Now what? Now – do nothing. Absolutely nothing. No new bills, no new laws. It’s not like they were really going to get impeachment done against a Democrat. It’s not like they really hold the deep state accountable.

The House doing nothing is a far better option than them continuing on as usual. Shut it down. Shut it all down. It’s not like the military is protecting America from invasion by 10,000 unlawful combatants per day. It’s not like the Justice Department is helping implement actual, you know, justice.

The next bill I want to see out of the House should read, in total: “All laws passed after December 31, 1932 are hereby rescinded. All administrative regulations are hereby declared null and void. No administrative regulation may be promulgated or enforced without passage as law as laid forth in the Constitution of the United States.”

I wonder if the perception of civility is merely that I was silent.

There is a flaw in your argument that the king’s man should be paid the king’s shilling, and that the legionare should get his salt.

What if that pay is earned by actively doing evil? Then good men might not morally owe it to the soldier to see that the soldier is paid. It may still pragmatically make sense to continue to pay the soldier, to keep him from supporting himself by banditry, but even that fails if the chain of command is directing them as bandits against the population.

In the case of even current day American soldiers and sailors, this is more true because of the explicit orders against following illegal orders. We are clearly warned that crimes against humanity will earn us a noose, not the continuation of honorable pay and an honorable retirement.

It would not have been a just choice to refrain from trying to assassinate Hitler or Stalin for the sake of continuing to obtain funding for the payroll of the Waffen SS or the NKVD.

The moral situation is not so clear cut that the question clearly falls into the same category as assassinating Hitler, but it is also not so clear cut that the question clearly falls only into the other category.

Of what crimes can accussiations be made? Some, like tolerance for CRT and AGW, are clearly not serious enough to support this line of argument. The only two that could be sufficient are a) failure to show loyalty to the constitution by putting Democrats to the sword b) the policy ‘discussion’ around Election Related Respiratory Syndrome.

Loyalty is to the constitution first, and it is clear that the only readings which support the Democrat theory of insurrection on January sixth are readings that would occur to a confederate supporter, sympathizer, and apologist. If Lincoln acted constitutionally in authorizing the militia to suppress an insurrection, then the president’s executive power extends to authorizing the militia to suppress insurrections. Trump was clearly President, that crowd was large enough to perhaps be militia, and he is accused of authorizing it to act. The only way that said hypothetical authorization could be improper is if a) congress or the judiciary have the power to limit appropriate uses of executive power, which does not hold for this case b) there was no insurrection. Pelosi and Biden are carrying out formalities that assume an insurrection. Therefore, support for Pelosi and Biden could be illegal activity that is disloyal to the constitution. So, are servicemen compelled by their oath to put Pelosi and Biden to the sword?

If so, then by failing to do so, they void any moral obligation to seeing them paid. Most definitely, servicemen have ample opportunity to see these evil doers dead. The former speaker and Biden officially traveled by airplanes serviced by the armed forces, so sabotage could have easily caused a crash. Now, the sane answer is that we are going to address and resolve these disputes by other means, so that no serviceman was morally compelled to act immediately.

However, the validity of that argument does depend on future events yet unknown.

The second line of analysis is the novel legal and medical theories forced upon people in relation to the allegedly novel and allegedly natural coronavirus strain.

The analysis there divides into the natural hypothesis and the artificial hypothesis. If natural, it is statistically unlikely that any such strain could have the claimed properties, and that the properties could genuinely justify such a break with previous policy, if previous policy was also correct. If artificial, it is clearly plausible biowarfare, and the decision not to go with previously settled biowarfare policy needs to be justified in some way.

From there it quickly follows that the lockdowns may have been a crime against humanity, and also the force attempts with the vaccine may have been a crime against humanity.

Again, we have a sane answer that does not incriminate every active serviceman in general. Some people in the American population need to be tried justly for crimes against humanity, and if guilty sent to the gallows.

In neither case do the degrees of crimes committed apply so broadly as to make every servicemen the moral equivelant of a volunteer for the Einsatzgruppen C. Okay, so by default we still owe servicemen their pay.

The problem here is your calculation or inference that weighs that against other factors, and concludes ‘this was NOT the time, IMHO, to pull shit like this.’

Firstly, the politicians have effed up, and made the office of President into something that is no longer a prize, and will not be a prize again for some time.

The communists are trying to start a civil war, and have come much too close. We are probably not going to have a stable civil peace again until some of them are killed. That is going to splash onto the hands of any good person in the office of the President for the foreseeable future. A good person thinking about that prospect is going to conclude that ‘doing the needful’ and then resigning in shame is not going to support career ambitions.
Secondly…

To a conventional thinker who is a long term congressman, the speakership is clearly the more powerful, desireable and sustainable position in current circumstances. The Speaker /also/ has access to confidential information, the records of the Capitol Police, that can easily be used to destroy Biden, Pelosi, and the status quo. The difficulty there is that there is every danger of getting stuck with the presidency.

McCarthy did release some records, but only to Tucker Carlson, who was then ‘destroyed’ to silence him. If McCarthy intended that stuff to come out, the next step would have been to release more to other journalists.

Likewise with the failure to impeach Biden. Impeaching Biden has outcomes the Speaker cannot control, and too great a danger of becoming President, and losing that sweet sweet Speakership power and influence.

If the Republican Speaker is too afraid of losing the Speakership to apply the same standard to Biden that the Democrats applied to Trump, then he should be removed as Speaker.

Perhaps Gaetz should have acted earlier, but waiting to have the votes is perhaps reasonable.

This lets the Republican leadership play hot potato with who gets to be the one stuck with impeaching Biden and becoming President.

If the next Speaker does not act quickly, he should also be removed. Republicans in congress deserve all of the trouble that they will experience. If innocents are punished downstream of that, such as failure to pay serviceman, well, it is a sucky situation without good answers.

If Trump had purged congress with fire and sword on January 6th, then the American population in general would not have been harmed by the continuation of lockdown policy. The American population were also innocents potentially harmed by a failure to be decisive.