OUR AMERICA 2026

Hold public officials to a HIGHER STANDARD

This is OUR America, not some South African billionaire’s America. Not some Australian billionaire’s America. And certainly not some convicted felon and rapist’s America. It is OURS and it is our responsibility to not just fix it after the GOP breaks it again, but to rebuild it and find ways to prevent it from being easily broken again. With that in mind, we present a number of ideas that the Democrats could pursue that should lead to vastly improving the lives of millions of Americans.

Hold officials to a higher standard and enforce their oaths

Thousands of Americans who work in various capacities for the government or public life, from the President to Congress, to State Houses and City Councils, to the highest and lowest ranked judges, all the way to law enforcement officers from state troopers to everyday beat cops all take an oath of office to do their jobs and to follow the law and/or the Constitution as they do it. These people are put in a position of authority over others and given great responsibility to serve and protect regular Americans. They have more power than others which should mean they have to hold themselves to a higher standard.

Unfortunately, many of these people often act as if their position entitles them to be held to a lower standard. They feel as if they can skirt the laws that everyone else has to follow or not face consequences when they do something that regular people would get in trouble for. But people with more power should always be held to higher standards. They should be expected to be even more careful about following the law and they should face greater consequences when they flaunt it.

One way to make this happen is to add legal repercussions to violating their oath of office. If you lie to law enforcement or criminal investigators, or if you lie under oath in court, you should be able to be charged and convicted of perjury and you should go to jail for it. This obviously makes those oaths much stronger and more meaningful. There is no reason not to provide legal repercussions to violating your oath of office as well any other oaths people make.

Now the difficult part would be to parse if and when the oath was violated. It would be challenging to prosecute someone just for a violation of their oath. But an easy way to enforce it and hold these people to higher standards is to make it an automatic conviction if the oath-breaker is convicted of ANY other crime. Because the fact is, if someone is convicted of a crime they obviously have violated their oath in some way. In that case any conviction for a crime should also automatically include a conviction and sentence for breaking their oath. So if anyone who has sworn an oath is convicted of a crime will receive additional years on their sentence.

Obviously there could be a variety of ways to enforce and/or set up a law like this, but the key element is making sure that those with greater power and authority face stiffer consequences if they violate their oaths and abuse that power. This should be one of many priorities for Democrats to run on and try to pass in 2026 and beyond.