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Dear Editor:
I stopped writing to our two Michigan senators about health care because they really don’t seem to care anymore what people who oppose the bill are thinking in Michigan.
Each senator has made up his or her mind even though polls show a majority of Americans do not want the current health care bills in the House or the Senate. That apparently is irrelevant.
I always thought the Senate was a genteel place where people exercised great care over their rhetoric. I was mistaken. Sen. Harry Reid recently compared senators wanting more time to study health care to the people who wanted to wait before abolishing slavery in the 19th century and before voting for civil rights legislation and women’s rights in the 20th century. Since almost all Republicans oppose this current health care bill, he must be referring to Republicans. But he is completely wrong about history. Anti-slavery was the principal plank in the Republican platform before, during and after the Civil War: Democrats wanted to accommodate the South.
Over 80 percent of the senators who filibustered the Civil Rights bill in the mid-1960s were Democrats. I don’t know how support for giving women the vote was divided between Democrats and Republicans. One fact that cannot be disputed is that a Republican won the election of 1920, which was the first year all women over 21 could vote.
What is Harry Reid saying about Democrat senators who have reservations about the health care bill? Is he comparing them to their pro-slavery antecedents? President Obama, Vice President Biden, Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Harry Reid all lament that Republicans are against the health care bill and refuse to cooperate with Democrats. Well, why shouldn’t they be against it? No Republican ideas are included in the bill, and Sen. Reid implies they are racists and misogynists.
Is there a whiff of desperation in Sen. Reid? Is the pressure to deliver the Senate’s approval of an unpopular 2,000-page plus bill by the end of this year getting to him?
Or is it simple stupidity? After all, it was Sen. Reid who announced that Washington, D.C. tourists smelled bad in the summer and perhaps the new air-conditioned reception center for the capitol building might correct that problem.
Michael Waldron
Niles
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