Our office received the following letter to the Editor.
“The eyes are the window to the soul” the idiom of Shakespearean provenance tells us. Michael Anthony Peroutka’s piercing blue eyes are suggestive of a deep intellect; they convey a personable man of deep conviction which he carries with ease and confidence. He has an aura of a man securely grounded in life’s experience, topped-off with a touch of that famous Southern charm, and a bit of musical talent — he is not shy about bringing his guitar along to a fundraiser! But then, this is not the political season for cookie-cutter, finger-to-the-wind, candidates!
Mr. Peroutka, the Republican nominee for the Attorney General of Maryland, is not a candidate guided or swayed by the whims of momentary public sentiment — something our founding fathers fretted about. He is a constitutionalist through and through. To Mr. Peroutka, a retired attorney with some thirty years of experience in the field, any position, any action, any law or policy has to be viewed through the prism of constitutionality. That is the standard, and it is non-negotiable. It should not be negotiable. Ever.
Mr. Peroutka is a graduate of Loyola University, (B.A.), and the University of Baltimore, Juris Doctor (J.D.). In addition to his extensive legal experience, Mr. Peroutka has been politically active throughout his career. Most recently he served as a member and Chairman of the Anne Arundel County Council. Prior to 2014, when he officially joined the Republican Party, Mr. Peroutka was associated with the Constitution Party of the US, and was the presidential nominee of that party in 2004. His campaign slogan was: “God, Family, Republic”. As a sign of the times, he has come under attack for using this once commonplace, traditionalist, American slogan. He has also been vilified for his association with various historical groups.
The progressives and the modern left have, for all intents and purposes, vilified history. We see that in our county where a person running for office has been vilified for participating in historical re-enactments. Mr. Peroutka too has been caught in this vicious net. It is somewhat mind-boggling that these very critics don’t seem to recognize the contradiction in their own argument: how could a constitutionalist be a fascist? It is a question that needs to be asked of the contemporary mobs fond of hurling this epithet at anything or anyone not within their circumscribed ideological vista. They betray their own historical, linguistic, and philosophical illiteracy. But that is a story for another day.
Mr. Peroutka holds that a number of radical actions that were taken under the auspices of Covid-19 Emergency were unconstitutional. Since its founding this country has been through any number of crises, disasters, wars, depressions, pandemics, and social upheavals of one kind or another. Never in the history of this great nation has the government saw fit to institute such drastic measures, such drastic individual mandates, and such drastic curtailments of individual liberty. Who could ever envision that in the United States of America, “the home of the free”, the government could, under the threat of arrest, force you to allow your loved ones to suffer and die alone, or to not be able to hold or attend a funeral?
Even as a postscript these actions seem too horrendous, too cruel to dwell on for too long, and yet, that is the reality we were all forced to endure under government mandates that were both immoral and unconstitutional. I ask you to pause for a moment and reflect upon that.
Maybe your parent, sibling, or a friend did not die alone, surrounded only by the sterility of a hospital room, but many, many did. These fellow citizens who have endured such cruelty are due our sympathy, empathy, and an apology from this administration. Most significantly, we should all demand an assurance that this will never happen again — and that is the very platform Mr. Peroutka is running on.
We believe history will judge these mandates harshly, and prove Mr. Peroutka’s position to be the correct one from a political, constitutional, and from a humanitarian perspective.
In a recent interview Mr. Peroutka stated, unabashedly: “My top priority would be to redress what I call gross violations of the rights of the people to assemble, to care for their own medical health, to run a business. All these mandates, edicts, orders, proclamations – wherever you want to call them – are not law. They’re not lawful.”
The laws of a nation are the codification of its values — in our case Liberty is the crowning glory of our constitutional framework. Observance and enforcement of these laws is fundamental to an orderly functioning of a free society.
Amen. Please go out and vote for a constitutionalist, dedicated to preserving our God-given and constitutionally protected rights, for our next Attorney General.
Tatiana Croissette
Kent County
