Dear editor:
Our state newspaper prints a summary of congressional bills and items every Sunday with a list of how our Senate and congressional representatives chose to vote on each one. It should be required reading for anyone who wants to put forth an opinion or stay up to date on Washington. Outside of the fact that our two senators and four congressmen pretty much vote along party lines 95 percent of the time, it's worth looking at.
Here are a couple from this week: Our national security-minded Sen. Tom Cotton voted against a measure (in other words to rescind or nullify a prior piece of legislation that had become law) that simply required the Social Security Administration to notify the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System when someone with a mental impairment was attempting to purchase a weapon. In other words, Cotton, who supports immigration restrictions and bans (which I don't totally disagree with), is OK with a mentally ill person, as long as they're a U.S. citizen, getting a firearm with ease.
Then there's our local congressman, Bruce Westerman, with a pair of interesting votes. In one, he, like Cotton, voted to nullify or rescind a previous law involving Title X from providing some funds to Planned Parenthood. When you hear Planned Parenthood in a Republican quote, you are guaranteed to hear "abortion" in the same sentence, even though the organization receives zero federal funding for abortions. Even if they did, Republicans, who love to cut and slash social programs like unemployment benefits, welfare, food stamps, etc. (which I ironically agree with as well), never have the guts to address the fact that most of the recipients of those programs are the ones who could most use Planned Parenthood to stop the cycle of poverty that simply puts more people (the children they never should have had) into those programs in the next generation.
Finally, Westerman, a self-proclaimed advocate of wilderness, ecology and wildlife, hailing from The Natural State, voted to again nullify/rescind a law that did prohibit the "shooting of grizzlies from aircraft, using steel traps on brown and black bears, and gassing wolves, including cubs in their dens." What a sportsman and avid outdoor lover. The law that was nullified covered 77 million acres and 16 federal wildlife refuges.
I'm embarrassed to admit that, on at least one occasion, I voted for both Cotton and Westerman. The 2018 midterms can't come soon enough.
Anthony Lloyd
Hot Springs
Editorial on 02/22/2017