Open Letter to Our Congressman

 

Dear Friends,

Below is a letter that I sent on Friday to my local newspaper, the one for which I wrote for 9 years. Since then, nothing has changed, except that this issue of Republicans in Congress supporting Trump’s mad and destructive effort to overturn the election has gotten worse. Trump’s attacks have escalated to target Republican state officials. The paper’s editor did not respond to my submission.

This is an example of the “freedom of the press” that I address in my book. I can write whatever I want, but I have no public forum where I can publish this open letter and call Rep. LaHood to account. Trump and Giuliani and the others who advance his claims in public will, I believe, eventually pay a price in reputation. LaHood and many like him will cheerfully carry on under the new administration, acting as if they have done their duty. We, the voters, especially the voters in the majority, will pay the biggest price, as public confidence in the American political system reaches its lowest point in my lifetime.

That is apparently not newsworthy.

I wish you all well.

Steve

 

 

Open Letter to Our Congressman

 

To Rep. Darin LaHood:

I read in this newspaper your comments on the election. I fully agree that “fair, legal, and ethical elections are the cornerstone of our democracy and their integrity must be protected.” I wish you would contribute to protecting them, instead of attacking them.

You say that you “support President Trump’s effort to ensure that all legal votes are counted”. Here is the content of Trump’s effort. On Thanksgiving Day, he held a press conference where he used the word fraud dozens of times. He said that Georgia has “a fraudulent system, tremendous fraud”. He said about Pennsylvania, “It was a rigged election.” He said about Detroit, “Dead people voting all over the place.” Over and over again, he said our election was a fraud: “the numbers are false... the numbers are corrupt... It was a rigged election, 100% ... those machines are fixed, they’re rigged. You can press Trump and the vote goes to Biden.... we caught them cheating, we caught them stealing ... You’re going to find fraud of hundreds of thousands of votes per state... they used COVID in order to defraud the people of this country.” The last thing he said was, “This election was a rigged election.”

Those are just the latest versions of his campaign to deny the integrity of the election, to reject legal votes in Democratic cities, and to pursue court cases which judges have called ridiculous.

Trump’s appointee at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Chris Krebs, stated officially, and courageously, that this election was “the most secure in American history.” “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Less than a week later Trump fired Krebs.

Krebs showed how to protect the integrity of our democratic system. If you were honest, you would have said days ago that Trump lost. If you were brave, you would say that Trump’s claims about a rigged election are harmful to our country.

I worked on November 3 with Republican and Democratic election judges here in Jacksonville to insure that people could record their votes. Most of the people I saw voted for Trump and for you. You won’t say that those votes, and over 150 million other votes in America, represent the best of American democracy.

All American voters deserve to know that this election was fair and free, and that the reported results are accurate. You said that it is important to ensure that “all Americans have faith in the electoral process”. Trump’s actions have caused the opposite: more than half of Republican voters believe that the election was rigged.  Your unwillingness to tell the truth about the election, your support for Trump’s form of election fraud, along with most of your elected Republican colleagues, creates that lack of faith.

Your oath of office committed you to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. Trump’s claims that this election must be “turned over” makes him a domestic enemy of our Constitution.

Unlike Krebs, Trump can’t fire you if you contradict him. But unlike Krebs, honesty and courage are not part of your political calculations. The voters of the 18^th District deserve better from their Congressman.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL