In her letter last week, Krystina Tapia urged a transition from Rep. Elton Gallegly to Michael Tenenbaum for essentially frivolous reasons: cock fighting, irritable bowel syndrome and square dancing.

While I applaud his efforts on behalf of environmental cleanup at the Rocketdyne site, Rep. Gallegly, a loyal and predictably partisan congressman for the greater portion of the last 20 years, has consequently taken grievously wrong headed positions.

Publicly stating that he is against the inhumane use of torture, he supports this current administration's Orwellian efforts to redefine these criminal practices, at their discretion, as "enhanced interrogation techniques"- a phrase used by the Nazis.

He also voted for retroactive corporate immunity in regard to the use of illegal wire-tapping. Our Constitution in Article 1 sections 9 and 10 makes passage of retroactive laws a felony. The fourth amendment requires search warrants.

And immunity doesn't remove any illegality. Immunity elevates the perpetrator of the criminal behavior to a privileged class above the law. This is contrary to our republic's most basic founding principals.

I expect our elected representatives to be partisan. I expect them to work for photo opportunities and back room deals. I've even grown to expect a measure of inevitable greed and corruption inherent in the money and machinery of career politics. This is normal and trivial.

The real reason to remove this man from public office is his failure to protect our Constitution. Thomas Scott Nelson Moorpark