2020 Election
I realized that over the last few months I’ve been publishing some pretty technically dense material. So I figured I’d take a break to cover a much more light-hearted topic, politics! Back in 2016 I wrote about the Hillary-Trump election. It makes for quaint reading given the perspective of 2020. What’s funny is that in 2016 a lot of my conservative friends believed that Obama wasn’t going to give up the White House if Hillary lost. Now a lot of my liberal friends believe that Trump isn’t leaving either. I’ve told both that they were (and are) being silly. I’ll explain why, but first we need to go way back to a PME2 (Professional Military Ethics Education) class I took in 2008.
Most of my PME2 classes are forgotten. Those that aren’t are largely remembered for being terrible blunders by the Military Academy (Bobby Knight’s “piss-on-ethics” speech comes to mind, a story for another time). But there is one that did get it’s message across and has stuck with me ever since. In the class an upperclassman showed us a PowerPoint slide with the following:
“I swear: I will be faithful and obedient to the President of the United States and people, to observe the law, and to conscientiously fulfill my official duties, so help me God”
He then asked how many of us were prepared to swear to this as our oath of office when we graduated as commissioned officers. About half of my classmates raised their hands. The upperclassman then clicked to the next slide, revealing the format of the original oath half of us had agreed to:
I swear: I will be faithful and obedient to the leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, to observe the law, and to conscientiously fulfill my official duties, so help me God"
On the closing slide, he juxtaposed this pledge with our actual oath of office:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
The lesson was clear, but he took pains to clearly spell it out for us. As members of the United States Department of Defense we don’t swear allegiance to the President, or any individual for that matter. We swear to serve the U.S. Constitution.
Now, back to the original point. The Secret Service, as members of the Department of Homeland Security, happen to swear the same oath. Their allegiance isn’t to Obama, or Trump, or Biden, but to the US Constitution. Come January 20, 2021 if Trump is still in the Oval Office their oaths will obligate them to escort him off the White House grounds, forcefully if necessary.
Because we’re humans with free-will and not automatons there is always a chance the Secret Service may renege on their oaths come January and bar Biden from entry, in which case this document will serve as excellent evidence against me. But I doubt it.
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