To the Editor:
Re “Democrats Capture the Senate as Ossoff Defeats Perdue” (nytimes.com, Jan. 6):
Should the Democrats ultimately win both seats in Georgia’s runoff elections, it might do more than give them control of the Senate when they can maintain solidarity on legislation. It could give permission or encouragement to a handful of Republican senators who may still have a periodic twinge of conscience and may have grown weary of Mitch McConnell’s cynical obstructionism. It could free them to vote with the opposition on the occasional legislation that they could admit would be good for the nation.
It would also help diminish the toxic power of the former president. In fact, it might even help repair their own party in the long run.
Tom Herz
San Francisco
To the Editor:
I grew up in Atlanta in the 1940s. Ralph McGill, legendary editor of The Atlanta Constitution, wrote about the New South. That vision felt like a mirage to most Georgians. The Ku Klux Klan had burned crosses at Stone Mountain; Georgia disenfranchised most Black voters; the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent, was not that long ago; and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a teenager stepping into a sea of Jim Crow segregation and anti-Semitism.
With the election of a Black and a Jewish senator in Georgia, McGill and King’s dream may be becoming real.
(Rabbi) Charles A. Kroloff
Westfield, N.J.
To the Editor:
As Donald Trump continues to aim blow after blow at American democracy, the results of Stacey Abrams’s steady voter registration work confirm and consolidate that democracy. What a contrast, what a lesson! Thank God for patriots like her!
Christina Davis
Fort Worth
To the Editor:
Memo to Democrats, liberals and the media:
It looks as if your prayers have been answered, and we will now learn what you have been praying for and if the nation truly wants what you now have — complete control of our government.
Donald Trump is history, defeated by the coronavirus plague, and you will now have to govern in a time of unprecedented peril. As St. Teresa of Avila warned, “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered ones.” We may very well be entering a period of prolonged national lamentations.
Dennis L. Breo
New Smyrna Beach, Fla.