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Letters to the Editor | Jan. 29, 2025

Inquirer readers on Sen. McCormick's support of Pete Hegseth, protecting immigrant children, and police accountability.

Dave McCormick speaks to a crowd during a June rally for Donald Trump at the Liacouras Center at Temple University.
Dave McCormick speaks to a crowd during a June rally for Donald Trump at the Liacouras Center at Temple University.Read moreYong Kim / Staff Photographer

McCormick’s priorities

Dave McCormick ran on honor, dignity, and country. With his first consequential vote to approve Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, he set aside his honor and dignity, and he betrayed the women and men who serve in our military. We can be grateful to Hegseth for his past service; however, his limited military experience was woefully inadequate to support him leading the U.S. Department of Defense. Sen. McCormick voted for a man who isn’t qualified to lead an $850 billion operation with such enormous responsibility.

McCormick put politics above the well-being of our sons and daughters whose lives exemplify the true meaning of honor and dignity. His concept of “meritocracy” is to hire a man who looks like him and therefore must be qualified to do the job despite having no track record of previous successes at a scale that is required to lead these brave women and men. I highly doubt McCormick would have hired the former Fox News host to run his own company, yet he has no trouble hiring him to run our nation’s most complex and consequential organization. How sad that the values instilled in McCormick were left at the door of the Senate chamber when he cast his vote.

Joan McConnon, Springfield, joandmcconnon@gmail.com

All welcome

As a parent of a public school student, I was thrilled to see The Inquirer report on the Philadelphia School District’s firm support for immigrant students. Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr.’s actions to protect our city’s children — no matter where they were born or how they came here — is a lesson in solidarity that made me proud to be a part of the Philadelphia public school community.

It also reflects what I see in public opinion research that I lead at the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker advocacy nonprofit in Center City: people in the U.S. overwhelmingly want an immigration system that is welcoming, dignified, and fair. But the Trump administration’s plans to deport millions of moms, dads, “loving grown-ups” (my daughter’s school’s term for caregivers), and, yes, school kids, not only harms families and communities, it goes against our core values. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has no place in our schools. As the full impact of last week’s executive orders unfolds, I hope other school districts follow Philadelphia’s example. All kids should be welcome in the City of Brotherly Love — and in schools everywhere.

Beth Hallowell, Philadelphia

Imminent danger

The National Institutes of Health is the premier biomedical research institution in the world. The funding it provides for research has been fundamental to improving the health of Americans and of the rest of the world. Development of drugs to treat cancer, COVID-19, communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, AIDS, and malaria required NIH support. The highly successful biotechnology sector arose from NIH-supported research. President Donald Trump has now effectively shut down the NIH. Researchers in Bethesda, Md., can no longer order supplies needed to treat patients or fix equipment if it breaks. Grant proposals that have been through highly competitive peer review have now been blocked. No new research is being carried out. This is a devastating blow to the success of science in the U.S. and to the health of all Americans.

Paul Fitzpatrick, Wynnewood

Road to perdition

I suspect your columnists don’t write the headlines for their pieces, but the one that accompanied Trudy Rubin’s Sunday column missed the mark by a wide margin. If she thinks the Jan. 6, 2021, pardons are just the “first stop on the road to authoritarianism,” she has not been paying attention to the last eight years. She does suggest she feels that way in her last paragraph, where she writes that “we are launched on a slippery slope that can only end in a nondemocratic state.” The Jan. 6 pardons were the final stop on the road to authoritarianism, not the first. We are already there; we are now a nondemocratic state. The current administration is run by a low-knowledge narcissist who thinks — and rightly so given recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions — that he is immune to many of our laws. Virtually everything he has done since taking office last week goes against society’s norms, and in many cases is blatantly illegal. The next stop is when he becomes president for life. U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles (R., Tenn.) has already introduced a House Joint Resolution to amend the Constitution to end its ban on more than two presidential terms.

Steven Barrer, Huntingdon Valley, sjbarrer@icloud.com

Duck tales

Now-former Towamencin Township Supervisor Laura Smith claimed that her “hand gesture” was “mischaracterized.” Who does she think she’s fooling? All she was missing was the armband. But absurd claims are an old fascist tactic, one that Jean-Paul Sartre described in 1946: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But … by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.”

It’s the same old playbook: lie to people’s faces, trade in absurdities, and laugh while we tie ourselves in knots trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. The sad part is that The Inquirer is still falling for it. Calling it a “controversial gesture” that has merely been “likened to a Nazi salute” accepts the bad faith framing that fascists use to sow confusion and dodge accountability. We must not discredit ourselves by taking their “ridiculous reasons” seriously. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, well, there’s only one conclusion.

Ryan Kraus, Philadelphia

Bad apples

Philadelphia is negotiating with the Fraternal Order of Police over a new union contract. In addition to the normal things a union would negotiate — like work hours, pay, benefits — the FOP wants less police oversight. For example, it wants to prevent the Citizens Police Oversight Commission from investigating police misconduct. It wants to restrict access to records like those detailing how fired officers return to the force through the grievance arbitration process. This is exactly the opposite of what is needed.

No matter how egregious the conduct determined by police internal affairs, the FOP always works to get any penalty reversed, including reinstatement of fired officers. Unfortunately, it is usually successful. This lack of accountability creates an atmosphere where the police, seeing that bad behavior is very seldom punished, feel they are above the law. As Adam Serwer wrote in the Atlantic, “This is a system that creates bad apples by design.” It’s time to reverse the toxic power of the FOP, particularly its arbitration process. I know there is a shortage of police in the city. But if some “bad apples” decide to quit because police are held to account, then good riddance.

Gordon Cohen, Philadelphia

Join the conversation: Send letters to letters@inquirer.com. Limit length to 200 words and include home address and day and evening phone number. Letters run in The Inquirer six days a week on the editorial pages and online.