Rep. Laurel Libby violated code of ethics

I am responding to a letter from March 7 by Joanne Hall of Bath. What the writer fails to understand is that Rep. Laurel Libby was not censured for her opinion on transgender women in sports, she was censured for violating the legislative code of ethics. She outed a transgender youth. She had no right to do that and could easily have made her points without doing that. This teen is likely to experience bullying and possible violence because of Rep. Libby’s behavior. She silenced herself when she took this course of action.

Margaret Duhamel,
Woolwich

Federal budget balancing is a farce

There has been a lot of noise in the media for the past six weeks about the federal government and its budget. I wonder how many people actually understand the purpose and function of the federal government. According to preamble of the U.S. Constitution, the purpose of the federal government is “to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”

Government spending is how this is done. We can not achieve these things without using our resources to pay for them. But UNLIKE a state, local or personal budget, the federal government does NOT have to balance its budget because the federal government can print the money it needs. The economics of how the government uses taxes and resources is complicated, but the bottom line is that it can’t run out of money. How it allocates resources determines whether the money spreads out across the bulk of the people or mostly goes into the pockets of the wealthy.

In addition, this current attack on federal employees and agencies is flat-out wrong. Most of these employees, especially those who are not political appointees, take their jobs seriously and do their best to work within the rules and laws set out by their agencies and Congress. The United States is a government not a corporation, and this attempt at a hostile takeover is not a business reorganization, it is a form of a coup. Our founding fathers, fearing this kind of thing could happen, wrote the separation of powers in to the Constitution. Democracy stands only when the rule of law prevails.

Susan Chichetto,
Bath