Sanders for justice | Letter

Published 8:33 pm Monday, October 29, 2012

I’ve known Justice Richard Sanders for 50 years, ever since he transferred into Highline High School in the fall of 1962 for our senior year together. We played in the Highline band and orchestra together, and he was an enthusiastic debater even then, being elected captain of the debate team (quite an honor for a transfer student in a highly-competitive class). The national debate topic that year was a proposed “Common Market for the western hemisphere,” in the midst of a Cuban missile crisis. Quite a challenge!

Richard also began a Youth for Goldwater club, which didn’t go far among us young, idealistic fans of JFK back then, but over the years I have come closer to Richard’s pro-freedom pro-Constitutional views. In recent decades, he and I have even shared the speaking stage at a couple of Liberty Magazine editorial conferences in Seattle and Tacoma.

Since he first became a Washington State Supreme Court Justice in 1995, I have followed Richard’s career and have seen many a courageous stand for the nation’s founding principles of individual rights against state encroachment.

In Washington D.C. once, when the U.S. attorney general under President George W. Bush defended indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, Sanders was in attendance and shouted, “Tyrant! You are a tyrant!” Was that “conduct unbecoming a Justice?” Probably so, but don’t you wish you had the chance to speak truth to power like that, just once? Sanders later explained, “Frankly, everybody in the room was applauding or sometimes laughing, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to stand up and say something.’ And I did.”

Now it’s our turn to stand up for Richard and for our constitutional rights. I don’t see any reason why both right- and left-leaning voters would not appreciate and vote for Richard’s defense of the individual against un-constitutional powers. Vote Richard Sanders for Supreme Court Position #9.

Gary Alexander

Lopez Island