Correspondence: Open Letter to Senators Kohl and Feingold

One lovely Monday I grabbed a copy of The Capital Times, read the headline, and nearly went nuclear. “President” Bush had nominated a crony with absolutely no judicial experience to serve on the Supreme Court. It seemed there would be no end to this madness, so I wrote a letter:
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Dear Senators:

It has become increasingly clear to me that our country’s leadership has not only done nothing to lead, but has done nothing to deserve the authority to lead. Our nation has been hijacked by selfish, ignorant, and unsympathetic cynics who profit more from failure than from success. When I see our President and his cronies appear on television, I’m reminded of children who are testing their parents’ limits, and who find there are none. Every week there are new tests of the limits of what is acceptable behavior, and never is there a consequence. Senators, it is you who are supposed to provide consequences for the President.

In voting to approve John Roberts, a man with precious little experience as a judge, to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the very highest and most critical judicial position in the country, you have given the Bush administration (and their middle-school mentality) permission to do as they please. As evidence: the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court—she has no experience as a judge at all. A judge is supposed to be those rarest of creatures, someone who is not only knowledgeable of the law, but who can set aside their own notions long enough to see from the perspective of both sides of a case, and to be able to weigh that along with considerations of fairness, precedent, and lawmakers’ original intent. President Bush has nominated two people who have done little more than advise their clients how to break laws without getting caught. Are these the kind of people we want interpreting the Constitution for the modern era?

I was raised to believe that the United States is not just a democracy, but is a meritocracy, where people are in leadership positions because they deserve to be, and where issues are decided based solely on merit. The only thing the Bush administration’s appointments have proven is that they are loyal to President, party, and financiers, and are willing to do anything to advance themselves, including deceiving the public and skirting the law. And now they have a fellow crony on the Supreme Court, with another waiting in the wings.

Please, Senators, please do not ever again vote for something Republicans want, thinking that they will return the favor later. They will not; they have become too cutthroat for that, and many Democrats are either befuddled or following suit. Just judge the issue on whether it has any merit. Wisconsin does not need any pork-barrel projects that you might get later in return. We won’t need any favors if the country has been destroyed while Nero fiddles away. What we need from you is leadership. We need for the Bush administration to be shown that there are limits and consequences for their selfish ignorance, and for members of both parties to begin acting based on merit and not on personal gain. Perhaps it will cost your political future, or perhaps it will enhance it. But I think we will all gain if just one Senator stands up and stops accepting poor behavior from his leader and his colleagues. Grow a backbone and vote your conscience.

Very truly yours,
Andrew Lee Hunn
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I received formulaic responses from both Senators’ office staff, as expected. It’s interesting that I mentioned the President’s “success by failure” strategy; it occurred to me after sending this that Harriet Miers may never have been intended to succeed in her nomination, that it was merely a ploy that could be withdrawn in order to make the subsequent candidate seem more favorable, and indeed, the next nomination was not female. “You see, I tried to appoint a woman and look what happened…” Success by failure.