My Letter Today To Senator Lisa Murkowski

Senator,

The time to take action was a while ago. Further delay will be disastrous.   I urge you to find enough Republican colleagues to block all legislation in the Senate that further empowers Trump and erodes our crumbling democracy.

I don't pretend to understand the pressures you are under.  I wrote to you during impeachment that if you didn't stand up against Trump then, Trump would cause incalculable damage at the next major crisis.  (Not that the day-to-day blows against democracy, the dismantling of the US' alliances around the world, the horrors against immigrants,  the dismantling of women's rights, the attacks on our intelligence services, etc. weren't all outrages of their own.)  And now, a couple of months after the Senate passed on the chance to impeach Trump, or even just hear more witnesses and review documents,  we have the virus.
Trump is at the helm causing through his action and inaction, his encouragement of armed protest against governors, his promotion of untested cures, the needless deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.  He won't increase tests because "too much testing makes the US look bad."   Meanwhile all the professional health experts say testing is essential to stopping the virus.
I urge you as strongly as I can to recruit five or six  Republican Senators  (or whatever number is needed to stop Trump's mismanagement of the COVID crisis and his dismantling of democracy) who have the courage to say "No More."  To vote, as a block, against legislation that strengthens Trump or supports his refusal to let his appointees testify.  To vote against appointments until there is legislation that insures fair elections (stopping voter roll purges, shutting down polling places in minority neighborhoods, blocking vote by mail during this pandemic, etc.), and that insures the continuation of the US Post Office as we know it. This is a particular issue in rural Alaska.

My mother went to school in the 1930s in Germany.  She experienced the rise of Hitler and she managed to get out at age 17 in August 1939. Her parents didn't make it out and I never knew any of my grandparents because my father's parents also died, victims of Hitler. I've only begun to fully understand recently, as I interact with my own grandchildren,  how great a loss it is to not know your grandparents.

My mother always told me when I was growing up that it could happen here.  Trump's actions and the Senate's failure to check his power is making my mother's prophecy reality.   If Trump is reelected he will feel no need to follow any rules but his own.   He's already pardoning all his convicted cronies and now Barr has had the DOJ drop charges against Michael Flynn.  A fair justice system, a foundation of democracy, is crumbling before our eyes.

If this isn't the time to take bold action, there is no such time for you and other Republican Senators.  
I have told anyone who asks that I suspected you were keeping a low profile until you could do something.  But I'm afraid you have waited too long.  

I pray that you focus on finding enough Senate colleagues that you can stop this president from further destroying the United States.  Even if he is not reelected, he would be able, with the current Republican Senate majority, to continue to do damage and to make the US a second rate country until January 2021.

You can't keep waiting.  Time is up.  Our democracy is at stake.