No headline

Sessions wrong for attorney general

I believe Jeff Sessions should not be confirmed as attorney general of the United States.

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions has spent his career fighting voting and civil-rights laws that he would be responsible for enforcing as attorney general.

Sessions repeatedly has called the Voting Rights Act “intrusive” and in 2013 endorsed the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder that effectively gutted key provisions of the law. “If you go to Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, people aren’t being denied the right to vote because of the color of their skin,” he asserted at the time. However, Selby triggered a multi-state offensive against voting rights, particularly for African-Americans and Hispanics.

In North Carolina, a state Sessions cited as free of racial bias in administering elections, Republican legislators passed voting law changes that a federal appeals court concluded were drafted “with almost surgical precision” to disenfranchise blacks. The judges in that case overturned the Carolina law and the Supreme Court refused to restore it. Judges in Texas, Kansas, North Dakota and Wisconsin have made similar findings in overturning or blocking enforcement of other post-Shelby voting laws in those states.

While those laws were thwarted, other states have successfully erected obstacles to voting that the Voting Rights Act likely would have blocked before Shelby.

Sessions’ home state of Alabama closed 31 motor-vehicle offices that also served as voter registration centers in rural, majority African-American counties; after a public outcry, the offices were re-opened for one day each month. In one Georgia county, the elections board tried to move the polling place in a black-majority precinct from a school gymnasium to the county sheriff’s office; public complaints got it shifted to a church instead.

There is an ample additional evidence of Sessions’ unfitness, starting with testimony during confirmation hearings when he was nominated for a federal judgeship in 1986. One witness then recalled hearing Sessions refer to an African-American colleague as “boy”; others recounted his references to the ACLU and the NAACP as “un-American” organizations.

Additionally, as a senator, Sessions opposed the Violence Against Women Act and the Matthew Shepard Act, which would classify offenses based on the victim’s sexual orientation, gender or disability as hate crimes.

Sessions appears to be indifferent or even hostile to some of the most important responsibilities of his prospective office.

For these and other reasons, Sessions is unfit to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. —Susan Sanocki, Bigfork

Don’t balance budget on backs of veterans

The Congressional Budget Office has described one budget cutting option this way:

Under current law, “retirees whose disabilities arose from combat are eligible for combat-related special compensation, and veterans who retire with at least 20 years of military service and who receive a VA disability rating of at least 50 percent are eligible for what is termed concurrent retirement and disability pay …

“Beginning in 2018, this option would eliminate concurrent receipt of retirement pay and disability compensation: Military retirees now drawing combat-related special compensation or concurrent retirement and disability pay would no longer receive those payments, nor would future retirees. As a result, the option would reduce federal spending by $139 billion between 2018 and 2026, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.”

PLEASE, if you care about your vets and our sacrifices to this great country, take a few minutes to read my letter.

Tell your senators, representatives and president: Hands off our veterans’ entitlements!

In my case, nearly $2,000 per month will be taken from me if this is enacted. I am banged up and broken from giving my country arguably the best 30 years of my life. Now my country’s legislators want to disregard my and EVERY disabled veteran’s service and sacrifice to our country by eliminating our receipt of disability pay from the Veterans Administration while receiving retirement pay from the military.

It has been less than a decade since the old way of doing business was finally fixed. Now they want to return to the old way of doing business off the backs of we veterans.

A simple explanation of what is proposed goes like this: Retirement pay = $1000 per month / Disability pension from the VA = $500 per month, giving a veteran a total of $1,500 monthly ENTITLEMENT (like Social Security, it is not a BENEFIT, rather it is an ENTITLEMENT ... we EARNED it). This legislation would take the $500 disability from a veteran’s monthly income. But, out of the kindness of the legislators’ hearts, $500 of the $1,000 monthly retirement income would be tax free. Meanwhile, with such a drastic reduction of monthly liquid income, tens of thousands of veterans and their families will lose homes, default on debts, go hungry, etc., all to cut spending by our government. Sadly, I will be included in those throngs of vets.

I have great alternative ideas: Reduce or stop funding for the United Nations, stop spending money on people who are in this country illegally, cut back or eliminate BILLIONS of dollars in foreign aid, stop providing sweetheart tax shelters for big business, etc. There are many ways to reduce this government’s spending that will save a hell of a lot more money than what will be gained by breaking faith with veterans.

I wonder how long the irresponsible legislators proposing this thievery served in uniform and laid their very life on the line every day for their country ... The answer to this rhetorical question is most likely a very simple one: NOT ONE DAY.

P.S.: Rob Quist, this should be a SUBSTANTIAL issue for your campaign ... wink, wink, nudge, nudge. —William Tyrrell, Bigfork