Given your distinguished military record and tenure as chief of both the NSA and the CIA, it’s hard to identify any person more qualified to opine on America’s national security than you. And given your intellect and partisan neutrality, it’s hard to imagine any such opinion that should be accorded greater weight. That you were appointed to lead the NSA by Bill Clinton and the CIA by George W. Bush; that the later nomination was confirmed by then-Senator Joe Biden yet opposed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton; and that you oppose Donald Trump and the MAGA strain of the Republican

History furnishes many examples of democratic and popular governments, but of only two attaining uncontested sovereignty over their respective worlds: the Roman republic and the United States. These two superpower republics have in turn produced an equally short list of egalitarian reformers whose resistance to the plutocracy marked the onset of civil war and who were slain for their devotion to the republican cause. The greatest story that Hollywood has never told is of the earlier –Tiberius Gracchus – the young noble tutored in Greek philosophy, who went on to become the first Roman to scale the ramparts at Carthage, was

Devotion and duty would seem to be the watchwords of your life, judging by your record of military service to our country. Few Americans today match your dedication in rising to John Adams’s call: “Our Obligations to our Country never cease but with our Lives. We ought to do all We can.” But your recent writings suggest a third maxim guiding your civilian life. One deployed not to defending America’s interests and assets from foreign aggression but that would instead preserve its republican form of government: egalitarianism. In Lincoln’s Call to Service – and Ours, you noted your concern over poverty.

Although I’ve never voted against the Republican presidential nominee, I salute you for certifying Donald Trump’s defeat on January 6, 2021. In so doing, you placed the orderly transition of power ordained by the Constitution above partisan politics. You may even have single-handedly prevented a constitutional crisis for which, as your legal counsel put it, there would be “no neutral arbiter to break the impasse.” But though you protected our republican institutions from that crisis, the populist forces which precipitated it – the “disorders and miseries” that George Washington warned lead men to “seek security and repose in the absolute power

Reference is made to your statements of September 13, 2023 announcing your intention to relinquish your Senate seat upon the conclusion of the current term. In describing the reasons leading to this decision, you expressed your aversion to the reactionary populist demagoguery and disregard for the Constitution manifesting in a disaffected portion of the Republican Party. All who are familiar with George Washington’s nightmare vision of the fate stalking America’s experiment in self-government – which judging by the sad state of our national discourse is far fewer than it ought to be – should applaud your loyalty to the Constitution and

During the 2012 campaign cycle, you deplored the fact that your tax rate was lower than that of your secretary, Debbie Bosanek. Refuting the justification given by then-Speaker John Boehner, you blamed Congress for the absurd state of affairs still persisting in America: Billionaires are taxed at lower rates than ordinary middle-class households. You not only reiterated your opinion in a 2019 interview, stating: “The wealthy are definitely undertaxed relative to the general population.” You also then asserted that wealth taxes, when they come, would be unlikely to trigger the apocalyptic capital exodus that their opponents routinely prognosticate. We agree on