"They shall be...Imprisoned not more than 20 years"

[dairydog91]

19. Are people really buying this "Sedition"/"treason" quackery?

You can't criminalize legislating or failing to legislate, because legislating or failing to legislate is Congress's prerogative. Congress members have the power to legislate, even if they're assholes about it. Congress members have almost full Constitutional immunity when they're legislating (i.e. under Article One, Section 6). Congress may make its internal rules, and it may even impeach its own members, but other branches must keep their hands off. Congress members answer to their constituents; if a majority of House members' constituents actually want a shutdown, well, then it's time to start stockpiling supplies. You can't override Congress's Constitutional powers with a sedition law; even if you could convince a court that the sedition law otherwise applies, the Constitution would bar applying that law to the act of legislators legislating.

Trying to apply "Sedition" logic to a legislature's actions is bizarre; of course Congress may refuse to carry out an act of legislation. Criminalizing legislators when they refuse to vote how you want them to is an act of dictatorship (grossly so in the case of a system of government that's supposed to separate the legislative and the executive), and there's no amount of yelling "MY TEAM" that changes that. Hell, under this logic any legislator who voted to condemn the Iraq War a few years ago could have been charged with sedition. Following this train of legal "thought", under which any vote by a legislator which goes against fully executing a previously law is considered sedition, it WOULD have been sedition to vote in any way against the Iraq War (After all, you'd be hindering the execution of the Authorization of Military Force, which was a U.S. law).

In short, if you want the kind of legal system where legislators can be punished for "wrong" votes, there are any number of tinpot dictatorships available. I'll take the U.S., despite its flaws.