Letters for Tuesday, Aug. 18

Our future

With a convicted felon, sex abuser, tax cheat and grifter running our country with an approval rating of around 35%, we are at a pivotal point in our lives.

Our current congressman for some reason fits into that 35% portion of Americans, leaving the rest of us trying to think of how we get out of our current problem. We have only one option, yes, only one, and that is to replace our current congressman with a person that can be brave enough to join a common effort to normalize our failing country to its former status. We had some good independent candidates, with similar goals run for office and doing well, but the top of the list emerged and, as I noted, this is our only chance to add our one person to the list of Congress,

This hopefully resulting in a congressional majority, to address the corruption, grifting and degrading of our country in the world’s eye, along with the 65% of us who see our country in peril. Again, as citizens we have only one option available to us and that is our one vote to elect people that truly care about our future and country.

Bob Sanborn

Colbert

Baumgartner’s fiscal insanity

Flashback: On May 22, 2025, Rep. Michael Baumgartner proudly voted yes on the One Big Beautiful Bill, cheering it as a local victory. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office wasn’t impressed: this legislative “masterpiece” adds $4.1 trillion to the deficit once interest costs are included.

We’re now living with the consequences of his lack of judgment. As The Spokesman-Review reported in “Funding patch passes Senate to head off fall shutdown” (Aug. 9), Congress is stuck patching funding just to keep the lights on. Thanks to the debt-busting tax giveaways Baumgartner championed, the Treasury hit a grim milestone in July: America now pays more per month for interest on our debt, $118 billion, than it spends on Medicare or national defense!

Our safety nets for seniors are straining too. As The Spokesman-Review reported in “Newly retired couples may lose $16,900/year in Social Security” (July 22), that trust fund is projected to run dry by 2032. Baumgartner’s bill moved that date earlier, draining revenue from both Social Security and Medicare.

To fund Baumgartner’s multitrillion-dollar handout to corporations and billionaires like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg, the federal government is squeezing local healthcare networks. Here at home, where roughly half of Washington’s kids rely on Medicaid, these cuts threaten to starve our rural hospitals out of existence.

Voting to torch our country’s financial stability proves we can’t afford to keep Baumgartner in office. Eastern Washington deserves a fierce representative with real fiscal sanity, not a yes-man bankrupting our children’s future.

Michael Ryan

Spokane

We need a countywide data center moratorium

On Aug. 11, I was one of many who packed the county commissioners’ meeting to express our opposition to data centers. Every seat in the auditorium was filled, and many more people stood against the walls. One by one, people went up to testify: a social studies teacher, a geologist, a Liberty Lake council member, a Gonzaga student, several parents and grandparents, military veterans, and many others, all arguing that building a data center in Spokane County was a bad idea.

I’m a board member for 350 Spokane, a climate action nonprofit, and our organization is one of many calling for at least a one-year data center moratorium. At this point, there hasn’t been enough research to fully understand the long-term risks of data centers. The research that has been done shows that they can deplete the local water supply, worsen air quality, create unrelenting noise and heat, strain the energy grid, and severely disrupt the surrounding ecosystem.

Currently, Spokane County doesn’t have regulations in place to protect its residents from potential harms. We need more time to identify the environmental and public health risks and create laws to prevent data centers from poisoning our air and water.

Spokane has just experienced one of the worst disasters in our history, and county resources should be going toward helping fire victims rebuild their lives. The last thing we need right now is a massive data center straining our limited energy and water sources.

Rebecca Gonshak

Spokane