Sanders (1964) pointed out that it was constitutionally required that House districts be apportioned so that “each man’s vote … is to be worth as much as another’s,” ensuring roughly equal population across districts. Justice Hugo Black wrote that Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution required Representatives to be “chosen by the People of the several States,” which means that as nearly as practicable, one person’s vote in a congressional election should be worth as much as another’s. The Court required congressional districts to have roughly equal populations, or as often summarized, “one person, one vote.” The opinion noted: “To say that a vote is worth more in one district than in another would run counter to our fundamental ideas of democratic government.” The President’s demand directly violates this principle.

Rigging the voting districts in order to elect five more Republican members in the House of Representatives and guarantee a Republican majority is an unconstitutional scheme demanded by the President of the United States. His justification is that “I got the highest vote in the history of Texas,” and therefore, this victory entitles Republicans to more congressional representation, even though illegally obtained. He claimed, “We are entitled to five more seats” as justification for l cheating to accomplish this through fraudulent manipulation of voting districts in Texas.

Edward Gibbon, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789), repeatedly argued that moral decay was a major cause of Rome’s downfall. He identified this as  corruption and self interest in leadership with leaders pursuing wealth and power over the common good.

When a nation ignores the restraints of its Constitution and abandons the laws of morality, it begins to dismantle the very safeguards that preserve its liberty. When leaders place themselves above the laws designed to restrain them, they teach the people that law is optional, and contempt for law soon follows. History shows—whether in the republics of antiquity or in the democracies of our own age—that when moral duty gives way to personal gain, and when constitutional chains are broken for convenience or power, the fall is not sudden but inevitable. No nation survives long when it ceases to be ashamed of its own lawlessness.