Word: oath
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...Tuesday the City Council in Madison will vote whether elected officials or city appointees can add to their oath of office, in which they swear to uphold the state and federal constitutions, a rejection of the parts they don't like. It started when Wisconsin amended its constitution to ban gay marriage, and a member of the city's Equal Opportunities Commission resigned rather than swear the traditional oath. Members of that board in particular, which is charged with protecting civil rights, felt torn about promising to uphold laws they felt were discriminatory. So the Council will debate whether public...
...That comes awfully close to letting officials pick which laws they want to enforce. And that doesn't seem like the most promising way to usher them into office. The oath sworn by public servants, starting with the President of the United States, is the closest thing to a sacred act of all our democratic traditions. Candidates may be partisan brawlers when they run for office; campaigning is a contact sport that you play to win or not at all. But once elected, they're born again as servants of all the people, and taking the oath...
...civil disobedience - you break it and suffer the consequences. So you can respect the city commissioner who didn't feel he could even implicitly endorse a gay marriage ban and would rather resign than pretend. But what happens if you let officials take office with an asterisk in their oath? That would "come perilously close to saying [that] in their duties they will ignore the law or alter the law when it conflicts with their personal principles," UW-Madison political science professor Howard Schweber told the Wisconsin State Journal. "That is a fundamental breach of the duty of office...
...Speaker's lobby just off the House floor, staffers had set up folding tables with packets containing a voting card, lapel pin and license plates for every member. Nancy Pelosi set aside more than three and a half hours for faux-swearing-in photos: the real oath was taken by the entire House on the floor just after noon, but everyone wanted a class-day picture with their families and the new Speaker...
...Richard Nixon under the terms of the recently ratified 25th Amendment to succeed the disgraced Spiro Agnew. Less than a year later, on Aug. 9, 1974, Nixon resigned rather than face a Senate trial on three articles of impeachment passed by the House of Representatives, and Ford took the oath to be the 38th President...