Dear Elected Representatives,
Senator Dianne Feinstein town hall, First AME Church, 4/20/17
In the last 3 weeks I have been at meetings with 5 of you, 3 of whom are my actual Senators and Congressperson. In each of these instances you answered questions from the audience and in all but one, none of those questions were mine.
That’s not your fault. We have a lot of questions right now that need to be answered and you did the best you could: some had raffles, some picked people from raised hands, others vetted the questions first. And the majority of these questions that did get asked were all important questions. The answers to these questions are crucial to people’s lives and to their mental and often physical well being.
But my question really needs an answer, too. Because I believe our democracy has never faced a more important question than this in its history, and we need an answer if our democracy is to have a future.
First of all, I want to thank you all because each and every one of you has called for either a Special Prosecutor or an Independent Investigation of the Trump/Russia scandal, or both. And many of you have called for the Attorney General Sessions to not just recuse himself, but to actually resign after he lied under oath about meeting with a Russian ambassador.
Unfortunately as you have pointed out at all of these meetings, we do not have the votes to get anything on our own. We have to rely on Republicans to support these things too, and so far none of them have shown they are willing to put country before party. To know that our fate rests in members of a party that has had shady dealings with a foreign power is maddening. We are being held hostage and our only hope is expecting the people who did the wrong thing to do the right thing.
My greatest fear is that a bloodless coup happened in this country. A political party colluded with a foreign power to influence – if not outright rig – an election in favor of their candidate. And we rewarded this treasonous behavior with the Presidency. I am terrified that we will never find out the truth because of their penchant for blatantly lying and covering up without consequence and the fact that we control neither the House or the Senate.
But if we do find out that this was the case, that there was collusion with Russia, it taints every executive order and appointment, the entire administration, members of the Republican party, and the very election results themselves. You do not allow someone to cheat themselves into a win and then let them keep the trophy. Nor do you just hand it to someone else from the same team that cheated. They’re disqualified and the other team is declared the winner – or a new game is played.
So my question to you is: what is the remedy? How do we fix this grotesque perversion of our democratic system? Because without a remedy, no one will ever believe that any election in this country will ever be free or fair again.
Sincerely,
Tess Rafferty