Letters to the Editor: How we the people are letting Trump destroy our democracy
President Trump’s latest attempt to stifle free speech is the latest manifestation of a long line of attacks on our First Amendment rights that have been going on for years — and that have been happening all over the world since the mid-1800s. For example, look at the American Revolution. (There’s a lesson in that there.) In 1774, British soldiers attacked the Continental Congress, which was meeting at Philadelphia. They tore down the building and destroyed all of the documents that had been there for years because they feared that those documents would reveal the government’s illegal activities. In other words, the Founding Fathers were trying to protect the public from the government by hiding the truth and then bringing the government down.
The First Amendment was written to protect the kind of free speech and free press protected by the early American founders. That is what the founders intended in the letter and spirit of our Constitution. But unfortunately, the Trump-Republican Party leadership has decided that it does not care about our rights, and they are going to try to silence the other side while claiming that we all have to compromise our First Amendment rights. This is unacceptable.
The Republican Party’s strategy has been to deny the legitimacy of the election and then to try to force as much political, social and economic change as possible at any cost. For example, it is a crime, a felony, to vote illegally. The courts have said that voting fraud is a real threat to our system of democracy. But the Republican majority in the House refuses to impeach the president of the United States because they don’t want to offend the “base.” Instead, they want to try to make as large a change as possible without having to do anything that might offend the base.
So when millions of people in the country, including those whose votes were stolen, said no to a constitutional amendment that would require our votes be counted as a check and balance on our government, Republicans put partisan politics over the constitutional principle and voted to defeat the election results. But what is the alternative?
Well, the alternative is to have another election based on the rules which were in place when the votes were counted.
I know it is hard to trust the government, but we the people in this country still deserve more