Letters to the Editor (March 20, 2025)

Where’s the unity?

Editor:

Isn’t the president supposed to unify the country?

The many letters to the editor in the past weeks have shown the strong polarization of our neighbors, exacerbated already during the first Trump term.

Isn’t the president supposed to unite the country rather than sow division?

Just asking ...

Paul Parmentier

Los Lunas

Complexity of the case

Editor:

It only took about a month for a presidential action to reach the Supreme Court in the case of Scott Bessent v. Hampton Dellinger. Never heard of it?

Let’s start with the fact the case was on the court’s “shadow docket.” The court cannot hear every case. It has to decide what it’s going to decide, and sometimes justices disagree about what to decide.

That happened here. The president fired a lawyer, Hampton Dellinger. Dellinger went to court to keep his job, and a district court judge gave him a “temporary restraining order,” saying Dellinger could not be fired for five days, until a hearing on whether Dellinger can be fired while his lawsuit goes forward.

The administration took that “don’t fire Dellinger for five days” order to the Supreme Court, and the court ultimately decided not to act at all until the order was set to expire. We did get five pages of written material on Feb. 21, telling us two justices would have turned down the case and two would have taken it.

Then there’s the complexity of the case. Those five pages talk about appealability, equitable remedies and even something called quo warranto. Huh? This seems not to be the easiest case to explain how the president and the court are going to collaborate — or collide.

But fear not. Presidential action will be back at the court sometime, in a case not on the shadow docket.

Jonathan Gardner

Los Lunas

He doesn’t care about the country’s veterans

Editor:

The Veterans Administration (VA) cares for our veterans after their military service. Millions of Americans depend on VA services.

The VA has had and continues to have problems, including long waits to get medical care or even appointments, denial of benefits and other issues.

Now, Donald Trump and private citizen Elon Musk (neither of whom served in the military) plan to fire 80,000 VA employees. Are we to believe that all those people will suddenly be fired en masse because of waste, fraud and abuse? That all 80,000 of them are being fired because of poor performance, the standard reason Musk and Trump give for firing tens of thousands of federal employees?

Or that Musk’s Musketeers have actually evaluated the performance of 80,000 people within a matter of a few days? Are thinking adults really expected to believe this stuff?

Question: Given Trump’s pettiness, instability and mercurial decision making, isn’t it time he be given a serious mental evaluation?

James Rickey

U.S. Army veteran

Los Lunas