Voting record
In a recent newsletter, Rep. Jen Kiggans assured constituents that she is lowering costs for families, strengthening national security, and ensuring access to quality health care for every Virginian. Those are worthy goals. Unfortunately, her voting record tells a different story.
Kiggans has opposed measures that lowered prescription drug prices and capped insulin costs, and voted against child tax credits that directly reduced family expenses. At the same time, she supports tariff-based economic policies that economists widely agree raise consumer prices. On health care, she has opposed the Affordable Care Act and supported policies that restrict Medicaid enrollment and reduce SNAP benefits, programs that are essential to health care access and food security, particularly in rural and aging communities. Finally, national security is more than military force. Unilateral actions taken without strong alliances or clear congressional oversight weaken America’s credibility and global leadership rather than strengthen it.
Voters deserve more than reassuring language. We deserve policies that align with the promises made.
Antoinette Kahan, Virginia Beach
Not silent
Re “Organic protests?” (Your Views, Jan. 13): After reading this letter about the tragic events in Minneapolis, I was stunned. Then I read the next letter, “Stand up” and headed right to my computer to respond. That letter writer is absolutely correct about what is happening to our country and our responsibilities as citizens. If we are silent, we are complicit.
The first writer’s assertion that the protesters are “paid participants” is laughable, but fits right in with many recent Republican narratives, such as the 2020 election was stolen; former President Joe Biden runs a crime family; the Jan. 6 riot was staged by Democrats; immigrants are eating our dogs and cat; and the ACA is terrible and should be replaced with the “no health care for you” plan. He states that the protesters secretly hoped that someone would get killed so they could win the “media game.” In reality, Democrats have been warning for months that this would eventually happen. Masked, armed and aggressive ICE agents roaming our streets — what could go wrong?
He asserts that this is “all about power,” but he has the wrong suspect. It is the GOP, not the Democrats, that will use any means to maintain its hold on power. In my opinion, ICE’s real objective is not to deport dangerous immigrants, but to make all Americans fearful of our own government, to silence us.
Rodney Whitt, Norfolk
History
Some years ago a writing project took me to Berlin’s museum about the secret state police of the Nazi government. Its mission is to teach how racial and political oppression had been turned into the Gestapo of 1933, which was given the power to remove, imprison and torture people without trial or explanation in 1936.
Many of those people ended up in Auschwitz, which held political prisoners in 1940 but evolved into a place of torture and mass murder by 1942. Anyone who travels in post-war Europe ought to visit there, to be reminded of human cruelty.
The palatial Wannsee House sits in an upscale neighborhood just outside of Berlin. It was here that the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was planned over a luncheon in 1942. It’s now a museum holding the posters and propaganda that depicted those who were not purely Aryan and Christian as vermin and poisoners of blood, language that has been used by the leadership of present-day America.
I don’t worry that the worst of what occurred in WWII will happen here in America. But we did get halfway there with the internment of Japanese Americans during that war. In the present day, we’ve gone further to Alligator Alcatraz.
In the meantime, ICE funding has been increased more than three-fold, in support of a planned addition of 10,000 to its police force. The detention facilities are coming online.
Chris Dickon, Portsmouth
