Letters

A recent letter submitted by Amy Paradise [“Total Hypocrisy,” Letters, October 2] decries the utter hypocrisy of the Republican Party, “a party that supports totally irrational, tyrannical behavior as normal.” Her conclusions reveal the breakdown in objective logic, one that reduces society to an oppressor vs. oppressed mentality, corrupting any meaningful communication.

Ms. Paradise points out what she considers Republican usage of “every dirty trick to stack the Supreme Court.” Donald Trump, as chief executive, exercised his right to nominate another justice as a replacement. Typically, this individual will reflect the president’s own views. The nominee is fully vetted before the entire Senate, which then votes on approval by a simple majority. This was precisely the process followed during Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court.

Republicans did effectively block Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland until it expired in January 2017, when Trump won election. Hardly any difference, politically, from when the 1987 inquisition led by the Senate Democrats of Ronald Reagan nominee Robert Bork prevailed, preventing his nomination.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted to pack the Supreme Court in 1937 by proposing legislation that would have allowed him to appoint a new justice for every sitting justice over the age of 70, up to a maximum of six new justices, that would have certainly been the “stacking” Ms. Paradise is referring to. That’s politics, Ms. Paradise — that is how the system works. No side has a monopoly on it. Your righteous indignation is muted by history.

Karl Marx created an entire political system predicated on the oppressed masses rising up against their oppressors. By arousing the rabble, the poor peasants’ lament was magnified into revolution. Ever since the Communist Manifesto, human existence has been reduced to this simple dichotomy rendered by class analysis, casting revolution as liberation, and political violence as justice. Both sides scream past one another in a circular firing squad, while violence accelerates on our campuses, inner cities and political platforms.

Make no mistake, the blue cities of Chicago, Portland, Baltimore and Philadelphia are crime nightmares directly attributed to their lax enforcement and justice system. While I do not support the National Guard being deployed without local consent, the question should be: Why wouldn’t they want to request help? Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser begrudgingly noted a significant lowering of crime after the National Guard was deployed to assist local police.

Mass protests and rioting have become the norm in blue cities rebelling against ICE agents who are attempting to enforce immigration laws that have always been in force but deliberately overlooked by liberal administrations, both locally and nationally. The massive influx of illegal immigrants promoted by the Biden administration brought this heartbreaking dilemma to its current breaking point.

John Porta

Westhampton