Senator Susan Collins:
I join millions of New Englanders and hundreds of thousands of your Maine constituents in calling on you to demand the removal of President Donald Trump by the provisions of the Twenty-fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This man is guilty of sedition, pathological dishonesty, hate speech and insurrection against the United States government and his people.
Donald J. Trump has violated his oath of office in countless ways. It is time for you to uphold yours.
Reread the Preamble to the Constitution, madam Senator. Do what is your duty: to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, allowing a criminal to remain in the White House would constitute dereliction of your duty.
President Trump must go. If you enable his sedition and insurrection with silence or glib rationalizations, your legacy will be irreparably tarnished on a par with that of Senators Cruz, Hawley, Scott, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Tuberville, Kennedy and Lummis, all of whom voted to overturn the will of the people, made clear in certified elections in several states. These senators are, by having actively supported Mr. Trump’s denigration of the most secure and accurately tabulated presidential election in history, accomplices to the violent insurrection of January 6th. As such they are seditionists.
I demand that you do what is manifestly your duty this time, for the sake of this nation and its people and for your legacy as an elected leader duty bound to the Constitution. I demand that you denounce the sedition of these senators and call for the removal of Donald Trump from the presidency.
Senator Collins, there is no politically expedient way out to make nice with reactionaries who ignore the facts of Donald Trump’s malfeasance, while also maintaining an appearance of dutifulness to moderates. Playing it down the middle with nice words won’t cut it this time.
You can choose to make a statement against the lies and hate speech of Donald Trump and the defiling of our Capitol that he and a cabal of your senate colleagues instigated. It is time for you and scores of your senate colleagues of good conscience to summon the courage and conviction to take actions that make that statement.
Do the right thing, Senator. Remember what your parents and the people who taught you in publicly funded schools taught you. Be worth of the legacy of Margaret Chase Smith, George Mitchell and Edmund Muskie.
Mark Trafton
Exeter, N.H.
Mark:
Though some nit-pickers might object to a Granite Stater presuming to instruct a Senator from Maine, we endorse your admonition. Judging from past experience, getting the Senator to do the right thing may require all hands on deck.
The Editor