An Open Letter to the Political Left

Crisis Dispatch

This letter is both an invitation and a warning. I want to be clear about which is which.

The invitation: any Republican member of Congress who crosses the aisle — who honors their oath, votes for impeachment, does whatever is within their power to end this unconstitutional war — deserves a welcome from you. An unconditional one. I am publicly volunteering to be their advocate. If one steps forward, I will stand next to them.

The warning follows.

Now I am writing to you.

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I know you. I know your instincts. I know that the moment a Republican member of Congress steps forward to do the right thing, the first question many of you will ask is not “what can we do to help?” but “what do they believe about X?” Where X is whatever issue sits at the center of your particular coalition’s identity. Trans rights. Immigration. Climate. The history of their votes. The things they said in 2018. The donors they took money from. The caucuses they belonged to.

I understand why you do this. The history is real. The harm that has been done by people who said the right things at the right moments and then went back to doing the wrong things — that history is long and it is legitimate.

But I need you to hear me clearly.

This is not that moment.

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The republic is not in ordinary danger from ordinary politics. An unconstitutional war is being prosecuted without congressional authorization. Court orders are being ignored. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. The supply shock entering the global economy will arrive at your neighbors’ grocery bills and heating costs in ways that no election can undo quickly enough to matter. The constitutional order — the thing that makes any of your policy goals achievable in the long run — is being dismantled in real time.

In this moment, the question of whether a Republican member of Congress voted the wrong way on a social issue in a previous term is not the relevant question. The relevant question is whether they are willing to honor their oath now, when honoring it costs something.

If they are, they deserve a welcome.

Not a conditional welcome. Not a welcome contingent on a full accounting of their ideological record. A welcome. Because the republic does not have the luxury of demanding that its defenders be perfect before it accepts their help.

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I am putting you on notice.

If you respond to a Republican defector with purity tests — if you subject them to ideological interrogation rather than a welcome — I will consider you my political enemy. Not my ideological opponent. My enemy. Because you will have chosen the satisfaction of your faction over the survival of the republic that makes your faction possible.

I will not make this point once and move on. I will make it continuously, repeatedly, and loudly, for as long as you persist in it. I have no interest in being polite about this. The stakes are too high for politeness and I have run out of patience for people whose purity is more important to them than their country.

You have been warned. This is not a threat I will forget I made.

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I want to be honest about what I am asking, because I think the honest version is more persuasive than the flattering one.

I am not asking you to forgive. I am not asking you to forget. I am not asking you to pretend that the policy differences between you and a Republican member of Congress do not exist or do not matter. They exist. They matter. They will matter again, on the other side of this crisis, when there is a functioning constitutional order within which to contest them.

That is precisely the point. The policy differences matter. The fights you want to have are worth having. The progress you want to make is worth making. But none of it is possible — none of it — inside a constitutional order that has been hollowed out by an unconstitutional executive acting without congressional sanction, ignoring court orders, and conducting a war that nobody voted for.

Save the republic first. Fight about everything else after.

That is not a betrayal of your values. It is the precondition of them.

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The coalition that saves this republic will be impure. It will contain people who disagree with you about things that matter. It will require you to stand next to people whose records are complicated, whose politics are different from yours, whose journey to the right side of this question was longer and more reluctant than you would have liked.

That is what coalitions look like in moments of genuine emergency. Not the coalition of people who already agree with you. The coalition of people who are willing to do the necessary thing, for whatever reason, at the necessary moment.

The American Revolution was not fought by people who agreed about everything. The coalition that defeated fascism in the twentieth century was not ideologically pure. The movements that have actually changed the arc of history have always been broader, messier, and more morally complicated than the movements that remained pure and lost.

You know this. You have studied this. You cite these examples in your own arguments.

Apply the lesson now.

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I am one man with a Substack and a microphone and a belief that this republic is worth saving. I have no institutional power. I have no party. I have no donors. I have only the argument and the willingness to make it.

But I am making you this promise: if a Republican member of Congress steps forward to honor their oath, and you respond with a purity test, I will defend them against you as vigorously as I have defended the Constitution against Trump.

Not because I agree with everything they have done or said or believed. Because the republic needs them more than it needs your approval.

The coalition is open. The welcome is genuine. The moment is now.

I suggest you be ready to receive it.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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