Dear Senator Lamar Alexander

Yesterday, the senior U.S. Senator from Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, sounded off about the FDA on Facebook, lamenting its failure to weigh in on the safety of e-cigarettes.  As a constituent, I posted a version of the following response as a comment on his post.  I would be daft to expect a reply there. I’m equally sure that, if I were to send a typed letter to Senator Alexander’s office, it’s more likely that my cat would be transformed into a footman and my car into a horse-drawn carriage than it is that I would receive anything other than a biased form letter typed & stamped by his staff.  So for my own satisfaction, I’m sharing my response to Senator Alexander’s complaint right here where it’s boldly conspicuous.  I’d love to know what y’all think about it.

Senator Lamar Alexander, agreed.  The FDA and many other federal regulatory agencies should do much more to stop many harmful products and practices.  It would be much easier for them to do so if they weren’t all so drastically understaffed and neutered following years of the systematic failure of Congress to fully fund their budgets, don’t you think?

In your decades as a public servant, Senator, how many times have you voted to cut the budgets of federal agencies and to decrease their regulatory authority?

And in the past 3 years alone, how many times have the Executive & Legislative branches, at the behest of the corporations and other moneyed interests who pay expensive lobbying firms to write the laws that favor them over commoners like me, taken action to reduce the effectiveness of countless federal departments and agencies?

How many conservative justices, nurtured, approved, and proffered by the Federalist Society, have you helped to elevate to lifetime appointments on the federal judiciary, justices who will spend decades working to undermine precedents extant since Theodore Roosevelt’s administration that have served to protect American citizens from the predatory practices of the wealthy, powerful, and corporations?

I thought the swamp was going to be drained under the current administration.  Can you tell me why, instead, it has only become more swollen as Trump has installed, and your Senate has approved, one wealthy corporate executive after another after another after another in Cabinet-level and agency head positions, and they in turn have worked to gut the authority and effectiveness of the agencies and departments they lead?

Sincerely,

Denny McBride

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What do y’all think?  Is my response appropriate?  What do you think about Congress’s constant strangling of and weakening of the federal regulatory agencies and departments that are charged with protecting Americans?  Is it time for an administration that will restore their power to curtail corporate greed and punish corporate violations?

Take care, be well, and happy blogging.

Love,

Denny

Via Ragtag Daily Prompt for Tue., 11/19/19, “sound“.
Via Word of the Day Challenge for Tue., 11/19/19, “daft“.
Via Fandango’s One-Word Challenge for Tue., 11/19/19, “carriage“.
Via Your Daily Word Prompt for Tue., 11/19/19, “conspicuous“.