Elections

The Minnesota congressman made his presidential bid official in New Hampshire before a crowd of a few dozen people composed largely of journalists and campaign staff.On the last possible day to do so, Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota walked into the New Hampshire Statehouse on Friday through a side door and submitted paperwork to put his name on the state’s primary ballot.He then went downstairs to the visitors center, where he placed a pin for his newborn presidential campaign on a wall of historical campaign pins next to Hubert Humphrey, whom he called “my hero,” and removed a pin featuring former President Donald J. Trump from his desired spot to do so.“By the way, this is a metaphor,” he joked.Then the Democrat walked out into an unseasonably warm morning, stood at a lectern in front of a crowd of a few dozen people, composed largely of journalists and campaign staff, and formally declared that he was challenging President Biden.It was, he acknowledged to reporters earlier, the longest of long shots. Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign has the near-unanimous support of Democratic leaders, who are less than pleased to see Mr. Phillips running. And with the first primaries only about three months away, the hour is late. He has already missed the filing deadline to appear on the ballot in Nevada, an important early-voting state.“I’m at a massive disadvantage,” he said, before citing the Miracle on Ice in the time-honored tradition of underdog candidates everywhere. “This is the country of long shots.”Mr. Phillips — a onetime Biden ally who has repeatedly praised the president even as he says he shouldn’t run again — has made no secret of the animating principle of his campaign: Mr. Biden’s 80 years of age, and what he sees as his party’s refusal to grapple with voters who have, in survey after survey, expressed significant concerns. In remarks making his bid official, Mr. Phillips, 54, called for generational change, warning of dire electoral consequences should the party refuse the debate he hopes his candidacy will force.Mr. Phillips filed paperwork to put his name on the New Hampshire primary ballot with Secretary of State David Scanlan on Friday.Reba Saldanha/Reuters“It is time for the torch to be passed to a new generation of American leaders,” he said.Among the sparse crowd in front of the statehouse in Concord, N.H., were some who agreed.Tracy Tanner Craig, 49, of Peterborough, N.H., said that while she generally voted for Democrats in national elections, she had been disillusioned with the party since the Great Recession. She and her husband, Matt Craig, 51, heard about Mr. Phillips five days ago, immediately began researching him and liked what they saw.“Age matters,” Ms. Tanner Craig said, expressing dismay that her two children — who, for the first time, are both eligible to vote in a presidential election — might have to choose next November between an 81-year-old, Mr. Biden, and a 78-year-old, Mr. Trump. “What hope does that give them for a future? What inspiration is there? Last time we felt inspired was ’08 with Obama.”She and Mr. Craig said they liked that Mr. Phillips was moderate, and did not like that Democrats had largely circled the wagons around the incumbent. (Mr. Biden will technically not appear on the New Hampshire primary ballot.)“We need options,” she said. “Part of democracy is we should have choices.”“Good candidates, a diverse set of candidates,” Mr. Craig added. “Instead of, ‘OK, we’re going with Trump again,’ ‘OK, we’re going with Biden again.’”Dan Kipphut, 66, of Concord, said Mr. Biden “should take the last four years as a big win and move on.” He has done “pretty well,” Mr. Kipphut said, but “I think the country could stand to have some new direction with a new generation.”Others were there simply out of curiosity — willing to consider Mr. Phillips, but not sure they supported him yet.“Considering all of the other stuff happening, I think he’s doing somewhat of a good job,” Nick Hadshi, 32, of Concord, said of Mr. Biden. “It could be better, it could be worse.”He was open to alternatives, he said.Mr. Biden’s campaign said in a statement that it was “proud of the historic, unified support he has” and added: “The stakes of next year’s election could not be higher for the American people, and the campaign is hard at work mobilizing the winning coalition that President Biden can uniquely bring together to once again beat the MAGA Republicans next November.”While Mr. Phillips outlined a number of issues that he would focus on — including the affordability of health care and child care, and the accessibility of guns after the mass shootings in Lewiston, Me., this week — he did not cite any policy disagreements with Mr. Biden. He did, however, mention disagreements with some of his fellow Democrats in general and suggested, without elaborating much, that they saw issues as too black and white.“Two things not only can be true at once, they usually are true at once,” he said. “We need border security, and we need immigration reform. It’s humane, and it’s the economic choice. Every issue, from gun violence prevention to reproductive rights to any policy of substance we need right now — every one of them, two things are true at once.”Mr. Phillips told reporters that he saw preventing Mr. Trump from winning the 2024 election as an “existential” necessity, and that this was why he was running. But he also said unequivocally that he would fall in line if Mr. Biden won the primary.“If you care about democracy, if you care about freedom, I think it’s terribly important that a Democrat win this election,” he said. “And I will do anything, I will give everything I have, every moment of my time, every ounce of my energy, to ensure that that nominee — whether it be me, of course, President Biden or somebody else — becomes president.” More

While the G.O.P. field has largely moved away from the neoconservative policies of George W. Bush, Mr. DeSantis has taken heat for some of his isolationist tendencies, including on Ukraine.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, working to maintain his second-place status in the Republican primary, said Friday that as president he would “reorient” U.S. foreign policy to give clear priority to China while downplaying national security risks posed by conflicts such as Russia’s war on Ukraine.In a speech laying out his approach, Mr. DeSantis cast Beijing as a greater threat to the United States than the Axis powers and the Soviet Union ever were because of its economic might. As commander in chief, he said, he would “prioritize the Indo-Pacific region as the most pressing part of the world for defending U.S. interests and U.S. security.”A less aggressive approach, he argued, would allow China to export its “authoritarian vision all across the world,” creating a “global dystopia.”“They seek to be the dominant power in the entire world, and they are marshaling all their society to be able to achieve that objective,” Mr. DeSantis said. “So this is a formidable threat and it requires a whole of society approach.”Mr. DeSantis’s remarks, delivered in Washington, D.C., at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, come at a difficult moment for his presidential campaign. Not only is he badly trailing former President Donald J. Trump in the polls, but Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former ambassador to the United Nations, has successfully positioned herself as a credible alternative to Mr. Trump, puncturing the Florida governor’s argument that the Republican presidential primary is a two-man race.Mr. DeSantis has lately used foreign policy to attack other Republican presidential candidates, rebuking Mr. Trump for his critical comments about Israeli leaders and accusing Ms. Haley — who is attracting growing interest from Republican donors and voters — of being soft on China.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

Last week, on the eve of his first attempt to become speaker of the House, allies of Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio confidently predicted that his more mainstream and institutionalist opponents would cave rather than resist his ascent.Jordan’s allies were wrong about that particular caving. But they were right that those same moderates and institutionalists would eventually fall in line with the far-right of the House Republican conference because, on Wednesday, they did just that.After three weeks of chaos, the House Republican majority finally chose a speaker. The lucky legislator? Representative Mike Johnson from Louisiana’s Fourth Congressional District. A four-term backbencher with little leadership experience, Johnson was too obscure to have enemies, giving him an easy ride to the top after three previous nominees — Steve Scalise, the House majority leader; Jordan, the first chairman of the House Freedom Caucus; and Tom Emmer, the House majority whip — faltered in the face of opposition. After winning a nearly unanimous vote of the House Republican majority (one member was absent), Johnson became the 56th speaker of the House of Representatives.Mike Johnson is neither a moderate nor an institutionalist. Just the opposite. A protégé of Jordan’s, he comes, as you have doubtless heard, from the far-right, anti-institutionalist wing of the congressional Republican Party. And while he was not a member of the Freedom Caucus, he did lead the Republican Study Committee, a group devoted to the proposition that any dollar spent on social insurance is a dollar too much.When push came to shove, in other words, the supposedly moderate members of the House Republican conference were happy to defer to their most extreme colleagues on substance, if not on style.And what does Johnson believe? He is staunchly against the bodily autonomy of women and transgender people and supports a nationwide ban on abortion and gender-affirming care for trans youth. He is also virulently anti-gay. In a 2003 essay, Johnson defended laws that criminalized homosexual activity between consenting adults. In 2004, he warned that same-sex marriage was a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.” Last year, Johnson introduced legislation that has been compared to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, and he continues to push to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.If Johnson is known for anything, however, it is for his tireless advocacy on behalf of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Johnson wrote one of the briefs purporting to give a legal justification for throwing out the voting results in several swing states. He advanced the conspiracy theory that Venezuela was somehow involved with the nation’s voting machines. On Jan. 6, 2021, he urged his Republican colleagues to block certification of the election on the grounds that state changes to voting in the face of the pandemic were illegitimate and unconstitutional. When questioned, during his first news conference as speaker, whether he stood by his effort to overturn the 2020 election, he ignored the question, and his fellow Republicans shouted down the reporter who asked it.The new speaker is, in short, an election-denying extremist who believes that his allies have the right to nullify election results so that they can impose their vision of government and society on an unwilling public. He is Jim Jordan in substance but not Jim Jordan in style, which was enough for Republicans to come together to make him leader of the House and second in line to succeed the president of the United States in the case of emergency.The fractious House Republican majority cannot agree on how to fund the government. It cannot agree on whether to fund the government. It cannot agree on the scope of federal spending. It cannot even agree on whether it should do anything to govern the nation. But it can agree, it seems, to hand the reins of power to someone who showed no hesitation when asked to help overturn American democracy.During the summer of 2012, President Barack Obama told supporters that if he won the White House again, it would “break the fever” among Republicans. Instead, after Mitt Romney lost to Obama, the party embraced the worst version of itself and nominated Trump in 2016 and 2020. After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he expressed his hope that this time, with Trump’s departure from power, the Republican fever would finally break. Instead, the Republican Party went even deeper into the hole, hailing the former president’s failed attempt to keep himself in office as another lost cause and defending his leadership again and again.It’s not that the fever won’t break. It’s that there is no fever to break. The far-right extremism and open contempt for democracy that marks much of modern Republicanism is not an aberration. It’s not a spell that might fade with time. It is the Republican Party of 2023 and it will be the Republican Party of 2024. And while Trump may, for either legal or political reasons, eventually leave the scene, there’s no reason to think the Republican Party will revert to a state where the Mike Johnsons are back on the sidelines.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

At a pivotal moment during one of the Watergate hearings in 1973, President Richard Nixon’s counsel, John Dean, asked a question that still resonates: “How in God’s name could so many lawyers get involved in something like this?”In the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation, the issue posed by Mr. Dean’s bracing question triggered a revolution in the legal profession. With so many lawyers involved in the Watergate criminal scheme, the American Bar Association started requiring law schools to provide ethics instruction or risk losing their accreditation. Exams began testing law students’ knowledge of intricate ethical rules.It wasn’t enough, if the past few weeks are any guide. In Fulton County, Ga., three of former President Donald Trump’s lawyers — Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis — have now pleaded guilty to crimes in service of Mr. Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election and stay in the White House. All three have agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in the sprawling state RICO case against Mr. Trump. Two other Trump lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, still face criminal charges in the Georgia case. They, along with Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell, have also been identified as unindicted co-conspirators in the related federal prosecution of Mr. Trump, which will probably benefit from the guilty pleas in Georgia.The charges in the plea agreements vary, but the underlying story is the same: Fifty years after Watergate, the nation is once again confronted with a president who grossly abused the powers of his office, leading to criminal prosecutions. And once again, that abuse relied heavily on the involvement of lawyers. If Mr. Trump’s 2020 racket was “a coup in search of a legal theory,” as one federal judge put it, these lawyers provided the theory, and the phony facts to back it up. In doing so, they severely tarnished their profession.How in God’s name? The question is no less urgent now than in 1973. Lawyers hold immense power within the American system of government, which depends on their expertise, and their integrity, to function. Those who abuse this power pose an even greater threat to the country than some random Capitol rioter, because we count on them not only to draft and execute the laws but to follow them — to lead by example. Everyone should behave ethically, of course, but despite the “Better-Call-Saul” reputation of so many lawyers, there’s nothing wrong with holding the profession to a higher standard.One can view the guilty pleas by the Trump lawyers as evidence that the system is working as it should. They broke the law, they violated their ethical obligations, and now they are facing the music — not only in the courts, but from their chosen profession. Mr. Giuliani’s New York law license was suspended for his “demonstrably false and misleading statements” on Mr. Trump’s behalf; the District of Columbia’s bar association has recommended he lose his license there for good. Ms. Ellis was censured by Colorado state bar officials for violating the rule against “reckless, knowing, or intentional misrepresentations by attorneys,” and may face more severe consequences in light of her guilty plea.Mr. Eastman, a former law-school dean and one of the key legal architects of Mr. Trump’s bonkers plot to stay in office, is in the final days of his California disbarment trial for ethical violations. Officials there have argued that his conduct was “fundamentally dishonest and intended to obstruct the lawful certification” of President Biden’s victory.All of this is to the good. Careers are rightly ruined over such behavior. It is also the exception to the rule. In the real world, lawyers rarely face any consequences for their legal or ethical transgressions.“It’s a club,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal-ethics expert at New York University School of Law who has studied the profession’s opaque and feckless disciplinary system. “The judges who make the decisions are lawyers in robes. They tend to be sympathetic to the other lawyer.”And it’s hard to gloss over the fact that a disturbing number of experienced attorneys, some of whom once held prestigious posts in government and academia, were willing and eager to tell transparent lies and concoct laughable legal arguments to help a con man stay in the White House against the will of the American people.“Part of the reason Trump had to resort to attorneys to attempt the overthrow of the election was because the military was not available to him,” Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. Recalling the notorious Dec. 18, 2020, Oval Office meeting, during which the former president openly contemplated ordering the armed forces to seize voting machines, Mr. Eisen said, “It’s a testament to our military leaders, to our military culture, that that door was closed.”The same cannot be said, alas, for America’s legal culture. It’s easy enough to understand why Mr. Trump, who was mentored by the ruthless mob lawyer Roy Cohn, would seek out lawyers who were willing to do whatever he asked, legality and ethics be damned. The more troubling question is how he was able to find so many takers.The obvious answer is the eternal seduction of money and power. Laurence Tribe, one of the nation’s foremost constitutional scholars, fell back on that explanation for the choices made by Mr. Chesebro, his former student, referring to him as a “moral chameleon” who was engaged in deeply dishonest lawyering.Related to this is the intense pressure to satisfy the demands of powerful clients, even if it means bringing lawsuits so frivolous that they can result in legal sanctions, as many of Mr. Trump’s lawyers have learned the hard way.There is an important caveat here: Many government and private lawyers in 2020, faced with Mr. Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional demands, resisted the temptation and behaved honorably. From the White House counsel’s office to the Justice Department to top law firms, some key attorneys held the line.“What was one of the determinative factors in Trump’s coup failing?” asked Ian Bassin, executive director of the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “Responsible lawyers refused to participate.”That explains why many of the lawyers caught up in Mr. Trump’s outrageous plot were not what you might call the cream of the crop. They were grifters, shysters, hair-dye-leakers, tapped primarily because Mr. Trump had trouble finding more serious people to make his case. And yet there were still those with more respectable backgrounds, like Mr. Chesebro, who chose to sell their honor to a man devoid of it, and who they should have known wasn’t going to pay them anyway. In the end, they were all smeared with the humiliation of having filed meritless, fact-free cases. With one minor exception, federal and state courts rejected every lawsuit brought on behalf of Mr. Trump.To a degree many people didn’t fully realize until the past few years, the functioning of American government depends on honor. “There are no guarantees in a democracy,” Mr. Eisen said. “Our rule of law is a central part of what defines our democratic system. Ultimately it comes down to whether the majority of people will do the right thing.”When it comes to lawyers, the choices of just a few can make all the difference.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

As a raw divide over the war ripples through liberal America, a coalition of young voters and people of color is breaking with the president, raising new questions about his strength entering 2024.The Democratic Party’s yearslong unity behind President Biden is beginning to erode over his steadfast support of Israel in its escalating war with the Palestinians, with a left-leaning coalition of young voters and people of color showing more discontent toward him than at any point since he was elected.From Capitol Hill to Hollywood, in labor unions and liberal activist groups, and on college campuses and in high school cafeterias, a raw emotional divide over the conflict is convulsing liberal America.While moderate Democrats and critics on the right have applauded Mr. Biden’s backing of Israel, he faces new resistance from an energized faction of his party that views the Palestinian cause as an extension of the racial and social justice movements that dominated American politics in the summer of 2020.In protests, open letters, staff revolts and walkouts, liberal Democrats are demanding that Mr. Biden break with decades-long American policy and call for a cease-fire.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

Is the celebrity professor’s candidacy a wild variable in the 2024 presidential campaign or performance art? Yes, he says.Cornel West, the left-wing public intellectual and independent presidential candidate, stood on a rainy stretch of suburban highway in New York’s Rockland County. “Watch that truck!” he called out, holding up a United Auto Workers sign.A dump truck blew past, the spray from its wheels momentarily knocking Mr. West back on his feet and further soaking his already damp suit.It was not supposed to be like this. The week before, on Sept. 20, Mr. West had announced he was going to Michigan, the epicenter of a strike against the three unionized American auto manufacturers over wage increases. But then President Biden announced that he, too, would be going to Michigan, a crucial swing state, on the same day. Soon, Mr. West said, union officials urged him to delay his Michigan trip and in the meantime join workers picketing a local auto parts distribution center in Tappan, N.Y., instead.(A U.A.W. spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.)Still, Mr. West seemed determined to make the best of this Siberia of solidarity. “That’s it!” he shouted, fist raised, after the dump truck driver let out a low blast on his horn. “Now you know!”Even by the standards of outsider politics, Mr. West’s presidential campaign has been uncommonly chaotic. He has embraced and discarded political parties the way other people try on outfits before going to work. He has predictably infuriated Democrats, who fear that his campaign could draw a decisive number of voters away from Mr. Biden in 2024. But he has also irked activists from the Green Party, whose nomination he sought before announcing this month that he would run as an independent instead.That latest move is perhaps the most perplexing. Independent candidacies face far more hurdles than third-party runs. Mr. West’s decision threatens to transform his candidacy from a wild variable in the 2024 contest into a minor curiosity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

After factional infighting dominated the G.O.P.’s struggle to elect a House speaker, it feels weirdly quaint to revisit Mitt Romney’s career. He’s served as governor, U.S. senator and presidential nominee for a Republican Party now nearly unrecognizable from what it was when he started out. At the end of his time in public office, Romney has found a new clarity in his identity as the consummate institutionalist in an increasingly anti-constitutionalist party. But as a newly published biography of him shows, that wasn’t always the case.McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic, interviewed Romney dozens of times over the past several years and had access to his private journals, emails, and text messages. In this resulting biography “Romney: A Reckoning,” Coppins pushes Romney to wrestle with his own role — even complicity — in what his party has become.[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]In this conversation, guest host Carlos Lozada and Coppins examine Romney’s legacy at a time when it may seem increasingly out of place with the mainstream G.O.P. They dive deep into the key decisions and events in Romney’s life; discuss the looming influence Mitt Romney’s father, George, also a Republican presidential candidate, had over his life; how Romney rationalized appeasing figures on the campaign trail he found disdainful, including Tea Party populists and an early 2010s Donald Trump; how he failed to articulate just why he wanted to be president; the many grudges he has against members of his own party who acquiesced or embraced Trump; how Romney will be remembered by history; and much more.This episode was hosted by Carlos Lozada, a columnist for The New York Times Opinion, and the author of “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.” Lozada is also a host on “Matter of Opinion,” a weekly podcast from New York Times Opinion.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Jessie PierceThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero. More

The Minnesota lawmaker is undertaking a long-shot bid against an incumbent president who has significant financial advantages.Representative Dean Phillips, a moderate Minnesota Democrat who has for months publicly argued that President Biden should not run for re-election, announced his candidacy for president on Thursday, setting up an underdog challenge for the Democratic nomination.In an interview with CBS News, Mr. Phillips — who plans to officially launch his campaign on Friday in New Hampshire — argued that finding an alternative to Mr. Biden was essential because of polling showing the president at risk of losing to former President Donald J. Trump.“I will not sit still and not be quiet in the face of numbers that are so clearly saying that we’re going to be facing an emergency next November,” he said. Late Thursday evening, he posted his campaign announcement on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, saying, “It’s time to put our country back together again.”Mr. Phillips, a third-term congressman who represents a district that includes suburban Minneapolis, enters the race with long-shot odds.The Democratic establishment and major donors have already lined up behind Mr. Biden, who raised $71.3 million with the Democratic National Committee and his joint fund-raising committee during the three-month reporting period that ended Sept. 30.Mr. Phillips will also need to work fast to get his name on the ballot in several early-voting states. Already, he has missed the deadline to appear on the ballot in Nevada, the second nominating state on a new presidential primary calendar approved by the national committee this year.Mr. Phillips, 54, has for months stressed his belief that Mr. Biden, 80, should face a serious primary challenge, citing the president’s age and low approval ratings as evidence that Democrats are eager for a new generation of candidates. (Several Republican candidates have made similar arguments in their bids against former President Donald J. Trump, who is 77.)An heir to a Minnesota liquor company who also ran the gelato company Talenti, Mr. Phillips was first elected in 2018, as part of a wave of Democrats who flipped Republican-held suburban districts in a backlash to Mr. Trump. He stepped down from a position in Democratic leadership in the House this month as he weighed joining the presidential race.Mr. Phillips will join two other primary challengers to the president: Marianne Williamson, the self-help author who unsuccessfully ran against Mr. Biden in 2020, and Cenk Uygur, the co-creator and co-host of the progressive talk show “The Young Turks.”Another candidate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., had initially planned to compete for the Democratic nomination but announced this month that he would instead run for president as an independent candidate. More