Letters to the editor, May 8, 2026

Voter on Lawler: Why choose suffering?

To the Editor:

Congressman Lawler votes for suffering.

When it comes to health care, food assistance, research, compassion, foreign aid, and war, he keeps choosing policies that deepen our suffering instead of relieving it. That is a betrayal of the people.

Health care: Lawler chooses suffering.

Lawler voted for massive cuts that threaten Medicare and Medicaid. These programs are life saving. They are the difference between security and medical debt, and between treatment and health decline and death.

Food security: Lawler chooses suffering.

Lawler’s vote to slash food assistance is cruel. Thousands of households in his district depend on SNAP. According to the New York Health Foundation, food insecurity in suburban areas such as NY-17, reached a five-year high in 2025-26, surpassing pandemic year levels.  

Medical research: Lawler chooses suffering.

Cuts to federal science and medical funding slow cancer breakthroughs, weaken clinical trials, and drive talented researchers away. Lawler’s deep cuts to federal funding of scientific research. According to Nature, a poll of 1,600 researchers resulted in more than 75% saying they were considering leaving the United States. Lawler is postponing cures and prolonging pain.

Foreign aid: Lawler chooses suffering.

Lawler has backed policies that weaken America’s ability to respond to humanitarian crises and save lives abroad. Aid programs provide food, medicine, disaster relief, and support for communities that are devastated by poverty and disease. According to the Impact Counter estimates, USAID funding cuts more than 762,000 people have died as a result of those cuts, including more than 500,000 children.

War: Lawler chooses suffering.

In June 2025, President Trump declared that U.S. military strikes had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. Therefore, Lawler’s failure to prioritize diplomacy over war was reckless and the outcome was tragic. When leaders support reckless escalation, civilians pay the price not only in rising prices and debt, but more importantly in injury and death. 

Lawler has deliberately voted for us to suffer. It’s time for the suffering to end. Vote Lawler out in November!

Mark A. Lieberman Yorktown

Kudos to a newspaper and a young writer

To the Editor:

Congratulations to The Recorder on its 16 awards in the statewide 2025 Better Newspaper Contest. That’s very sweet and well deserved!

Congratulations also to Hudson Lutz for a well-written and thoughtful Letter to Editor (May 1, “A high-schooler’s position on Prop. 3”). It’s exciting to see young people taking an active role. I hope that Hudson Lutz’s letter encourages other young people, and not so young people, and shows them that politics does not have to be a dirty word if it is based in concern for the well-being of others and reflects a will to do what we can for the world around us. Bravo!

Ellen Kearns Pound Ridge

We must protect the right to vote

To the Editor:

The right to vote in this country was never freely given — it was demanded, fought for, and paid for in sacrifice.

The Supreme Court’s decision dismantled core enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — a landmark civil rights law designed to prevent racial discrimination in access to the ballot.

The protections were not theoretical. They were built in response to a documented and persistent history of racial exclusion from the democratic process.

The Supreme Court decision was not an abstract legal shift. It was a decision that removed guardrails against discrimination and signaled that the hard lessons of history could be set aside. It told communities who had long been denied a voice that the protections they relied on were no longer necessary.

But America’s history has already answered that claim. We know the SCOTUS ruling has a disproportionate impact on Black voters and other historically marginalized communities. That reality should concern anyone who values democracy and representation under the law.

This is about whether the right to vote is equally protected in practice — not just in principle.

When protections are removed, suppression returns. When oversight ends, barriers rise. And when those barriers rise, they fall hardest on Black Americans whose voting power has been treated as something to be limited rather than protected.

We are watching that pattern unfold again.

A nation that allows the systematic dilution of Black voting power is not simply making a policy error — it is repeating a moral failure.

And that failure has consequences far beyond any single election. It erodes trust. It weakens representation. It undermines the very idea that the government derives its power from the consent of all the people.

The Voting Rights Act stood as a promise that this country could do better — that it would not allow discrimination in voting to hide behind procedure or persist without consequence.

But history also teaches something else: rights can be taken, but they can also be reclaimed.

This moment demands action equal to the urgency of the threat. Congress must restore and strengthen the protections of the Voting Rights Act. Communities must organize, advocate, and refuse to accept a diminished democracy.

Because the right to vote is not negotiable. It is not conditional.

It is the foundation of freedom — and it must be defended with the same determination that secured it.

Strengthening these protections is not about rewriting history. It is about honoring and protecting the principle that made progress possible in the first place — that in a democracy, every voice counts equally.

When access to the ballot is unequal, representation is unequal. And when representation is unequal, democracy becomes threatened.

Mary Ann Carr

MaryAnn Carr is the president of the Greater Bedford Chapter, Westchester Black Women’s Political Caucus.