“If you’re invited to a town hall for the sole purpose of being shouted down and shouted at … it’s not a good use of anyone’s time,” Sen. Dan Sullivan told Alaska Public Media (AKPM) last week. “I think it’s disrespectful to the Alaskans that I’ve seen by the hundreds who do want to have constructive dialogue.”
I absolutely agree. Many of the groups doing the inviting want constructive engagement. They feel a compelling need to discuss their concerns with the direction President Trump and the Republican majorities in Congress appear to be taking the country.
The AKPM article didn’t tell listeners what are those concerns are. Or that there were three different groups protesting at the Alaska State Capitol at three different times. His coverage treated the demonstrators as little more than extension of the disruptive town hall meetings congressional members have been subjected to down south.
I was at the early morning demonstration by the Juneau People for Peace and Justice (JPPJ) and one of the several people interviewed. (Full disclosure — I am a member of JPPJ.) They’ve been participating in demonstrations at the Capitol at least once a week ever since Trump signed two executive orders related to immigration.
The first order restricted immigration and refugee resettlement of people from Muslim countries. This is an issue JPPJ and Veterans for Peace spoke out against 15 months ago. A 1,300 signature petition opposing such a policy was sent to the delegation in December 2015. One thousand of those names were included in a full page, paid ad in the Empire. This was before Trump’s campaign proposal for a temporary but “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
The other executive order contains an aggressive deportation directive for illegal immigrants. One of the first people deported since it was signed was a 35-year-old mother who, at the age of 14, illegally crossed the U.S./Mexican border. She’s lived in Arizona ever since. Her only crime was using a fake Social Security number that allowed her to find work.
Her deportation contradicts the message Trump continues to give the nation — that his priority is to remove “gang members, drug dealers and criminals that threaten our communities and prey on our citizens.” What’s also seriously troubling is that he’s empowered individual immigration officers to determine whether any undocumented immigrant poses those kinds of threats to public safety.
This policy unjustly upends a century long American tradition of telling other nations to send us “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
That statement greeted my grandfather when he arrived at Ellis Island in 1913. He came here legally. But think about how porous our borders were back then. Photo identification and copy machines didn’t exist. It means a lot of Americans may be legally born citizens who are justifiably unaware that they’re the decedent of an illegal immigrant.
These are just a few of the points JPPJ would like to discuss with Murkowski and Sullivan. And by way of letter, they’ve formally asked for a town hall in Juneau.
Murkowski should trust that JPPJ will insist the dialogue be respectful. It’s part of the principles of non-violence that guides the group. She experienced this first-hand in May 2006 when she accepted their invitation to discuss the Iraq War with the entire community. It was a collaboration with the University of Alaska Southeast, Juneau World Affairs Council and Juneau League of Women Voters. Supreme Court Justice Walter “Bud” Carpeneti was the moderator.
All but two of the people who spoke that day called for an end to the war. Murkowski didn’t agree, but she still said the event was as patriotic as the Memorial Day ceremony she attended the day before.
Patriotic is also how Congressman Steve Israel described his first town hall meeting that was disrupted by an unruly, name calling crowd. It happened in 2009. The recently retired New York Democrat was the target of Tea Party activists.
“It was my obligation — my job — to listen to disagreement” Israel wrote in the New York Times last week. “The people there were Americans expressing their anger and anxiety; exercising a constitutional principle to petition their grievances to government.”
Tea Party tactics helped Republicans win control of the House in 2010. It undermines their moral legitimacy if party members condemn such action now. And they’ll have even less if they use it as an excuse not to hold town hall meetings with constituents who want to question them on the direction America is headed.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
