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      The Everlasting Pain of Losing a Child

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      More from our inbox:Clarence Thomas’s EthicsPolitical NovicesDon’t Kill the LanternfliesIgnoring the Truth About Trump Karlotta FreierTo the Editor:Re “Life After Loss Is Awful. I Need to Believe It’s Also Beautiful,” by Sarah Wildman (Opinion, Aug. 27):I just read your essay, Ms. Wildman, about your daughter Orli, and I know everything you are saying and am crying with you and for you and for myself.I know what it is to look for your child everywhere, in a rainstorm, in trees and butterflies. I even looked for my son, Jack, in an exhibit of Goya paintings, seeing him in a young man of about his age and size, even though the clothes and setting were of another era.I used to pretend, as long as I could, that the person coming toward me on the trail near our house was Jack. When I hugged his friends, I’d pretend I was hugging him. Unlike you, we lost Jack suddenly, and we had him for what I think of as a third of a life, 26 years. He died skiing in an avalanche in Montana in 1999, almost as long ago as he got to live.That longing ache, the feeling of having failed him, that I should have tamped down his physical daring — I know those too. I am so sorry for your loss that nothing can make go away.We used to say: “We’ve been really good and grieved well. Can we have him back now?” I guess we were saying it to the universe.Bonnie GilliomChapel Hill, N.C.To the Editor:There is overwhelming grace and dignity to this piece and to its earlier companion in the aftermath of Sarah Wildman’s daughter’s death (“My Daughter’s Future Was Taken From Her, and From Us,” May 21).A palpable cascading sadness and grief, resting side by side with a longing to remain attached to what was beautiful in Orli’s universe and what remains so even now that she has passed. Two universes colliding, a mother trying to reconcile these impossibly irreconcilable differences.I am thankful that Ms. Wildman has allowed us into her world. That she has given us permission to see and feel what such devastating loss looks like, how it manifests itself, how to try to manage it even as it cannot be managed.There can be no greater pain, no greater loss than that of watching a child slip through one’s grasp as you try desperately to hold on. But Orli will remain forever present through the words of her mother.And though she may no longer be able to protect her daughter, Ms. Wildman has been able to preserve her and her memory. It is a mother’s last loving gift to her wonderful child.Robert S. NussbaumFort Lee, N.J.To the Editor:I have finished reading Sarah Wildman’s essays on the loss of her daughter. I too have lost a child, although he was 42 years old. I still weep at times that have no connection to losing him. He was my “baby,” and there are days when I can still feel his presence even though he died almost six years ago.Ms. Wildman’s articulation of the grief as ever-changing but everlasting was heartbreaking, but consoling as well. Just knowing that other parents have felt the soul-wrenching pain of this awful loss and continue on with their lives as I have feels like a warm hug.I don’t ever have to end this grieving of my loss. I can allow the memories I hold of him to live with me. I often want to tell family and friends that talking about my son doesn’t have to be off limits. Remembering him for the loving, sensitive and funny person he was is a way to honor and celebrate his memory.Patricia KoulepisPhoenix, Md.Clarence Thomas’s EthicsJustice Clarence Thomas had requested a 90-day extension for his financial disclosures.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Thomas Defends His Private Trips With Billionaire” (front page, Sept. 1):Justice and ethics both require adherence to what is morally right. In his flagrant disregard for such principles, Justice Clarence Thomas has done irreparable harm to a once respected institution.The Supreme Court may never regain the public trust it once held, but Chief Justice John Roberts could make a small beginning by urging Justice Thomas to resign. The perks that Justice Thomas and his wife, Virginia, have already enjoyed should be enough for a lifetime.He could do a great service to history and to his own legacy by doing the just, ethical and statesmanlike thing: a graceful resignation in the interest of the court and the country.Fran Moreland JohnsSan FranciscoThe writer is an author and activist.Political NovicesWhen asked about some past comments, Vivek Ramaswamy has denied ever making them or claimed to have been misquoted, even as those denials have been refuted.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Ramaswamy’s Repeated Aversion to the Facts Mirrors Trump’s Pattern” (news article, Aug. 31):The idea has taken hold that a person with no government experience, particularly a successful businessman, can be president. You wouldn’t want a neophyte to remove your gallbladder or give you a haircut, but apparently a lot of people feel differently about picking a president.Donald Trump — with no legislative, foreign policy or executive branch experience, little knowledge of history or government, and little understanding of the powers of the president — was elected and is still wildly popular with his party.What Donald Trump taught us is that the skill and experience it takes to become president, to get the job, and the skill and experience it takes to be president, to do the job, are not the same. It isn’t that they are not exactly the same; it is that they are totally different. The Venn diagram circles, Mr. Trump has taught us, do not intersect. He has also taught us that the second skill doesn’t have to be on your résumé to get the job.At least one person, Vivek Ramaswamy, has learned this lesson. If this works, it is democracy’s Achilles’ heel.Clem BerneSouth Salem, N.Y.Don’t Kill the LanternfliesEncouraging the public to kill spotted lanternflies can help raise awareness of the problem while scientists seek a lasting solution, experts said. These lanternflies were flattened by a photographer.Ali Cherkis for The New York TimesTo the Editor:New York City’s lanternfly bloodsport is sending our children the wrong message. “Swatting and Stomping in a Lanternfly Summer” (news article, Sept. 3) encourages us to continue the killing despite its obvious futility.First, it’s absurd to think that we can control the pest population one stomp at a time. Second, you don’t have to be a follower of ahimsa (the ancient Indian principle of nonviolence) to see that encouraging our children to destroy a life is problematic, even, or especially, a small and annoying one. Third, it teaches our children that the lanternfly is the problem while ignoring the root problem: us.Humanity’s sprawling globalization, ignoring its effects on nature, created the pest by introducing it into a new environment. Perhaps a better lesson for our children would be to point out the lanternfly as an unintended consequence of human practices and to teach them to be a better steward of our planet than we were.Ari GreenbaumTeaneck, N.J.Ignoring the Truth About TrumpTo the Editor:Remember when we were kids and someone was going to say something that we didn’t want to hear? We’d stick our fingers into our ears or make a lot of noise to drown out the anticipated comment.Isn’t this essentially what Matt Gaetz and other Republicans are doing in their proposal to defund Jack Smith’s investigation of former President Donald Trump?Yeah, growing up can be hard. We often hear things we’d prefer to remain ignorant of. For some, ignorance is still bliss.Robert SelverstoneWestport, Conn. 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      Does Justice Alito Hear Himself?

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      For someone who wields unimaginable power and exudes utter confidence in his own moral rectitude, Justice Samuel Alito is an exceptionally touchy guy.Exhibit A: His decision to devote time and energy to a newspaper essay defending himself against charges of ethical and legal violations that had not yet been published, and which he considered invalid in the first place. The essay, in both form and substance, epitomizes the bitterness and superciliousness that he has demonstrated in regular doses throughout his years on the Supreme Court.The nature of the charges, detailed in a deeply reported article published by ProPublica on Tuesday evening, will sound familiar after the recent revelations about the casual attitude of several justices regarding the most basic ethical standards.In 2008, Justice Alito accepted a free flight to a luxury fishing resort in Alaska on a private jet owned by Paul Singer, the hugely wealthy hedge-fund owner and major conservative donor. When one of Mr. Singer’s companies later appeared before the court in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the Argentine government, it won its case, eventually netting $2.4 billion. Justice Alito voted in the majority. He neither recused himself from the case nor reported the free flight, which could have cost him up to $100,000 on the open market, and which appears to be a violation of a federal law requiring the disclosure of such gifts.Most judges, whether by temperament or fidelity, avoid the spotlight. They prefer to follow rules and let their opinions do the talking. That has never been Justice Alito’s way. For most of his 17 years on the court, he has appeared to relish playing the role of bare-knuckled partisan soldier, standing athwart history in loyal service to a vengeful, theocratic right-wing movement that elevates religious liberty for some over basic freedoms for all. Remember when he mouthed “not true,” on live national television, in reaction to President Barack Obama’s criticism of the court’s Citizens United decision during the 2010 State of the Union address? Or when he attacked liberals as threatening religious liberty and free speech? Or when he mocked the critics of his majority opinion last year striking down Roe v. Wade and a woman’s constitutional right to abortion? You’d think you were listening to a pugnacious politician rather than a high-minded jurist — and you would not be entirely wrong.On Tuesday evening, hours before the ProPublica report came out, Justice Alito took to the ramparts again. In a lengthy screed on The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, he absolved himself of any wrongdoing, flatly rejecting any suggestion that he should have recused himself or reported Mr. Singer’s gift. Recusal is required only when “an unbiased and reasonable person who is aware of all relevant facts would doubt that the justice could fairly discharge his or her duties,” he wrote, quoting the court’s recently adopted statement of ethics and principles. “No such person,” he concluded, “would think that my relationship with Mr. Singer meets that standard.”One of the hazards of an unelected lifetime gig is that you have little idea of what regular people actually think. Contrary to Justice Alito’s cosseted worldview, the real reason “no such person” would doubt his impartiality is that no such person exists. The justice never disclosed the existence of the trip, so no one was aware of “all relevant facts” besides himself, Mr. Singer and the other people on the plane.But even if the relationship had been known, can anyone say with a straight face that no “unbiased and reasonable person” would question the justice’s impartiality when he votes for someone who gave him a valuable gift? Isn’t there at least the appearance that something other than the strict application of the rule of law is at work? And appearances count, perhaps nowhere more than at the Supreme Court, which is the final arbiter of many of the most fraught issues of American life.Justice Alito is hardly the first member of the current court to face charges of serious ethical lapses. Nearly all the other justices, conservative and liberal, have accepted free travel and other gifts over the years, although these have rarely involved such a clear connection to cases that have come before the court. Justice Clarence Thomas has been under fire for, among other things, failing to recuse himself from cases involving the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, even though his wife, Ginni, was in regular communication with the Trump White House in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election. More recently, ProPublica has reported on Justice Thomas’s ties to Harlan Crow, another conservative billionaire who has lavished gifts on him and his wife over the years, and who has been connected to at least one business with a case before the court.Justice Thomas has mostly kept his mouth shut, though he did issue a brief statement after the ProPublica article about him. Justice Alito, by choosing to speak up at length and in a forum that he knew would be both friendly and prominent, muscled his opinion into public view. In doing so, he illustrated how flimsy even a Supreme Court justice’s reasoning can be when he attempts to be a judge in his own cause.For instance, Justice Alito defended his decision not to report Mr. Singer’s freebie because it was “personal hospitality,” which he believed, like his colleague Justice Thomas, did not need to be reported. And yet he also claimed he barely knew Mr. Singer. So which is it? “If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” one legal-ethics expert said to ProPublica. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?”Rather than try to square that circle and admit he’d been caught doing something ethically wrong and arguably illegal, Justice Alito went to laughable lengths to lawyer his way out. As far as he was aware, he wrote, the seat he occupied on his private-jet jaunt to Alaska “would have otherwise been vacant” — by which he presumably means to say the gift was valueless. Remind me to try that one out the next time I walk past an empty first-class seat on a Delta flight. Seriously, though: do these guys listen to themselves?Justice Alito doesn’t like these sorts of questions. In fact, he doesn’t seem to like any criticism of the court. In addition to getting his back up about ethical complaints, he is aggrieved about challenges to the court’s blatantly partisan decisions and its increasing reliance on the secretive “shadow docket” to issue rulings without oral arguments or written opinions.“We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us,” he said in an interview in April with The Wall Street Journal.If Justice Alito doesn’t appreciate being called out for taking lavish trips on litigants’ dimes, or for overturning precedent to impose his personal ideology, then he might consider not doing those things in the first place. Instead, he chooses to shoot the messenger.It is this odor of impunity, this mockery of legitimate critique, this disregard for the rights and freedoms of millions of Americans — this “stench” of politicization, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it during oral arguments in the case that eventually overturned Roe v. Wade — that defines today’s Supreme Court. That should concern Chief Justice John Roberts above all, because his name and legacy will be forever attached to this court.And that is why, if the justices are confused as to the reason public trust in the court is in free fall, they need look no further than Justice Alito’s smug, defensive reaction to a very fair criticism. As long as the court refuses to accept significantly stricter ethics rules, either adopted by themselves or imposed by Congress, that trust — and with it the court’s legitimacy — will continue to erode until it’s not worth a seat on a private jet.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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      The Supreme Court Has Earned a Little Contempt

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      Although the Supreme Court has been deciding cases at a glacial pace this term — and that with an almost comically small docket of only 59 merits cases — the justices have found other ways to keep busy. They have been spinning their ethical lapses (Justice Clarence Thomas), blowing off congressional oversight (Chief Justice John Roberts), giving interviews whining about public criticism (Justice Samuel Alito) and presenting awards to one another (Justice Elena Kagan to Mr. Roberts).In the cases it has decided, the Supreme Court has gutted an important provision of the Clean Water Act and made it easier for private litigants to mount constitutional challenges to an administrative agency’s structure or existence. Opinions still to come threaten to strike down everything from affirmative action in education to student debt relief to the Indian Child Welfare Act.Court observers might be tempted to describe all this as a relatively recent development, a function of the court’s 6-to-3 Republican-appointed supermajority. The University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman has called this the “YOLO court” (for “you only live once”), because of the majority’s apparent sense of liberation in pursuing long-held conservative goals. Mark Lemley of Stanford placed the beginning of the “imperial Supreme Court” in 2020.Mr. Lemley is right to decry the self-aggrandizing nature of the court. But his dating is somewhat off. Judicial self-aggrandizement has been in the works for a lot longer: It has been a hallmark of the John Roberts years.Over roughly the past 15 years, the justices have seized for themselves more and more of the national governing agenda, overriding other decision makers with startling frequency. And they have done so in language that drips with contempt for other governing institutions and in a way that elevates the judicial role above all others.The result has been a judicial power grab.Judges have long portrayed themselves as neutral, apolitical conduits of the law, in contrast to the sordid political branches. This portrayal serves to obscure the institution of the judiciary and to foreground the abstract, disembodied concept of the law. In turn, it serves to empower judges, who present themselves not as one type of political actor but rather as the voice of the majestic principles of the law.But Mr. Roberts’s judiciary has increasingly taken subtext and made it text. Here are three thematic examples out of many.Campaign Finance LawStarting with Citizens United in 2010, the Republican-appointed majority on the court has consistently struck down provisions limiting the influence of money in politics, including provisions that it previously upheld. In a 2014 case, Mr. Roberts wrote that campaign finance regulations that pursue objectives other than eradicating quid pro quo corruption or its appearance “impermissibly inject the government into the debate over who should govern. And those who govern should be the last people to help decide who should govern.”In this brief passage, Mr. Roberts implicitly distances his own institution from “the government” of which it is obviously a part, implies that the court stands outside the processes of governance, and suggests that there is something self-dealing and borderline corrupt about campaign finance laws passed by elected legislatures.In these same cases, the justices have described nonjudicial political speech in terms that make it sound kind of … icky. It involves “sound bites, talking points and scripted messages that dominate the 24-hour news cycle,” in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words. This sort of speech deserves protection for the same reasons that “flag burning, funeral protests and Nazi parades” do, in Mr. Roberts’s.Yet there has been one glaring exception to the majority’s hostility to campaign finance regulations: In the context of state judicial elections, they have upheld restrictions that they would be highly unlikely to tolerate in the context of nonjudicial elections. Tellingly, these cases describe judges in a manner that starkly contrasts with how they have described nonjudicial officeholders.As Mr. Kennedy put it in a 2009 case about when campaign spending required a state judge to recuse himself, “Precedent and stare decisis and the text and purpose of the law and the Constitution, logic and scholarship and experience and common sense, and fairness and disinterest and neutrality are among the factors at work” when judges consider cases — a far cry from the “sound bites, talking points and scripted messages” of nonjudicial political speech.And in a 2015 case upholding a Florida law that forbade candidates for judicial office from personally soliciting campaign contributions, Mr. Roberts, anachronistically appealing to the authority of Magna Carta, wrote that judges “cannot supplicate campaign donors without diminishing public confidence in judicial integrity” and concluded that “judges are not politicians, even when they come to the bench by way of the ballot.”Mr. Roberts’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, judges are political actors, and striking down federal election laws is an aggressive act of governance by the judiciary. And the justices’ language in these cases, holding up judges as noble instruments of the law and denigrating other officeholders as power-grubbing and superficial, serves to reinforce and justify the notion that they are uniquely qualified to govern us.Congressional OversightOn one day in 2020, the court decided two cases dealing with very similar subpoenas for information about President Donald Trump’s financial and business dealings. One set of subpoenas came from congressional committees; the other came from a New York State grand jury.Mr. Roberts wrote both opinions. In the case dealing with congressional subpoenas, he worried that Congress may aim to “harass the president or render him ‘complaisan[t] to the humors of the legislature.’” Accordingly, the subpoenas must be superintended by the courts, lest the legislature “‘exert an imperious controul’ over the executive branch and aggrandize itself at the president’s expense, just as the framers feared.” (The internal quotations there are from the Federalist Papers to provide a patina of antiquity.) He thus announced a multipart balancing test that applies only when Congress seeks the personal papers of the president.While that decision made the president a supercitizen vis-à-vis congressional subpoenas, the other opinion emphasized that he is just a regular citizen when it comes to judicial subpoenas. Unlike Congress, apparently, a grand jury requires “all information that might possibly bear on its investigation.” Whereas Mr. Roberts worried about Congress harassing the president, “we generally ‘assume[] that state courts and prosecutors will observe constitutional limitations.’”Not only do these opinions stymie congressional oversight — the papers were not handed over to the committees until nearly two years into the Biden administration — they also do so using language that elevates judicial institutions while denigrating legislative ones.Federal RegulationCongress is not alone; administrative agencies also bear the brunt of the justices’ disdain. In a series of recent cases that, for example, struck down the E.P.A.’s clean power plan for addressing climate change, the Republican-appointed justices have invented the so-called major questions doctrine. If they consider an issue major — and they have not told us what makes a question major beyond “vast economic and political significance” or “earnest and profound debate across the country” — then they will not allow an agency to regulate in that manner unless Congress has clearly stated that it may.To use an analogy: If a majority of justices determine that eating an ice cream cone is a major question, then it is not enough that Congress has empowered the agency to “eat any dessert it chooses.” It must legislate that the agency can “eat any dessert it chooses, including ice cream cones.” But Congress has no way of knowing whether eating an ice cream cone is major until it sees what a majority of justices have to say about it.In justifying this doctrine, the justices have raised the specter of out-of-control bureaucrats intruding on the liberty of citizens, undermining legal stability, serving only special interests and invading the domain of the states.You might think that this doctrine is meant to protect congressional power, except that it dictates to Congress how it must legislate, despite the fact that Congress has no way of knowing in advance what issues will be considered major. Moreover, as the legal scholar Beau Baumann has noted, Justice Neil Gorsuch and his colleagues have justified the doctrine on the grounds that Congress is too eager to delegate to agencies in order to avoid political responsibility, so the courts must keep Congress in line. In other words, the justices are paternalistically claiming to protect Congress from itself.***In all of these areas and in plenty more, the justices have seized for themselves an active role in governance. But perhaps even more consequentially, in doing so, they have repeatedly described other political institutions in overwhelmingly derogatory terms while either describing the judiciary in flattering terms or not describing it at all — denying its status as an institution and positioning it as simply a conduit of disembodied law.This is the ideological foundation for the Roberts-era judicial power grab.It is also worth noting that this ideological project is bipartisan. Republican-appointed justices dominate the court and have for many decades, but their Democratic-appointed colleagues — while dissenting in many individual opinions — evince no desire to contest the underlying disdain for other institutions or elevation of their own. When Mr. Roberts recently refused to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, nothing stopped Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan or Ketanji Brown Jackson from volunteering to testify, but they did not. Nothing is stopping them from publicly calling for a binding ethics code or from questioning not just the correctness but also the legitimacy of their institution’s assertiveness, but they have not.Recognizing the justices’ ideological project also points to the beginning of the solution. We ought to begin talking about the justices the way we talk about other political actors — recognizing that their first name is not Justice and that they, like other politicians, should be identified by their party.We should stop talking about another branch’s potential defiance of a judicial opinion as an attack on “the rule of law” and instead understand it as an attack on rule by judges, one that may (or may not) be a justified response to some act of judicial governance. And those other branches should be more willing — as they have at other moments in American history — to use the tools at their disposal, including cutting the judiciary’s funding, to put the courts in their place.In recent years, the judiciary has shown little but contempt for other governing institutions. It has earned a little contempt in return.Josh Chafetz (@joshchafetz) is a law professor at Georgetown and the author of “Congress’s Constitution.” This essay is adapted from a forthcoming article in The St. Louis University Law Journal.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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      The Polite Disdain of John Roberts Finds a Target

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      Although the three branches of the American government were designed to be coequal, the structure of the Constitution tells us something about the relative power of each branch, as envisioned by the framers.Article I establishes the legislature. Article II establishes the executive branch. And Article III establishes the federal judiciary. It is true that the branches share powers and responsibilities. But it’s also true that the framers trusted Congress — the representative branch — with far more authority than it did the president or the Supreme Court.Congress makes laws. Congress spends money. Congress approves the president’s cabinet and says whether he can appoint a judge or not. Congress structures the judiciary and Congress sets the size of the Supreme Court and the scope of its business.The upshot of all of this is that when Congress calls, the other branches are supposed to answer — not as a courtesy, but as an affirmation of the rules of the American constitutional order. The modern Congress might be weak, and the presidency, against the expectations of the framers, might be the center of American political life, but it’s still newsworthy when a member of the executive branch says he or she won’t meet with the legislature.Chief Justice John Roberts is in a different branch of government, the judiciary. But he — a constitutional officer confirmed to his seat by the Senate — is still subject to the power of Congress to question and investigate his conduct. When Congress calls, he too should answer.Last week, Congress called the chief justice. In the wake of revelations concerning the friendship between Justice Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow, a billionaire Republican donor, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, invited Roberts to testify at an upcoming hearing on Supreme Court ethics rules.“There has been a steady stream of revelations regarding justices falling short of the ethical standards expected of other federal judges and, indeed, of public servants generally,” Durbin wrote in his letter to the chief justice. “These problems were already apparent back in 2011, and the Court’s decade-long failure to address them has contributed to a crisis of public confidence.”“The time has come for a new public conversation on ways to restore confidence in the Court’s ethical standards,” Durbin went on to say. “I invite you to join it, and I look forward to your response.”This week Roberts answered. He said, in a word, no.“I must respectfully decline your invitation,” Roberts wrote. “Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by the chief justice of the United States is exceedingly rare as one might expect in light of separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.”This deceptively polite reply sounds reasonable for as long as you can manage to forget the fact that it is questions about the ethical conduct of the court and its members that have compromised the independence of the court. Was Thomas influenced by the largess of his billionaire benefactor? Was Justice Samuel Alito influenced by an explicit campaign to curry favor with the conservative justices? Was Justice Neil Gorsuch influenced by the lucrative sale of a Colorado property, in the wake of his confirmation, to the head of a powerful law firm with ample business before the court?It is with real chutzpah, in other words, that Roberts has claimed judicial independence in order to circumvent an investigation into judicial independence.More striking than this evasion is the manner in which Roberts ended his reply. Faced with serious questions about the integrity of the court, he pointed to a nonbinding ethics document that has done almost nothing to prevent these situations from arising in the first place. “In regard to the Court’s approach to ethics matters,” he wrote, “I attached a Statement of Ethics Principles and Practices to which all of the current members of the Supreme Court subscribe.”Roberts did not write an aggressive or confrontational letter. And yet, he is quietly making an aggressive and confrontational claim about his own power and authority and that of the court’s. “Separation of powers,” in Roberts’s view, means the court is outside the system of checks and balances that governs the other branches of government. “Judicial independence,” likewise, means neither he nor any other member of the court has any obligation to speak to Congress about their behavior. The court checks, according to Roberts, but cannot be checked.A number of legal scholars have remarked on the judicial power grab of the past several years, in which courts across the federal judiciary have seized key governing decisions from the legislative and executive branches and disparaged the ability of elected officials to, as Josh Chafetz of Georgetown University Law Center writes, “engage in principled, competent governance.”As one of the architects of this development in American politics, Roberts is essentially using this letter to make plain to Congress the reality of the situation: I will not speak, and you cannot make me. And he’s right, not because Congress doesn’t have the power, but because it doesn’t have the votes. In the absence of a majority of votes, the Senate Judiciary Committee cannot subpoena a justice. In the absence of 218 votes, the House cannot impeach a justice. And in the absence of 67 votes, the Senate cannot remove a justice.There are steps Congress could take to discipline the court — shrinking its budget, reducing the scope of its docket, imposing ethics rules itself, even making it “ride circuit” à la the 19th century — but those require a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate because of the filibuster, as well as a consensus among lawmakers (and specifically, Democrats) to follow through if they ever have the chance to do so.It is not especially dramatic, but this exchange with Chief Justice Roberts over the court, its ethics and its responsibility to the public and its representatives has done more than almost anything else in recent memory to illustrate a key reality of American politics in this moment: that our Supreme Court does not exist in the constitutional order as much as it looms over it, a robed tribunal of self-styled philosopher-kings, accountable to no one but themselves.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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      North Carolina’s Governor Says a Fringe Claim Before the Supreme Court Would Upend Democracy

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      Over the past six months, the United States Supreme Court has handed down one misguided ruling after another, stripping Americans of the constitutional right to an abortion, curtailing the regulation of guns and industrial emissions, and muddying the divide between church and state. The people have protested. They’ve organized. And in 2022, they voted.In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the June decision on abortion, the majority wrote that “women are not without electoral or political power.” That’s one thing they got right, and Republicans found that out the hard way in the November midterm elections that they expected to win big. Now, however, the very ability to exercise electoral and political power at the ballot box is hanging in the balance in a case the court is scheduled to hear on Wednesday.Moore v. Harper is a case from North Carolina that state and national Republicans are using to push an extreme legal premise known as the “independent state legislature theory.” While the United States Constitution delegates the authority to administer federal elections to the states, with Congress able to supersede those state decisions, proponents of this theory argue that state legislatures are vested with the exclusive power to run those elections. This view would leave no room for oversight by state courts and put the ability of governors to veto election-related legislation in doubt.The court’s decision on this alarming argument could fundamentally reshape American democracy. Four justices have suggested that they are sympathetic to the theory. If the court endorses this doctrine, it would give state legislatures sole power over voting laws, congressional redistricting, and potentially even the selection of presidential electors and the proper certification of election winners.Indeed, the North Carolina Supreme Court, in a decision earlier this year, said the theory that state courts are barred from reviewing a congressional redistricting plan was “repugnant to the sovereignty of states, the authority of state constitutions and the independence of state courts, and would produce absurd and dangerous consequences.”You can look to North Carolina to see the potential for dire consequences. In 2010, Republicans took over the state legislature in a midterm election. Since then, North Carolina has been ground zero for Republican attempts to manipulate elections. As the state’s attorney general and now governor since 2017, I’ve dealt with Republican legislative leaders as they advanced one scheme after another to manipulate elections while making it harder for populations they have targeted to vote.These schemes robbed voters from the start to the end of an election: a voter ID requirement so strict that a college ID from the University of North Carolina isn’t good enough. No same-day registration during early voting. No provisional ballots for voters who show up at the wrong precinct. Shorter early voting periods eliminated voting the Sunday before Election Day, a day when African American churches hold popular “souls to the polls” events.Fortunately, these measures were stopped in 2016 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which described them as targeting African Americans “with almost surgical precision.”Republicans in the legislature have also gerrymandered districts in diabolical ways. In 2016, state Republicans drew a congressional redistricting map that favored Republicans 10-3. They did so, the Republican chairman of a legislative redistricting committee explained, “because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.”North Carolinians have relied on courts and my veto power as governor to foil many of these schemes. In 2022 a successful lawsuit in state court challenging a 2021 gerrymandered congressional map resulted in fair districts, splitting the state’s 14 districts (the state gained a district after the 2020 census) so that Democrats and Republicans each won seven seats in November’s elections. It seemed only right, given the nearly even divide between Democratic and Republican votes statewide. Republican efforts to avoid this result led to the Moore v. Harper appeal now before the Supreme Court.As recently as 2019, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in a majority opinion on partisan gerrymandering claims in Maryland and North Carolina that state courts were an appropriate venue to hear such cases but that those claims were political issues beyond the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Retreating from that position on the role of state courts would be a shocking leap backward that would undermine the checks and balances established in state constitutions across the country.Republican leaders in the North Carolina state legislature have shown us how the elections process can be manipulated for partisan gain. And that’s what you can expect to see from state legislatures across the country if the court reverses course in this case.Our democracy is a fragile ecosystem that requires checks and balances to survive. Giving state legislatures unfettered control over federal elections is not only a bad idea but also a blatant misreading of the Constitution. Don’t let the past decade of North Carolina voting law battles become a glimpse into the nation’s future.Roy Cooper, a Democrat, has been the governor of North Carolina since 2017. He was previously elected to four terms as attorney general.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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      Outrage Over Trump’s Dinner With Antisemites

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      More from our inbox:Inciting Mass ShootingsThe Supreme Court, in TroubleClimate and the G.O.P.Long Lines to VoteFormer President Donald J. Trump addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition’s conference in Las Vegas on a video call this month.Mikayla Whitmore for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Jewish Allies of Trump Recoil After He Hosts 2 Antisemites” (front page, Nov. 29):Your article about Jewish Republican supporters “slowly peeling away” from Donald Trump raises the question, Why has it taken this long?In the days after he was elected, spray-painted swastikas appeared all over the country. It’s been five long years since the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., during which hordes of white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us!” and Mr. Trump infamously said there were “very fine people on both sides.”As Jews, we of all people should know better than to let the fervor (and denying) mount for this long. We know the consequences.Nora ZelevanskyBrooklynTo the Editor:Donald Trump’s recent dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist leader, is another example of the former president’s proclivity to grant an audience to anyone who feeds his ego.Mr. Trump did much for the Jewish people and Israel during his presidency. He recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved our embassy to this ancient city. The Abraham Accords are the most significant peace development in the Middle East since Camp David in the 1970s. On a personal level, the president’s daughter Ivanka is a convert to Judaism.But apparently, all it took were a few kind words of flattery for Mr. Trump to grant an audience with two notorious antisemites. Leaders from Russia, China and North Korea will undoubtedly exploit this personal tendency of Mr. Trump’s to their advantage should he regain office.In 2024, voters must ask themselves if they can stomach Mr. Trump’s transactional notion of “friendship” for another four years.David WedenDover, Mass.To the Editor:A few Republican politicians are speaking out against the former president’s dinner with two men with offensive views. Is this because those politicians are suddenly aware of Donald Trump’s previous antisemitic statements, or because he is apparently beginning to lose voter approval?Joann Green BreuerBostonTo the Editor:Very few topics infuriate me as an American Jew more than hearing prominent American Jews defending Donald Trump, particularly in the wake of his latest foray into antisemitic behavior. Mr. Trump made blatant antisemitism acceptable after he indirectly lauded those chanting “Jews will not replace us!” in Charlottesville.His bigotry is not confined to Jews, and his vitriol has led to sharp increases in violence against Asian Americans, Black people and Latino immigrants. His track record of bigotry and hatred violates everything Judaism teaches, and his cozy dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes should not, cannot, be glossed over and tolerated.I am a Jew, but I am an American first and foremost, and I care about the values that our leaders espouse and display to the world.The near-universal disdain that Mr. Trump is viewed with around the world should tell you everything you need to know about this dangerous man. I would classify him as a clown, but there is really nothing funny about him.Bill GottdenkerMountainside, N.J.Inciting Mass ShootingsPhotos of the victims of the Club Q attack were placed at a memorial near the scene. Joanna Kulesza for The New York TimesTo the Editor:America is experiencing a contagion of mass shootings that gun rights advocates repeatedly assert is due to mental illness. But the rates of mental illness are much the same throughout the developed world, while countries such as Britain and Australia, with strict gun controls, have almost no such incidents.Even a casual look at the genocides of the 20th century and current events demonstrates that human beings are capable of extremes of brutality and cruelty. These are kept in check by a thin patina of civilized values that may prove no more protective than a tinfoil hat under the relentless incitement of politicians who use bigotry and hate as political tools.Gail Collins reminds us (column, Nov. 24) that Donald Trump went after Glenn Youngkin, governor of Virginia and a potential rival for the Republican nomination, by saying: “Youngkin … Sounds Chinese, doesn’t it?” What relevance could the sound of Mr. Youngkin’s name possibly have other than as a dog whistle cue to the next bigotry- and hatred-laden loner waiting in the shadows, angry with Asians for being … well, Asian?Constant calumny against Nancy Pelosi leads to calls for her death and a break-in and assault on her husband. Derision of the L.G.B.T.Q. community spews from extremist mouths, disinhibiting and inciting the susceptible to horrific massacres.“Good guys with guns” have shown us that they cannot stop the shooting while bad guys with big mouths go on fomenting it.Harold I. SchwartzWest Hartford, Conn.The writer, a psychiatrist, served on the Connecticut governor’s Sandy Hook Advisory Commission.The Supreme Court, in Trouble“I think that every justice should be worried about the court acting as a court and functioning as a court,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said in 2006.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Roberts’s Early Court Agenda: A Study in Disappointment,” by Adam Liptak (Sidebar, Nov. 22):The aspiration of Chief Justice John Roberts — to preserve the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as a venerated institution and to safeguard the credibility of its decisions — has been seriously undermined by the majority of justices currently on the court. His disappointment can be traced to two overarching factors.The conservative justices, despite their earlier assurances, have abandoned their respect for precedent, the bedrock of any worthy judicial system. That same conservative majority also ignores the time-honored mandate of the court, to decide only issues raised by the litigants and to decide them as narrowly as practicable.This court has an obvious agenda, which it pursues by reaching out for issues beyond the scope of cases being considered — the very essence of judicial activism — and then promulgates decisions that unnecessarily overturn firmly rooted constitutional protections.When the public perceives that the court’s decisions are detached from enduring legal principles and seem only to reflect the political preferences of individual justices, respect for the court is shattered and the rule of law is put in dire danger.Gerald HarrisNew YorkThe writer is a retired New York City Criminal Court judge.Climate and the G.O.P.Finding shade in cement pipes for construction in Allahabad, India, on May 31.Sanjay Kanojia/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Extreme Heat Will Change Us” (news article, Nov. 25):The parched land and heat-stressed people described in this article are the heartbreaking reality our children and grandchildren will soon face everywhere. The resulting migrations to escape the worst effects will become a tsunami.I do not understand why Republicans and others unwilling to invest in the infrastructure and lifestyle changes necessary to mitigate the severity of this outcome haven’t figured out that unless we address the climate crisis, the waves of immigrants pressing our borders in years to come will dwarf the current border “crisis” they decry.Judith Farris BowmanBennington, Vt.Long Lines to Vote Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle, via Associated PressTo the Editor:Now that this election is over, can we please stop arguing over giving water to people standing in line to vote and instead discuss why there are such long lines to vote, and what we can do about it? Seems to me that waiting in line for more than 15 or 20 minutes should not be acceptable.J. Danton SmithHamilton, N.J. More

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      Justice Thomas Ruled on Election Cases. Should His Wife’s Texts Have Stopped Him?

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      The nature of the text messages was enough to require recusal, legal experts said. But the Supreme Court has traditionally left such decisions to the discretion of the justice in question.WASHINGTON — The disclosure that Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, had sent a barrage of text messages to the Trump White House urging efforts to overturn the 2020 election brought into sharp focus the conflict of interest her political activism has created — and the lack of a clear-cut remedy.It is one thing, experts in legal ethics said on Friday, for the spouse of a Supreme Court justice to express political views, even ones shot through with wild conspiracy theories. That may not by itself require the justice’s recusal from cases touching on those views.But the text messages from Ms. Thomas, a longtime conservative activist who goes by Ginni, revealed something quite different and deeply troubling, experts said.The messages from Ms. Thomas to Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, sent during and just after the fraught weeks between the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, demonstrated that she was an active participant in shaping the legal effort to overturn the election.“I’m not sure how I would have come out if we just had a lot of texts from her saying that ‘this is terrible,’ said Amanda Frost, a law professor at American University in Washington.“But she wasn’t doing just that,” Professor Frost said. “She was strategizing. She was promoting. She was haranguing.”The texts were among about 9,000 pages of documents that Mr. Meadows turned over to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack. Democrats immediately seized on the disclosure to draw attention to the conflicts they said were presented by Ms. Thomas’s political activities and to press Justice Thomas to recuse himself from cases concerning the election and its aftermath. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said that Justice Thomas’s “conduct on the Supreme Court looks increasingly corrupt” and that he had been “the lone dissent in a case that could have denied the Jan. 6 committee records pertaining to the same plot his wife supported.”Justice Thomas, Mr. Wyden said, “needs to recuse himself from any case related to the Jan. 6 investigation, and should Donald Trump run again, any case related to the 2024 election.”But Justice Thomas, who was released from the hospital on Friday after being treated for the last week for flulike symptoms, has long been a pillar of the conservative establishment. Republicans, even those who have distanced themselves from Mr. Trump and the more extreme wing of their party, showed no interest in pressuring him to recuse himself.Ms. Thomas’s text messages were heated and forceful, urging Mr. Meadows to pursue baseless legal challenges. “Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” one said.Ms. Thomas’s activities should have prompted Justice Thomas to disqualify himself from cases related to them, said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University.“He had an obligation not to sit in any case related to the election, the Jan. 6 committee or the Capitol invasion,” he said.Professor Frost agreed that the situation was “an easy case.”“When your spouse is conversing with people who have some control over litigation to challenge an election,” she said, “you shouldn’t be sitting on the Supreme Court deciding that election or any aspect of it.”But Justice Thomas did participate in a ruling in January on an emergency application from Mr. Trump asking the court to block release of White House records concerning the attack on the Capitol. The court rejected the request, in a sharp rebuke to the former president.Only Justice Thomas noted a dissent, giving no reasons.He also participated in the court’s consideration of whether to hear a related appeal, one in which Mr. Meadows filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying that “the outcome of this case will bear directly” on his own efforts to shield records from the House committee investigating the attacks beyond those he had provided.The Supreme Court last month refused to hear the case, without noted dissent. There was no indication that Justice Thomas had recused himself.In December 2020, around the time of the text messages, Justice Thomas participated in a ruling on an audacious lawsuit by Texas asking the court to throw out the election results in four battleground states. The court rejected the request, with Justices Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. issuing a brief statement suggesting the majority had acted too soon in shutting the case down.In February 2021, Justice Thomas addressed election fraud in a dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision to turn away a challenge to Pennsylvania’s voting procedures.Ms. Thomas’s messages urged Mark Meadows, President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, to pursue baseless legal challenges.Oliver Contreras for The New York Times“We are fortunate that many of the cases we have seen alleged only improper rule changes, not fraud,” he wrote. “But that observation provides only small comfort. An election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence.”Justice Thomas did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.All federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, are subject to a federal law on recusal. The law says that “any justice, judge or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”Judging by the nature of the text messages and the uproar over them, that provision alone is enough to require Justice Thomas’s recusal, legal experts said.A more specific provision concerning relatives, including spouses, might also apply to his situation. Judges should not participate, the law says, in proceedings in which their spouse has “an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.”Professor Gillers said the word “interest” was the key.“By writing to Meadows, who was chief of staff and active in the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement, she joined the team resisting the results of the election,” Professor Gillers said. “She made herself part of the team and so she has an interest in the decisions of the court that could affect Trump’s goal of reversing the results.”The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      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