To the editor:
Often times, we should look to history to guide our thoughts and actions — not because it either supported our contemporary thought or worked against it, but because it sheds light on our country and what it means. And what it means to be a patriot.
The following is an excerpt from The Hill, Rick Beyer, opinion contributor, and it demonstrates what a true patriot does — not for himself or herself, and sometimes against popular positions — but for our country and our Constitution:
“The president is running for a second term. The Senate is closely divided along partisan lines. In September of election year, a vacancy unexpectedly occurs on the Supreme Court. The Republican president gets a chance to fill a seat formerly held by a Democrat. Thirty-eight days before the election he announces his choice.
“Sound familiar?
“But this is 1956. The Republican president is Dwight D. Eisenhower. His response would be almost unimaginable today.
“Ike instructed his attorney general, Herbert Brownell, to seek out a Democrat to fill the seat.
“’The President believed and acted upon the belief that the Supreme Court’s membership should represent diverse political points of view,’ wrote Brownell. Three weeks later, the president appointed Democrat William Brennan, a justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court.
“Susan Eisenhower, Ike’s granddaughter, recounts this story in her timely and illuminating book, ‘How Ike Led.’ I asked her about it in the wake of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death.
“’He really believed that the Supreme Court had to be ideologically balanced,’ she told me, ‘or people would lose confidence in their decisions, thinking that they were actually political, and not based on legal precedent or other legal matters.’”
If Biden loses, then proceed our Hoosier Senators, but please think before you act.
Gene Elias, Nashville
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