Letter: An Act of Political Immorality
To the Editor:
The Republican Party’s decision to turn its back on our party heritage makes our claims to a grand Lincolnian legacy laughable.
In 1854 several dozen men crammed into a small schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin to form a new political party out of the ashes of the then collapsing Whig Party.
These men were a combination of Conscience Whigs, Northern Democrats, Free Soilers, and Know Nothings. An eclectic group of partisans that shared a wide array of different policies and ideologies.
Unifying them, however, was a belief that free farmers should not have to compete with slave plantations, that the presidency had become too unaccountable, that slavery could not be allowed to expand into the territories, and that the back of the Democratic Party’s slave power, a term used to describe the vice grip plantation owners held over D.C., must be broken.
A serious grievance they had was the overwhelming power the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 gave to the federal government. The law was intended to strengthen federal authorities’ ability to take runaway slaves in the North back to the South. However, in practice, the law allowed federal authorities, backed by the Southern planter class, to go into the North and, for all intents and purposes, black bag freemen of color and put them into slavery without due process.
Now, some 172 years later, a coalition of former Democrats turned Republicans are seemingly doing the same thing the Republican Party was formed in opposition to. All while proper Republicans are doing nothing to stop it.
Here are the facts I know concerning Abrego Garcia. I know he was here illegally, I know he was deported back to his native El Salvador, and I know the Supreme Court has demanded he be returned to the United States for a proper trial.
In all likelihood, an immigration court will find that Mr. Garcia is here illegally. But he deserves a trial to verify that he was not here legally. Not because I have a particular soft spot for illegal immigration but because if he is not afforded a proper trial what is to say that legal immigrants or naturalized citizens won’t face a similar fate? What’s to say that those of us who were born and raised here won’t eventually be denied our due process rights?
The rights we have been granted are universal and God given. Even if a government so eagerly and despotically trample on them with glee and insist they be mere fabrications of long dead old men, codified by a cheap piece of paper, they remain constant and true. Due process is not a luxury afforded only to the elite but a right granted to the people, regardless of who we are, and we must stand up for it.
Governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller, the boogeyman of reactionary “Republicans” the world over, said while campaigning in 1963 that “The Republican Party is the party of Lincoln. It was founded to make men free and equal in opportunity. It is the party of all men, the only truly national party in America. For the party to turn its back on its heritage and its birthright would be an act of political immorality.”
The Republican Party is more than Trump. It is a party with a proud political lineage that traces its roots back to men and women who, in the middle of the 19th century, said enough was enough. They formed a party that aspired to better fulfill the promise of America. We are heirs to a great legacy. We must not, for the sake of political expediency, cast aside this great inheritance and undermine those rights to which our party was formed to uphold and defend.
— Alex Burns
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