Todd Young: Your Broken Oath and Our Nation’s Crisis

Senator Todd Young,

I am one of the many constituents who have written, phoned, and/or visited your office, and given the non-responsive form letters I’ve received in return, I seriously doubt if any of my concerns have been heard, so I am writing this open letter in hopes that someone will share it with you. (I have not made a similar effort to communicate with Senator Banks, who is clearly a lost cause, but due to previous actions and remarks on your part, I had hoped you might be more independent, more open to reason – thus your recent behavior has disappointed me greatly.)

You were a Marine. You are currently a member of Congress. You swore an oath to uphold the Constitution in both capacities. You did not swear allegiance to a person or a party, but to our founding document – to a set of principles. You continue to violate that oath in multiple ways.

Despite his apparent gross incompetence and lack of qualifications for the job, you voted to confirm Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense, putting the lives of service members and our country’s national security at risk.

You put your loyalty to a cult leader ahead of concern for the health of your constituents by confirming another grossly unqualified candidate – a conspiracy theorist without any scientific background – as head of the HHS.

You ignored questions about Tulsi Gabbard’s ability to guard sensitive information necessary for the safety of our country. These are just three of the many examples of times you have shirked your duty.

The United States is in a crisis, one that could be somewhat mitigated if only a few Republicans would put country before party and the good of the people before their self-interest – if they would remember their oath to uphold the Constitution and take back the power it grants them and which they have so cravenly ceded to a wannabe dictator.

You could help negate Trump’s executive orders, most of which are grossly illegal. You could help counter the horrific consequences of Elon Musk’s attempts to destroy government agencies that provide critical services to your constituents. (And whose actions have coincidentally ended several of those agencies’ investigations into his very questionable business dealings.) How does cutting off funding for cancer research or Alzheimer’s disease benefit the residents of Indiana? How will gutting Education and the Arts help citizens of this (already undereducated) state?

Please tell me how your children will benefit from leaving them an environment with less breathable air, drinkable water, and safe food. How do you think women and other marginalized groups in Indiana feel about being returned to second class citizenship, and how do citizens on the edge of retirement—many of them Hoosiers who have struggled for years to put food on their tables– feel about the GOP’s vicious proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicaid?.

In my almost 78 years (several of which I spent as a member of a Republican Party that no longer exists), I have never seen an administration that is so brazenly corrupt. History will record that every member of Congress who failed to protest this corruption, who cravenly enabled our would-be autocrat, was complicit in that corruption.

It’s probably just as well that former principled Republicans such as William Ruckelshaus, Dick Lugar, and Bill Hudnut are not here to see the debacle you have made of a once Grand Old Party.

Eileen Prince
Proud Hoosier