Democratic frontrunner makes commitment at debate as Bernie Sanders suggests he would probably do the same Joe Biden has vowed to choose a woman as his running mate if he wins the Democratic presidential nomination. “There are a number of women who are qualified to be president tomorrow,” Biden said during the first one-on-one Democratic […] More

It’s easy if you try. Source: Elections – nytimes.com More

President Trump traveled to West Palm Beach, Fla., on Saturday morning to cast his ballot in the 2020 election early and in person after spending months making unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud during an election in which polls have shown him to be trailing Joe Biden.Mr. Trump cast his ballot at the West Palm Beach Main Library, roughly a year after he changed his primary residence to Palm Beach, Fla., from Manhattan. Early voting centers opened in the critical battleground state on Saturday, but millions of Floridians have already cast their ballots by mail.“I voted for a guy named Trump,” the president said, according to a pool report. Mr. Trump also noted that his experience had been “perfect” and that “it was a very secure vote.”JUST VOTED. A great honor!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2020
Mr. Trump wore a mask during the morning stop, the pool report also said. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, told the pool reporter that there was no one else inside the library voting at the same time as Mr. Trump and that he had cast a paper ballot.Mr. Trump cast a ballot by mail in August during Florida’s primary, despite having repeatedly argued, without evidence, that mail voting invites fraud. More broadly, Mr. Trump has asserted that the 2020 election will be “the most corrupt election in the history of our country.”In fact, there have been numerous independent studies and government reviews finding that voter fraud is extremely rare in all forms, including mail-in voting.On Saturday morning, the president’s motorcade departed Mar-a-Lago at 9:43 a.m. and arrived at the library roughly 10 minutes later. Mr. Trump’s supporters were waiting at the site and cheered his arrival, according to the pool report. The motorcade departed around 10:20 a.m. and was proceeding toward the Palm Beach airport.The president is expected to appear later on Saturday in Lumberton, N.C., and then head to Ohio and Wisconsin, a trifecta of crucial swing states. More

A gathering of Republican leaders and top donors in Florida this weekend is less a reset of priorities and more a reminder of the tensions that Donald J. Trump instills in his party.The first spring donor retreat after a defeat for a political party is typically a moment of reflection and renewal as officials chart a new direction forward.But with former President Donald J. Trump determined to keep his grip on the Republican Party and the party’s base as adhered to him as ever, the coming together of the Republican National Committee’s top donors in South Florida this weekend is less a moment of reset and more a reminder of the continuing tensions and schisms roiling the G.O.P.The same former president who last month sent the R.N.C. a cease-and-desist letter demanding they stop using his likeness to raise money will on Saturday evening serve as the party’s fund-raising headliner.“A tremendous complication” was how Fred Zeidman, a veteran Republican fund-raiser in Texas, described Mr. Trump’s lingering presence on the political scene.The delicate dance between Mr. Trump and the party — after losing the House, the Senate and the White House on his watch — will manifest in some actual shuttle bus diplomacy on Saturday, as the party’s top donors attend a series of receptions and panels at the Four Seasons Resort before traveling to Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s private club, to hear Mr. Trump speak.Mr. Trump’s insistence on leading the party “affects every member,” Mr. Zeidman said, as lawmakers and would-be elected officials jockey for a Trump endorsement that is as powerful in a Republican primary as it can be problematic in a general election.“He’s already proven that he wants to have a major say or keep control of the party, and he’s already shown every sign that he’s going to primary everybody that has not been supportive of him,” Mr. Zeidman said. “He complicates everything so much.”Among other things, Mr. Trump is considering running again in 2024. Though few of his allies believe he will follow through, his presence could have a chilling effect on other potential candidates.“The party is still very much revolving around” Mr. Trump, said Andrea Catsimatidis, chairwoman of the Manhattan Republican Party and a donor who will be at the retreat. “He was the one who very much revived the party when we weren’t winning.”Also inescapable is the fact that Mr. Trump has quickly built a political war chest that rivals that of the R.N.C. An adviser to Mr. Trump said he currently had about $85 million on hand, compared with nearly $84 million for the R.N.C.“Send your donation to Save America PAC,” Mr. Trump urged supporters last month, not to “RINOS,” the derisive acronym for “Republicans in Name Only.” Mr. Trump has appeared as passionate about punishing Republicans who crossed him, especially those who supported his second impeachment, as he has about taking back the House and Senate in 2022.For party officials, the goal is keeping the energy that has propelled Mr. Trump to success inside the Republican tent while not entirely allowing the former president to dominate it. Ronna McDaniel, the R.N.C. chairwoman whom Mr. Trump supported for a second term, has vowed to remain neutral in a potential 2024 primary should Mr. Trump run again.“It is a difficult balancing act,” said Bill Palatucci, a Republican National Committeeman from New Jersey who has been critical of Mr. Trump.“The president certainly has devoted followers,” Mr. Palatucci said, “but he also more than offended a lot of people with his conduct since the November election, which culminated in his helping to incite the riot on Jan. 6.”Organizers moved the final Saturday evening events to Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property, meaning the party will again be paying the former president’s private club to use its space.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesSeveral Republicans who are considered likely to run for president in 2024 — including Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota — were scheduled to speak to the R.N.C.’s donors at the Four Seasons. Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state and C.I.A. director who served under Mr. Trump, had been scheduled to speak on Friday but did not attend the gathering.Notably absent are two leading Republican figures who also skipped the last big Republican gathering, the Conservative Political Action Conference, that Mr. Trump attended: former Vice President Mike Pence, who is starting his own political advocacy group, and Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador.Some donors are hoping to quickly move past Mr. Trump, but they are also focused on the current Oval Office occupant.“It is very important the Republican Party puts Donald Trump as far into the past as possible,” said William Oberndorf, an investor in California who has given millions to G.O.P. candidates but fiercely opposes the former president.“However, if Joe Biden does not ensure that major pieces of legislation have bipartisan support, it is he who will bear more responsibility than any group of Republican donors ever could for resurrecting Mr. Trump’s political future and fortunes,” he added.Among donors, the jockeying for favor and financing extends beyond Mr. Trump and the R.N.C.On Thursday and Friday, a separate but overlapping gathering for Republican contributors was held at Mr. Trump’s private club: an “investors meeting” of the Conservative Partnership Institute (C.P.I.), a nonprofit organization. Mark Meadows, who served as Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, is now a senior adviser for the group, and Caroline Wren, who used to fund-raise for the former president, is raising money for it.Donors are being pitched on a dizzying array of Trump-adjacent projects, including Mr. Pence’s group and new entities being started by Ben Carson, Mr. Trump’s former housing secretary; Stephen Miller, his former White House adviser; and Russell Vought, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget.Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s first campaign manager in 2016, is said to be involved with efforts to start a Trump-aligned super PAC, as well.Mr. Trump, who continues to talk privately about a future campaign of his own in 2024, spoke to donors for the Meadows-linked group for more than an hour on Thursday, also at his private club.“All Republican roads lead to Mar-a-Lago,” said Jason Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump. “Trump is still the straw that stirs the news cycle. His influence will be central to every speech and story line this week.”Those who have trekked there to meet Mr. Trump in recent months include Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his former press secretary and a candidate for governor of Arkansas; Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee; and Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the House minority leader.The R.N.C. had initially planned for its entire retreat to be held nearby in Palm Beach, but organizers moved the final Saturday evening events to Mr. Trump’s resort, meaning the party will again be paying the former president’s private club to use its space.During Mr. Trump’s White House tenure, his political campaign, the R.N.C. and his allies spent millions of dollars at Trump businesses, including his hotel in Washington near the White House and a resort property in Miami, where yet another pro-Trump group also held a conference this week.Party officials maintained that donors and a number of party activists were happier being at Trump-branded properties than they were anywhere else.Still, the Trump branding of official Republican events had alienated what was once the Republican establishment.“This is all about the Trump circle of grift,” said former Representative Barbara Comstock of Virginia, who is close to another high-profile Republican — and a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s — who was also notably absent: Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming.Ms. Comstock said that the Republicans keeping their distance were wise to “build their own coalitions” and “not get sucked into Trumpism, which has a limited and short-term appeal with demographics dying in this country.”Henry Barbour, an influential R.N.C. member from Mississippi, said that the party was still in a transitional phase since Mr. Trump’s loss.“When you lose the White House, you kind of figure it’s going to take a little bit of healing, and I think probably first quarter has hopefully got us moving on a better path,” Mr. Barbour said. Mr. Trump, he said, is a “big force in the party, but the party is bigger than any one candidate including Donald Trump.”With Mr. Trump’s priorities differing from those of other party leaders, the tension remains palpable. On Friday, the super PAC for Senate Republicans, which is aligned with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, announced its backing of Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, who infuriated Mr. Trump by voting to impeach him. (Some Trump 2020 advisers are working for Ms. Murkowski’s Republican challenger, Kelly Tshibaka.)Last month, Mr. McConnell privately boasted of the super PAC’s fund-raising in a meeting with Senate Republicans, bragging that it had raised more than Mr. Trump’s super PAC had in 2020. He even distributed a card to hammer home the point: “In three cycles: nearly $1 billion,” the card said. Below that were Mr. Trump’s super PAC statistics: “Trump: $148+ million,” referring to the group America First.But the Republican small donor base remains very much enamored with Mr. Trump.“He’ll still be the most significant figure in the party in November 2022,” predicted Al Cardenas, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party and former chairman of the American Conservative Union. “Everybody has a shelf life and Donald Trump has lost a bit of his shelf life.”“It could be two years,” Mr. Cardenas added. “It could be 10.” More

NEW DELHI — The rise of right-wing populist leaders in several countries has brought immense attention to the use of executive power, in popular debate and among constitutional scholars across presidential and parliamentary systems. Along with the rise of executive power, there has been a corresponding but less studied phenomenon: the decline in judicial power.The courts were once seen as shields against the tyranny of majority and autocratic drifts within the state, and as the defenders of liberty and enforcers of accountability. Sadly, courts today have become silent bystanders and complicit actors.In Hungary, the autocratic government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban has systematically disarmed the judiciary by lowering retirement ages, creating vacancies and appointing favorable people. Mr. Orban initially planned a parallel system of administrative courts that would be controlled by the government. That plan was dropped but a new law was introduced in December, which enables the government to move politically sensitive cases from the more independent wings of the judiciary to the Constitutional Court, whose autonomy was severely compromised by court-packing. Earlier, after Mr. Orban’s re-election in 2018, several Hungarian judges resigned for “personal reasons,” though the timing and collective action raised concerns of government pressure.In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan similarly took command of the judiciary by filling its benches with supporters. Thousands of judges were removed in 2016 after the failed military coup against the Turkish government. A 2017 referendum cemented Mr. Erdogan’s power by giving him nearly complete authority over the Council of Judges and Prosecutors, which manages appointments to the judiciary. The new judicial system has approved the indefinite detention of dissident intellectuals and civil society activists.Neither in Turkey nor in Hungary were the courts closed. The strategy, instead, was to expand their jurisdiction and give them even more authority to decide cases, thereby overwhelming them with so much work that they could not perform. The courts still had a place in society, but because judicial appointments had been manipulated, the outcomes were all but predetermined.Similarly, in Poland, the populist Law and Justice party, which came to power in 2015 and was re-elected in 2019, sought to neutralize any forces that checked its powers. An early victim was the constitutional court, called the Constitutional Tribunal, which the Law and Justice party first packed and subsequently swamped with cases, thereby preventing it from scrutinizing the government.Yet nowhere has the collapse of judicial power been more extreme than in India. Over the past six years, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has taken India away from the liberal, democratic and secular principles that it has long endorsed. Mr. Modi’s government has passed a law that makes religion the basis for deciding Indian citizenship; it has expanded a pervasive biometric project with few privacy safeguards; it has unilaterally annulled the constitutional status of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, followed by widespread arrests and lockdowns; and it has created an electoral finance scheme that protects donor and recipient anonymity.India’s once powerful judiciary has been largely silent or approving. On questions such as the biometric project or the building of a Hindu temple on disputed land where a mosque once stood, it has offered its stamp of approval. On a great many matters, it has been missing in action. Hundreds of habeas corpus petitions relating to detentions in Kashmir remain unheard. And the opacity of the new election-funding arrangement has yet to evoke judicial interest, with challenges in court languishing for more than two years.As Gautam Bhatia, an Indian lawyer and scholar, has documented, India’s higher judiciary has simply avoided dealing with difficult legal matters. The most serious questions, like the abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood without consultation with the state legislature as required by the Constitution of India, remain to be heard. And recently, the Supreme Court of India pronounced that a highly respected public interest lawyer who commented on its functioning was guilty of contempt.Kim Lane Scheppele, a scholar of constitutional law at Princeton, has drawn an important contrast between traditional autocrats and contemporary ones. If the autocrat’s moves in the 19th century were mass human rights violations and streets afloat with tanks, “the new autocrats come to power not with bullets but with laws.”We see this in the co-opting of courts by populist regimes. In Turkey, Hagia Sophia’s conversion from a museum to a mosque was made possible by a judicial ruling. Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal approved changes to the National Council of the Judiciary that appoints judges and regulates their behavior, giving politicians far greater power over courts.The Indian judicial approach of not only approving the government’s actions — like the courts in Hungary, Poland and Turkey — but also being absent, remaining silent while the state acts, raises a genuine puzzle. India’s judiciary possesses a rare institutional safeguard: Since the early 1990s, it has exercised formal control over the processes for the appointment of judges. The Indian Supreme Court’s rare confrontational decision in recent years was in 2015, when it struck down a federal commission for judicial appointments proposed by the government.For decades, India’s higher judiciary has held extraordinary power and been noticeably interventionist, recognizing social welfare rights, passing wide-ranging interim orders that assess the work of executive ministries at regular intervals, and even reviewing and striking down constitutional amendments.Yet the self-abrogation by the judiciary in India; court packing in Hungary, Poland and Turkey; and the strategy of submerging the courts with so much work that they are not able to scrutinize the government illustrate the demise of judicial power and the courts losing their institutional role in a variety of ways.The lesson has been a sobering one for constitutional scholars. A generation ago, law students, whether in the United States or elsewhere, had interpreted the Warren Supreme Court era, which saw the expansion of civil rights, as the rule rather than the exception. It was hard to think of democratic constitutionalism in the absence of a powerful judiciary. Now it seems just as likely that when freedom is truly at stake, courts are quick to collapse, either from within or without.The legitimacy of courts was never built on popular authorization from the people. It was built on the promise of keeping representation in check and protecting the people from the extremes of politics. The real question for the future is not how courts will act. It is whether their actions will carry legitimacy if and when they do.Madhav Khosla teaches law and politics at Ashoka University and Columbia Law School. He is the author of “India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy.”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