The inflammatory and misguiding email of a congresswoman
This week Congresswoman Mary Miller (15th congressional district of Illinois) sent me an email that I presume is meant to rally her constituents. Her letter is filled with inaccurate statements, contains false comparisons, and relies on hypocrisy to criticize one measure while ignoring the same principle in supporting another measure. While she writes from a position of authority, her letter suggests that she has no better information nor technique than the person sitting at the end of the bar yelling at the TV.
Let’s take a look at the main points of her letter.
The Congresswoman’s first point is to call out President Trump’s recent address focusing on the vulnerabilities of our election system. She provided her full support to President Trump’s claims and emphasized that “This is BIG!” The link she provided to “READ MORE” was to a whitehouse.gov press release, which I’m sure must be conveniently consistent with the President’s remarks. Anyone inclined to determine whether any of these claims can be substantiated (which Mary Miller does not seem inclined toward) can quickly find that President Trump’s claims are not supported by any facts or our shared reality. If we look at what election-integrity.org (and many other sites) says about Trump’s claims, we find…
There is no evidence that China stole voter information and there is no evidence that China used this information to influence election outcomes. FBI and National Intelligence Council reviews concluded that there wasn’t any evidence that China meddled in the 2020 election.
Trump’s claim that American voting machines can be easily compromised is based on a declassified report about a hypothetical vulnerability in a voting system used in Venezuela. This system is not in use in US elections. Cybersecurity officials have repeatedly affirmed that the 2020 Election was “the most secure election in American history,” and, post-election audits in Georgia and Pennsylvania confirmed the accuracy of the 2024 results. There simply isn’t any evidence to support the claim that our election system is vulnerable.
Trump claims (yells?) that voter fraud is rampant, “hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people” are “active on the voter rolls.” Reviews by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, find that voter fraud is exceedingly rare, perhaps one or two handfuls of instances going back decades – certainly fewer than could affect the outcome of any election.
Trump also likes to rail on mail-in ballots, even though he voted by mail in a 2026 Florida special election. Mail ballot fraud has only occurred roughly 0.000043% of the time in the four most recent general elections. That’s less than one vote in one million votes or about 64 votes in 150 million votes – which is about the total number of votes in the 2024 presidential election.
Congresswoman Mary Miller’s loud support for President Trump’s claims is misplaced and is supporting statements that are lies. This is not only misleading, but downright dangerous. Support for these fraudulent claims provides the pretext for Trump to implement more severe voter restrictions or oversight during the midterm election in 2026.
Next Congresswoman Mary Miller highlighted her confrontation with medical school leaders at a congressional hearing about woke ideology, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), and the difference between a man and a woman (presumably related to nonbinary and transgender issues). I watched the video that she provided, and I am embarrassed for her bratty behavior and marvel at the courtesy provided to her by these medical school leaders.
Congresswoman Miller focused on “Men cannot become women. Women cannot become men,” and, “Can a non-biological woman ever have a baby?” or “Can someone have a uterus but not be a woman?” Because the medical school refers to people as “a person” when they might present either as a man or a woman they are somehow running afoul of Congresswoman Miller’s sensibilities about biological distinctions between a man and a woman. Her focus on these distinctions emphasized her ignorance about nonbinary and transgender people and her ignorance about the difference between sex and gender. You only need to google these terms to get a better understanding about them than that displayed by Congresswoman Miller at this hearing. Her conclusion that these medical schools are “failing the American people” pales when considered next to her failing the people of the 15th congressional district of Illinois and the American people.
The Congresswoman’s next main point was focused on defunding Planned Parenthood. She says that “Planned Parenthood is an evil organization.” First off, I’ll point out that anytime anyone writes in terms of good and evil in such a way as to conjure images of biblical implications, this is a warning that what’s to follow is probably an exaggeration, or not necessarily rationally based, and is meant to invoke outrage (or similar). She has plenty of hyperboles about Planned Parenthood, which is unfortunate because anyone who reads her email might believe these things. I’ve written briefly in a previous post about abortion, so I won’t delve into the problems with the anti-abortion position with respect to women’s rights and religious rights. I will, however, comment on some of the language the Congresswoman uses in her email and that are common in the discussion among those who are against abortion.
She says that “Every unborn child … deserves the right to life.” At first glance, this statement might seem compelling because we can easily read that “every child deserves the right to life.” “Unborn” is only an adjective here and as we all know, the noun does not need the adjective to make a statement true. But in this case, the child is not a child until it is born. Prior to birth, it is a fetus, and the sentence “Every fetus deserves the right to life” is not as impactful or compelling. In fact, most (perhaps almost all) of us don’t consider that a fetus has any rights that are assigned to people. This is a very deceptive use of words, and if left unrecognized, makes all the subsequent arguments against abortion legitimate.
One more topic highlighted in Congresswoman Mary Miller’s email was her support for our second amendment rights. In this section she emphasized that “Law-abiding Americans should never be monitored or profiled simply for exercising a constitutional right.” In this case, when it comes to purchasing firearms. I find this exclamation particularly hypocritical because I’m sure that the Congresswoman is fully supportive of the Trump administration’s deployment of ICE and ICE’s propensity for monitoring and creating a database of ICE observers and protestors who are simply exercising their constitutional rights.
I’ll end this blog with a reminder. No one is going to help us fix our problems except us. We need and deserve representation in Congress that is more than that provided by Congresswoman Mary Miller.
Resources
Are American Elections Secure? posted by election-integrity.org