The Hollow Choir: When Power Sings Without a Song
What we’re watching in Congress isn’t politics—it’s submission in slow motion
By Dino Alonso
CNN reports it as policy gridlock. A jam. A budget battle.
But let us not lie to ourselves.
This is not legislation. This is a test of loyalty.
It is not about crafting solutions, reaching across divides, or stewarding a nation through complexity. What’s unfolding in Congress is the quiet disintegration of duty, not through scandal but through surrender, one compromise at a time.
The Republican leadership isn’t paralyzed because of bold differences. They’re trapped in a cage of their own making, one forged by years of enabling a man who trades principle for performance, duty for dominance.
They haggle now not over ideas, but proximity.
Not over values, but signals.
What they cut, what they protect, what they say on camera—all of it filtered through the same unspoken question: Will this keep me close enough to stay safe?
The policies—massive cuts, erratic tax shifts, punitive budget proposals—are not strategic. They’re ritual, movements repeated not for outcome but for display.
Inside those chambers, what echoes is not leadership but theater—a hollow sound, like a choir singing a song no longer believed—words with no breath behind them.
And while they quarrel over how deep the blade should go, the people they serve grow quieter. Not because they agree, but because they no longer know where to speak.
This is the sickness.
They have stopped asking what the people need. They have stopped challenging one another to rise. They are not defending freedom but protecting themselves from the consequences of a single man’s wrath.
He doesn’t govern by fiat. He governs by fear of exclusion.
He doesn’t need to issue threats. His silence is enough.
And so the laws begin to change—not on paper, but in practice, not by decree, but by inertia. They long slide into irrelevance, where tradition becomes superstition, and institutions perform their rituals even as their foundations rot.
Those in power know better. That is the tragedy.
They know these policies are cruel.
They know this leadership is hollow.
They know the language of unity is being twisted into a tool of division.
But knowing isn’t the problem.
Silence is.
The great unraveling of a democracy doesn’t begin with tanks in the streets; it starts when elected men and women trade courage for choreography, when the law becomes a convenience, and when governing becomes appeasement.
“People who shut their eyes to reality,” the writer once said, “simply invite their destruction.”
And this—this moment, right now—is the invitation.
We are being taught to accept that obedience is a virtue.
That doubt is betrayal.
That governance is a matter of proximity, not purpose.
And if we do not resist this—if we do not name it, out loud, for what it is—then what comes next will not surprise us.
It will only shame us.
Because this doesn’t end with a bang, it ends with a nod.
A vote cast with trembling hands. A gavel struck with nothing behind it.
And a nation, still dressed in the garments of freedom, but long since stripped of its soul.