Letters: Reconsider Ferguson Township Stormwater Fee; Keller and Thompson Should Resign

Supervisors Need to Reconsider Proposed Stormwater Ordinance

Soon everyone in Ferguson Township may be handing over more of their hard-earned dollars.

Thanks to the township staff and Board of Supervisors, an ordinance dealing with stormwater is soon to be voted upon. The new ordinance would affect residences, businesses, farms, churches, retail stores and their parking lots, etc. In other words, everyone.

I, and others living in the township, seriously question the need for additional taxes or fees. Governments, big or small, should be responsive to those under their jurisdiction, being more concerned with the welfare of the people rather than making it more difficult for people to live.

Everyone in the Centre Region should be concerned, for if the ordinance passes in Ferguson Township, I believe the entire Centre Region will be looking into doing the same.

I’m asking the board to reconsider. Put no extra burden on residences, farms and businesses.

Ed Guenot
Gatesburg

Reps. Keller and Thompson Should Resign

As sad and shocking as the assault on the U.S. Capitol was on January 6, it was followed by something even more damaging because it was more difficult to understand and easier to spin. While most legislators were chastened by this tragedy to withdraw their objections to electoral votes when counting resumed, eight Pennsylvania House Republicans insisted on proceeding with theirs, and subsequently voted to reject the certified electors of Pennsylvania (the objection failed).

Representatives Fred Keller (PA-12) and Glenn Thompson (PA-15) were among those who voted to overturn the will of Pennsylvania voters in the interest of partisan politics. Previous to this, Keller and Thompson had sought to disenfranchise Pennsylvania voters by signing onto a lawsuit brought by the attorney general of Texas that, if granted, would have thrown out Pennsylvania ballots in defiance of state electoral sovereignty that has been an integral part of U.S. electoral law since the founding of our nation.

If Pennsylvania had a system of recall, I would immediately begin work on that remedy. Lacking that recourse, I must call on these representatives to resign immediately, for having egregiously failed in their obligation to respect the will of the voters of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. If they are unable to summon the moral courage to resign, they should at least solemnly swear that this will be their last term in office. I beg donors to the campaigns of these two (ideally, of any Congressperson who voted to reject Arizona or Pennsylvania electoral ballots) to inform them that they now regret that decision, and cannot be a contributor in the future. These are lawless lawmakers who do not hesitate to toy with the U.S. Constitution under the pretext of protecting Pennsylvania’s.

Mr. Keller’s Twitter posts (I don’t follow Mr. Thompson) perpetuate the false equivalence of the January 6 challenges to ones in the past, in order to give his actions the veneer of normalcy. He neglects to mention that while challenges do frequently occur in the counting of electoral votes, since 1877 they have always occurred in the context of an election that has already been conceded, that most fail for lack of bicameral support, and that most if not all involve a single state.

As is well known by now, Donald Trump is the first president in modern history not to have conceded a lost election prior to the counting of electoral votes — despite the convincing results — making the challenging of ballots from six states an obvious attempt to thwart the will of voters, an objective he made no effort to hide. Having failed to persuade court judges in numerous pre- and post-election challenges to throw out a sufficient number of ballots — because judges adhere to law and precedent in treating voter disenfranchisement as a last, drastic remedy for irregularities — the mounting of challenges on January 6 was a transparent attempt to pull these decisions out of the realm of law into that of partisan politics.

The will of voters and the expert opinions of an independent judiciary were to be replaced by the raw struggle for political power between elected officials. A senator from Missouri instantly claimed expertise on Pennsylvania election law. Throughout the post-election litigation, irregularities have been trumpeted as though they were fraud, allegations trumpeted as though they were evidence. Democracy will not survive if the losing side cannot accept a loss, however difficult and disagreeable, and take upon themselves the responsibility to achieve a better result in the future.

I do not write with the goal of trying to reduce the Republican headcount in Congress; as stated above, I would prefer a recall campaign that, if successful, would trigger a special election that would likely be won by a Republican, but that remedy is not available in Pennsylvania. I am for the foreseeable future a one-issue voter: democracy vs. the war of all-against-all that we witnessed on January 6.

I offer my time and energy to assist in the 2022 campaign of Republican candidates who commit to democracy and genuine GOP values, and I pray that a few still exist. If not, I will have to quit my job and leave Pennsylvania, because I do not feel safe here anymore under this kind of “leadership.”

Thomas Beebee
State College