Letters

To Nick LaLota: Untold members of your constituency, Congressional District 1, are repulsed by your Republican Party’s general and collective refusal to abide by their oaths of office to support our Constitution and our precious, fundamental rule of law. You are openly challenging our democracy’s mandate of three “co-equal” branches of government,with no one branch, or certainly no one individual, overruling any other. You are driving America into what is being called a “constitutional crisis.” And to what end?

You are dangerously refusing to denounce Vladimir Putin’s continuing assault on Ukraine, showing your ignorance of what that will mean for both economic and geopolitical security around the world. At the same time, you threaten our loyal global allies with insane trade wars and even invading some of their sovereign lands.

You are responsible now for effectively dismantling our long-established, and generally well-managed, government bureaucracies (without which, obviously, we would have no functioning government); for encouraging Elon Musk (where did he come from?), who is chainsawing government agencies with little understanding of what he is actually doing, indifferent to the real harm he is causing to real people; for wildly firing effective, responsible employees, essential to our nation’s complex inner workings, with little evidence of achieving anything of value gained for the well-being of the American people (shrinking the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, threatening cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security); for disabling vital health, science and research agencies (including the vapid threats to dismantle the Education Department); for insanely castrating the government’s revenue-raising IRS while claiming to want to reduce the deficit (and, of course, still giving tax cuts to the wealthy); for optioning off our national lands, which are owned by all Americans; and, lastly, for ignoring completely the “monster under the bed” of potentially irreversible climate change, which threatens the very viability of life on Earth. This is not a hoax.

You guys are like madmen running/fumbling around in our country’s halls of power in trance-like adoration of one abnormal, damaged man, Donald J. Trump, with his clown show of sycophants pretending to be “making America great,” or some such nonsense.

Do your job, Nick. Stand up for our values, our democracy, our love of country, our freedoms, our rights. Free yourself from your current myopic, destructive obsequiousness and think more clearly of the good that needs to be done, that can be done, that you could do for all of us.

Save yourself, Nick. Your GOP party is lost.

We are watching and will do our part when the time (perhaps your time, too) soon comes.

James Ewing

Water Mill