Letters to the Editor | Jan. 3, 2023

While cynically sitting on my grassy knoll, I can’t help but wonder if columnist Kyle Sammin’s glowing endorsement of ranked choice voting has an underlying conservative agenda. Sammin laments the losses of Doug Mastriano and Mehmet Oz late last year and postulates that a ranked choice selection process would have yielded more “electable” GOP candidates. He goes on to note that GOP candidates have very limited, if any, chance of prevailing in Democratic strongholds like Philly. Could ranked choice voting change that? Possibly. The system requires voters to pick a number of candidates (often five) in descending preference, with the lowest vote-getters eliminated. It’s possible that the winner could be the first choice of a few voters, but the second or third choice of a plurality. Would that half-a-loaf scenario increase apathy and diminish turnout, perhaps allowing a minority party candidate (say, the GOP) to win? Perhaps a better strategy for a dwindling Republican Party would be to stop endorsing extremists and obstructionists.

J. Savage, Philadelphia

When Donald Trump came into office, he was pretty transparent — he just wanted out of Afghanistan. So Trump took a swing at something his predecessors hadn’t: a real effort to strike a deal with the Taliban. It took nine rounds of talks over 18 months. In February 2020, Trump announced there was a deal. The basic contours: The United States was to get out of Afghanistan in 14 months and, in exchange, the Taliban agreed not to let Afghanistan become a haven for terrorists and to stop attacking U.S. service members. Trump’s deal forced Joe Biden to choose between a withdrawal or an escalation of the war. He chose to withdraw. “I had only one alternative,” Biden said, “to send thousands more troops back into Afghanistan to fight a war that we had already won, relative to the reason why we went in the first place.”

Dave Savage, Collingswood

Regarding Doc Rivers’ work with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project: Looks like the NBA legend isn’t just a good coach for the Sixers; he’s also a good person!

David C. Epler, Cherry Hill, epplehead@aol.com

It was heartening to read that Adam Jentleson will be U.S. Sen.-elect John Fetterman’s chief of staff. Jentleson is the author of Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. In the book, Jentleson makes the case that the Senate’s rules and practices, starting with the filibuster, need to be reformed, or we face the prospect of permanent minority rule. Fetterman campaigned on fighting to end the filibuster. It will be a difficult task. My view of the filibuster is that it is wielded by politicians from both teams to stop anything from getting done that the wealthy financiers of political campaigns don’t want. Good luck, Sen.-elect Fetterman. We are almost certainly already under minority rule, and that minority — the so-called “donor class” — has the money to keep their employees on the job.

Roy Lehman, Woolwich Township

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