With promises that she will one day return, Gabbie Giffords today resigned from Congress. You probably think I am about to call for more gun laws. I am not.
A special election will follow with roughly four Dems and one Republican (so far) interested. Despite the democratic (with a small d) process, it is unthinkable that a Republican might benefit from what was done to Gabbie. It just wouldn’t be right.
So, what I call for is a law that would remove the heinous political incentives for those without conscience to remove a member of Congress from office by violence instead of the ballot box. No one and no party should benefit from such a horrendous event. To address this I propose a constitutional amendment which would require that any legislator who dies by gunshot, accident or suspicious causes be replaced by one from his or her own party.
So, Gabbie Giffords should be replaced by a Democrat. With such a constitutional amendment, Paul Wellstone, who died in a suspicious airplane crash precipitated when someone turned off the runway lights at the general aviation airport, would have been replaced by a Democrat too. That there were suspicious circumstances has been swept under the rug. And what do you know. Congress changed hands when he died. That should never happen.
As far as we know, Gabie Giffords was shot by a madman, not a GOP partisan. Yet the Republican party, its right wing radio talking heads, and the super-heated rhetoric of both, surely led to the hatred which took all normalcy from Gabbie Giffords.
Today I learne
Let us work to remove the possibility that more members of Congress be harmed.
