Senator Lee,
I am troubled.
You see, when I heard about the issues in Flint, Michigan, about poor decisions by elected officials resulting in the poisoning of American citizens, the humanist in me felt sick to my stomach. I hoped that the people responsible would be held accountable, that people would be fired, recalled, or even indicted. You’re a lawyer. I’m sure you can appreciate what a fun trial that would have been.
But I know how things work in this country. I know that people in charge of huge catastrophes like this often aren’t held accountable. They use their positions to protect themselves, placing blame on the lowest person on the totem pole, publicly and quickly firing the scapegoat, and moving on like nothing happened. But something terrible and tragic did happen, and it continues to happen, no thanks to you.
Now, I’ll admit that I’m no legislative expert. There are probably more esoteric rules that you’ve forgotten than I’ll ever know, and that’s why elect such learned and educated men such as you to represent us in Congress. Granted, I’ve never voted for you, but it’s not because I didn’t want to… scratch that. I didn’t want to, but unfortunately, I was still living in Connecticut when you and the Tea Party somehow defeated a senator I kind of liked — at least as far as Republicans go — in the 2010 election, using rhetoric against a president to anger up your constituents into leading the Republican wave that swept you, and others like you, into Congress during that fateful November, and beginning what has been one of the worst obstructionist periods in U.S. history. But again, I’m no expert.
I’ve taken a bit to get to my main point, so I apologize to whatever intern from the Hinckley Institute that might actually be reading this for you. Back to the Flint crisis. Now, nobody has been held responsible, but some bad stuff still happened. We, as Americans, as human beings, should care that thousands of our fellow citizens, most of them children, are now POISONED. We should do everything in our power to help fix this, yet you get on your high horse and secretly block some aid from going to Flint to help deal with this problem, claiming that it is a “local issue” and that the federal government shouldn’t be involved.
Now, from what I understand, this is even money that is just sitting out there to be used; granted, it didn’t start out as being earmarked for this purpose — it was originally money for a subsidy for the automakers — but who would’ve known that we would need to spend millions, if not billions, to stop a city from poisoning its own people. I took a quick look, thanks to opensecrets.org, to see if some money from the automakers maybe influenced your decision, but I didn’t see anything that jumped out, so bully for you!
Anyway, I’ve probably taken up enough of your intern’s time, so I guess I’ll close this letter here with this: I would hope that you still have some humanity, that you actually care about your fellow citizens enough to stop being such an obstructionist on this particular thing. I won’t even get into the other stuff you probably should be doing as an elected official; this one thing seems to be the easiest thing for you to fix. If you decide to keep fighting this bill, this aid to the poor people of Flint, I vow that I will do everything in my (admittedly) limited power to make sure that you aren’t elected again in November. You are bad for the people of Utah, but even worse, you are bad for the people of America.
Your constituent since 2012,
Robert
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