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      in Elections

      The Supreme Court Fails Black Voters in Alabama

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      You know the Rubicon has been crossed when the Supreme Court issues a conservative voting rights order so at odds with settled precedent and without any sense of the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts feels constrained to dissent.This is the same John Roberts who in 1982, as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, fought a crucial amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; whose majority opinion in 2013 gutted one-half of the Voting Rights Act and who joined an ahistoric opinion last summer that took aim at the other half; and who famously complained in dissent from a 2006 decision in favor of Latino voters in South Texas that “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”Yes, that Chief Justice Roberts. What the 5-to-4 majority did was that far out of line.The unsigned order that drew the chief justice’s dissent Monday night blocked the decision by a special three-judge Federal District Court ordering the Alabama Legislature to draw a second congressional district in which Black residents constitute a majority. Alabama’s population is 27 percent Black. The state has seven congressional districts. The lower court held that by packing some Black voters into one district and spreading others out over three other districts, the state diluted the Black vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act.The Supreme Court will hear Alabama’s appeal of the district court order in its next term, so the stay it granted will mean that the 2022 elections will take place with district lines that the lower court unanimously, with two of the three judges appointed by President Donald Trump, found to be illegal.Chief Justice Roberts objected that the ordinary standards under which the Supreme Court grants a stay of a lower court opinion had not been met. “The district court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction,” he wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, also dissented in a more extensive opinion that accused the majority of using the court’s emergency “shadow docket” not only to intervene improperly on behalf of the state but also to change voting rights law in the process.This is no mere squabble over procedure. What happened Monday night was a raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point. It bears emphasizing that the majority’s agenda of cutting back on the scope of the Voting Rights Act is Chief Justice Roberts’s agenda too. He made that abundantly clear in the past and suggested it in a kind of code on Monday with his bland observation that the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But in his view, that was an argument to be conducted in the next Supreme Court term while permitting the district court’s decision to take effect now.While the majority as a whole said nothing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh took it upon himself to offer a kind of defense. Only Justice Samuel Alito joined him. Perhaps the others — Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — chose not to sign onto his rude reference to Justice Kagan’s “catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket.’ ” Or perhaps his “To reiterate: The court’s stay order is not a decision on the merits” rang a little hollow when, as Justice Kagan pointed out, “the district court here did everything right under the law existing today” and “staying its decision forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution.”In other words, when it comes to the 2022 elections, for Black voters in Alabama the Supreme Court’s procedural intervention is the equivalent of a ruling on the merits.Or maybe the others couldn’t indulge in the hypocrisy of Justice Kavanaugh’s description of the standards for granting a stay. The party asking for a stay, he wrote, “ordinarily must show (i) a reasonable probability that this court would eventually grant review and a fair prospect that the court would reverse, and (ii) that the applicant would likely suffer irreparable harm absent the stay.”But wait a minute. Weren’t those conditions clearly met back in September when abortion providers in Texas came to the court seeking a stay of the Texas vigilante law, S.B. 8, which was about to go into effect? That law, outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and authorizing anyone anywhere in the country to sue a Texas abortion provider for damages, was flagrantly unconstitutional, and the law was about to destroy the state’s abortion infrastructure. But did Justice Kavanaugh or any of the others in Monday’s majority vote to grant the requested stay? They did not. Chief Justice Roberts did.It’s impossible not to conclude that what we see at work is not some neutral principle guiding the Supreme Court’s intervention but simply whether a majority likes or doesn’t like what a lower court has done. In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh sought to avoid that conclusion by arguing that when it comes to election cases, the Supreme Court will more readily grant a stay to counteract “late judicial tinkering with election laws.” But there was no late “tinkering” here. The legislature approved the disputed plan in November, after six days of consideration, and the governor signed it. The district court conducted a seven-day trial in early January and on Jan. 24 issued its 225-page opinion. The election is months away — plenty of time for the legislature to comply with the decision.Disturbing as this development is, it is even more alarming in context. Last July, in a case from Arizona, the court took a very narrow view of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon against vote denial measures, policies that have a discriminatory effect on nonwhite voters’ access to the polls. That case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was brought under the act’s Section 2, which prohibits voting procedures that give members of racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Justice Alito’s opinion for a 6-to-3 majority set a high bar for showing that any disputed measure is more than just an ordinary burden that comes with turning out to vote.It was an unusual case, in that Section 2 has much more typically been used as it was in Alabama, to challenge district lines as causing vote dilution. Obviously, at the heart of any Section 2 case is the question of how to evaluate the role of race. In its request for a stay, Alabama characterized the district court of having improperly “prioritized” race, as opposed to other districting factors, in ordering a second majority Black district. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, representing the Alabama plaintiffs, called this a mischaracterization of what the district court had actually done when it took account of the compactness and cohesion of the Black community and the history of white Alabama voters refusing to support Black candidates.Stripped to its core, Alabama is essentially arguing that a law enacted to protect the interests of Black citizens bars courts from considering race in evaluating a redistricting plan. Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion contained a warning that granting the stay amounted to a tacit acceptance of that startling proposition. She said the stay reflected “a hastily made and wholly unexplained prejudgment” that the court was “ready to change the law.”The battle over what Section 2 means has been building for years, largely under the radar, and now it is front and center. The current Supreme Court term is all about abortion and guns. The next one will be all about race. Along with the Alabama case, Merrill v. Milligan, the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions cases are also on the docket — to be heard by a Supreme Court that, presumably, for the first time in history, will have two Black justices, and all in the shadow of the midterm elections. The fire next time.Linda Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008. She is the author of “Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in US Politics

      A court caught Republicans discriminating against Black voters – here’s how

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      A court caught Republicans discriminating against Black voters – here’s howAn Alabama case tests how much Republicans can legally dilute the power of Black votersIt has been called a textbook example of discrimination against Black voters in the US. And a ruling on it from the supreme court is expected any day.It isn’t the kind of explicit voting discrimination, like poll taxes and literacy tests, that kept voters from the polls in the south during the Jim Crow era. Instead, it is more subtle. Let us walk you through the case with our visual explainer. The case focuses on Alabama, where the Republican-controlled legislature, like states across the US, recently completed the once-a-decade process of redrawing the boundaries of congressional maps. If partisan politicians exert too much control over the redistricting process, they can effectively engineer their own victories, or blunt the advantages of the other side, by allocating voters of particular political persuasions and backgrounds to particular districts.Under the new districts, Black people make up 25% of the Alabama’s population, but comprise a majority in just one of the state’s seven districts.In late January, a panel of three federal judges issued a 225-page opinion explaining how the state was discriminating against Black voters.“Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress,” the panel wrote. The judges gave Alabama 14 days to come up with a new plan and said the state had to draw two districts where Black voters comprise a majority. @font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline 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      Republicans’ redistricting maps are motivated entirely by race – not politics | Michael Harriot

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      Republicans’ redistricting maps are motivated entirely by race – not politicsMichael HarriotThere has been a subtle campaign to redefine racism by the intent and not the effects of discriminatory actions, even as gerrymandered maps diminish the power of Black voters Although the phrase “All politics is local” is usually attributed to Tip O’Neill Jr, a former speaker of the US House of Representatives, the aphorism probably originated in the February 1932 Associated Press column “Politics at Random”, when the Washington bureau chief, Byron Price, wrote: “All politics is local politics.” As valid as Price’s summarization of inside-the-Beltway politics may be, there is probably a more accurate way to describe the All American sport of civic power-brokering:All politics is racial.Over the last quarter-century, white voters have overwhelmingly identified with the GOP while every other racial and ethnic group – Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters – consistently identify with the Democratic party. This unwavering reality reduces the machinations of each political party to a game of demographic mathematics, especially in racially diverse parts of the country, where one truisim dominates local politics: when non-white people can’t vote, Republicans win.Perhaps the starkest example of this racial divide is Alabama, where white people make up 69% of the population and are 89% of the Republican electorate. By comparison, the state is 27% African American, 80% of whom identify as Democrat. Six of the seven Democrats in the Alabama senate are Black, as are 26 of the 27 Democratic members of the house. In 2022, Kenneth Paschal became the first Black person to represent the Republican party in the Alabama state legislature since Reconstruction. Contrary to what Price would say, politics is not local here. In Alabama, regardless of the location, “white voter” is synonymous with “Republican” and “Black” means “Democrat”.Perhaps this reality is why last Monday, a federal court threw out the state’s congressional map that disenfranchised Black voters across the state. The three-judge panel explained that the congressional redistricting plan created by Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature meant that “Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress.” The previous map packed the two Blackest cities in one congressional district, splitting the rest of the state’s Black population – three of the five largest cities in the state – among three majority-white districts that have been safely Republican for years. The judges gave the white (Republican) lawmakers 14 days to draw new districts that did not violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Alabama Republicans vowed to appeal the ruling to the US supreme court, where the court’s conservative majority ruled in 2019 that disenfranchising Black voters is perfectly fine as long as the gerrymanderers’ intent was partisan and not racial. “If district lines were drawn for the purpose of separating racial groups, then they are subject to strict scrutiny because ‘race-based decisionmaking is inherently suspect,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion. “But determining that lines were drawn on the basis of partisanship does not indicate that the districting was improper. A permissible intent – securing partisan advantage – does not become constitutionally impermissible, like racial discrimination, when that permissible intent “predominates”.Herein lies the problem with politics, conservative ideology and America in general. For years, there has been a subtle campaign to redefine racism by the intent and not the effects of discriminatory actions. According to this new American translation, disenfranchising entire communities by suppressing their voting power is not necessarily racist as long as the person didn’t mean to be racist. And, because there are very few people willing to stand in front of the world and confess to their racial prejudices, anyone is allowed to discriminate as long as they don’t articulate their racism out loud. However, this cleverly constructed loophole only applies to racism. America’s jurisprudence system has found a way to convict people for unintentional murder and hold people accountable for car accidents, but somehow white people are innocent until proven racist.But in the case of the Alabama Republican-controlled legislature, there is actual proof.A few weeks after justices sitting on America’s highest court decided that there was nothing they could do about North Carolina disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Black citizens, the daughter of the man who pioneered using race to redraw political maps leaked the contents of her recently deceased father’s hard drive, revealing that North Carolina’s redistricting plan was about race all along. Known as the “Master of the Modern Gerrymander”, Thomas Hofeller had only considered race when drawing the maps for North Carolina. The proposed maps even included a plan that would have allowed the state to elect an all-white legislature.But the leaked files also revealed that Hofeller was the main architect of redistricting plans for states across the country, including Alabama. Hofeller’s files included emails and proposals from then Alabama state House redistricting commission chair Representative Jim McClendon, who included racial data, census maps broken down by race and … well, nothing else. The basis for McClendon and Hofeller’s plan for Alabama wasn’t mostly about race; it seems as if it was only about race. After serving in the Alabama house for 12 years, McClendon was elected to the state senate in 2014, where he co-chaired the senate commission whose gerrymandered maps were thrown out by the federal court. It was probably a coincidence. I’m sure he didn’t mean to do it.Alabama is not an outlier in this phenomenon. Republican-controlled legislatures in Georgia, Tennessee, Texas, Missouri and Wisconsin have submitted gerrymandered maps that diminish the power of Black voters. Of course, they won’t admit that the redistricting plans are solely motivated by race because, according to the New American definition, that would make it racist. According to America’s highest legal authorities, there is nothing wrong with stealing the voices of Black people and accidentally murdering their opportunity to participate in democracy. After all, it has nothing to do with racism.It’s just politics.
      Michael Harriot is a writer and author of the upcoming book Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America
      TopicsUS voting rightsOpinionRaceUS politicsAlabamaRepublicanscommentReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Alabama Redistricting Decision Reasserts Voting Rights Act

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      Three federal judges in Alabama ruled that a new congressional map drawn by G.O.P. state lawmakers violated the Voting Rights Act.After years of court decisions battering the Voting Rights Act, a ruling in an Alabama redistricting case is reasserting the power of the 56-year-old law — and giving Democrats and civil rights groups hope for beating back gerrymandered maps.The decision from three federal judges ordered state lawmakers to rework their newly drawn congressional maps. The Republican-led legislature violated the Voting Rights Act, the judges ruled, by failing to draw more than one congressional district where Black voters might elect a representative of their choice.Alabama’s Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall, quickly appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit on Tuesday, and asked for a motion to stay the ruling.Still, the unanimous ruling — signed by two judges appointed by former President Donald J. Trump and one by former President Bill Clinton — was a sign that a key weapon against racial discrimination in redistricting could still be potent, even as other elements of the landmark Voting Rights Act have been hollowed out by Supreme Court decisions. The case hinged on Section 2 of the act, which bars racial discrimination in election procedures.A similar case already is pending in Texas, and the success of the challenge in Alabama could open the door to lawsuits in other states such as South Carolina, Louisiana or Georgia. It could also serve as a warning for states such as Florida that have yet to finish drawing their maps.“The Supreme Court has cut back on the tools that we in the voting rights community have to use to deal with misconduct by government authorities and bodies,” said Eric Holder, a former U.S. Attorney General who is now the chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “Section 2 to now has remained pretty much intact.”The court’s ruling in Alabama — where the Black residents make up 27 percent of population yet Black voters are a majority in just one of seven House districts — comes amid a polarized redistricting cycle, in which both Republicans and Democrats have sought to entrench their political power through district lines for congressional and legislative maps. In much of the country, that has created districts that bisect neighborhoods or curl around counties to wring the best possible advantage.Civil rights leaders and some Democrats argue that process too often comes at the expense of growing minority communities. Black and Hispanic voters have a history of being “packed” into single congressional districts or divided up across several so as to dilute their votes.In 2013, the Supreme Court dealt the Voting Rights Act a significant blow in Shelby v. Holder, hollowing out a core provision in Section 5. The “preclearance” provision required that states with a history of discrimination at the polls get approval from the Justice Department before making changes to voting procedures or redrawing maps. Last year, the court ruled that Section 2 would not protect against most new voting restrictions passed since the 2020 election.Mr. Marshall, the Alabama attorney general, argued the only way to create two majority-Black congressional districts is to make race the primary factor in map-drawing and called the court’s ruling “an unconstitutional application of the Voting Rights Act.”“The order will require race to be used at all times, in all places, and for all districts,” Mr. Marshall wrote in his appeal Tuesday. “Based on the political geography of Alabama and the broad dispersion of Black Alabamians, it is essentially impossible to draw a map like those presented by plaintiffs unless traditional districting principles give way to race.”The case is very likely to advance to the Supreme Court, where Justice Clarence Thomas has already indicated he does not believe that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prevents racial gerrymandering, a question the court did not address when it struck down other elements of the law.The Alabama decision is the second this month in which a court has invalidated a Republican-drawn congressional map. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled state legislative and congressional maps drawn by Republicans violated a state constitutional prohibition on partisan gerrymandering. The North Carolina Supreme Court delayed the state’s primaries while a challenge to Republican-drawn maps there is heard.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      in Elections

      Court Throws Out Alabama’s New Congressional Map

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      A federal panel of judges ordered state lawmakers to redraw the lines, saying Black voters “have less opportunity than other Alabamians” to elect candidates of their choice.WASHINGTON — A panel of three federal judges threw out Alabama’s congressional map on Monday and ordered state lawmakers to draw a new one with two, rather than just one, districts that are likely to elect Black representatives.The map that Alabama’s Republican-majority State Legislature adopted last fall drew one of the state’s seven congressional districts with a majority of Black voters. The court ruled that with Alabama’s Black population of 27 percent, the state must allot two districts with either Black majorities or “in which Black voters otherwise have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.”“Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress,” the panel of judges wrote.The case is certain to be appealed and could lead to the U.S. Supreme Court addressing the question of whether lawmakers can draw political maps to achieve a specific racial composition, a practice known as racial gerrymandering. In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts have no role to play in blocking partisan gerrymanders. However, the court left intact parts of the Voting Rights Act that prohibit racial or ethnic gerrymandering.If Alabama legislators do not produce and pass a new map with a second majority-Black district within 14 days, the court will appoint a special master to do so, the judges wrote. That second district would be a significant legal and political victory for Democrats, who would be overwhelming favorites to carry it.“This decision is a win for Alabama’s Black voters, who have been denied equal representation for far too long,” said Eric H. Holder Jr., the chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. “The map’s dilution of the voting power of Alabama’s Black community — through the creation of just one majority-Black district while splitting other Black voters apart — was as evident as it was reprehensible.”The Alabama Republican Party chairman, John Wahl, said he was disappointed in the court’s ruling and expected it to be appealed. “The basic outlines of Alabama’s congressional districts have remained the same for several decades and have been upheld numerous times,” he said. “What has changed between now and those past decisions to cause the court to act in this manner?”The Alabama congressional map is the second drawn by Republicans to be struck down by courts this month. Two weeks ago, the Ohio Supreme Court invalidated a map drawn by Republicans which would have given the G.O.P. a likely 12-to-3 advantage in the state’s congressional delegation. North Carolina’s new congressional map is also enmeshed in a legal battle, and several other states are likely to be sued over their political cartography.The three-judge panel is made up of two Federal District Court judges appointed by former President Donald J. Trump and one by former President Bill Clinton. All three signed the opinion. The panel pushed back Alabama’s ballot qualification deadline from Jan. 28 to Feb. 11 for the state’s May primaries.Alabama’s secretary of state, John H. Merrill, declined to comment on the ruling.Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main mapmaking organization, said the map was based on one that was cleared in 2011 by President Obama’s Justice Department, then led by Mr. Holder, and comports with the Voting Rights Act.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      On Vaccines and More, Republican Cowardice Harms America

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      Back in July, Kay Ivey, governor of Alabama, had some strong and sensible things to say about Covid-19 vaccines. “I want folks to get vaccinated,” she declared. “That’s the cure. That prevents everything.” She went on to say that the unvaccinated are “letting us down.”Three months later Ivey directed state agencies not to cooperate with federal Covid-19 vaccination mandates.Ivey’s swift journey from common sense and respect for science to destructive partisan nonsense — nonsense that is killing tens of thousands of Americans — wasn’t unique. On the contrary, it was a recapitulation of the journey the whole Republican Party has taken on issue after issue, from tax cuts to the Big Lie about the 2020 election.When we talk about the G.O.P.’s moral descent, we tend to focus on the obvious extremists, like the conspiracy theorists who claim that climate change is a hoax and Jan. 6 was a false flag operation. But the crazies wouldn’t be driving the Republican agenda so completely if it weren’t for the cowards, Republicans who clearly know better but reliably swallow their misgivings and go along with the party line. And at this point crazies and cowards essentially make up the party’s entire elected wing.Consider, for example, the claim that tax cuts pay for themselves. In 1980 George H.W. Bush, running against Ronald Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination, called that assertion “voodoo economic policy.” Everything we’ve seen since then says that he was right. But Bush soon climbed down, and by 2017 even supposed “moderates” like Susan Collins accepted claims that the Trump tax cut would reduce, not increase, the budget deficit. (It increased the deficit.)Or consider climate change. As recently as 2008 John McCain campaigned for president in part on a proposal to put a cap on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. But at this point Republicans in Congress are united in their opposition to any substantive action to limit global warming, with 30 G.O.P. senators outright denying the overwhelming scientific evidence that human activities are causing climate change.The falsehoods that are poisoning America’s politics tend to share similar life histories. They begin in cynicism, spread through disinformation and culminate in capitulation, as Republicans who know the truth decide to acquiesce in lies.Take the claim of a stolen election. Donald Trump never had any evidence on his side, but he didn’t care — he just wanted to hold on to power or, failing that, promulgate a lie that would help him retain his hold on the G.O.P. Despite the lack of evidence and the failure of every attempt to produce or create a case, however, a steady drumbeat of propaganda has persuaded an overwhelming majority of Republicans that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate.And establishment Republicans, who at first pushed back against the Big Lie, have gone quiet or even begun to promote the falsehood. Thus on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal published, without corrections or fact checks, a letter to the editor from Trump that was full of demonstrable lies — and in so doing gave those lies a new, prominent platform.The G.O.P.’s journey toward what it is now with respect to Covid-19 — an anti-vaccine, objectively pro-pandemic party — followed the same trajectory.Although Republicans like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott claim that their opposition to vaccine requirements is about freedom, the fact that both governors have tried to stop private businesses from requiring customers or staff to be vaccinated shows this is a smoke screen. Pretty clearly, the anti-vaccine push began as an act of politically motivated sabotage. After all, a successful vaccination campaign that ended the pandemic would have been good political news for Biden.We should note, by the way, that this sabotage has, so far at least, paid off. While there are multiple reasons many Americans remain unvaccinated, there’s a strong correlation between a county’s political lean and both its vaccination rate and its death rate in recent months. And the persistence of Covid, which has in turn been a drag on the economy, has been an important factor dragging down Biden’s approval rating.More important for the internal dynamics of the G.O.P., however, is that many in the party’s base have bought into assertions that requiring vaccination against Covid-19 is somehow a tyrannical intrusion of the state into personal decisions. In fact, many Republican voters appear to have turned against longstanding requirements that parents have their children vaccinated against other contagious diseases.And true to form, elected Republicans like Governor Ivey who initially spoke in favor of vaccines have folded and surrendered to the extremists, even though they must know that in so doing they will cause many deaths.I’m not sure exactly why cowardice has become the norm among elected Republicans who aren’t dedicated extremists. But if you want to understand how the G.O.P. became such a threat to everything America should stand for, the cowards are at least as important a factor as the crazies.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More