Elections

Josh Hawley, senator who ran from Capitol mob, mocked by home paperKansas City Star editorial excoriates Republican as ‘laughingstock’ as memes based on January 6 video proliferate

Robert Reich: Trump’s coup continues
01:08Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator shown running from the mob he incited on January 6, is “a laughingstock” who should be afraid of what the Capitol attack committee might disclose next, a leading newspaper in his home state said.‘US democracy will not survive for long’: how January 6 hearings plot a roadmap to autocracyRead moreHawley was widely criticised for raising a fist to protesters outside Congress on 6 January 2021, then after the mob sent by Donald Trump failed to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election win, voting to object to results anyway.The senator cast that vote, American voters now know, after running when rioters broke into Congress.In an editorial, the Kansas City Star noted that Hawley will soon publish a book entitled Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, but said people watching the hearing “didn’t see much virile bravado as he ran from the mob”.The Star began: “Josh Hawley is a laughingstock. During Thursday night’s televised hearings of the House committee investigating the January 6 2021 coup attempt … [Democratic] representative Elaine Luria showed video of Missouri’s junior senator that will surely follow him the rest of his life.“In the clip, Hawley sprints across a hallway as he and his fellow senators are evacuated after insurrectionists had breached the Capitol building. When it played on the screen, the audience in the room with the committee erupted in laughter.”On Twitter, users spliced the video to songs including Born to Run, Running Up That Hill and the Benny Hill theme. Charlie Sykes, a conservative Trump critic, wrote: “Running Josh Hawley is a meme for the ages.”But the Star also noted that “Hawley has become one of the defining figures of that day. A famous photo captured by Francis Chung shows him raising a fist in solidarity with the crowds that would soon break through doors, loot offices and assault law enforcement.”The senator shows no sign of backing down. Speaking at a conservative conference in Florida on Friday, apparently without irony, he said: “I just want to say to all of those liberals out there and the liberal media, just in case you haven’t gotten the message yet, I do not regret [voting to object to electoral results].“And I am not backing down. I’m not going to apologise. I’m not going to cower. I’m not going to run from you. I’m not going to bend the knee.”He has also used the image to fundraise, selling among other items mugs said to be “the perfect way to enjoy coffee, tea, or liberal tears!”Politico, which owns the image, asked Hawley to stop using it. He refused. On Friday morning, he tweeted a link to a site selling the mug.In February, Hawley told the Huffington Post: “It is not a pro-riot mug. This was not me encouraging rioters … At the time that we were out there, folks were gathered peacefully to protest, and they have a right to do that. They do not have a right to assault cops.”As the Star noted, however, in Thursday’s hearing Luria “quoted a Capitol police officer who was there and told the committee that Hawley’s gesture ‘riled up the crowd, and it bothered her greatly because he was doing it in a safe space protected by the officers and the barriers’”.Hawley was the first senator to say he would object on January 6, when he was joined by 146 other Republicans. Hawley, the Star said, “took to the floor as the very first voice calling to throw out millions of Americans’ votes cast fairly and legally for the rightful winner in a presidential election”.Any Given Tuesday: Lis Smith on Cuomo, Spitzer and a political lifeRead moreIt continued: “Funny as the visual of the self-proclaimed manly senator’s immediate retreat was, there’s absolutely nothing amusing about January 6 2021. A bipartisan Senate report concluded seven people died as a result of the attack. Two more Metropolitan police officers took their own lives shortly after.“About 150 members of law enforcement were injured, and it’s impossible to know how many others caught up in the horrific event will carry scars for life, of body and mind. We said that day Hawley has blood on his hands for his role in perpetuating the lies that drove thousands of people to violence. That remains true.”The editorial signed off with a warning. Noting the work of Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican nonetheless vice-chair of the January 6 committee, it said: “Josh Hawley might not fear a little mockery of his hasty flight from Capitol marauders.“But he might be justified if he’s afraid of what emails or text messages some previously-loyal staffer might be considering turning over to the House committee.“Stay tuned to the hearings.”TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackRepublicansUS politicsMissourinewsReuse this content More

The suspect, who had been released without bail shortly after the Thursday attack on Representative Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate for New York governor, will be held pending a hearing next week.A man accused of using a sharp weapon to confront Representative Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate for governor of New York, on Thursday night has been arrested on a federal assault charge, officials said.The incident took place outside a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall near Rochester, N.Y., where Mr. Zeldin was speaking during the first in a series of campaign stops over the weekend. A man, who was later identified by the police as David G. Jakubonis, approached Mr. Zeldin with a pointed weapon that federal officials later described as a key chain with two sharp points.Mr. Jakubonis pulled the candidate down before being dragged away by several people nearby, according to officials and videos of the attack. Mr. Zeldin was not injured, a campaign representative said at the time.On Saturday, Mr. Jakubonis, 43, of Fairport, N.Y., appeared in federal court in Rochester before U.S. Magistrate Judge Marian W. Payson of the United States District Court for the Western District of New York. He had earlier been charged with attempted assault in the second degree, according to the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, and released without bail. Under state law, judges have been prohibited since 2020 from setting bail on a nonviolent felony charge of attempted assault.The federal charge — assaulting a member of Congress using a dangerous weapon — carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, according to officials. Mr. Jakubonis will be held pending a detention hearing on July 27, according to Barbara Burns, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of New York.New York’s 2022 ElectionsAs prominent Democratic officials seek to defend their records, Republicans see opportunities to make inroads in general election races.N.Y. Governor’s Race: Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the issue of abortion rights has the potential to be a potent one in the battle between Gov. Kathy Hochul and Representative Lee Zeldin.10th Congressional District: Half a century after she became one of the youngest women ever to serve in Congress, Elizabeth Holtzman is running once again for a seat in the House of Representatives.12th Congressional District: As Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, two titans of New York politics, battle it out, Suraj Patel is trying to eke out his own path to victory.After the attack, Republicans quickly cast Mr. Jakubonis’s release as a failure of the bail law enacted by Democrats in recent years. Mr. Zeldin, who has long made public safety a centerpiece of his campaign against Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said that Mr. Jakubonis should not have been released and argued that the episode illustrated a need to increase policing and tighten New York’s bail laws to make it easier for judges to hold people charged with certain crimes.In a hastily arranged news conference on Saturday afternoon, Mr. Zeldin repeated that he did not think Mr. Jakubonis should have been set free the day before.“I am concerned, deeply, that we have laws in this state that would result in that offense not being bail eligible,” he said. He added that he did not believe Mr. Jakubonis should have been“immediately released back out on the streets, and I predicted publicly that that’s exactly what was going to happen.”Mr. Zeldin did not respond to a request for comment, but issued a statement after his rally, calling the justice system “broken” and “pro-criminal.” “Cashless bail must be repealed,” he said in the statement, “and judges should have discretion to set cash bail on far more offenses.”Democrats have accused Mr. Zeldin of trying to exploit the attack for political gain.Mr. Jakubonis, a U.S. Army veteran who had served in Iraq, said on Friday that he did not know who Mr. Zeldin was at the time of the attack. In a disjointed interview outside his apartment in suburban Rochester, he said he approached Mr. Zeldin, an Army reservist, to try to take his microphone after someone told him that Mr. Zeldin was “disrespecting veterans.”Mr. Jakubonis, a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, said that he was battling a relapse of alcoholism and was being treated for anxiety. He described his mental state on Thursday night as “checked out,” adding that he had fallen “asleep within” himself.He suggested the pointed object he was holding at the time of the incident — which was shaped like a cat — was intended for self-defense. “The ears are plastic, but I guess they’re sharp,” he said in the interview on Friday afternoon. “Then I was tackled.”According to federal court records, investigators said Mr. Jakubonis told them he had consumed whiskey on the day of the incident.“When shown a video of the incident, Jakubonis stated, in sum and substance, that what was depicted in the video was disgusting,” the court records said.Voter registration records indicated that he was not affiliated with a political party, and a LinkedIn page that appeared to belong to him indicated he had been “actively seeking employment” for years.Nicholas Fandos More

ATLANTA — The criminal investigation into efforts by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn his election loss in Georgia has begun to entangle, in one way or another, an expanding assemblage of characters:A United States senator. A congressman. A local Cadillac dealer. A high school economics teacher. The chairman of the state Republican Party. The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor. Six lawyers aiding Mr. Trump, including a former New York City mayor. The former president himself. And a woman who has identified herself as a publicist for the rapper Kanye West.Fani T. Willis, the Atlanta area district attorney, has been leading the investigation since early last year. But it is only this month, with a flurry of subpoenas and target letters, as well as court documents that illuminate some of the closed proceedings of a special grand jury, that the inquiry’s sprawling contours have emerged.For legal experts, that sprawl is a sign that Ms. Willis is doing what she has indicated all along: building the framework for a broad case that could target multiple defendants with charges of conspiracy to commit election fraud, or racketeering-related charges for engaging in a coordinated scheme to undermine the election.“All of these people are from very disparate places in life,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University, said of the known witnesses and targets. “The fact that they’re all being brought together really suggests she’s building this broader case for conspiracy.”What happened in Georgia was not altogether singular. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has put on display how Mr. Trump and his allies sought to subvert the election results in several crucial states, including by creating slates of fake pro-Trump electors. Yet even as many Democrats lament that the Justice Department is moving too slowly in its inquiry, the local Georgia prosecutor has been pursuing a quickening case that could pose the most immediate legal peril for the former president and his associates.Whether Mr. Trump will ultimately be targeted for indictment remains unclear. But the David-before-Goliath dynamic may in part reflect that Ms. Willis’s legal decision-making is less encumbered than that of federal officials in Washington by the vast political and societal weight of prosecuting a former president, especially in a bitterly fissured country.But some key differences in Georgia law may also make the path to prosecution easier than in federal courts. And there was the signal event that drew attention to Mr. Trump’s conduct in Georgia: his call to the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, whose office, in Ms. Willis’s Fulton County, recorded the president imploring him to “find” the 11,780 votes needed to reverse his defeat.A House hearing this past week discussed a phone call in which President Donald J. Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” an additional 11,780 votes.Shawn Thew/EPA, via ShutterstockMr. Trump’s staff did not comment, nor did his local counsel. When Ms. Willis opened the inquiry in February 2021, a Trump spokesman described it as “simply the Democrats’ latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump.” Lawyers for 11 of the 16 Trump electors, Kimberly Bourroughs Debrow and Holly A. Pierson, accused Ms. Willis of “misusing the grand jury process to harass, embarrass and attempt to intimidate the nominee electors, not to investigate their conduct.”Last year, Ms. Willis told The New York Times that racketeering charges could be in play. Whenever people “hear the word ‘racketeering,’ they think of ‘The Godfather,’” she said, before explaining that charges under Georgia’s version of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act could apply in any number of realms where corrupt enterprises are operating. “If you have various overt acts for an illegal purpose, I think you can — you may — get there,” she said.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 8Numerous inquiries. More

In Donald Trump’s quest to sustain his dominance over the Republican Party, his claim to have been robbed of victory in 2020 has been a crucial talisman, lending him powers denied to previous defeated presidential candidates. By insisting that he was cheated out of victory, Trump fashioned himself into a king-in-exile rather than a loser — an Arthur betrayed by the Mordreds of his own party, waiting in the Avalon of Mar-a-Lago to make his prophesied return.As with many forms of dark Trumpian brilliance, though, the former president is not exactly in conscious control of this strategy. He intuited rather than calculated his way to its effectiveness, and he seems too invested in its central conceit — the absolute righteousness of his “Stop the Steal” campaign — to modulate when it begins to reap diminishing returns.That’s a big part of why 2022 hasn’t been a particularly good year for Trump’s 2024 ambitions. Across 2021, he bent important parts of the G.O.P. back to his will, but in recent months his powers have been ebbing — and for the same reason, his narrative of dispossession, that they were initially so strong.While Ron DeSantis, his strongest potential rival, has been throwing himself in front of almost every issue that Republican primary voters care about, Trump has marinated in grievance, narrowed his inner circle, and continued to badger Republican officials about undoing the last election. While DeSantis has been selling himself as the scourge of liberalism, the former president has been selling himself mostly as the scourge of Brian Kemp, Liz Cheney and Mike Pence.Judging by early primary polling, the DeSantis strategy is working at the Trump strategy’s expense. The governor is effectively tied with the former president in recent polls of New Hampshire and Michigan, and leading him easily in Florida — which is DeSantis’s home state, yes, but now Trump’s as well.These early numbers don’t prove that Trump can be beaten. But they strongly suggest that if his case for 2024 is only that he was robbed in 2020, it won’t be enough to achieve a restoration.This is not because the majority of Republicans have had their minds changed by the Jan. 6 committee, or suddenly decided that actually Joe Biden won fair and square. But the committee has probably played some role in bleeding Trump’s strength, by keeping him pinned to the 2020 election and its aftermath, giving him an extra reason to obsess about enemies and traitors and giving his more lukewarm Republican supporters a constant reminder of where the Trump experience ended up.By lukewarm supporters, I mean those Republicans who would be inclined to answer no if a pollster asked them if the 2020 election was fairly won, but who would also reject the conceit — as a majority of Republicans did in a Quinnipiac poll earlier this year — that Mike Pence could have legitimately done as Trump wished on Jan. 6.That’s a crucial distinction, because in my experience as well as in public polling, there are lots of conservatives who retain a general sense that Biden’s victory wasn’t fair without being committed to John Eastman’s cockamamie plans to force a constitutional crisis. In the same way, there are lots of conservatives who sympathize in a general way with the Jan. 6 protests while believing that they were essentially peaceful and that any rioting was the work of F.B.I. plants or outside agitators — which is deluded, but still quite different from actively wishing for a mob-led coup d’état.So to the extent that Trump is stuck litigating his own disgraceful conduct before and during the riot, a rival like DeSantis doesn’t need the lukewarm Trump supporter to believe everything the Jan. 6 committee reports. He just needs that supporter to regard Jan. 6 as an embarrassment and Trump’s behavior as feckless — while presenting himself as the candidate who can own the libs but also turn the page.A counterargument, raised on Friday by New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, is that so long as those lukewarm supporters still believe the 2020 election was unfair, Trump will have a trump card over any rival — because if you believe a steal happened, “you are perfectly rational to select a candidate who will acknowledge the crime and do everything to prevent it from reoccurring.”But it seems just as possible for the lukewarm supporter to decide that if Trump’s response to being robbed was to first just let it happen and then ask his vice president to wave a magic wand on his behalf, then maybe he’s not the right guy to take on the Democratic machine next time.There is more than one way, in other words, for Republican voters to decide that the former president is a loser. The stolen-election narrative has protected him from the simplest consequence of his defeat. But it doesn’t prevent the stench of failure from rising from his well-worn grievances, his whine of disappointment and complaint.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

The complications of keeping campaign promises.It was a fraught fist bump.As you heard on Monday’s episode, President Biden’s chosen greeting for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia became a diplomatic drama.After years of bombastic foreign policy tweets, analyzing the subtleties of Mr. Biden’s behavior feels like a throwback to the tan-suit era — a time when diplomacy was in the details.But this wasn’t the only fist bump Mr. Biden gave on his tour of the Middle East. He also extended one to Prime Minister Yair Lapid while disembarking from Air Force One in Israel.Below, Rachelle Bonja, the lead producer of the episode, looks more closely at Mr. Biden’s Middle East tour and explains the significance of a few diplomatic decisions we didn’t get the chance to discuss on the show.The big idea: Biden’s human rights dilemmaThe Daily strives to reveal a new idea in every episode. Below, we go deeper on our episode with Ben Hubbard, The Times’s Beirut bureau chief, about President Biden’s foreign policy.At the beginning of his campaign, President Biden set out a clear goal: to make human rights the center of American foreign policy. He promised to return to a previous era of international relations, before Donald J. Trump introduced an “America first” doctrine and withdrew from international agreements. However, Mr. Biden’s visit to Israel and Saudi Arabia quickly became a test of one of his boldest campaign promises.In both countries, Mr. Biden was under pressure to keep his commitment to speak out against human rights abuses, specifically by condemning the recent killings of journalists.As a candidate, Mr. Biden was explicit about how he felt the United States should deal with Saudi Arabia after the 2018 killing of​​ Jamal Khashoggi, a former Washington Post columnist. (American intelligence officials have determined that the crown prince approved the operation to assassinate Mr. Khashoggi.)Mr. Biden said that his plan was to make the Saudis “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.”But when the war in Ukraine drove American gas prices over $5 a gallon, Mr. Biden’s approach to the crown prince, who manages the country’s oil reserves, shifted focus.Although Mr. Biden said Friday night that he had confronted the crown prince over the murder during their closed-door meeting, the Saudi government disputed the nature of the interaction. Now the president is being criticized for his apparent compromise on human rights.But this wasn’t the only human rights dilemma Mr. Biden faced on his trip.Before he arrived in the Middle East, the president had not publicly addressed the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh. Ms. Abu Akleh was a Palestinian American journalist for Al Jazeera who was fatally shot in May while wearing a press vest and covering an Israeli raid in the West Bank for the network. Several investigations, including one by The New York Times, found that the bullets had come from the location of an Israeli Army unit.The United Nations’ human rights office concluded that “the shots that killed Abu Akleh and injured her colleague Ali Sammoudi came from Israeli security forces and not from indiscriminate firing by armed Palestinians,” Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the agency, said.Despite pressure from Ms. Abu Akleh’s family and others to address the killing, Mr. Biden did not mention Ms. Abu Akleh’s death while he was in Israel.Instead, in Jerusalem, the president reaffirmed his commitment to Israel as an ally and as an “independent Jewish state.” He called for a “lasting negotiated peace between the State of Israel and the Palestinian people.”Mr. Biden later visited Bethlehem in the Palestinian territories, where he spoke about Ms. Abu Akleh and called for accountability in her killing: “The United States will continue to insist on a full and transparent accounting of her death and will continue to stand up for media freedom everywhere in the world,” he said.Ms. Abu Akleh’s family has called for a joint investigation of her killing. While Israel had previously offered to examine the bullet that killed Ms. Abu Akleh in the presence of Palestinian and American representatives, the Palestinian Authority has refused a joint investigation, citing distrust of the Israelis. Mr. Biden’s decision to call for an investigation only while speaking in the Palestinian territories has stoked accusations that the president is trying to shield Israel from scrutiny.The two visits highlight how Mr. Biden has compromised on his previously stated commitments — a contradiction pointed out in a tweet by Hatice Cengiz, Mr. Khashoggi’s fiancée.If he were alive, she wrote, Mr. Khashoggi might have tweeted at Mr. Biden, asking: “Is this the accountability you promised for my murder? The blood of MBS’s next victim is on your hands.”From the Daily team: Your weekend playlistIn October 2020, a group outside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul commemorated the second anniversary of the death of Jamal Khashoggi.Murad Sezer/ReutersHere is some further listening on the Middle East and its leaders to add to your weekend playlist.Nine Days in Gaza: Last summer, a two-week outbreak of violence occurred between Israelis and Palestinians. We spoke to a resident of Gaza City, Rahf Hallaq, about her life and what the conflict was like for her.Biden’s Saudi Dilemma: More than a year before last week’s meeting with Prince Mohammed, Mr. Biden took the bold step of releasing an intelligence report that implicated the crown prince in the killing of Mr. Khashoggi.The Disappearance of a Saudi Journalist: Saudi Arabia’s crown prince has promoted himself to the West as a reformer determined to create a more free and open society. The killing of Mr. Khashoggi changed that. (From 2018.)On The Daily this weekMonday: What did the meeting between President Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman tell us about relations between the countries they lead?Tuesday: Has the era of global cooperation over planet-warming emissions ended?Wednesday: How abortion bans are restricting miscarriage care.Thursday: A prosecutor who worked on the Mueller inquiry discusses the possibility of criminal charges against former President Donald J. Trump.Friday: As the Great Salt Lake dries up, Utah is facing an “environmental nuclear bomb.”That’s it for the Daily newsletter. See you next week.Have thoughts about the show? Tell us what you think at [email protected] you forwarded this newsletter? Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox.Love podcasts? Join The New York Times Podcast Club on Facebook. More

She shattered glass ceilings, voted to impeach Nixon and helped chase out Nazis. But can Ms. Holtzman overcome one more political hurdle: her age?Elizabeth Holtzman has heard the doubters, the skeptics and the New Yorkers who were mildly surprised that she is still alive, let alone up to the challenge of running for Congress at age 80, half a century after she became one of the youngest women ever to serve there.“The 1980s wants its candidate back,” quipped Chris Coffey, a Democratic political strategist, recalling his first reaction when he heard that the pathbreaking former congresswoman, feminist and New York City official had launched a comeback bid.To all of that, Ms. Holtzman, a Democrat, says that she is not only happily among the living, but ready to prove that she is every bit as pugnacious as when she left electoral politics some three decades ago.So on a recent July evening, she stepped into a green kayak and paddled laps somewhere between Brooklyn and Manhattan, pointing a reporter toward the Statue of Liberty, the crumbling Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and a lifetime of fights that she regrets are urgently new again.“I was really angry,” Ms. Holtzman, an avid kayaker, said back on dry land, explaining how the leak predicting the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade had driven her out of a long political retirement and into an improbable campaign for New York’s newly reconfigured 10th District.“I was angry at the result, but the so-called reasoning was even scarier because it made women second-class citizens, bound by the thinking of people who were misogynist in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries,” she said. “So, I decided to run.”The Aug. 23 Democratic primary for a rare open seat in the heart of liberal New York City has attracted no shortage of head-turning candidates, including a sitting congressman from Westchester County; an architect of Donald J. Trump’s impeachment; a Tiananmen Square protester; and rising stars in their 30s, and until recently, a former mayor of New York City.But the race’s most surprising twist may be the re-emergence of Ms. Holtzman, who, in a summer of intense Democratic anxiety, is asking voters to set aside pressing concerns about aging leadership in Washington and return a storied fighter to the arena who first made her name during the Nixon era.Ms. Holtzman during an unsuccessful bid in the Democratic Senate primary in 1993.Andrea Mohin/The New York TimesIf she pulls off an upset, the candidate who was once the youngest woman elected to Congress could set another record — as the oldest known nonincumbent in the House of Representatives’ long history (surpassing James B. Bowler of Illinois, 78, and Will Neal of West Virginia, 81) after she turns 81 next month.That possibility has left longtime admirers, former foes and a whole generation of voters who have scarcely heard of her at least a little baffled, particularly in a summer when questions about President Biden’s age (79) are front-page news and Senator Dianne Feinstein has shown the perils of taxpayer-funded senescence.Her opponents make a broader argument: For all her experience and evident mental acuity, Ms. Holtzman is simply out of step with the challenges facing New Yorkers trying to make it today in an increasingly unaffordable city. And if she won, they grumble, she would block an important steppingstone for a new generation of New York leaders.“The problems that need to be solved in this country would benefit from voices that have lived and experienced them,” said Carlina Rivera, 38, a City Council member from Manhattan who is considered a leading contender in the race.“For many people in their 40s or younger, they’ve only ever experienced more transience than a sense of security in their jobs, their benefits, their housing and their education,” she added. “I fit into that category.”Ms. Holtzman uses the same logic, only in reverse.It is her own experiences — working in the Civil Rights-era South, fighting for abortion rights in the 1970s and challenging a Republican president undermining democratic norms (Richard M. Nixon) — along with a sense of national backsliding that she says persuaded her to re-enter electoral politics. Otherwise, she would most likely be spending summer weekends kayaking her beloved Peconic River on Long Island instead of zipping around the city to crowded candidate forums and paddling with reporters.“I’m not a person who sits on the sidelines,” she said in an interview at a cafe near her Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, home after the boating outing. “I’ve taken on the right wing, I’ve taken on presidents, and I can stand up to them.”Ms. Holtzman knows that her campaign is a long shot, but she has been here before. At the age of 31, she became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress in 1972, decades before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed the title, by defeating a 50-year Brooklyn incumbent, Emanuel Celler and the Democratic Party machine. She was the first (and only) woman to serve as district attorney in Brooklyn and as New York City comptroller.A legal mind with a prodigious work ethic, Ms. Holtzman was hardly an average backbencher. As a House freshman, she battled Nixon to the Supreme Court over war powers and later used her perch to help track down and deport Nazi war criminals from the United States and fight for the Equal Rights Amendment. Then as district attorney, she pushed the courts to curb the use of peremptory challenges to keep African Americans off juries because of their skin color.There were also bitter disappointments. She came within a percentage point of being New York’s first female senator in 1980, badly lost a Senate primary in 1992 and then, a year later, was ousted after a single term as comptroller amid a banking-related scandal that undercut her ethical record.Elizabeth Holtzman, on a recent kayaking jaunt off the Brooklyn shore, said she knows she needs to overcome “preconceptions about people my age.”Mary Inhea Kang for The New York TimesIn the interview, Ms. Holtzman likened questions about her age to arguments that a woman was not fit to serve as district attorney and drew a distinction between herself and Celler, whom, decades earlier, she had portrayed as tired and out of touch.“There are obviously some preconceptions about people my age. Can they do the job?” she said. “I feel I have something unique to offer. And I’m not tired. That’s the whole point.”Unsurprisingly, many of Ms. Holtzman’s defenders are older. But some of them are unexpected.“Biden’s decline has made it more difficult for those who are older,” said Alfonse M. D’Amato, 84, the former Republican senator who defeated Ms. Holtzman in 1980. “But that doesn’t mean that every person who is older can’t do the job. Maybe the experience that life has given them makes them as capable or more so.”Ms. Holtzman’s allies argue that her boundary-pushing style, which helped win a generation of admirers (many of whom still vote), has the potential to offset concerns about her advanced age among younger, progressive voters hungry for authenticity.It also makes Ms. Holtzman something of an appealing safe harbor for some older voters who say now is not the time to take a chance on a promising but less seasoned politician, like Ms. Rivera or Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, 39.“She is kind of a dream candidate for me,” said Eileen Clancy, an activist in Manhattan who recalled as a child watching Ms. Holtzman participate in the House Judiciary Committee’s Watergate hearings.“I’m probably much more aligned with Yuh-Line’s policies,” Ms. Clancy said. “But I have to say, considering the country is in an uproar now and the questions at hand, I think Holtzman is uniquely capable. She could add a gravitas to Congress, and she has the backbone and nothing to lose.”With a dozen candidates in the race and a highly abbreviated campaign timeline, any winning candidate probably only needs a small slice of the vote. A pair of recent polls of likely primary voters by progressive groups showed Ms. Holtzman in the middle of the pack, neck and neck with Representative Mondaire Jones and Assemblywoman Jo Anne Simon.But the challenge for Ms. Holtzman may be reaching and turning out potential supporters who do not realize she is running.Though she has stayed active in private legal practice and on federal commissions and has written books, her political network thinned long ago: Gloria Steinem, a feminist contemporary, is her only recognizable endorser. As of Friday, her campaign Instagram account (run by hired consultants) has only 25 followers — a dozen more than her Facebook page.And when other candidates showed up with colorful signs and volunteers to march in Brooklyn’s Pride parade in June, Ms. Holtzman walked alone with little indicating she was running for anything.Her fund-raising operation? “It’s rusty,” Ms. Holtzman said just before her campaign reported raising $122,000, about one-tenth of the amount raised by Daniel Goldman, another Democrat in the race. “Getting it geared up and functioning like a lubricated machine, it’s not happening yet.”So far, Ms. Holtzman has sent out a single glossy mailer that touts her record and her “guts” — but could also serve to surface questions about her age. “Sometimes a picture’s worth 1,000 words,” she said, describing a photograph it features of her with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the liberal Supreme Court justice who died at age 87.Bill Knapp, a veteran political ad maker who got his start working for Ms. Holtzman in 1980 and is working on this year’s race, conceded the race was “no layup,” but argued that Ms. Holtzman had a lane, particularly in the shadow of the abortion decision.“There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical,” he said. “But when you take a measure of the person and the times, this is possible.” More

Toward the end of my Tuesday column on the Senate, I gestured toward the idea of making it into something like the British House of Lords, which has limited power to veto legislation or make policy. Most democracies with bicameral national legislatures have done something similar, empowering their lower, popular chambers and weakening their upper chambers.The Canadian Senate, for example, acts mainly as a council of revision, amending legislation that comes out of the House of Commons. It can reject legislation, but it rarely exercises that power. The Australian Senate has much more power to block legislation from the House, but the chamber is more democratic than its American counterpoint in that it is apportioned by proportional representation.The United States stands alone with a Senate that is powerful enough to grind the entire legislature to a halt. You could end the filibuster, of course, and that would improve things, but it would take a constitutional amendment to do any root and branch reform of the Senate.Let’s say that amendment was on the table. What would it say?What I would write is simple. I would repeal the 17th Amendment, returning the election of senators to each state legislature, and restoring the federal nature of the chamber. But to compensate for the end of popular election of senators, I would also strip the Senate of its power to introduce or veto legislation.In my vision, the Senate would be a council of revision that continues to represent the states as states. I think this is necessary because the United States will likely be a federal democracy for as long as it exists, and the system should probably accommodate the interests of state governments (insofar as they exist) in one way or another.My Senate could not block House legislation, but it could offer amendments if it chose to take action. Those amendments would then be voted on by a conference committee of House and Senate members, for final approval. If the Senate decides to hold a bill for revision, it has a set amount of time — let’s say 60 days — with which to act. If it does not act in that time, the bill is deemed passed and goes to the president for signing.The Senate would retain its oversight powers as well as its power to approve treaties and offer “advise and consent” to the president for judicial and executive branch nominees. But “advise and consent” would mean an actual hearing and an actual vote.The idea is to move the locus of policymaking back to the House of Representatives (which I would like to enlarge to at least 600 members), and to make it the most important chamber in the operation of government. In this scheme, it might be worth extending House terms to three years to reduce the pressures of campaigning and allow members more time to develop expertise, should they seek it.My basic principle here is that the popular chamber of Congress should also be the most influential one. You see some of this in the Constitution as written — Article I, Section I establishes the Congress and Section II establishes the House — but I’d like to make it the defining part of our constitutional system. I also think that we’d have a more agile and effective government if we removed the veto point that is the Senate.My scheme for transforming the structure of American government is a little broader and more nuanced than this (I’d like to extend federal representation to territories and Americans abroad, for example), but these are the basics of a major part of it. The Senate is too powerful. Let’s cut it down to size.What I WroteMy Tuesday column was on the problem of the Senate:It may seem odd to blame the institution for this outcome. It’s not as if there is any alternative to passing legislation through both chambers of Congress. But it’s also no accident that climate legislation has repeatedly been passed in the House only to collapse in the Senate. It is no accident that, as a general rule, the upper chamber is where popular legislation goes to die or, if it isn’t killed, where it is passed in truncated and diminished form, like the recent (and lackluster) bipartisan gun bill. The Senate was built with this purpose in mind. It was designed to keep the people in check — to put limits on the reach of democracy and the scope of representation.And my Friday column was on the problem of the Electoral College (a recurring theme, I know):The Electoral College makes it difficult to see that each state contains a multitude of political perspectives, and that our democracy might be a little healthier if the vote of a Seattle Republican mattered as much for the outcome of a presidential election as that of a Green Bay Democrat.Now ReadingErwin Chemerinsky in defense of judicial review for The American Prospect.Corey Robin on Clarence Thomas for The New Yorker.Sarah Jones on the anti-abortion movement for New York magazine.Vanessa Williamson on taxation for Dissent.B.D. McClay on sore winners for The Outline.Feedback If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to your friends. They can sign up here. If you want to share your thoughts on an item in this week’s newsletter or on the newsletter in general, please email me at [email protected]. You can follow me on Twitter (@jbouie), Instagram and TikTok.Photo of the WeekI took this years ago at a Civil War re-enactment marking the 150th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox. The Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant re-enactors were having a coffee and relaxing a bit before the day’s festivities.Now Eating: Curried Broccoli and Cauliflower SaladThis recipe is from the wonderful book “Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking,” by Toni Tipton-Martin. It is very easy to put together, and very, very good. This recipe makes enough for about four people, and you can easily double it if you’re cooking for a group. I didn’t make any adjustments to the salad the last time I made it, but what I will recommend is to make your own mayonnaise. It’s pretty easy, and the results are far superior to anything you can get from the store.Ingredients4 slices bacon½ cup mayonnaise¼ cup sugar1 tablespoon cider vinegar¼ teaspoon curry powder or more, to tasteSalt2 cups broccoli florets, trimmed and cut into bite-size pieces¼ cup sliced celery.2 cups cauliflower florets, trimmed and cut into bite-size pieces⅓ cup plus one tablespoon raisins⅓ cup plus one tablespoon toasted slivered almondsDirectionsIn a medium skillet, cook the bacon over medium-high heat until crisp, about 7 minutes. Drain on paper towels and crumble when cool enough to handle. Reserve the fat for another use.In a small bowl, mix together the mayonnaise, sugar, vinegar, curry powder, and salt to taste.In a serving bowl, layer the broccoli florets, celery, and cauliflower. Pour on all the dressing. Add a layer of raisins, then almonds, then top with the bacon. Cover with a tightfitting lid or plastic wrap. Refrigerate for at least 8 hours or overnight. Toss before serving. More

Wes Moore, a celebrity author and former nonprofit executive who campaigned as a political outsider, has won the Democratic primary for governor of Maryland.Three days after voting concluded, The Associated Press declared Mr. Moore the winner late Friday over Tom Perez, a former labor secretary and Democratic National Committee chairman; Peter Franchot, the state comptroller; and six other candidates.Mr. Moore, a best-selling author who for a time hosted a show on Oprah Winfrey’s cable network, cast himself as a dynamic newcomer in a race in which his top rivals were all veterans of Maryland or national politics. In addition to an endorsement from Ms. Winfrey, he had the backing of the Democratic leaders of both chambers of the Maryland legislature and three members of the state’s congressional delegation — a strong showing for a first-time candidate.Mr. Moore, who would become Maryland’s first Black governor if he wins, will be a heavy favorite in the general election against Dan Cox, a Republican state legislator who was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Cox has amplified an array of election conspiracy theories, and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, he called Vice President Mike Pence “a traitor.”Democrats are seeking to retake the Maryland governor’s office after eight years in which it was occupied by Gov. Larry Hogan, a moderate Republican who is among the nation’s most popular governors.Mr. Hogan, who endorsed Mr. Cox’s rival in the G.O.P. primary, is prohibited by state law from seeking a third term. Despite his popularity, he was unable to transfer his support to Kelly Schulz, a longtime ally who served in his cabinet for seven years. Mr. Hogan said Wednesday that he would not support Mr. Cox.Results from Maryland’s Democratic primary for governor, along with a number of other key races, were delayed because state law prohibits absentee ballots returned through the mail or in drop boxes from being counted for two days after Election Day.On Thursday, election officials across the state gathered to begin the laborious process of inspecting and opening absentee ballots, allowing campaigns to review ballots that prompted any questions, and feeding the ballots through voting machines.Mr. Moore prevailed in the primary despite questions about the veracity of the biography he has presented. He is not a Baltimore native, as he has claimed, and his tenure as a nonprofit executive in New York was marked by an episode in which his assistant was fired after a dispute regarding overtime pay for personal work she was doing for Mr. Moore.Unlike a host of recent Democratic primaries, the party’s contest for Maryland governor didn’t turn on sharp ideological differences between the candidates. Instead the race centered on which candidate could build coalitions across ideologies. More