THIS EMAIL TO THE EDITOR WAS SUBMITTED BY BRUCE DEHM FROM GROVELAND
I attended the town hall meeting this morning in LeRoy with Rep. Chris Collins and came away with these observations:
The meeting did not start well with Rep. Collins saying that the founders designed our government with three branches: The House of Representatives , The Senate and the Executive Branch. I’m not sure why he didn’t include the Judicial as one of the three branches of government, perhaps it does not involve him so it just was not on his mind. Most of the attendees were there to encourage our Representative to become defiant in the face of the Federal Government’s moves to ignore the limits on government by our Constitution. I’m sorry to say most left the meeting very disappointed.
There was much interest by attendees in continuing to fight against Obamacare using the threat of not voting for a Continuing Resolution (continued funding of the government – as is). Rep. Collins will not vote against the upcoming Continuing Resolution as a way to continue the fight against Obamacare because he is afraid the Republicans will get blamed for shutting down government by the liberal media (again) and then, there will be no chance for Republicans to win the Senate and Presidency in 2016. He said he is drawing the “line in the sand” on the December 2103 vote on increasing the debt level. (Boy, I have not heard that before!)
Mr. Collins s also took a lot of time defending Obama’s executive order allowing government employees to continue receiving generous subsidies for their health care costs. “We can’t hurt Postal workers or employees in my office, it wouldn’t be fair to them.” When it was mentioned that the Post Office is losing $149,000,000 a day, or that the average Federal employee is making more than the average private business employee, he said that that was a different problem. He definitely came down on the side of keeping government employees happy. Although he espoused his position on smaller Federal government, not once did he indicate he would vote against the existing status quo of supporting expanded government.
There was no discussion on Benghazi, DHS, IRS, Fast & Furious or any of the other scandals currently in the news. A 16 year old attendee asked him what he was doing to fix the problems and in a long-winded answer, basically said he’s had a number of hearings on issues pertaining to small business and technology. Other than holding these hearing, nothing concrete was indicated.
Time and again Rep. Collins said that “Elections have consequences,” meaning that we have to live the fact that President Obama and the Democrat majority in the Senate were elected and there was little he (or we) could do about it. In saying that “Elections have consequences,” he is absolutely right. We have elected a Republican representative who is not willing to fight against the power of the established Republicans who helped put our liberty in jeopardy, and now, we have to live with it. I hope someone more conservative and willing to fight against the tyranny of our Federal Government will emerge to replace this weak-kneed Representative.
Bruce Dehm
Groveland