This is no time for Democrats to set example

To the editors,

Re: “Republican vision for CT’s Congress map makes sense” (Dan Haar column, Dec. 21), how about a deal: Connecticut GOP chairman Ben Proto gets 10 of the 50 Republican U.S. senators to vote for The Freedom to Vote Act, which prohibits gerrymandering and implements a wide range of measures to protect our democracy. Alternatively, he convinces Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to suspend the filibuster to allow voting reform legislation to pass with a simple majority. In return, Connecticut Democrats agree to Congressional redistricting that favors neither Democrats or Republicans.

Through an onslaught of legislation aimed at voter suppression and partisan control of elections, Congressional and state-level Republicans, including here in Connecticut, are engaged in an unprecedented attack on our representative democracy. As a group of 150 top scholars of U.S. democracy recently wrote in an open letter, “This is no ordinary moment in the course of our democracy. It is a moment of great peril and risk.”

This is no time for Democrats to “set an example” by further ceding control to a party that refuses to accept the outcome of free and fair elections, witnessed by the fact that a majority of its members still believe the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump and whose leaders are actively trying to change the narrative around the Jan. 6 insurrection, led by the former president. Jonathan Perloe

Cos Cob