Simone Gold, MD, JD, an emergency room physician and founder of the anti-vaccine, pro-hydroxychloroquine COVID-19-cure group America’s Frontline Doctors, was dead center in the caravan of violent insurrectionists that invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Captured on video, she was arrested on January 17.
Gold’s fellow mobsters include white supremacists, armed nationalist militiamen, virulent anti-Semites, and QAnon conspiracy-mongers. Then there are the terrifying images of a man in camouflage and flak jacket in the Senate chamber with a belt load of zip ties intended for detaining members of Congress, and a group of men constructing a gallows with a prefabricated noose just outside the capitol as the crazed horde inside screamed, “Hang Mike Pence!” and “Where’s Pelosi?”
Yet Gold was not the only physician in the Capitol that day to support the unconstitutional overturning of the Electoral College’s certification of the election of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States.
Among the most outspoken opponents of confirmation by Congress of the election results, unanimously upheld by more than 90 judges across the nation, including the U.S. Supreme Court, were a group of seven physicians, all far-right white Republican adherents of losing candidate Donald J. Trump.
The group comprises half of the 14 physicians in Congress. Only three physician members of Congress are Democrats, all in the House of Representatives. Every one of the 11 Republican physicians in Congress, including four in the Senate, Kentucky ophthalmologist Rand Paul (MD from Duke), Wyoming orthopedic surgeon John Barrasso (MD from Georgetown, residency at Yale), Louisiana gastroenterologist Bill Cassidy (MD from LSU), and Kansas obstetrician/gynecologist Roger Marshall (MD from University of Kansas), has stood in lockstep behind Trump through his term in office, including his attempts to downplay the gravity of the COVID-19 crisis, hinder the CDC from coordinating the effort to contain the virus, and cede management of the pandemic to the ill-equipped states.
Marshall not only cast his two first votes as a U.S. senator in opposition to certifying the judicially upheld election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania — one of just five Republican Senators to do so — but also invoked his identity as a physician as a reason for his decision:
“I want my fellow Kansans and all Americans to know that I’ve given as much consideration and thought surrounding the issue of objecting to a state’s Electoral College vote as I did considering the treatment plan for a serious health concern, and today’s decision is once again from my heart.”
In contrast, Kansas’ senior senator, Republican Jerry Moran, said that to vote against certifying the electoral college results violated one’s oath to the Constitution.
“I am a conservative Republican,” he wrote on his official website on Jan. 5. “Therefore, I must strictly adhere to the United States Constitution. The Constitution clearly limits the role of Congress with respect to presidential elections to the counting of electoral votes that have been certified by the states…. To vote to reject these state-certified electoral votes would be to act outside the bounds of the Constitution, which I will not do.”
“Voting to object to the electoral process without a constitutional basis to do so may be expedient and lead to short-term political benefits for some, but would risk undermining our democracy – which is built upon the rule of law and separation of powers. No victory for one’s cause today can be worth what we would lose tomorrow.”
In voting against democracy and for the disenfranchisement of the voters of Arizona and Pennsylvania — and endorsing Trump’s false allegations of rigged elections in several other states in which African-American voters made the difference — Marshall was joined by six of the ten Republican physicians in the House of Representatives. These include Florida urologist Neal Dunn (MD from George Washington), Texas obstetrician/gynecologist Michael Burgess (MD from University of Texas, Houston), Tennessee general practitioner Scott DesJarlais (MD from University of South Dakota), Maryland anesthesiologist Andy Harris (MD from Johns Hopkins), and North Carolina urologist Greg Murphy (MD from University of North Carolina).
The most cynical of all may be Pennsylvania dermatologist John Joyce (MD from Temple University, residency at Johns Hopkins), who voted not to accept the legally authorized results of the Pennsylvania presidential vote even though he was elected on the same Republican ticket. All but Dunn include “MD” after their names on their congressional websites.
Marshall, Dunn, Burgess, DesJarlais, Harris, Murphy, and Joyce have disgraced themselves not just as congressmen and physicians but as American citizens, by casting their seditious votes even after a veritable lynch mob of Trump supporters invaded the very chambers where Congress was in the process of affirming the results of a democratic election.
Adding to the Washington circus, on Jan. 21, just 15 days after the bloodshed in the Capitol, Harris set off a metal detector outside the House chamber while carrying a concealed gun, according to The Washington Post. It is illegal to bring a gun into the nation’s deliberative body.
Are the votes of these doctor-politicians acts of sedition or merely the manifestation of a deer-in-headlights fear of alienating Trump and his base? In our opinion, they reflect not only the willful rejection of legal and judicial democratic norms but also unabashed racism.
These physicians’ deeds must be addressed by the medical profession. In 2008, the American Medical Association (AMA) issued an apology to the nation for a century and a half of systemic racism in its ranks by preventing African Americans and other minorities from having the same opportunities as whites to train and practice as physicians. Now even as its reputation, influence, and credibility wanes, the AMA needs to denounce racism among physicians in elected office — especially those whom the AMA’s political action committee, AMPAC, still generously supports.
In the 2020 election cycle, AMPAC gave $9,000 to Marshall (and zero to his Democratic physician opponent Barbara Bollier, MD, an anesthesiologist), $10,000 to Burgess, $7,000 each to Harris and Murphy, and $6,000 each to Dunn and Joyce. These amounts were among the highest given by AMPAC to any congressional candidates.
The seven physicians in Congress who voted against confirming the results of the election — indeed, the most efficiently and securely run vote in U.S. history in spite of a raging pandemic and a torrent of actions and tweets by Trump throughout 2020 aimed at undermining public confidence in the electoral process — have contributed to the subversion of democracy and violated one of the principles of the practice of medicine that all physicians since Hippocrates must try to uphold: Primum non nocere … first, do no harm.
On March 21, 1973, as President Nixon’s closest aides realized that their attempts to aid his cover-up of his full knowledge of the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate had failed, White House counsel John W. Dean III was recorded famously warning Nixon, “We have a cancer within, close to the presidency, that’s growing.”
As 147 Republicans in the House of Representatives (including six physicians) and eight Republicans in the Senate (including one physician) voted for the first time in American history — and just hours after a failed violent insurrection — to overturn the results of a free and fair election, is it any exaggeration to suggest that we have a cancer within the Congress?
Alan Blum, MD, is a professor and holder of an endowed chair in family medicine at the University of Alabama School of Medicine’s Tuscaloosa campus. He is a former editor of the Medical Journal of Australia and the New York State Journal of Medicine. In 2006 he received an honorary doctor of science from Amherst College for a career dedicated to fighting the tobacco industry. Howard Wolinsky is a Chicago-based author and medical journalist. He is the co-author of “The Serpent on the Staff: The Unhealthy Politics of the American Medical Association.”
Source: MedicalNewsToday.com
