Letters: Thompson doesn’t represent constituents; Learning from history

Thompson doesn’t represent constituents

I applaud Rep. Glenn Thompson for his newsletters describing “The good, the bad, and the local.” My enthusiasm stops there. His newsletters – and voting record – make clear how poorly he represents many of us.

Thompson laments the “crisis” at the southern border. He voted to impeach Homeland Secretary Mayorkas (with zero evidence of wrongdoing), but he hasn’t actually done anything to solve the problem. He voted against providing funds to border agents. He joined his House Republican colleagues in blocking bipartisan legislation addressing border security, legislation that – by most analyses – gave Republicans almost everything they requested.

His failure to act on border security highlights Thompson’s fealty to Trump rather than to his constituents. Trump wants chaos and doesn’t support any legislation that might appear to give credit to Democrats.

Americans, however, want action on border security.

Thompson recently co-sponsored a bill affirming that life begins at conception. It has the same effect as the recent Alabama decision, conferring personhood on frozen embryos produced through in-vitro fertilization. It makes abortion illegal under all circumstances.

With this legislation, Thompson shows callous disregard for many constituents: namely, the one in six couples who experience fertility problems; the people whose religion differs from his, including those who are equally moral but define life as beginning at birth; and the women who need a medical abortion for a severely ill fetus or a dangerous pregnancy.

Representative Thompson needs to stop playing partisan games and represent his constituents.

Brucie Serene, State College

Learning from history

In reading C. W. Goodyear’s recent biography of James Garfield, the second of our four assassinated presidents, I was reminded that although Donald Trump is unique in presidential history some Trump-like issues are not, including two during Garfield’s election campaign in 1880.

Tens of thousands of cheap labor Chinese immigrants hired to build western railroads were “kindling white grievance,” Goodyear writes. “The Caucasian working class bemoaned livelihoods lost; histrionic novels like ‘Last Days of the Republic’ cast the migrants as a foreign invasion...” (The Chinese Exclusion Act resulted in 1882.) Trump has claimed that hordes of immigrant families today are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Another issue was the spoils system of patronage that put frequently corrupt or simply incompetent allies of Congressional politicians in federal jobs that required knowledge or at least skill. Public outrage had pushed civil service reform for years. (The Civil Service Reform Act resulted in 1883.)

Recently the press has reported that a cadre of admiring lawyers who are planning for a second Trump administration is devising ways of replacing “administrative state” key career civil servants at various agencies — who allegedly sabotaged the first Trump administration — with true believers, Trumpists who will never question the whims of the strongman in the White House.

John N. Rippey, Zion