Spoils of victory include rehiring dismissed employees Re: “In D.C., keeping them fired is the hard part,” July 20
Thank you for Barbara Hollingsworth’s column, which prevents the public from forgetting that the administrative process politicians have created brings government workers the public clamored to fire back on the payroll, often with back pay.
Former Mayor Adrian Fenty tried to shut down this system by de-staffing the Public Employees Appeals Board and by appointing unqualified political cronies to it until he was stopped cold by the unions’ well-organized countercampaign.
Elections matter in a democracy. Even though losing, mayoral incumbent Fenty outspent Vincent Gray 2-to-1, labor unions helped Gray raise enough money to mount a credible challenge and made independent expenditures to turn out Gray voters. Bringing these fired workers back onto the payroll is one of the spoils of political victory.
The candidates D.C. voters elected favor a system where they can respond to immediate public outcries against employee incompetence and misbehavior by firing them, but bring them back on the payroll later when public attention wanes. The money and political organizing that got them elected comes from interests dedicated to preserving this kind of system.
Dino Drudi
Alexandria
Obama supports contraceptive giveaway
Re: “Gov’t advisers: No copays for contraceptives,” July 20
With the government drowning in debt and businesses teetering on the brink, the seemingly oblivious Obama administration has concocted a “cash for contraceptives” scheme that considers neither cost nor conscience.
An Institute of Medicine panel, commissioned and ideologically stacked by the Obama administration, has decreed that pregnancy is a public health hazard that requires forcing every American to subsidize a nationwide contraceptive giveaway program.
Besides mandating a massive expenditure without a cost analysis, the dictatorial mandate also tramples the conscience rights of every patient, physician, employer and insurer who ethically objects to the controversial contraceptives included in the mandate, such as ella and the “morning-after pill”, which can end the life of a human embryo.
But this administration and its allies, like the billion-dollar Planned Parenthood empire, see conscience rights as an impediment to abortion ideology, and the appropriation of the public health system as the path to their own profits.
Jonathan Imbody
Vice president for government relations,
Christian Medical Association
Ashburn
Socialism ends badly for everyone
Socialism’s quintessential flaw is that eventually you even run out of other people’s money.
Two and a half years into its term, President Obama has saddled us with a national debt equal to 69 percent of America’s gross domestic product. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate is far above what it was when he took office and home values have plummeted.
One might suppose a sense of collective failure would temper Democrats’ appetite for tax-and- spend rhetoric. Yet even defections among their own caucus have had scant effect upon the Democrat leadership’s enthusiasm for socialism and its carefully nurtured sense of racial grievance and entitlement — the preferred tools for undermining meritocratic societies like ours.
Ron Goodden
Atlanta
