A friend who is a Wisconsin attorney recently posted this on Facebook, and I thought both the idea and the template deserved a bigger audience. This letter encourages one of our state senators, Ron Johnson, to do his job and call for a hearing on Obama’s selection of Justice Garland for SCOTUS. This letter does not expect or even request Johnson approve of the nominee; it only asks that he do his job and call for a hearing.
You can contact your state senator here. Please feel free to use this letter as a template.
Senator Johnson,
I am writing to you today to ask you to split from your obstructionist colleagues in the Senate and meet with (and push for a vote on the appointment of) Judge Merrick Garland.
I understand there is a mistaken notion that waiting until the new president is elected is “letting the people decide” but the logic there is extremely faulty. The people decided when they elected President Obama.
While you may disagree with President Obama’s selection, your “advice and consent” comes in the form of your vote to approve or not approve Judge Garland’s nomination. Advice to not nominate someone at all is not advice, it is obstruction of the President’s duty.
I do not know if the Senate will approve Judge Garland, but the people who elected President Obama, Senator McConnell, Tammy Baldwin, Elizabeth Warren, and every other elected official in Washington deserve to have their voices heard by way of a vote on Judge Garland’s appointment.
I cannot pretend this will effect my vote for your seat in November, I am a firmly based lefty, I voted for Senator Feingold in 2010 and I will vote for him again in November, but I am a resident of Wisconsin and have been for most of my voting life and you are my Senator. Mine is one of the voices you represent. I am asking you to do the job you were elected to do and to uphold the oath of office you took when you went to Washington on January 3, 2011.
Mine is one of the voices you will continue to represent until at least January of 2017. With that, you have a responsibility to me and to the residents of this great, progressive State of Wisconsin to avoid the typical gridlock caused by the extreme and damaging partisanship in our Nation’s Capital.
The refusal to so much as hold a vote on Judge Garland (you must be truly afraid he’d actually be approved by the majority [or as I like to call it “the voice of the electorate”]) is not just an abdication of your Constitutional privilege/responsibility (and those of Senators McConnell and the rest of the Republican Judiciary Committee), it is an act of extreme cowardice. It is also an act of great presumption. It presumes you’ll be happier with the elected President in January 2017. It might be someone more liberal than President Obama. It might be Donald Trump. Don’t both of those options cause you to shudder?
I’ll be honest, there is a part of me that would love to see you and yours continue with the stonewalling tactics and then watch as Secretary Clinton or Senator Sanders sweeps into office and immediately nominates President Obama to the highest Court in the land. Thinking about it gives me the giggles. I am sure that will not happen, but that is something you open yourself to with the continued refusal to come to the table.
I’m not asking you to vote for Judge Garland’s appointment, but I am demanding as a voter in the great State of Wisconsin that you call for a hearing on his appointment. That is your Constitutional duty and one you promised to uphold and defend. I may not agree with your stance on many issues, Senator, but I do expect you to follow through on the stances you take. When you asked my fellow Wisconsinites to send you to Washington D.C. you did so with a promise to uphold and defend the US Constitution. Now would be a really good time to show you meant it.