Dear Editor,

I was pleased to read in Terri Cowart Frazier’s weekend article last weekend that the fired staff of Vicksburg National Military Park have been reinstated. The park’s ability to carry out its work to an appropriate standard was even more compromised by this reduction in staff than it has already been because of chronic underfunding. Perhaps the restriction on an order of the executive branch will allow time for reflection and result in a fairer distribution of needed cuts to emerge.

However, I am not pleased with how this reversal was accomplished. It occurred through judicial overreach and this is affecting our republic adversely, seriously undermining the legitimate authority of the president. Meanwhile, unelected solely district judges – not national justices – are extending their rule across the whole nation. Such a situation was not the way the founding fathers envisaged how the judicial branch should work.

Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper No. 78 did address the scenario of judicial power running amok and the consequences of such a development. As a historian, I never imagined I would be alive when what Hamilton published in 1788 would actually be playing out. Interesting times indeed.  

– Bernadette Cahill, Vicksburg, Mississippi