Dear Senator McConnell,
I am writing as someone who considers himself a
moderate. Over the years, I have voted
for members of both parties based on who seemed to me to be best qualified. But since the rise
of the tea party, I've found it harder and harder to justify voting for any
Republican. Members of the party seem
much more interested in making political statements than in doing their
jobs. Your recent decision to refuse to
even consider President Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court is just the
latest and most egregious example of this. The
President's constitutional responsibility was to make the nomination. Yours is to carefully and fairly evaluate the
nominee. By not doing so, you are
violating your oath of office. It
doesn't matter that it is an election year. You are simply refusing to do your
job, a job for which you are being paid by American taxpayers like me, and that
isn't acceptable. I'm sure I speak for
many other American voters. We are not
fooled by your claim that it is a matter of principle. It is clearly a matter of politics.
For our two-party system to work, members of both parties
have to be willing to work together to find compromise solutions that don't
really please either completely but that will work. The current Republican absolutist
determination to oppose anything Democratic is hurting our country. It has to stop. You have the responsibility to set an example
for the rest of the country. At the
moment, that example is a bad one.
Donald Trump's success is just one symptom of the result. If this continues, things are likely to get
much worse.
You were not elected to play politics. You were elected to do a job for the American
people. I appeal to you to do so.
