ABC5, YouTube screenshot.

Federal immigration agents have raided Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home. Yes, that’s problematic for all kinds of reasons that have already been trotted out across our (social) media landscape that operates at breakneck speeds. What they generally point to is a breakdown in democracy.

Commenting to Reuters on the Justice Department’s mere policy against timing its activities to have an influence on elections, “the idea is to avoid even the appearance of any kind of interference by the Department of Justice with the political process,” George Washington University law professor Randall Eliason said. “It’s not surprising that they wouldn’t really care about violating this policy because they’ve shown they don’t really care about politicizing the Justice Department in many other ways.”

We are to understand Trump regime moves like these that reverse simple tradition and policy, rather than violate actual law or mandate, as evidence of the United States’ departure from democracy. What strikes me as a defect of our democracy, though, is the fact that Omar is living in D.C. in the first place.

We no longer exist in the times of horses and buggies. We are not beholden to communication by written letter or telegram. We have technologies that allow Congress to do its work remotely throughout the pandemic. There is absolutely no reason for us to have a representative democracy anymore at all, much less one that allegedly requires politicians like Omar to live outside of and far away from the communities they supposedly represent.

But this is how it goes. The discourse is about the raid, not the charade that is a “democracy” represented by the wealthy and the well-connected. The scandal covers the crime, which is that none of us are represented by this democracy at all. And as long as we’re kept focused on the symptoms rather than the sickness, as long as we parrot the party lines that the raid is what evidences the dissolution of democracy rather than the disconnection of our elected officials in the first place, the crime continues to play out in broad daylight.

There is absolutely no reason for us to not have a direct, participatory democracy. There is absolutely no reason we shouldn’t be voting on everything our government does rather than the circus of the election cycles of elected officials. But here we are.

In one way or another, from the breathless news coverage of politicos to the existence of the field of political “science” and too much to name in between, the idea that our political problems are huge and intractable, that they’re in need of interventions that can only be devised by the most educated and intelligent among us endures. As if common sense isn’t good enough.

As if anyone can’t look at how plainly and obviously off the rails everything is and understand that the first step in course correcting is simply not continuing down the problematic path we’re already on—simply stopping. It’s like refusing to clasp our hands over a water leak before devising a full and complete plan for how the leak is not only going to be stopped long term, but how the next design isn’t going to leak in the first place. It just doesn’t make sense. The first thing you do is just plug the leak.

I’m not going to act like I have all the answers because anyone who does is lying. No one of us can have the answers ourselves. A better future can only come to be by creating it together. But I do know that stopping what we’re doing now obviously needs to happen. And that one way we can start to retreat from where we’re headed is by calling our “representatives” home. They no longer need to live in the land of D.C. to do their work. They need to be back here with the rest of us, made to look the people they betray in the face every day as they’re forced to live their lives among the rest of us.

People like Omar should have to face people like me, a journalist and member of her district, who reported on a horrific injustice carried out by state and federal transportation authorities, and who wants to know why she has the ability to tweet about the goings on at her daughter’s private university in New York, but not the political plight of those she’s charged with representing. She should actually have to exist in Minneapolis during the ICE raids rather than show up for a well-timed photo op with a poor kid in a blue bunny hat who probably just wanted to go home and be left alone.

Or, you know, drain the swamp, as they say.