Letters to the editor for July 2

The Senate is scary, strange, and shocking

Scary: That today’s Republican Party is opposed to strengthening our democracy. Last week, every Senate Republican voted against a bill that would have made it easier for eligible voters to participate in the democratic process.

Provisions of the bill included: making Election Day a national holiday; allowing 15 days of early voting; and creating nonpartisan redistricting commissions to reduce gerrymandering. But these commonsense provisions were unable to garner the support of a single Senate Republican.

Strange: That 50 Republican Senators, collectively representing roughly 40 million fewer people than their 50 Democratic colleagues, can so easily frustrate the will of the majority.

Shocking: That anti-majoritarian Senate rules (the filibuster) permitted the antidemocratic party (the Republican Party) to prevent the chamber from even debating the merits of the bill! (The vote was on the question of whether the Senate should even debate the bill — not on whether the Senate should actually pass the bill.)

Senators – particularly those on the right — love to tout the Senate as “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” But with its anti-majoritarian rules — and one party wholly committed to antidemocratic positions — the Senate cannot even discuss desperately needed legislative items.

Andrew Stashefsky, Lacey

Support the Comprehensive Care for Alzheimer’s Act

Congresswoman Marilyn Strickland recently announced that Cara Kwon, a junior at Emerald Ridge High School in Puyallup, won the 2021 Congressional Art Competition for Washington’s 10th Congressional District. Ms. Kwon created a lovingly warm acrylic painting depicting her uncle comforting her grandfather in the hospital before he passed away from Alzheimer’s disease.

Ms. Kwon’s painting immediately brought to mind the experience I had in 2019 lying beside my wife of 40 years holding her hand as she passed away from a dementia-related disease.

The issues facing anyone who finds themselves either as a caregiver or the person with Alzheimer’s or another dementia is complex and difficult to navigate effectively through our health care maze.

Fortunately, the bipartisan Comprehensive Care for Alzheimer’s Act (S.1125/H.R.2517) supported by Congresswoman Strickland will create a path for better Alzheimer’s and dementia care and address the shortcomings in the way care is now delivered. This act also would reduce costs while providing better overall quality care.

Please join me in thanking Congresswoman Strickland for her support of the Comprehensive Care for Alzheimer’s Act.

Mark Holly, Olympia

Truman’s ‘To Secure These Rights’

In 1946, Harry Truman’s Presidential Commission on Civil Rights in the U.S. put forth a report called, “To Secure These Rights.” That report found that segregation and Jim Crow laws had split the country wide open less than 100 years since the Civil War. Truman integrated the Armed Services based on that report.

Seven decades later, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defends teaching history at West Point to young congressional wastrel Matt Gaetz.

Every child attending public school since 1970 was taught some aspect of Critical Race Theory. It’s nothing new. Did you learn something about African slavery at school, and about how it was wrong? Did you learn about suffrage and women’s right to vote? Did you learn about Sacagewea and Sojourner Truth? About picking cotton and working in the western mines and railroads? Did you learn about unions and the many workers — black, like John Henry (who was a prison convict) or Chinese and Irish immigrants — who built the infrastructure upon which rested the Age of Industry?

If you learned that history, you learned about how ideas of race, class, and gender formed our democracy, and how a government of, by, and for the people continues to grow.

We are all humans, every one of us. Every One of Us.

Every one of us deserves, and should demand respect.

Vote for those who respect human dignity and sovereignty.

Vote!

Liza Rognas, Olympia