Letters to the Editor | Nov. 20, 2025

It seems the idea of a con man selling false pardons to fearful sinners was the subject of satire as far back as Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Whereas Chaucer’s barbs were directed at a corrupt medieval church hierarchy, we now almost daily witness a corrupt president handing out pardons like candy to his friends and co-indictees/conspirators, while at the same time prosecuting his perceived enemies. Chaucer was well aware of the irony of his tale’s narrator capitalizing on the very sin of avarice that he condemned. This rogue president continues to flout the spirit of clemency and the rule of law, brazenly lining his own pockets and those of his cronies. Meanwhile, an ineffectual Congress and a compromised U.S. Supreme Court allow this mockery of justice to go on unchecked. Who will finally call out the hypocrisy and end this criminal enterprise? We the people grow impatient.

Charles Derr, Philadelphia

A recent Associated Press article on the global conference on climate change in Brazil left out one crucial fact.

While most of the world’s nations sent delegations to the annual gathering, the United States did not send any official emissary. Not only is the current administration ignoring the perils of climate change, but by being absent, we are missing an opportunity to promote American technology to the rest of the world.

While we ignore the problem and prioritize the use of fossil fuels, the Trump administration is endangering Americans’ health and our economy. We need a government in Washington that takes climate change more seriously, rather than one that keeps its head in the sand and enriches its fossil fuel donors.

Steve Stern, Mount Laurel

As an emeritus professor at Drexel University, I would like to express my appreciation of professor Lisa Tucker of Drexel’s School of Law for her coauthorship with Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of their op-ed in praise of Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson’s principled dissents from the U.S. Supreme Court’s repeated failures to uphold the rule of law against President Donald Trump’s serial breaches of it. Drexel itself faced its own crisis when, at a time when Mr. Trump refused to accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, faculty realized that its School of Law had previously conferred an honorary doctorate on his chief defender, Rudolph Giuliani. Together with action by Drexel’s Faculty Senate and petitioners from each of its schools, both the faculty and student body of the law school called unanimously for Giuliani to be stripped of his degree, and the board of trustees revoked it. The nation’s law schools would, I think, do well to apply this precedent to Mr. Trump’s conduct in office, and to the Supreme Court majority that has been his chief enabler.

Robert Zaller, Drexel University, Distinguished University Professor of History, emeritus

Join the conversation: Send letters to letters@inquirer.com. Limit length to 150 words and include home address and day and evening phone number. Letters run in The Inquirer six days a week on the editorial pages and online.