Senate Democrats DO YOUR JOB!

Hi All,

My good friend, Tom, did his civic duty and wrote a letter to our public representative. He wrote to the Democratic Leader Sen. Harry Reid focusing on his and the senators' responsibilities and duties. I though this letter was right on target.



Dear Harry,

I am certainly concerned with honest elections and I applaud your efforts to clean up campaign financing and some other stands you have taken against the current administration; however you and other democrats have dissapointed me and many of my friends by backing down on critical issues, most notably, federal court appointments. You and Senators Boxer, Byrd, Durbin and others who are supposed to be "liberal" dems completely caved in to Bill Frist, the Republicans and their "nuclear option" threat and let them have three utterly terrible right-wing federal court appointees. You all congratulated yourselves for a great "victory" in defeating the nuclear option. So where is the victory? What did that effort win for our cause other than loading more ultra- conservative neo-con backers onto the courts? The very next day, Frist was back with the same nuclear option threat. You must be intelligent enough to know that that threat is not going away and the only real power you out-manned democrats have is your lobbying ability among the few right-headed Republicans and, more importantly, your right to filibuster. If you keep backing down from that, you have no power whatsoever.

You didn't filibuster against Roberts, and now we have another corporate shill on the Supreme Court. You have a historic opportunity now to stand firm against a man who, in my opinion, represents the greatest threat to democracy perhaps in all of American history, namely: Samuel Alito. It looks like you're going to back down again.
Please, if you have any real democratic values, stand up and filibuster this guy---go to the wall with it---for us, the American people. Alito is a racist and elitist who favors giving the president unitary power, placing him above the other two branches of government. Once on the bench, he becomes an apologist and defender of all the crimes this president and his croniies have committed. Please, filibuster!

With regards to your bill to "stop republican organized crime", again you democrats and the republicans are falling way short of real campaign reform. It looks for all the world as if both parties are scrambling to do a "photo-op", so to speak, to distance yourself from any connection with Jack Abramoff and other criminal fund-raisers.

Real campaign reform, the kind that would actually put power back in the hands of the people, would have to severely limit not just gifts and favors, but MONEY... BIG MONEY... the kind of millions that comes from corporations to pay for BIG, EXPENSIVE TV ADS, the better to brainwash the people with. This corporate influence is the real enemy of democracy! As Mussolini said, "When corporations run government, that' s fascism." What we need is the kind of campaign reform that California's Jerry Brown touted some years back: limiting contributions from anyone, individual or corporation, to no more than one hundred dollars.

Here are my choices for most important issues: 1) Impeach Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove, Wolfowitz, and the rest of the neo-cons! Now, I know you can't do this with a minority in the House and Senate, so you must first 2) Block Alito!! You must filibuster! Then you can begin to work toward 3) Real campaign reform, so that we can actually fairly elect a majority of honest, ethical representatives of EITHER PARTY, who will actually do what they are paid to do, which is: ENACT THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE THAT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT! Once this is accomplished, we can then do #1, GET RID OF BUSH!! Once we get the neo-cons out of office, we can do something I am passionate about 4) GET OUT OF IRAQ!! Please, get us out of this unjust, illegal, hugely expensive war, an Orwellian war that will go on forever unless checked, a war whose only purposes have to do with corporate interests...oil, Haliburton, Unicon, Hearken industries, etc. ... and to "keep us in line" with the false fear of terrorism; and, last but not least on my list of most important issues: 5) Protect our precious environment! Get people with strong ties to corporate interests out of federal agencies such as the EPA. Stop letting the fox guard the henhouse!

Senator Reid, your "give 'em hell Harry" website name is a real catchy slogan. Well, I was alive when Harry Truman was president, and, let me tell you, you fall very short of the kind of "buck stops here" tenacity and integrity that Truman lived by while he was in office. If you want to be identified with that man for real, not just use him for a catchy slogan, then show some backbone and really stand up to the crime family in office. You can start by
keeping Alito off the Supreme Court. FILIBUSTER!!!

Peace,
Thomas Margitan
Costa Mesa, CA