Although I am generally in disagreement with Jim Fossel’s columns, I enjoy reading them. His June 27 column makes some interesting points about the filibuster (“Senators, not Senate rules, make laws“). He rightly observes that if  Democrats vote to undo the filibuster, the Republicans might do the same when they are able to do so.

What he doesn’t say is that the Republicans are likely to do the same regardless of what the Democrats do — they are not taking their cues from Democrats and most of them don’t seem to be interested in “bipartisan politics.” This is the party that voted unanimously against investigating an insurrection against Congress. This is the party that supported cheating Obama out of selecting a judge for the Supreme Court in his final term, and then voted a Supreme Court judge in during the last minutes of Trump’s presidency.

This is the party of Trump at the moment, and they have detached themselves from reality and have no platform. If they have their way they will suppress the votes of black, brown and young citizens in more than one-third of the states in the Union, by making it more and more difficult to vote. They are not interested in compromise or bipartisanship; they desperately want to get back into power regardless of the cost to our democracy. For these reasons the Democrats need to carve out the filibuster for issues involving voting rights and the admission of new states.

Having done that, they need to pass the For The People Act, and vote to admit Washington, D.C., as our 51^st state. This would insure that all people regardless of skin color or voting age would have access to the vote in our next election cycle, as well as enfranchising 700,000 tax-paying D.C. residents who currently have no vote in Congress.

 

Emanuel Pariser

Waterville

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