As a man, it is disturbing and unsettling to hear American guys on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives admonishing their colleagues for opposing a budget bill because the criticisms might offend Donald Trump.

These are elected officials, congresspeople, and Republicans, as it turns out, who one by one, defend the president's "big, beautiful bill," with a twist of unbearably unamerican obsequiousness.

"Members are reminded not to engage in personalities toward the president," said the acting chair of the governing body after an especially substantive criticism of the bill expressed by one House member.

This is a bill, incidentally, that kicks 17 million insured Americans off the healthcare rolls and shifts that burden to others in the form of higher insurance premiums, while lavishing the millionaire and billionaire class with tax cuts. U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-6) calls it "a cruel bill," the cruelest he has encountered in his time in the United States House of Representatives.

Indeed, it is cruel, as it seeks - at its core - to placate the powerful while punishing the powerless.

Of course, this is Trump's agenda - the only one he knows in a life of golf courses and skyscrapers, far removed from the real world.  The chief protagonist of the TV show, The Apprentice, who now serves as the President of the United States, routinely pursed the lips of lackeys by supplying his signature line, "You're fired."

As television it was low-grade and unentertaining.

As a matter of public policy, expressed by the priorities of this budget bill, it is obscene.

The contents of the bill are nauseating enough.

But to put it as politely as possible, it is deeply uncomfortable to watch grown men - members of Congress - praise this president and his "big, beautiful bill," over and over again, relinquishing their oversight as a branch of government constitutionally distinct from the executive, as if they formed the withered and decayed branch of a cult of personality.

Where do these people come from? In their Fox News MAGA cocoon, do they perpetually agonize over the regional wounds they suffered in the Civil War, still determined - after all these years - to take down the Union, with their nativist-placating mole from New York?

Have the pileup of golf courses, bling, and Beltway dinners merely anesthetized them to real people?

What do they fear the most - the anarchists who stormed the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the drying up of donor dollars, or a Trump tweet?

Who the hell knows.

The bottom line is we don't roll like that in New Jersey, where the dreariness and softness of those "male" MAGA disciples and their power-mollifying agenda in Congress today look staggeringly small and pinched, alongside the presence at the microphone of U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-10), who wants to exclude Medicaid and SNAP benefits from the cuts in Trump's "big, beautiful bill."

While grown men slobber at the microphone over their leader and his bill rewarding the billionaire donor class, McIver - if you'll recall - stands charged in a three-count indictment brought by Acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba.

Habba charged McIver with "forcibly impeding and interfering with federal officers" as they attempted to arrest Newark Mayor Ras Baraka outside the Delaney Hall Federal Immigration Facility in Newark, New Jersey on May 9. On that day, McIver was doing her job as an elected representative, as she joined other members of Congress, including U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, seeking answers about a private detention facility and those people housed within.

You can watch McIver's "impeding and interfering" on video tape from various angles. The Congresswoman pleaded "not guilty" to federal charges. McIver’s lawyer, former U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Paul Fishman, said she pleaded not guilty because "she is not guilty."

The facts will speak in a Court of Law.

And the facts will speak to the priorities of McIver, who on that day in question cared enough about other human beings, newly vulnerable in a national atmosphere on a rancorous edge in large part owing to the cruel, nativist rhetoric of this President and his followers.

As Trump's servants line up to sickeningly protect power in this budget session, remember McIver, dignified and impeccable at the microphone - this July 4th, Independence Day, and the stark contrast at the heart of our great nation.

Independence Day for Trump and his cronies looks like an African American woman from Newark - an educator by trade - indicted because she courageously stood up for undocumented workers and the right to due process - to guys with guns and masks. It looks like grown men falling all over one another to praise their leader, who brags about punishing his enemies and building prisons surrounded by snakes and alligators.

For the rest of us - it better look like standing up for America, not the powerful and billionaires, but the weak and the vulnerable, the workers, those who fight without violence and within the law, and those unjustly accused, among them LaMonica McIver, Congresswoman from Newark, New Jersey.