To the editor:

Shame on you, Congresswoman Stefanik. You and your master, President Trump, have encouraged and fomented the division and hatred that culminated in the Jan. 6 attack by the executive branch on the legislative branch. Never before in our nation’s history has the executive incited its followers to violently seek to overthrow and disrupt the Congress of the United States while it was doing its most fundamental constitutional duty in affirming the results of the election and designating the next president. Shame on you for your complicity in promoting Trump’s lies and sedition.

I have been honored to have visited the Capitol building many times. When there, I visit each chamber and sit in respectful silence as I watch the wheels of democracy slowly turn. I always find it a humbling and inspiring experience. What happened on the 6th defiled this sacred symbol of our democracy and was an attack on the legislative branch by a rogue president encouraged and enabled by conspiring Republican members of Congress, including you, Elise Stefanik. Shame on you.

Even today, you shamefully defend your baseless assertions that the election was fraudulent, a position disproven in many courts of law and the several states. Congresswoman, you and your 100-plus Republican colleagues are simply the mob within the Congress, doing the bidding of the mob that attacked the Congress. Both groups have the same intention, to disenfranchise millions of voters and overturn an election that had been litigated and certified by the states. You have been engaged in a violent and illegal coup attempt by mob rule. Shame, shame, shame on you, Elise Stefanik.

Barry B. Brogan

Saranac Lake