Letters: Where’s the justice?; A message for Republicans
Where’s the justice?
Does the name Paul Jawon Kendrick mean anything to you? How about Mark Baserman? On Feb. 15, 2018 Paul Kendrick attacked Sgt. Baserman, a corrections officer at SCI-Somerset. Kendrick repeatedly kicked Sgt. Baserman in the head wearing the steel toed boots provided by the DOC. Sgt Baserman died of his injuries 11 days later. Kendrick was and is serving a life sentence under a 2015 murder conviction.
Since that date Kendrick has been charged with Baserman’s murder. Three years later he is still awaiting trial, and at our expense getting three meals each day, clean clothes, clean sheets, a lawyer, a private investigator and other consultants to aid his defense.
Three years later Sgt. Baserman’s wife, step-children and grandchildren are still without him; without him at Christmas, without him on birthdays, without him at Little League games.
In 2015 Gov. Wolf imposed a moratorium on implementing the death penalty in Pennsylvania pending a legislative review of the use of the death penalty. That review report was issued in 2018. No action has resulted. Gov. Wolf has effectively given Paul Kendrick and all other life sentence inmates an unrestricted license to attack, injure or kill in Pennsylvania without further penalty.
Three years ago, our state employee was killed at work by a convicted murderer. Who speaks for Sergeant Baserman in this justice system?
A message for Republicans
Republicans, don’t be fascists. When you support a leader no matter what he does or says, true or false, you are not being Republicans but fascists. That’s what the word means. When you decide to have no platform for a presidential election (as the Republican Party did last summer) but whatever your president peddles, that’s fascist, not Republican. Stop trying to use free speech to incite violent insurrection, while hating and trying to stifle the free speech on my side. That’s fascist.
When you tell Pennsylvania’s Senator Toomey, one of the seven bipartisan votes to convict Trump, that you did “not elect him to vote his conscience,” as one county official just said, and the party is echoing that in a statewide censure vote, that’s not Republican, it’s fascist. Toomey is deeply, too deeply for most of us, conservative. He’s just apparently not a fascist. That should not make him a “RINO.”
Most especially, if you are among the 40% or so of Republicans who say they are prepared to use violence if necessary to get your way in terms of policy, if you prefer civil war to a democracy that goes against your policy choices, and if above all you make that choice to preserve the top-dog status of white people, you are not just a fascist, you are aligning yourself with Nazi Germans.
Be Republicans, not fascists.
Attacks on democracy
The current censure of Senator Toomey by the Centre County Republicans and other Republicans in the state once again gives evidence that Republicans are turning their back on democracy. The Republican Party chairman in Washington County boldly says, “We didn’t send him their to vote his conscience. We didn’t send him there to do the right thing.”
The Republican attack on democracy is also seen in their refusal to acknowledge the results of a fair and honest election. Again led by the CCRC taking a busload of people to the Jan. 6 insurrection, and state Republican “leaders” challenging the results of an election that followed the rules that they themselves established.
Republicans also work diligently to gerrymander districts to reduce competition for elected seats. This results incumbents being reelected over 95% of the time. No new ideas, no challenge to be a better representative.
Finally, the Republicans are attacking our voting system. Thanks to easy absentee voting, mail-in voting, and early voting, nearly 2/3 of the population voted in the 2020 election, as compared to just over 1/2 in other recent elections. Ease of voting increases participation, which is a good thing. Yet currently many states with Republican controlled legislatures are working to a) limit early and mail-in voting, and b) apply other voter suppression techniques.
Why do Republicans work so hard to decrease the public’s participation in democracy? What do they fear?