…but first, if you don’t know me personally, you don’t know my personal political leanings as “So far left that if the world were flat, I’d fall off the West Coast”. Thank mom. However, in her later years, she was afflicted with a brain tumor. We are not sure if she turned on Fox News one day and that caused the tumor, or if the tumor made her right wing…. but it’s important to understanding the letter.

Dear Mom —

If you were still with us, I know you’d be glued to the hearings every day. And I know we’d talk every night about them. I can hear your voice, and I’m sure you’d say “Why can’t you be more like that Elise Stefanik? She’s so smart, and I’m sure you’d share her opinions if you hadn’t been brainwashed by the Democratic Party.”

I know that you died a Trumpanista because of his wrong-headed approach to Israel. You always saw the Israeli situation as it was in the 1950’s and ’60’s and didn’t understand the import of how things changed in the intervening decades. But you were true to yourself as a Zionist. For you, “Israel” was your defining issue. I wonder about your thoughts on Bibi’s indictment.

Still, you cared about other things, and I wonder how you would feel about Trump having sold out an ally. About the hundreds of Kurds who died only because Trump cared about his Turkish business interests no matter the cost to anyone else. I wonder how you would have felt yesterday watching Fiona Hill destroy what little was left of the Republican goal posts.

If you were here, I would use you as a marker to try and understand how people can be so blind to a truth. Are they just, as you were, so committed to a single thing that nothing else matters? That could be Israel, or White Nationalism, or a hatred of immigrants, or perhaps being one of those 400 people whose tax bills actually went down with the change to the code. How can they ignore the facts? Would YOU have been convinced by the testimony, independent of spin?

I would ask you about cowardice. You raised me to be brave. To stand up to wrong. The thing you did of which I am most proud is when, as a 16-year-old co-ed at City College, you were arrested for protesting so that blacks could be students and teachers in lieu of maids and porters. That was so brave, and honorable. And now, I look at the Republican senators who care only about whether they get re-elected next year: not about law, nor history, nor morality. As a Republican, does that matter to you?

Some people have told me that they voted for Trump in 2016, but are sorry and will not do that again under any circumstances BUT they believe that Trump should neither be impeached nor convicted if impeached. They say that this is a “political process”. I ask about the Constitutional responsibility of Congress regarding oversight and upholding of the law, but none of them have actually read the Constitution. I know you have, so what say you regarding the obligation of Congress to right this wrong?

Others of your political leanings have told me that “everyone in politics” does “this sort of thing”. I then ask for a specific example of which president EVER withheld properly allocated Congressional aid to an ally at war, to the end of winning an upcoming election by smearing an adversary with falsehoods and innuendos. Not one can give me an example. Can you, mom?

You always had contentious relationships with your elected officials, especially two of your Senators with whom you sparred publicly and often. But you never accused them of being criminals, only of supporting political initiatives with which you disagreed. Do YOU have an example of this level of criminality? And as an aside, are you still sparring with Frank Lautenberg in the afterlife?

As we move into the second winter I will spend without you, please know that I miss you more than words can say. Yes, I’m taking my vitamins, and I have a warm coat. I wish you were here to explain the Republican position to me – you never raised me that “winning at any cost” was the way to go. Rather, that you fight the good fight, celebrate your wins, and lick your wounds when you lose, brush yourself off and try again. I wonder if you would remember the person you were before the tumor, and return to a political position of morality and constitutional adherence. Or if the brain left you after the radiation treatments that got you into remission was so brainwashed by the echo chamber that you lost the ability for independent thought and consideration forever.

I hope you are warm in the afterlife – you were always cold here on earth.

Love and Hugs,

Jessica