How My Congressman Helped Trump Attempt a Coup
And why that’s somehow even more offensive than Trump himself
Occasionally, out of some vestigial reflex, I still go through the archaic motions of being a citizen in a functioning republic. I wrote to my congressman last week. My representative, Andy Harris, is not what you’d call a major player in the D.C. arena; he’s a low-level Republican tool who sits on the leadership committee of nothing, doesn’t introduce a lot of legislation, and reliably votes along party lines — basically, does as he’s told. His parents were émigrés from Soviet bloc countries — his father from Hungary, his mother from Poland — and Harris is still holding fast against the red menace, the gravest threat facing us in 1954; he once took a stand against naming a post office after Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Maya Angelou because she was “a communist sympathizer.” About the best thing that can be said of him is that he probably accurately reflects the ideology and values of his constituents in the poor, rural part of Maryland where I live.
I’ve written Harris several times before, about issues from health care to guns to the impeachment, and he invariably responds with a form letter affirming his unwavering support of whatever’s the worst imaginable position on that issue. In my latest letter, written while Trump was…
