Pat Political

Supreme Court Nominee

I sent the following email to President Bush.

Dear Mr. President: We are not under the rule of Law. We are under the rule of a Constitution. You swore an oath to defend it. Remember?

And any candidate for appointment to the Supreme Court needs to answer only two questions.

This person needs to say yes, the Constitution provides the framework for all our law; yes, the intent of the Constitution should be the basis for all Supreme Court decisions.

Is the intent of the Constitution that clear?

Absolutely.

The men who fought the Revolution and met together to forge a new kind of government for their fledgling country had differences on the details but were united on the whole. They never wanted to see again any form of government in which they had no representation and no power.

Accordingly they created, to put it simplistically, a watchdog government. The three functions of government were separated with each branch to act as a check on the others. And the every two-year election for Representatives provides the check on the whole government structure by we the people.

If you read the ten first Amendments which define our protections as individuals, you will note that each one of these is concerned quite specifically with what your government may not do to you as an individual.

The Preamble states very clearly the general intent: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The test of all law coming before the Supreme Court should be whether that law is doing something that the ten first Amendments say specifically it shall not do to any one of us and/or whether it curtails the individual liberty, the right of personal choice for our lives, of each one of us.

There is today a whole range of obfuscating notions about the Supreme Court with which a commentary for Brooke Shield’s radio program for July 22nd On The Media deals far more effectively than I can, and I urge you to listen to it.

Our State Senators and Healthcare

(I sent the following email yesterday to VT Senators Welch and Leddy. Our State Senators begin to sound just like their Republican fellows, don’t they.)

I had the following conversation with Mark MacDonald Friday evening,
and he thought it would be all right to share it with you....

You Democrats are presently helping to re-elect Douglas because you
are allowing the health care debate to be framed in his terms, that
is, as a business issue, to be solved by a business solution.

If Clavelle had done his homework on the healthcare issue, we might
very well have a Democratic governor today. I don't believe that you
also have done yours.

The Vermont public has been well educated and is well aware that there
is a basic division between what they want as a community
infrastructure universal health care system and the
Bush-Douglas-Republican approach that health care is an insurance
concern to be solved by a business model.

Unless you really want to see Douglas re-elected, I suggest that your
approach should be to make your bill essentially the same as the
House, and perhaps you will be lucky enough to push Douglas to a veto.

In case you are looking for ways to pay for universal health care,
Vermonters are increasingly aware that they are paying with their
property taxes for the infrastructure that out-of-state corporations
benefit from but do not contribute to.

A tiered health care tax should be levied on all income which is
generated within the State of Vermont. This would include income like
mine, which is primarily Social Security and income from such
businesses as Wal-Mart, Hannaford, Chittenden Bank, and could quite
easily finance a state-wide health care system..

Health Care Solutions

Governor Douglas is once again obfuscating the issue of health care. He is trying to keep our attention on curing Medicaid woes and ignoring the simple fact that if we can set up a universal health care system, we will at the same time have cured Medicaid. The same can be said for worries about the high cost of Workman’s Compensation. Any work related injuries would be covered by the new system and any law suits would be connected with safety issues rather than health.

It is pretty clear that Vermonters are ready to look at some sort of universal health care, and it is this that the various committees of the House and Senate need to make their primary effort.

I shall not be able to attend the meeting at the State House Thursday evening because I am both elderly (79 years old this year) and needing a walker and so I am sending the following email to the various legislators concerned.

May I offer the following statement since I am unable to attend the meeting tonight because of my age and disability.

Vermonters are clearly asking for some sort of general health care system. And as we create it, we will at the same time cure the Medicaid deficit So general health care needs to be looked at first.

You will be needing to create a mechanism for this health care system and a way to pay for it.

Senator Ted Kennedy proposes that Medicare be used and expanded as a basis for a national health care system. But until this happens nationally we can use the model of Medicare for a Vermont system and expand it to fill our needs.

And we can do this in a very Vermont sort of way.

The first enrollees should be everyone on the present Medicaid list. Enrollment from this point on should be voluntary, since seniors on Medicare will not be eligible and some people may feel their present coverage is adequate.

But payment should be mandatory and should be based on a small tax, say .005%, on all gross income generated in the state. This would mean taxing all of the out of state corporations like Wal-Mart and Hannaford’s and Staples, which presently, as part of the corporate “business community”, state that they owe nothing to the communities from which they make their money.

Having such a minimal tax be mandatory on us all will be far less expensive than the present projected cost of the Medicaid deficit by itself.

Thank you for giving this your attention. Patricia Hejny, Williamstown, Vermont

To the Education Committee

I sent the following email to the Vermont House Education Committee.  And I must add each of them has been most friendly to me....

Thank you for letting me share some of my thoughts on education with you.

The one-room schools of Vermont, which most of my contemporaries here attended and even taught, were able to offer very individualized attention to the pupil. But even more important was the inter-generational inter-action, older children helping teacher with the younger.

The very ‘advanced’ school to which I went in New Jersey was already shoveling children though the school system in an age group, aimed at teaching the ‘average’. I remember still some of the people in my class, but I cannot recall one other person in that school.

The people I know in Vermont all came out of their school system ready to be responsible functioning members of the community. They are the ones keeping Town Meetings and the notion of civic responsibility alive.

I see a strong correlation between this inter-generational experience and today’s young people’s lack of community involvement..

Today’s educational philosophy is too abstract, especially in its insistence that college is the preferred goal. A week or so ago we had our first major snow storm and power outages as a result. It was very clear that any line-worker was worth more to us than any quantity of CEO’s, MBA’s, computer programmers, or NASA engineers.

Finally I am deeply disturbed by how easily we have turned the mental and physical health of our children over to the marketing practices of any business which wants to make money off them.

I do hope with all my heart that you will give your support to some sort of civic education.

I see this being accomplished with the gift of the State of a book like the one I showed all of you, containing the Declaration of Independence, the Federal Constitution, and Vermont’s two State Constitutions, both the present and the first, which was of itself an extraordinary document, to every sixth grader at the start of the school year. The accompanying course would mandate a read-through of each document and testing only of the actual words, no interpretations.

I see sixth graders generally moaning and groaning at the imposition of such a course, but out of this group will come our town clerks, select board members, local and federal legislators, lawyers, as well as citizens like myself, who will indeed value such a course more the longer they live.

Thank you again for taking time out of your busy lives to read this. I hope it has contributed something for you! Sincerely, Pat Hejny

Defining Agriculture

I sent the following email to the Houe Committee onAgriculture in connection with their hearings on defining agriciulture....

Dear David and esteemed members of the House Agricultural Committee--

Thank you for allowing me to send you this perspective on farming and agriculture and the problems which you must resolve.

There was a time when the words ‘agriculture’ and ‘farming’ were synonymous.

Today agriculture has two components: mono-cropping (agribusiness) and traditional farming.

In this country mono-cropping began in earnest after the Civil War when many small New England farms were abandoned for a move west to much large acreages.

Mono-cropping always gives only a raw, unprocessed product-- wheat, corn, soy beans, milk.

Traditional farms are ecological units which are self-sustaining interactions between animals and people and land. Indeed traditional farmers were our first ecologists, concerned as they were with keeping their land healthy and productive so that it could be passed on to succeeding generations. Traditional farms always involve both production of raw materials and the processing of these raw materials with the men concerned traditionally with the raw materials and the women with the processing. The organic farming movement is a step back to traditional farming.

Mr. Kehler with his 27 cow herd seems to me to be running what should classify as a traditional farm on which processing of raw materials has always been a proper function. And so do most of the other ‘value added’ operations cited in news articles recently. These need fostering and protecting against the pressures of ‘development’.

We have lost sight of what farming is because here in Vermont dairy farming has moved over the past sixty years from being a part of a traditional farm where the number of cows on the farm was still in balance with the land, i.e. where the amount of manure from these cows could still be utilized by the land, to mono-cropping or agribusiness where the number of cows on a ‘farm’ generates far more manure than the farm’s acreage can absorb. Hence the water pollution problems with which you must deal.

And in dealing with the water issues, since money will have to be spent, I sincerely hope that you will join with the energy committee to combine utilizing both the energy production possible from methane and the rich, non-polluting soil which results from proper composting of the manure. The state can perhaps assist large scale operations in setting up to do this for themselves, or help the start-up of small, local businesses to do it for smaller producers.

Thanks for reading this, and I hope that perhaps I have contributed a little to the hard work you will be doing. Sincerely, Pat Hejny.

We need a Right to Vote Act

I sent the following email to all three Vermont legislators today...

I was deeply disappointed to learn that you did not choose to support the non-certification of the Electoral College vote effort of several other legislators. This slight interruption in the process brought to Congress ‘s attention how deeply disturbed so many of us were by the outrageous voting tactics utilized by Republicans not only in Ohio but in several other states as well during this election.

In not joining in this protest, you have not only done a disservice to many of us who voted for you but may have done a real injury to the young upcoming Vermont voters whose interests you should be protecting. For if we lose control of the voting process, we have lost everything for our young people.

The only positive suggestion for dealing with this that I have heard came from a local internet news commentary show, GrrRadio.com, whose host stated that we need a ‘Right to Vote’ act, like the Civil Rights Act, which would leave actual conduct of the elections with the states but which would provide an enforceable federal avenue of redress in cases of abuse.

I sincerely hope that you will make such a bill a legislative priority for this session of Congress.

Thank you for your attention. Patricia Hejny, Candidate for Governor of Vermont, 2002 and 2004.