Recent E-mails to My Senators

I sent these emails to Senators Burr and Hagan, my Senators from North Carolina on March 1st and 2nd of this year:

Senator Burr:

HELP! It looks like everybody is losing their minds in the Senate. Jim Bunning is nobody of whom you Senators should be proud.

Mitch McConnell appears to have gone daffy! Is there something in the drinking water up there??

Getting to the serious matters facing our country today...please do what you can to restore benefits to our unemployed Americans. If you've ever been unemployed, you will have compassion for these people.

PLEASE BREAK YOUR SILENCE!


Senator Hagan, please get on board and make a public statement saying you will vote for the public option if it comes up through the reconciliation process.

For most of the health care debate, Democrats took reconciliation off the table. As you know this prevented Majority Rule in the Senate and allowed the Republicans to use procedural shenanigans to require a super-majority of 60 votes in order to pass the public option.

Your vote is so terribly important at this time. We were assured that a majority of Democratic senators supported the public option but that we couldn't clear the 60 vote threshold.

Now that reconciliation is back on the table, some are still claiming that the votes aren't there. Please show them how wrong they are.

The irony of the situation is that some Democrats in Washington have taken exactly the wrong lesson from the Republican victory to claim Ted Kennedy's Senate seat. Polling has shown in state after state that the public option is much more popular than the Senate bill without it.

Instead of making Democrats more cautious, the Republican victory in Massachusetts must be a rallying cry to get back to basics and support one of the most popular pieces of health care reform — the public option.

Like you, I don't need the public option for my health care although I suffer from multiple sclerosis. I am asking you to do the right thing for our fellow North Carolinians living without health care insurance.

I can't imagine coping with this disease without health care insurance. Can you?