Just hold your nose
Even if you have to hold your nose in doing so, you have no choice but to vote for Democrats in the midterms.
President Donald Trump’s disastrous policies (too many to list) have no end in sight if voters elect representatives whose only goal is to feed at his trough, along with the friendly corporate billionaires guarding their wealth and not your well-being.
He has circumvented, in every way possible, court decisions that hold him accountable. He controls a Republican Congress and a Supreme Court that no longer believes in checks and balances. He guts regulatory agencies and policies meant to protect us.
His sycophants bend at his knee as he and they become rich.
If you truly are one (Republican, independent, disillusioned Democrat) who disapproves of Trump’s actions, you must enforce his use-by date of November 2026. Hold your nose and use the only power left if you truly care about this country and its people.
Maybe someday a new party will emerge to represent America’s mainstream promise, but the only backstop now is a Democratic Congress. We have no other options.
Bev Graves, Westerville
The DOJ is full of criminals
The Trump Department of Justice has made many controversial hires, but this may be the most troubling one yet.
A decade ago, David Michael Levin was charged with three felonies after illegally accessing government election websites in Florida. Investigators said he used a cyberattack to obtain credentials, enter restricted portions of a county elections website, and separately targeted the state division of elections website.
He pleaded guilty to reduce misdemeanor charges, served 20 days in jail and later called the episode a “silly political stunt.”
Amazingly, Levin appears to have landed inside Trump’s civil rights division – the part of DOJ charged with enforcing federal voting rights laws. But that’s not all. In August, Levin was found at a Minneapolis polling site alongside a senior Voting Section attorney during the DOJ’s election monitoring operation.
That’s right. Someone who pleaded guilty to hacking election websites is now working for the federal division helping oversee elections.
And remember – the DOJ is preparing to deploy roughly 1,000 election monitors around the country this fall, while aggressively attempting to expand its role in state-run elections. Given its hiring of Levin, what can we expect from it? Truly, voting to save democracy is dependent on the midterms.
Wendy A. Turrell, Akron
Republicans are trying to trick you
Re "Ohioans are tired of toxic politics; candidates should debate the issues," Sept. 26: "Shocking" would be how I would describe two of the three data points discussed by Bowling Green State University professor Robert Alexander, the first being that, of the polled likely voters, 25% believe Sherrod Brown is the incumbent U.S. senator and 10% believe Democrats control the U.S. Congress.
I am rarely surprised by the ignorance U.S. citizens express outside election cycles of who holds individual offices. But in the heat of the contest between Brown and Husted, and its ramifications for control of the U.S. Senate and whether the Trump administration will be permitted to compound the wreckage of its first 18 months, it is profoundly disturbing that a material portion of the electorate may believe that Brown or Democrats in Congress had any responsibility for our high inflation, interest rates, soaring national debt, destructive tariffs and trade policy, "might makes right" foreign policy and Iran War, or acquiescence to corruption by the Trump-controlled Republican Congress.
Sen. Jon Husted, having rubber-stamped Trump's many flawed cabinet nominees and ill-considered agenda, has adopted Sen. Bernie Moreno's 2024 culture-war mud-slinging tactics.
He may be hoping voters think it is 2024 and don't recall his or the Republican Congress's role in Trump's failed second administration.
David Bruce Gabriel, Shaker Heights
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Hold your nose and vote for Democrats. Stench from Republicans far more pungent | Letters
