2-6 thursday letters
Kudos for Rep. Vern Buchanan
I applaud Congressman Vern Buchanan, R-Longboat Key, for kicking off his seventh term by introducing two meaningful bills to protect animals. The Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture (PACT) Act would add extreme animal cruelty to the federal criminal code, and the Safeguard American Food Exports (SAFE) Act would end the slaughter of American horses.
Despite felony level penalties in all 50 states, animal torture can still go unpunished. Current federal law does not address gruesome acts of cruelty, such as crushing, burning, drowning, suffocating or impaling animals, thereby providing a refuge for this depravity on federal property and in interstate commerce. The PACT Act closes this gap in the law. It provides law enforcement with an essential tool to protect our communities from violent individuals. Rep. Buchanan has supported the PACT Act since it was first introduced in 2015, and I am grateful that he took up the torch this year to lead it.
As a longstanding leader on the SAFE Act, he also continues to stand with the 80 percent of Americans who want to see a permanent ban on horse slaughter in this country. While the last horse slaughter plants in the United States closed years ago, America’s horses are still being killed for their meat. Each year, tens of thousands of our horses are transported under terrible conditions to Canada and Mexico, where they meet a cruel end. The SAFE Act will end this practice once and for all.
Thanks to Buchanan’s leadership, both bills are well positioned to advance this Congress. As co-chair of the Congressional Animal Protection Caucus, he has brought these issues to the forefront and built a bipartisan coalition of more than 150 lawmakers. For this I’m grateful, and so are America’s animals. They’re lucky to have him in their corner.
Sara Amundson
Washington, D.C.
Democrats wrong on immigration
Border security and our humanitarian and criminal crises –which are real- cannot be described or solved by a few simple sentences or proposals as is usually attempted.
Border security requires personnel, funding, and infrastructure (including a supporting criminal justice system), information and knowledge (especially on-site), and of course popular support.
It includes “smart” and physical barriers, “smart” and physical ports of entry, and infrastructure for handling immigrants who enter illegally or who violate our laws on visa conditions (like overstaying).
These are very complex systems where one part supports the others; eliminate one of these and border and national security are lessened.
Speaker Pelosi, Democrats, the Democrat Party, and the DNC approved border security -including physical barriers- before 2016.
Now they have done a 180 and universally oppose physical barriers. (If they are “ineffective”, tear down California’s wall with Mexico –or just install stiles.)
The only rational explanation is that Donald Trump was elected to be OUR President (the rule of law), and he promised to expand the wall at our southern border.
So their mantra now is no more wall, “Dump Trump”, and “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”. The House position is that un-funding federal workers is acceptable and even necessary absent any other powerful tool to not fund more wall and to “take down” Trump. Members participating in this unethical action are violating their oath to support the Constitution.
(Our Constitution gives power of the purse solely to the House, and not the Senate or the President.)
Let us push for and support broader solutions to these complex issues.
Hint: Maybe educating your Members of Congress on this is a start.
Roger Grossel
Lakewood Ranch
