The United States Congress is in a sad state. The American people recognize this, holding Congress in very low regard. Dennis Kucinich, who served in the House of Representatives from 1997 to 2013 as a Democratic representative from Ohio and is seeking to return to the House as an independent candidate, gives some of the details for why this situation has come about in a Tuesday interview with host Andrew Napolitano at the Judging Freedom show.
“The interests of Americans are being swept aside in this partisan polarization” that is “far beyond” what he experienced during his time as a House member, declares Kucinich in his opening comments. This situation is something that Kucinich notes “our first president George Washington warned about.” Kucinich elaborates:
He warned us about factions. He warned us about parties. He warned about usurping the higher interests of, then, a new nation. And now, hundreds of years later, we’re finding that he was a prophet, not only our founder, and that we are now in a position where America is deadlocked between the two parties and the people of the United States are not being served.
Kucinich argues in the interview that this intense partisanship helps explain why so many Democrats in Congress are now locked into backing the Biden administration’s belligerent foreign policy actions, including in the Ukraine War. States Kucinich:
First of all, the tendency inside Congress is to support the president of your party notwithstanding what he stands for, and I saw that. In addition to that, [there is] the fear that comes from being inside a caucus and then being shunned by other members for not going along with what leadership wants; there are very few people who want to buck the consensus that that builds.
Thus, you have Democrat after Democrat in Congress lining up behind the Biden administration’s dumping of weapons, intelligence, and money into war on Russia instead of pursuing, as Kucinich advocates in the interview, ending the US-incited war and achieving a diplomatic solution. Kucinich also calls for a termination of “this vainglorious effort of building up NATO for some crazy reason they think they are going to displace the Russian government — that’s not gonna happen.”
In his foreign policy approach, as in his critique of partisanship, Kucinich is echoing fundamental concerns stressed by George Washington in the winding down of his presidency in 1796. In his presidential farewell address it was domestic factions and intervention overseas, and in particular involving European governments, about which Washington warned the American people.
Watch Kucinich’s interview here:
In the interview, Kucinich, who like Napolitano is an Advisory Board member for the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, comments insightfully in regard to other matters as well. Included is the pressure on Congress members to please special interest groups, US support for Israel’s ongoing war effort in Gaza and beyond, and decades of US foreign policy with an emphasis on trying to “rule the world” and “dominate with military force” that has ended up undermining America, including by diminishing Americans’ wellbeing and liberty.
