To the editor:
Someone you had business dealings with, makes a claim against you in court, sues for damages and loses. They make another claim, sue and lose again. They bring 50 lawsuits, losing every time, each claim being found to be false. The court then orders you to pay anyway. When you ask why you must pay for a false claim, the court says because the claimant tried 50 times.
This sounds senseless because it is. Welcome to the Congressional complaint against states that voted for President-elect Biden.
The joint statement from the complaining senators (www.cruz.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=5541), that included our Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, said that Congress must reject the votes of millions of Americans because President Trump made so many claims against these states.
Over 50 times these claims were found to be without merit in our courts, providing unprecedented proof that there was no reason to suspend votes. But for our Sen. Marshall and the six senators who voted with him, reality itself warped and changed. That a claim had been determined false over 50 times meant that it was probably true.
In a particularly stark, the sun-comes-up-in-the-west passage, the senators’ joint statement said that ideally, the courts would have heard evidence and resolved these claims.
These senators offered the 1876 Hayes-Tilden presidential race as their precedent, when Congress formed a commission to determine the electoral votes of Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. These three states each sent competing Electoral College votes, one set for Hayes and one for Tilden. Congress was forced to determine which set to accept. Once again, for our Sen. Marshall and the six senators who voted with him, reality itself warped and changed. That every state in the 2020 election certified only one set of electors meant that it was the same as sending two competing sets.
The state governments and courts of this nation determined that Joe Biden won the Presidential election. Allegiance to the republic for which it stands means defending the Constitution. It does not mean creating an opposite-world of false reality and voting in the halls of Congress to nullify the authority of these institutions of government that our Constitution established.
In their heart of hearts, Sen. Marshall and our Rep. Tracey Mann, who voted similarly, may have seen themselves as having the noblest intentions. In reality they acted to aid the false claims of election fraud by ardently maintaining complicit silence. After thousands of Americans in our state governments and court system fulfilled their duties to provide and ensure a legal election result, they acted as if none of these efforts ever occurred. They provided no specific claim of any single election error, which freed themselves from the risk of anyone providing proof that they were wrong. They then voted to reject the votes of millions of Americans, effectively stripping these Americans of their most precious political power.
All of us want any claim against us to be determined in a court of law with the required standards of evidence and consensus of case law that are our safeguards. The joint statement from the complaining senators was exactly the opposite of this. Supporting the authority of our institutions when it gives us what we want and trying to nullify it when it does not, is not defending the Constitution. In Barton County, the large majority of us wanted President Trump re-elected and did not get it. In deciding to support or disown the actions of Sen. Marshall and Rep. Mann, we are deciding whether to give our loyalty to an individual or to our nation. That’s reality.
John Sturn
Ellinwood
