Richard Kosich: The Dean of duplicity
With the stroke of the Presidential pen on November 12, 2025, the recent 43-day government shutdown — the longest in American history — mercifully came to a close. Representative Madeleine Dean (PA-4) responded by claiming she was “relieved to see the shutdown end” after witnessing the “pain of dedicated federal employees working without pay.”
But Dean then candidly acknowledged voting “No” on reopening the government because the “clean CR” signed by 52 Senate Republicans — with only eight Senate Democrats in support — somehow did not “reflect my values.”
This double-talk is sadly nothing new for Dean, but rather the latest incident in a familiar trend dating back to 2018 when she was first elected to Congress. Those of us closely following her career since then have come to see this pattern of duplicity as a salient characteristic of Dean’s personality, not some anomaly or quirk of circumstance.
Here are just a couple of her other “greatest hits” of questionable decision-making and ambiguous moral clarity .
Presidential Impeachment
It started on December 18, 2019, when Dean voted for H.Res. 755 – “Impeaching Donald John Trump, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.” Two Articles of Impeachment against President Trump were introduced that day by the House Judiciary Committee, of which Dean is a member.
She voted for both gleefully and unquestioningly, then offered up the following self-aggrandizing statement: “Today is about the Congressional oath I swore — we all swore — to well and faithfully discharge the duties of this office…ultimately, this is about love of country, about carrying out a generational duty to protect our democracy.”
Well, not quite.
At the core of the first impeachment, for example, was a pause of the $391 million in security assistance Congressionally appropriated to aid Ukraine in their ongoing war of resistance against Russian aggression. The argument put forward by Democrats then was that Trump had abused his power, with the aim of interfering with the 2020 U.S. presidential election, because he wished to see the apparent corruption between the Biden family and Ukraine investigated.
Dean’s December 20, 2019, opinion letter published in The Philadelphia Inquirer largely echoes this false narrative to justify impeaching the President: “President Trump withheld essential military aid to Ukraine…unless the country promised to help him cheat during the 2020 election.”
If that wasn’t clear enough, she goes on to say, “More simply, President Trump used American foreign aid as an asset that he could trade for personal favors. This is the definition of corruption, and impeachment is the only appropriate remedy.”
Holy smokes — these are serious charges. But are they founded upon any semblance of truth?
Dean apparently thinks so, as her statements here seem to suggest at minimum a quid pro quo existed between Trump and Ukraine when the former allegedly strong-armed a hapless ally into doing his sinister bidding to selfishly aggrandize himself and further his political career (for a true quid pro quo, see Joe Biden in action here).
If true, such an ally would undoubtedly feel (at the very least) a sense of victimhood and resentment, and presumably wish to inform the entire world about it. Yet when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had the opportunity to publicly unload on his “oppressor,” he steadfastly refused to do so.
For example, during a joint press conference with Trump in New York on September 25, 2019, Zelensky, when asked by a reporter if he felt any pressure from President Trump to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, responded by stating “Nobody pushed me.”
And according to an article by Greg Wilson of Fox News from October 10, 2019, Zelensky specifically told reporters that his controversial July 2019 call with Trump was not what impeachment-minded Democrats claimed: “There was no blackmail,” Zelensky said. “They blocked this money and nobody asked us [for] anything.”
Finally, in a December 2, 2019 interview with Time and several European publications, he denied once again that he and Trump ever discussed a decision to withhold military aid to Ukraine for nearly two months in the context of a quid pro quo involving political favors: “Look, I never talked to the president from the position of a quid pro quo.”
Dean was either ignorant of the existence and veracity of these statements, or she knew better but deliberately obfuscated the truth anyway. Either way, it reflects poorly upon her, and ultimately Dean’s self-righteous indignation expressed in her opinion piece rings as hollow as the Democrats’ concocted case against Trump.
The Right to Choose Our Own Leaders
Dean’s most serious charge leveled against the President justifying his first impeachment was also perhaps one of the greatest unintentional self-owns in modern American politics: “The President’s ongoing pattern of conduct threatens our most precious rights as Americans. The right to choose our own leaders and hold them accountable.”
What, after all, could be more un-American than that? But by impeaching Donald Trump on false pretenses, Dean was actually guilty herself of subverting our constitutional republic by abusing her power and authority in trying to remove from office a democratically elected President, and thus disenfranchising the 62,984,828 Americans who voted for him in 2016 had he been convicted in the Senate.
Yet the irony was apparently lost on her.
“When we lie and we lie for personal gain, for political victories, we risk doing grave harm,” Dean once said while preparing for Trump’s second impeachment.
It was during this second impeachment push that Dean, as the House impeachment manager, argued forcefully for his conviction in the Senate, stating that he “did not preserve, he did not protect, he did not defend the Constitution.” She then sought to disqualify him from future office through the impeachment process, which, had it worked, would have assuredly included a vote to bar him from holding federal office ever again. Suddenly, “the right to choose our own leaders” for Dean was subservient to scoring political victories.
Defending the Indefensible
Dean also accused Trump during his first impeachment of “telling executive branch agencies and witnesses to defy subpoenas,” or quite simply to stop following the law.
Yet oddly enough, Dean had no moral incertitude in defending her six Democratic colleagues when they recently told service members to violate the oaths they swore to “obey the orders of the President of the United States” and “the officers appointed over me.”
For added context, a short video message, complete with patriotic music à la Saving Private Ryan, was posted to Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s X account on November 18. The video contained a joint message aimed squarely at members of the Military and the Intelligence Community, urging them to disobey unlawful orders and “to stand up for our laws, our constitution, and who we are as Americans.”
Dean wasted little time recording her own video defending the “Seditious Six” by claiming that they “put out a simple informational video,” never mind that it was in direct violation of federal law which prohibits attempts to “interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States.”
Once again, Dean was either woefully ignorant of established facts and law, or was knowledgeable but deliberately chose to operate in a wholly unethical manner, besmirching her position as a member of Congress and stepping into an amoral dead zone our Founding Fathers never considered.
Why This Matters
The six Democratic lawmakers Dean provided cover for concluded their video by telling service members, “Don’t give up the ship,” a War of 1812 phrase attributed to a U.S. Navy captain’s dying command to his crew.
In reality, their entire collective effort is a simile for a dying Democrat party desperately trying to gain leverage, any leverage, over a President they passionately despise with all the wrath and fury of a Shakespearean tragedy.
The citizens of Pennsylvania’s 4th U.S. congressional district deserve a representative whose judgement isn’t clouded by her audacious desire to subvert our constitution and basic freedoms we hold so dear — like choosing our representatives to govern the nation, as opposed to those who would impose their will upon us like the overlords of days of yore.
Richard F. Kosich is a freelance writer/community organizer, Chair of the Conshohocken Borough Republican Committee, and Vice-Chair of the Colonial Republicans. Opinions are his own.
