Same old cynical City Hall playbook: Mayor good, teachers greedy and bad

It is amazing that after the debacle of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Mayor Lori Lightfoot is demonizing the very people she made promises to — people who spend their lives helping the poor children of Chicago. The Chicago Teachers Union negotiations are not about pay for teachers, they’re about better conditions for children.

Spare us, suburbanites, your hatred for unions and you butting in with your critique of Chicago teachers on this issue. You have not a clue.

The players have changed somewhat, but the playbook is the same: Mayor and cronies good, teachers bad and greedy.

Edward Juillard, West Beverly

SEND LETTERS TO: letters@suntimes.com. Please include your neighborhood or hometown and a phone number for verification purposes.

Butt out of Sunday liquor sales

Limiting alcohol sales on Sunday is a relic of an era when paternalistic government assumed everybody should go to church. Arbitrary rules about which stores can sell alcohol at which times are a good example of why government isn’t competent or rational enough to meddle in our lives.

The City of Chicago should stick to filling potholes.

Richard Crane, Lakeview

Understand how impeachment works

The White House’s explanations for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena are a sophomoric jumble of misunderstandings and misconceptions that fall into two basic buckets.

First, impeachment and the subsequent trial are political, not legal, processes which may or may not contain trappings of legal procedure. We do not expect, for example, Trump to be given Miranda warnings, or assured of legal representation or that the jury (the Senate) would be sequestered and not permitted to speak about the case.

The White House would have us believe that the procedural rules of a legal case necessarily would apply, when clearly they would not and should not.

Second, to the extent that certain legal procedural concepts may apply, they apply very differently in impeachment and in the subsequent trial. Impeachment is the equivalent of indictment in a criminal case. An indictment does not, for example, require the defendant to be given the right of cross examination. That right only exists at trial. Accordingly, the White House letter is off base.

One understands that desperate times may require desperate measures, and the White House’s refusal to comply with the subpoena — in contravention of the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in the Nixon case — and the fatuous reasoning for its refusal are desperate, indeed.

William P. Gottschalk, Lake Forest

South Side Red Line extension loses out

Why doesn’t the CTA get honest with residents of the Far South Side and admit that the Red Line Extension to the city’s southern limit will either not be built or that it will be many decades?

The proof is to be found in the $2.4 billion renovation of the North Side Red line system, which will keep all those city contractors working and all those North Side residents happy. The cost of the North Side project is about what it would take to extend the Red Line south of 95th Street.

We are tired of almost 40 years of broken promises.

Eugene Broyls, Sr., Olympia Fields