The changes outlined by the senators are intended to prevent a repeat of the effort on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the presidential election in Congress.WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of senators proposed new legislation on Wednesday to modernize the 135-year-old Electoral Count Act, working to overhaul a law that President Donald J. Trump tried to abuse on Jan. 6, 2021, to interfere with Congress’s certification of his election defeat.The legislation aims to guarantee a peaceful transition from one president to the next, after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol exposed how the current law could be manipulated to disrupt the process. One measure would make it more difficult for lawmakers to challenge a state’s electoral votes when Congress meets to count them. It would also clarify that the vice president has no discretion over the results, and it would set out the steps to begin a presidential transition.A second bill would increase penalties for threats and intimidation of election officials, seek to improve the Postal Service’s handling of mail-in ballots and renew for five years an independent federal agency that helps states administer and secure federal elections.While passage of the legislation cannot guarantee that a repeat of Jan. 6 will not occur in the future, its authors believe that a rewrite of the antiquated law, particularly the provisions related to the vice president’s role, could discourage such efforts and make it more difficult to disrupt the vote count.Alarmed at the events of Jan. 6 that showed longstanding flaws in the law governing the electoral count process, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Senators Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, had been meeting for months to try to agree on the rewrite.“In four of the past six presidential elections, this process has been abused, with members of both parties raising frivolous objections to electoral votes,” Ms. Collins said on Wednesday. “But it took the violent breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6 of 2021 to really shine a spotlight on the urgent need for reform.”In a joint statement, the 16 senators involved in the talks said they had set out to “fix the flaws” of the Electoral Count Act, which they called “archaic and ambiguous.” The statement said the group believed that, in consultation with election law experts, it had “developed legislation that establishes clear guidelines for our system of certifying and counting electoral votes for president and vice president.”Though the authors are one short of the 10 Republican senators needed to guarantee that the electoral count bill could make it past a filibuster and to final passage if all Democrats support it, they said they hoped to round up sufficient backing for a vote later this year.Ms. Collins said she expected the Senate Rules Committee to convene a hearing on the measures before the August recess. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota and the chairwoman of the panel, was consulted in the drafting of the legislation.The bills were announced on the eve of a prime-time hearing by the House committee investigating the events surrounding the Jan. 6 attack, including Mr. Trump’s multilayered effort to invalidate his defeat. They also came as an investigation intensified into efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to have Georgia’s presidential election results reversed. A Georgia judge has ordered Rudolph W. Giuliani, who spearheaded a push to overturn election results on behalf of Mr. Trump, to appear before a special grand jury in Atlanta next month.Key Revelations From the Jan. 6 HearingsCard 1 of 8Making a case against Trump. More

President Trump is pondering swift military action in Iran. There were similar expectations that the war in Iraq would be quick and triumphant.A little more than 22 years ago, Washington was on edge as a president stood on the precipice of ordering an invasion of Baghdad. The expectation was that it would be a quick, triumphant “mission accomplished.”By the time the United States withdrew nearly nine years and more than 4,000 American and 100,000 Iraqi deaths later, the war had become a historic lesson of miscalculation and unintended consequences.The specter of Iraq now hangs over a deeply divided, anxious Washington. President Trump, who campaigned against America’s “forever wars,” is pondering a swift deployment of American military might in Iran. This time there are not some 200,000 American troops massed in the Middle East, or antiwar demonstrations around the world. But the sense of dread and the unknown feels in many ways the same.“So much of this is the same story told again,” said Vali R. Nasr, an Iranian American who is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Once upon a time we didn’t know better, and we bought all the happy talk about Iraq. But every single assumption proved wrong.”There are many similarities. The Bush administration and its allies saw the invasion of Iraq as a “cakewalk” and promised that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. There were internal disputes over the intelligence that justified the war. A phalanx of neoconservatives pushed hard for the chance to get rid of Saddam Hussein, the longtime dictator of Iraq. And America held its breath waiting for President George W. Bush to announce a final decision.Today Trump allies argue that coming to the aid of Israel by dropping 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on Fordo, Iran’s most fortified nuclear site, could be a one-off event that would transform the Middle East. There is a dispute over intelligence between Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, who said in March that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon, and Mr. Trump, who retorted on Tuesday that “I don’t care what she said.” Iran, he added, was in fact close to a nuclear weapon. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

WASHINGTON — House Democrats unveiled a far-reaching package of proposed government changes on Wednesday meant to protect federal watchdogs, bulk up congressional oversight powers, constrain presidential pardon power and impose new penalties on presidential appointees who participate in political activities while on the job.The multifaceted bill, assembled by seven House committee chairmen at the direction of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is Democrats’ most comprehensive response to date to what they consider abuses and excesses by President Trump and his administration. It has almost no chance of becoming law as long as Mr. Trump is in office, but Democrats say the bill would be an early priority if their party retakes control of the Senate and the White House in January.They likened their goal to the raft of laws passed after the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in the 1970s, when Congress adopted new campaign finance and government ethics requirements and put into place a rigorous new plan to oversee the nation’s intelligence services.“This bill is essential, not just because Donald Trump’s presidency has been so damaging, though it has been, but because we owe it to the American people to put in place meaningful constraints on power, fix what is broken and ensure there is never again another Richard Nixon or Donald Trump for either party,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, who oversaw the drive to impeach Mr. Trump that began almost exactly a year ago.Republicans are unlikely to see the proposals in such a favorable light, though some of them aim to address concerns that have cropped up in other administrations when Democrats and Republicans have technically stayed within the bounds of the law but defied Congress’s intent.Even institutionalists in the party who have traditionally fought for Congress’s interests against the executive branch now view House Democrats as fixated on destroying Mr. Trump above all else and disingenuous in their desire for real bipartisan change. Several of the provisions are likely to be susceptible to legal challenge.The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The authors of the bill include some of Mr. Trump’s chief antagonists, who have spent the past two years investigating various aspects of his presidency and leading his impeachment by the House last year. In addition to Mr. Schiff, they are Jerrold Nadler of New York, who oversees the Judiciary Committee; Representative Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, who leads the House Oversight and Reform Committee; and Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, who oversees the Ways and Means Committee and has sought Mr. Trump’s tax returns.The residue of many of those fights can be seen scattered throughout the bill.It would, for instance, grant new protections to whistle-blowers, including the right to sue if they are publicly identified by government officials, as was the case with an anonymous intelligence agency whistle-blower whose complaint about a July 2019 phone call by Mr. Trump prompted the impeachment inquiry.Another section of the bill would take aim at Mr. Trump’s rash of firings of independent inspectors general embedded in federal agencies who were investigating him or his appointees. It would stipulate that only the president can fire an inspector general and only for cause, putting in new requirements that the president detail the rationale for removal to Congress, something Mr. Trump has shirked.Democrats would try to limit the president’s pardon powers, explicitly outlawing presidents from pardoning themselves, and pause the statute of limitations on any federal offense committed by presidents or vice presidents during their time in office so they cannot escape charges that would otherwise be brought if they were not in office.And amid myriad fights with the White House over whether congressional subpoenas must be obeyed, Democrats propose requiring the courts to expedite those lawsuits enforcing the summons to prevent lengthy delays in testimony, such as the yearslong holdups caused by legal appeals by Trump administration officials like Donald F. McGahn II. Their bill would also allow courts to impose “monetary penalties” on individuals who defied subpoenas.The bill includes some better-known provisions Democrats have been promoting for years, like a requirement that political campaigns report to the F.B.I. and Federal Election Commission foreign offers of election assistance and new powers to police potential violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses.Others have garnered less attention or, like the Hatch Act provision, respond to actions taken as recently as this summer, when Mr. Trump shattered longstanding norms by using the White House as the backdrop for the Republican National Convention and inviting some of his top government appointees to speak.Democrats would try to strengthen the Hatch Act, an anticorruption law intended to prevent the use of government power for private political purposes, by giving a government watchdog new investigative powers and clarifying that those working directly for the president and vice president are not exempt. It would also raise the maximum fine for violations by political appointees to $50,000.Democrats — and some Republicans — have bristled as Mr. Trump has placed unusual numbers of “acting” officials atop federal agencies and in cabinet positions to circumvent the usual Senate confirmation process meant to ensure those running executive branch departments are well qualified and well vetted. Their bill would try to curb that use by limiting temporary, non-Senate-confirmed agency chiefs or other cabinet posts to serving just 120 days, compared with the 210 days currently allowed. More

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. joined forces with his top surrogate Thursday morning, releasing a video of a conversation with former President Barack Obama that cast the current occupant of the White House as unworthy and Mr. Biden as the perfect leader to replace him. Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama covered several topics in the wide-ranging, 15 minute conversation, including President Trump’s faltering response to the coronavirus pandemic, health care, economic recovery, police brutality and presidential leadership. The conversation, recorded at Mr. Obama’s Washington, D.C. office, was “socially distanced,” as Mr. Biden continues to contrast himself with Mr. Trump, who has only halfheartedly embraced coronavirus mitigation tactics such as wearing face masks and staying six feet away from another person. Mr. Biden and his former boss entered the office wearing masks, as the former vice president continues to diverge with Mr. Trump on that issue, then the two men sat in chairs across a room, not wearing masks, as they discussed how Mr. Biden would govern as president. The video, coming at a time when Mr. Biden is leading Mr. Trump in the polls, was part interview and part political layup, with Mr. Obama teeing up Mr. Biden to talk about current events in the lens in which he was most comfortable. The two men repeatedly circled back to Mr. Trump, drawing a contrast with how Mr. Obama’s administration — and Mr. Biden’s potential White House — would handle situations differently than the incumbent. Mr. Trump has been “deliberately dividing people from the moment he came down that escalator,” Mr. Biden said. “And I think people are now going, ‘I don’t want my kid growing up that way.’”Mr. Obama responded by saying, in part, “The thing I’ve got confidence in, Joe, is your heart and your character, and the fact that you are going to be able to reassemble the kind of government that cares about people and brings people together.”The video was released Thursday at 10 a.m. and represents another careful step into the political arena by Mr. Obama, who is desperate to see Mr. Trump defeated but for months remained behind the scenes as he sought to let the Democratic Party chart its own course. Hours ahead of the release, Mr. Biden’s campaign released several clips online, which built anticipation and showed Mr. Obama’s wide reach as a campaign surrogate and a highly respected leader of the Party. More

With early voting underway, the candidates are making their final cases to voters, and they are attacking their closest rivals.The front-runner in the race for mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, took aim at his rival Kathryn Garcia on Monday as the campaign entered its final week and a new poll showed that the two candidates were the leading contenders.Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, clearly sees Ms. Garcia as a threat: He held a news conference with sanitation workers on Monday to draw attention to allegations that women and minority workers at the city agency received unequal pay. Ms. Garcia ran the Sanitation Department until last year, when she resigned to run for mayor.Ms. Garcia, for her part, declared the mayoral contest a two-person race and defended her record.“I guess the mudslinging has started,” she said at a senior center in Manhattan. “So I guess he knows that we’re in a two-person race.”She said she had left the Department of Sanitation more equitable than she had found it.“I increased the number of chiefs and leaders in the department who are people of color by 50 percent,” she said.Mr. Adams leads with 24 percent support, according to the latest poll.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesEarly voting began in New York City over the weekend ahead of the primary election on June 22.In the poll, conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, Mr. Adams had 24 percent support, followed by Ms. Garcia with 17 percent and Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, with 15 percent. Andrew Yang, a 2020 presidential candidate who had once been considered the front-runner, fell to fourth place with 13 percent.Under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, Mr. Adams would win with 56 percent after 12 rounds, while Ms. Garcia was second with 44 percent. The poll was conducted between June 3 and June 9 and had a margin of error of 3.8 percent.At Mr. Adams’s news conference, held near a sanitation enforcement facility on Flushing Avenue in Queens, he criticized Ms. Garcia’s management of the city’s sanitation system and stood with employees from the department who criticized her for pay equity issues.“I’m not throwing dirt on anyone,” Mr. Adams said. “We are running to be the chief executive of this city, and the question must be asked of those of us who have previous experience in government, previous experience in other professions, are you going to run the city the way you have actually carried out your actions in your other profession?”Mr. Adams also criticized Ms. Garcia’s leadership of the New York City Housing Authority, the city’s public housing agency.“If you’re a New Yorker that states you are pleased with how NYCHA has been run over the years, then she’s the type of manager you want,” he said. “If you believe you are pleased with the cleanliness of our city, then she’s the type of manager that you want.”Philip Seelig, an attorney for the Sanitation Department enforcement agents, filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in February and plans to file a class-action lawsuit. The agents, who are mostly women and nonwhite, receive less pay and lower pension benefits than the mostly white and male sanitation police, Mr. Seelig said.“She can’t turn a blind eye to what happened in her agency when she was running it, and she can’t expect to be a better mayor than she was a lousy commissioner,” he said.Earlier Monday, Ms. Garcia visited a senior center on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Asked how she would frame the choice for voters between herself and Mr. Adams, Ms. Garcia cast herself as a seasoned public servant rather than a politician and implied that Mr. Adams owed payback for political favors.“This is about experience: When you look at the borough president, he runs a hundred-person shop,” she said. “I run a 10,000-person shop and deliver services every day to New Yorkers.”“He’s been making deals and getting favors,” she added. “You know, I’ve just been serving the city and showing up.”Later in the day, Ms. Garcia, who is vying to become New York City’s first female mayor, commented on the poll as she greeted shop owners on Avenue P in the Midwood section of Brooklyn.“This confirms it,” she said. “We’re in it to win it, and it’s time for a woman.”Ms. Wiley, who has gained momentum after endorsements from progressive groups and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, voted on Monday at Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with her longtime partner, Harlan Mandel..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“This is an extremely emotional moment for me,” Ms. Wiley told reporters afterward, standing in front of a group of campaign supporters who had marched behind her to the polling place.“I’ve never run for public office before,” she added, “and to go in and walk into the high school where my partner’s father went to school and to see my name on the ballot is an experience that is very hard to describe. And it was very moving.”Mr. Yang held an event in front of City Hall on Monday to announce he had been endorsed by the Captains Endowment Association, the union that represents police captains. Mr. Adams is a former police captain, and Mr. Yang said it was significant that those who had worked with Mr. Adams for years chose Mr. Yang instead.“This to me should tell New Yorkers all that they need to know about Eric Adams and his leadership,” Mr. Yang said.Mr. Yang said it was important for the mayor to have a relationship with the police, in contrast to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has struggled to get along with officers.“This city needs the police,” Mr. Yang said, adding that he would also rebuild trust between the police and communities of color.At the Adams news conference, Ydanis Rodriguez, a city councilman and supporter, emphasized that Mr. Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor and said Mr. Adams would ensure that streets in the “poorest neighborhood are as clean as Park Avenue and 75th Street.”Mr. Rodriguez also said several times — in English and Spanish — that Ms. Garcia was not Latina, in spite of her last name.“Kathryn Garcia no es una Latina,” Mr. Rodriguez said.Ms. Garcia is white and does not claim to be Latina, though her ex-husband is of Puerto Rican descent and she has referenced the fact that her children are half Puerto Rican.After the news conference ended, Mr. Adams returned to clarify to a reporter that he did not say that Ms. Garcia was not Latina.“I want to be clear that it is not my quote that Kathryn is not Latino,” Mr. Adams said.Katie Glueck, Michael Gold and Anne Barnard contributed reporting. 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