Our president recently stood at a lectern and stated that we will establish an embassy in the Republic of Cuba.
That statement made my head spin. Cuba is a communist dictatorship. The United States is a republic.
Most of our populace thinks that we live in a democracy, but that is not true. Read what some of our Founders thought of democracies.
• Alexander Hamilton: “We are a republican government. Real liberty is never found in the despotism or in the extremes of democracy.”
• James Madison: In Federalist Paper No. 10, he said, “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention, have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
• John Adams: “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.”
• Benjamin Franklin: When questioned about the results of the Constitutional Convention, he said, “We have given you a republic, if you can keep it.”
With some of the latest decisions made by the president and the Supreme Court, combined with the unwillingness of Congress to exert its duty to employ checks and balances, we may very well be losing our republic.
John M. Roberts
South Portland
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