Elections

The incoming lieutenant governor of Virginia was an unlikely candidate: a deeply conservative Black woman, and an immigrant, who supports Donald Trump.RICHMOND, Va. — On a December afternoon, Winsome Sears, Virginia’s lieutenant governor-elect, stood at the podium in the State Senate chamber where she will soon preside. It was empty but for a few clerks and staffers who were walking her through a practice session, making pretend motions and points of order. Ms. Sears followed along as the clerks explained arcane Senate protocols, though she occasionally raised matters that weren’t in the script.“What if they’re making a ruckus?” Ms. Sears asked her tutors.Then, a clerk said, pointing to the giant wooden gavel at Ms. Sears’s right hand, you bang that. Ms. Sears smiled.That she was standing here at all was an improbability built upon unlikelihoods. Her campaign was a long shot, late in starting, skimpily funded and repeatedly overhauled. The political trajectory that preceded it was hardly more auspicious: She appeared on the scene 20 years ago, winning a legislative seat in an upset, but after one term and a quixotic bid for Congress, disappeared from electoral politics. She briefly surfaced in 2018, announcing a write-in protest against Virginia’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, but this earned her little beyond a few curious mentions in the press.Yet just three years later she is the lieutenant governor-elect, having bested two veteran lawmakers for the Republican nomination and become the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia history. She will take office on Jan. 15, along with Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin.Ms. Sears during a campaign event for Glenn Youngkin in October. She became the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Virginia history.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe focus on Ms. Sears’s triumph, in news profiles and in the post-election crowing of conservative pundits, has been on the rare combination of her biography and politics: a Black woman, an immigrant and an emphatically conservative, Trump-boosting Republican.“The message is important,” Ms. Sears, 57, said over a lunch of Jamaican oxtail with her transition team at a restaurant near the State Capitol. “But the messenger is equally important.”This is the question that Ms. Sears embodies: whether she is a singular figure who won a surprise victory or the vanguard of a major political realignment, dissolving longtime realities of race and partisan identification. Democrats say there is little evidence for the latter, and that Ms. Sears won with typical Republican voters in an especially Republican year. But Ms. Sears insists that many Black and immigrant voters naturally side with Republicans on a variety of issues — and that some are starting to realize that.“The only way to change things is to win elections,” she said. “And who better to help make that change but me? I look like the strategy.”Ms. Sears dates her own partisan epiphany to her early 20s. She already had plenty of life experience by that point: moving at the age of 6 from Jamaica to the Bronx to be with her father, who had come seeking work; joining the Marines as a lost teenager and learning to be a diesel mechanic; becoming a single mother at 21. When she listened to the 1988 presidential campaign, hearing the debates over abortion and welfare, she realized, to her surprise, that she was a Republican.More than a dozen years passed before Ms. Sears, then a married mother of three who had run a homeless shelter and gone to graduate school, began her political career. At the urging of local Republicans, she ran in 2001 for the House of Delegates in a majority Black district in Norfolk. The seat had been held by Billy Robinson Jr., a Democrat, for 20 years; his father had held it before him. Weeks before the election, Mr. Robinson spent a night in jail on a contempt of court charge. Ms. Sears won in the surprise of the election season.Ms. Sears will take office on Jan. 15, along with Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin.Steve Helber/Associated PressIn the Legislature, she adjusted to the political architecture and her unusual place in it: joining, then leaving, the legislative Black caucus; voting dependably as a Republican but calling earlier than many colleagues for the resignation of the Republican House speaker when news broke of his sexual harassment settlement.She did not run for re-election, instead launching an underdog campaign against Democratic U.S. Representative Bobby Scott. Mr. Scott returned to Congress, where he remains, and the House of Delegates seat returned to Democratic hands for good. Ms. Sears was “done with politics,” she said.Her family moved to the small city of Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley, where Ms. Sears and her husband ran a plumbing and electrical repair shop. She held a few posts — on the state board of education and on a committee at the Department of Veterans Affairs — and wrote a book, “Stop Being a Christian Wimp!” Much of her focus was on caring for a daughter struggling with mental illness. In 2012, the daughter, DeJon Williams, was killed in a car accident along with her two young children.While Ms. Sears was absent from politics, Barack Obama won the presidency, Trayvon Martin was killed, the Black Lives Matter movement rose up, Donald Trump was elected and neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, Va. Ms. Sears’s political example, as a Black woman Republican representing a majority Black district in Virginia, went unrepeated.Republicans, she said, rarely even tried to sever the old ties between Black voters and the Democratic Party. This is partly why she decided to run this year.“I just took a look at the field, and said, ‘My God, we’re gonna lose again,’” she said. “Nobody was going to reach out to the various communities that needed to be heard from: women, immigrants, you know, Latinos, Asians, Blacks, etc.”Ms. Sears favors strict limits on abortion, supports vouchers to help students pay for private school tuition and insists that gun control laws do not deter crime but that gun ownership does.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesShe stood to the right of much of the field and was arguably the furthest right of the three Republicans nominated for statewide office. She favors strict limits on abortion, calling Democratic abortion policies “wicked”; she is an advocate of vouchers to help students pay for private school tuition and of tighter restrictions on voting; and she insists that gun control laws do not deter crime — gun ownership does. A photo that went viral last spring, showing her holding an AR-15 while wearing a blazer-and-dress outfit suitable for a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, propelled her as much as anything to the Republican nomination.Ms. Sears derides the left as too concerned with race but often explains her politics as rooted in Black history, stressing Marcus Garvey’s rhetoric on self-reliance as a Jamaican immigrant in Jim Crow America, emphasizing that Harriet Tubman carried a gun and referring to the infamous Tuskegee experiments in explaining her opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates. “If the Democrats are always going to talk about race, then let’s talk about it,” she said.She rejects the notion that the problems Republicans have attracting Black voters might run deeper than mere neglect. She was angered when Republicans nominated Corey Stewart, who had a history of associating with Neo-Confederates, for the 2018 U.S. Senate race in Virginia. But she said this didn’t give her qualms about the party. She remains a champion of Mr. Trump, who openly endorsed Mr. Stewart; indeed, she was the national chairwoman of a group called “Black Americans to Re-elect the President.”Jennifer McClellan, a Democratic state senator from Richmond, agreed that Democrats could not assume that Black people would show up for them at the polls, saying that Black voters, like any voters, choose candidates based on who they believe is going to help solve their problems. But, she continued, little that Ms. Sears has said suggests she would be that person in office.“The vast majority of Black voters disagree with her on abortion, on school choice, on guns,” Ms. McClellan said. “Those aren’t necessarily the issues driving Black voters anyway. It’s the economy, it’s health care, it’s broader access to education.”Lieutenant governors in Virginia are fairly limited in their responsibilities, but they have a public profile — and they almost always eventually run for governor. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThe evidence that this year’s elections scrambled the fundamentals of race and partisanship is mixed at most. If anything, some Republicans worried that Ms. Sears’s hard-right politics might jeopardize the campaign strategy of appealing to more moderate voters. This risk was largely mitigated, said John Fredericks, a conservative radio host, by the fact that Ms. Sears’s general election campaign, which he called “a train wreck from start to finish,” never raised enough money to really broadcast her politics.In any case, the attention was overwhelmingly directed to the top of the ticket.“The election this year was all about the gubernatorial candidates,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington. There were few big surprises in the exit polls, several political experts said, and Ms. Sears won her race by a margin that would have been expected of just about any Republican this year.But there were some warning signs for Democrats, outlined in a postelection survey by the Democratic Governors Association. While Black Virginians overwhelmingly voted for Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for governor, the analysis found a drop in Democratic support among Black men, compared with the 2020 presidential election. There was notable erosion in Democratic support among Asian and Latino voters as well.“We don’t need to be tied or beholden to one particular party,” said Wes Bellamy, a Black political activist and a former vice mayor of Charlottesville. He will be watching Ms. Sears closely, he said.Lieutenant governors in Virginia are fairly limited in their responsibilities, but they have a public profile — and they almost always run for governor. If Ms. Sears advocates for policies that improve the day-to-day lives of Black people and, more crucially, if she can persuade her Republican colleagues to go along, Mr. Bellamy said, “I think she’s gold.” More

The celebrity physician, a candidate in Pennsylvania’s Republican primary for Senate, has a long history of dispensing dubious medical advice on his daytime show and on Fox News.A wealth of evidence now shows that the malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine were not effective at treating Covid-19 and carried potential risks.But in the early months of the pandemic, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the celebrity physician with a daytime TV show, positioned himself as one of the chief promoters of the drugs on Fox News. In the same be-the-best-you tone that he used to promote miracle weight-loss cures on “The Dr. Oz Show,” he elevated limited studies that he said showed wondrous promise.His “jaw dropped,” he said, while reviewing one tiny study from France, calling it “a game changer.” In all, Dr. Oz promoted chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in more than 25 appearances on Fox in March and April 2020.When a Veterans Affairs study showed that Covid-19 patients treated with hydroxychloroquine were more likely to die than untreated patients, that advocacy came to an abrupt halt.“We are better off waiting for the randomized trials” that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, had been asking for, Dr. Oz told Fox viewers.As Dr. Oz jumped last month into the Republican primary for Senate in Pennsylvania, where his celebrity gives him an important advantage in a crucial race, he tied his candidacy to the politics of the pandemic. He appealed to conservatives’ anger at mandates and shutdowns, and at the “people in charge” who, he said, “took away our freedom.”But the entry into the race of the Cleveland-born heart surgeon, a son of Turkish immigrants who has been the host of “The Dr. Oz Show” since 2009, also brought renewed scrutiny to the blemishes on his record as one of America’s most famous doctors: his long history of dispensing dubious medical advice.In ebullient language, he has often made sweeping claims based on thin evidence, which in multiple cases, like that of hydroxychloroquine, unraveled when studies he relied on were shown to be flawed.Over the years, Dr. Oz, 61, has faced a bipartisan scolding before a Senate committee over claims he made about weight-loss pills, as well as the opposition of some of his physician peers, including a group of 10 doctors who sought his firing from Columbia University’s medical faculty in 2015, arguing that he had “repeatedly shown disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine.” Dr. Oz questioned his critics’ motives and Columbia took no action, saying it did not regulate faculty members’ participation in public discourse.He has warned parents that apple juice contained unsafe levels of arsenic, advice that the Food and Drug Administration called “irresponsible and misleading.” In 2013, he warned women that carrying cellphones in their bras could cause breast cancer, a claim without scientific merit. In 2014, the British Medical Journal analyzed 80 recommendations on Dr. Oz’s show, and concluded that fewer than half were supported by evidence.Two researchers who worked on “The Dr. Oz Show” for a year during a break from medical school in the 2010s said in interviews that the show’s producers had originated most of its topics, often getting their ideas from the internet. But the researchers, whose job was to vet medical claims on the show, said that they had little power to push back, and that they regularly questioned the show’s ethics to one another and discussed quitting in protest.“Our jobs seemed to be endless fighting with producers and being overruled,” said one of the former researchers, both of whom are now physicians and insisted on anonymity because they said they feared that publicly criticizing him could jeopardize their careers.According to the former researchers, the show’s producers conjured an imaginary, typical viewer named “Shirley,” a woman whose children were grown and who had time to focus on herself. The standard advice for many ailments covered on the show — obesity, sluggishness, back pain — was exercise, the researchers said. But there was a quota on how often exercise could be mentioned.Shirley watched daytime TV and didn’t want to exercise, the researchers said they were told.Dr. Oz’s on-air medical advice on both his show and Fox News has taken on greater significance as he enters the political realm. His promotion of hydroxychloroquine grabbed President Donald J. Trump’s attention and contributed to early misinformation about the virus on the right.“Information can harm — that’s the key thing we need to appreciate here,” said Harald Schmidt, an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “His track record is pretty concerning. What we’ve seen so far does not instill confidence that this will help reasonable politics.”Dr. Oz, kneeling, rose to fame as a medical expert on Oprah Winfrey’s show.Jemal Countess/ Getty ImagesDr. Oz declined to to be interviewed for this article. His campaign manager, Casey Contres, said in a statement that the doctor had always put patients first and fought the “established grain” in medicine.“Dr. Oz believes it was truly unfortunate that Covid-19 became political and an excuse for the government and many in the corporate media to control the means of communication to suspend debate,” Mr. Contres added. “From the start, therapeutics meant to help with Covid-19 were regularly discounted by the medical establishment, and many great ideas were squashed and discredited.”Over the years, when pressed about offering unproven medical advice, Dr. Oz said his goal was to “empower” Americans to take control of their health. Grilled by senators in 2014 about false claims he made for weight-loss products, he said, “My job on the show, I feel, is to be a cheerleader for the audience.”He also said it was his right to use unscientific language. “When I feel as a host of a show that I can’t use words that are flowery,” he told the senators, “I feel like I’ve been disenfranchised, like my power’s been taken away.”In using the politics of the pandemic to shape his campaign for an open seat — one pivotal to Senate control in the midterms — Dr. Oz may be in tune with primary voters in Pennsylvania. The race has drawn candidates echoing Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, including Jeff Bartos, a developer, and Carla Sands, a former ambassador. David McCormick, a hedge-fund executive married to a former Trump administration official, is expected to join the field soon.The criticism Dr. Oz has received over the years for spreading misinformation has done little to tarnish his celebrity, as measured by his long-running TV program, whose distributor announced that the show would end in January when its host departs.Still, misinformation about the coronavirus emanating from the Trump White House and conservative news sites helped politicize the nation’s response to the pandemic, with deadly consequences in many Republican areas of the country.Although Dr. Oz spoke strongly in favor of masks and vaccines on Fox, his championing of unproven treatments early on sharply contradicted infectious-disease experts like Dr. Fauci who urged caution.In Pennsylvania, as around the country, counties that voted by large margins for Mr. Trump in 2020 have had lower vaccination rates and higher death rates from Covid than counties that voted heavily for President Biden.Yet at one point early in the pandemic, he said that reopening schools was an “appetizing opportunity” that might cause the deaths of “only” 2 to 3 percent of the population. He later walked back the statement.“I can’t believe he took the same oath that I did when we graduated,” said Dr. Val Arkoosh, an anesthesiologist and county official in the Philadelphia suburbs who is running in the Democratic primary for Senate. “That oath is about first doing no harm and always putting your patients first. I just think he’s a quack, to be honest.”In reply to Dr. Arkoosh, Mr. Contres said that Dr. Oz had performed thousands of heart surgeries and had “helped countless patients live a better life.”Dr. Oz testifying before the Senate subcommittee on consumer protection in 2014, when senators pressed him on claims he had made about weight-loss pills.Tom Williams/CQ Roll CallIn Dr. Oz’s 2014 appearance before the Senate subcommittee on consumer protection, Claire McCaskill, then a Democratic senator from Missouri, quoted a bit of his TV sales patter back to him: “You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they’ve found the magic weight-loss cure for every body type — it’s green coffee extract.”Dr. Oz admitted to the senators that his claims often “don’t have the scientific muster to present as fact.” A study he had cited about green-coffee bean extract was later retracted and described by federal regulators as “hopelessly flawed.” The supplier of the extract paid $3.5 million to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission.Dr. David Gorski, a surgery professor at Wayne State University and longtime critic of alternative medicine, said Dr. Oz’s emergence as a Fox News authority on the coronavirus was no surprise him.“He could have gone the route of trying to be more reasonable and careful, vetting information, trying to reassure people where the science was still unsettled,” Dr. Gorski said. “But of course, that wouldn’t be Dr. Oz’s brand.”Early in the pandemic, on March 20, 2020, Dr. Oz appeared on several Fox News shows trumpeting what he called “massive, massive news” — a small study by a divisive French researcher, Dr. Didier Raoult, who claimed a 100 percent cure rate after treating coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, or Z-Pak. At the time, with Covid-19 cases and deaths rising rapidly, hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial treatment, was being studied in multiple countries and adopted by hospitals without much evidence. Mr. Trump hyped it repeatedly at White House news conferences as part of his effort to minimize the crisis. Dr. Oz communicated with Trump advisers about speeding the drug’s approval to treat Covid. On March 28, the F.D.A. authorized its emergency use. On Fox, Dr. Oz noted that the Raoult study, with just 36 participants, was not a clinical trial, but his enthusiasm overran his caution. The study was the “most impressive bit of news on this entire pandemic front,” he gushed. On April 1, as Dr. Oz called on Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York to lift restrictions on hydroxychloroquine, a public health expert, Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University, cautioned Fox viewers that “the facts are just not in” on the drug.There was much confusion in the early days of the crisis about how the virus spread and how to slow it, with some expert views reversed by new information. The Raoult study quickly fell apart. Only six patients had received the two-drug combination, all with mild or early infections. One who was reported “virologically cured” on Day 6 was found to have the virus two days later. Six other patients treated only with hydroxychloroquine were omitted from the final results, including one who died and three others who were transferred to intensive care.On April 3, the board of the research journal that initially published the study said it did not meet the “expected standard.” In June 2020, the F.D.A. revoked emergency authorization of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. That November, the National Institutes of Health concluded that the drug held no benefit in treating Covid-19.By then, Dr. Oz’s once-daily appearances on Fox had tapered off. He was rarely seen on the network this year. But he returned to Sean Hannity’s show on Nov. 30 to announce his candidacy, seizing the opportunity to push back at critics of his medical career.“Doctors are about solutions,” he said. “But instead, people with good ideas are shamed, they’re silenced, they’re bullied, they’re canceled.”Susan C. Beachy More

State-level races are becoming a central focus of American politics as the lasting effects of new congressional maps and election laws raise the stakes.Late on Nov. 8, 2016, the mood inside President Barack Obama’s West Wing turned grim. Hillary Clinton was coming up short. The realization was growing that Donald J. Trump would be elected president.Suddenly, David M. Simas, Mr. Obama’s political director, pumped his fist and called out, “Yes!”A cautious, cerebral lawyer, Mr. Simas was not known for attention-getting exultation. Asked why he was cheering, he deadpanned: “We just won a North Carolina Supreme Court seat.”Incongruous as it was, the moment of triumph in a relatively minor contest reflected a growing concern among Democratic leaders, all the way up to Mr. Obama, that their party needed a more assertive strategy for the end-of-decade redistricting fights to come. But as Democrats awakened to the depth of their plight, they found that learning to think small was easier said than done: Hopes of big gains at the state level in 2020, a crucial year for redistricting, did not materialize. Liberal voters showed they were less hungry to win those races than they were to oust Mr. Trump.Now, however, state-level contests like those for governor’s offices, legislatures and courts are suddenly moving from the periphery to the center of American politics. And the ongoing tussle over political maps is just one front in a larger conflict: As Mr. Trump pushes his false claims of a stolen 2020 election, what was once seen at most as a decennial scrum for partisan advantage in the provinces of government is transforming, in some Democrats’ minds, into a twilight struggle for the future of American democracy.“We’re at a moment of reckoning in America,” former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said during a recent fund-raising event for the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a group he formed that became the primary locus of Mr. Obama’s political activity when he left the White House. “I’m not being hyperbolic or alarmist. I think our democracy is on the line.”Fund-raising appeals on behalf of Democratic legislative candidates note the fact that at least six Republican state lawmakers were in Washington on Jan. 6, and that Republican-led states from Arizona to Georgia have passed laws tightening the rules around voting. And revelations about Mr. Trump’s ad hoc efforts to overturn the previous presidential election are fueling fears that in a rematch of 2020, Mr. Trump might conspire with G.O.P. state lawmakers to alter the outcome illegitimately.“We believe the right wing is signaling a strategy to steal the election through state legislatures in 2024,” said Daniel Squadron, a former New York state senator whose group, the States Project, has announced plans to raise $30 million to support Democratic candidates in state legislative races in 2022.Former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., left with microphone, at a Virginia rally in 2019. He formed a group focused on redistricting.Emma Howells for The New York TimesYet it remains to be seen whether such dire warnings will move voters. Selling rank-and-file Democrats on the importance of offices like state senator or state Supreme Court justice has proved daunting. In the 2020 campaign cycle, donors showered Amy McGrath, a doomed Democratic candidate for Senate from Kentucky, with $96 million, dwarfing the $51 million raised by the national Democratic Party committee responsible for aiding candidates for legislative seats in all 50 states. And Democrats tend to suffer disproportionately from “roll-off,” a phenomenon in which voters fail to complete their ballots, withholding their votes from candidates at the bottom of the ticket.“It feels very much like climbing uphill, pushing a rock while your arms are melting,” said Amanda Litman of the liberal group Run for Something, which recruits young people to run for state and local office.Redistricting at a GlanceEvery 10 years, each state in the U.S is required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.Redistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.Breaking Down Texas’s Map: How redistricting efforts in Texas are working to make Republican districts even more red.G.O.P.’s Heavy Edge: Republicans are poised to capture enough seats to take the House in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone.Legal Options Dwindle: Persuading judges to undo skewed political maps was never easy. A shifting judicial landscape is making it harder.Gaby Goldstein, co-founder of Sister District, a grass-roots organization that supports progressive candidates in state legislative races, noted that conservatives have mobilized around state politics for decades. “I always say that Democrats are tardy to the party,” she said.The Democratic Party’s belated interest in lower-tier races grew out of its bruising experience in 2010, when Republicans rode an anti-Obama backlash to oust hundreds of Democratic incumbents nationwide. Spending just $30 million, Republicans flipped 680 state legislative seats and 20 chambers, a stunning victory that put them in position to redraw election maps and entrench their hold over those states — and their congressional delegations — for a decade.“Democrats were frankly unprepared during that cycle,” said Kelly Ward Burton, who at the time was running House Democrats’ campaign committee. Now the president of Mr. Holder’s redistricting committee, Ms. Burton has been working closely with several Democratic campaign groups in hopes of a different outcome from the current round of redistricting.Part hardball politics and part good-government activism, the groups’ strategy has been to break up G.O.P. “trifectas” where possible — reducing the number of states where Republicans enjoy full control of the redistricting process because they hold the governorship and majorities in both legislative chambers. They also ask candidates for state and federal offices to pledge support for “fair redistricting that ends map manipulation and creates truly representative districts,” an aspiration that is sometimes in tension with more partisan goals.Midway through the current redistricting brawl, the results of those Democratic efforts are mixed.The long-troubled Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee became a force under new leadership in 2016, setting up the party to take six chambers in the 2018 midterm elections. Since 2017, Democrats have flipped 10 governor’s offices, including in the battlegrounds of Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and picked up seven state Supreme Court seats. Five states have passed nonpartisan redistricting reforms, putting map-drawing in the hands of independent commissions.But the blue wave that Democrats were counting on in 2020 never washed ashore. Although Democratic groups spent record amounts trying to win back G.O.P.-held statehouses, their party ended last year worse off, losing both chambers in New Hampshire. As a result, Republicans not only kept control of prizes like the Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin legislatures, but they also have retained the power to draw maps for 187 congressional districts, while Democrats control the fate of just 75.As a result, Democrats’ hopes of keeping the House may rest on legal challenges to maps that Republican-led states have already approved. And a 2019 Supreme Court ruling, which put partisan gerrymandering claims beyond the purview of federal courts, ensures that state courts will be the main arena for such lawsuits.In 2019, Democrats lost a crucial state Supreme Court contest in Wisconsin by fewer than 6,000 votes, cementing the body’s conservative majority. But the election of liberal judges in North Carolina and Ohio has given Mr. Holder’s group, and other liberal outfits allied with it, at least a chance to win in court what Democrats lack the power to achieve in Republican-dominated legislatures.Tim Butler, a Republican state lawmaker in Illinois. Aggressive gerrymandering in the state could net Democrats at least one additional House seat.Justin L. Fowler/The State Journal-Register, via Associated PressElsewhere, high-minded sentiments are yielding to the demands of brass-knuckle politics. Many Democrats cheered the aggressive gerrymandering in Illinois, where maps approved by Gov. J.B. Pritzker could net them at least one additional House seat, and they are urging a similar approach in New York, where a Democratic supermajority may seek to gerrymander its way to capturing as many as four seats currently held by Republicans.None of which is lost on Republicans. “Democrats pretend to be for ‘fair maps,’ but they use every advantage they get,” said Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for the Republican State Leadership Committee.Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

“Today, hope triumphed over fear,” declared Chile’s new president-elect, Gabriel Boric, a leftist lawmaker and former student activist, in a speech Sunday celebrating his victory over far-right rival José Antonio Kast.The refrain took on a life of its own, and all week Chileans, on social media and on the streets, repeated it, if only to serve as a reminder that fear-mongering and polarization should have no place in electoral politics.But hope alone will only get Mr. Boric so far. The 35-year-old leader immediately faces the challenge of helping those struggling in a Covid economy, including older Chileans crushed by meager or no pension benefits. But the biggest test of his presidency, the one that will not only cement his place in Chilean history but define society in a post-dictatorship nation, will be his leadership ahead of a referendum next year on a new Constitution that would enshrine rights and values for a more equal, inclusive nation and break with the charter birthed under Augusto Pinochet.In 2020, Chileans voted overwhelmingly to leave the old text behind, and less than a year later, they selected 155 drafters to write the new one. But weariness from the pandemic, funding controversies, and frictions over procedure and substance inside the constitutional convention — the body tasked with drafting the charter — could easily erode its public support. And if those are the challenges now, there’s no telling what challenges lie ahead once the framers approve the text of the new Constitution and it is up to the citizenry to debate and ratify it. A torrent of fake news around the constitutional process shows that bad actors are hard at work seeking to delegitimize it.Any misstep in the process could undermine the credibility of a new Constitution — and provide fodder for supporters of the old order, including figures like Mr. Kast, to rally around rejecting it.This is do-or-die for Mr. Boric.With history as a guide, Mr. Boric starts off with reason to hope that Chilean society, at a pivotal moment for its democratic project, will choose wisely. Mr. Boric was only 2 years old when Chileans, in a historic plebiscite in 1988, rejected the military rule of Mr. Pinochet, setting Chile on a path to democracy and self-determination. Then, nearly 56 percent of voters said no to the dictator’s brutal regime, opening the door to a modern era of democracy and institutional growing pains.More than 30 years later, by a similar margin, Mr. Boric’s message of hope and change prevailed over Mr. Kast’s dire warnings that Chile was on the precipice of abandoning this political and economic model, and descending into Communism. Fifty-six percent of the Chilean electorate rejected that message and voted for Mr. Boric, making him the youngest president to reach La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace, and the candidate to receive the highest number of votes in a presidential contest in the nation’s history. Turnout likewise shattered records. Mr. Boric’s mandate is clear.Yet the president-elect, for all his youthful energy and commitment to dignity, equality and the internment of neoliberalism, is keenly aware he’ll need more than just rhetoric to govern and make a reality the social promises that propelled him to power. In his same acceptance speech on Sunday, Mr. Boric was candid in his assessment that the future of his campaign promises — among them access to quality health care for all and overhauling Chile’s privatized pension system — will require consensus, meeting others in the middle, and taking “short but steady steps” in the face of a closely divided national Congress.This is not the discourse of a onetime student leader who cut his teeth organizing marches for better public education and, in the process, found himself in the cross hairs of President Sebastián Piñera’s first administration nearly a decade ago. Mr. Boric’s newfound pragmatism is a promising early sign for the constitutional process, as the approach holds appeal for those voters who are neither highly progressive like him nor far-right sympathizers like Mr. Kast. But as he juggles forming a cabinet and leading a government on one hand, he will also need to blend intellectual rigor, communications skills, and a solemn urgency about future milestones in the constitutional process on the other. Nothing can be left to chance — and every person in his team, no matter their role, must make the new Constitution their true north in everything they do.Mr. Boric has no room for error in this constitutional moment. After the social protests that rocked and nearly broke Chile in October 2019, he was a key signatory to the document that set in motion the process toward Chile’s new founding charter. Mr. Boric broke from his own party, and risked his own political future, when he took that visionary step.In the presidential seat, Mr. Boric will have to walk the fine line of championing the new Constitution — which could inevitably circumscribe his own power — and not alienating that part of the electorate that doesn’t share the progressive values of the drafting committee members who themselves are still debating key provisions. These include the enumeration of fundamental rights, the role of government in protecting them, and the state’s responsibilities to Indigenous peoples, political minorities and the environment.All of these issues can be highly divisive. And they explain why Mr. Boric, during his victory speech, urged all Chileans to guard the constitutional process. The new Constitution, he said, must be one of encuentro — a meeting place where all Chileans agree on fundamental values and agree to disagree on everything else.Setting this constitutional project on a firm foundation — or to a “safe harbor,” as he put it on Tuesday — is the key to Mr. Boric’s political legacy. His greatest challenge, beyond making it past his honeymoon with voters and responding to specific demands, will be to show that he’s the president of not just the here and now, but also of Chile’s imminent next founding — the first chief executive who’ll chart the nation’s future course based on the first charter ever written by Chileans themselves.Cristian Farias (@cristianafarias) is a Chilean-American journalist who writes about law, justice, and politics.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

What do the president, vice president, former president and party leaders want in 2022? We made our best guess.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.Given that this is the last On Politics newsletter before Christmas, and of 2021 for that matter, it seems like a good time to take stock and reflect on what a wish list might be for the nation’s leaders.Today, Democrats control both the White House and Congress. But the party’s hold on power is so slim — the 50-50 split in the Senate means that Vice President Kamala Harris must break tied votes — that the entire Biden agenda is dependent on every single Democrat’s falling into line. And they aren’t all doing so.History bodes poorly for the party of the president in a first midterm election, and many Democrats are bracing for a rout in 2022. Here is what we think the nation’s leaders are looking for in the New Year:President Biden: He won the Democratic nomination after making two early bets in the primary that paid off big: that he would be seen as the most electable Democrat and that Black voters would be a loyal base. Both bets paid off. Similarly, Biden made an early two-pronged bet about the midterms: that a surging economy and a waning threat from the coronavirus would deliver victory to the Democrats.Right now, neither is happening.The omicron variant is bringing rising caseloads and fresh fears despite the widespread availability of vaccines. Meanwhile, monthly economic reports tell the story of the fastest inflation in decades, the kind of in-your-face figures that can swamp other positive economic indicators like the unemployment rate.Wish list: a stronger economy, shrinking inflation and a disappearing virus.Mitch McConnell: The Senate Republican leader has an excellent shot at returning to the majority in 2023 — after only two years in the minority. But while the overall political landscape appears rosy for the Republicans, McConnell’s party must navigate a series of primary races next spring and summer that he and his allies worry could result in extreme and unelectable nominees.Former President Donald J. Trump is an added X-factor. He has provided early endorsements for candidates who are not exactly prototypical McConnell recruits, including in North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania, where the first Trump endorsee already dropped out. These days, Trump has even taken to insulting McConnell by name.Wish list: mainstream nominees in swing states for 2022; a toning down of Trump’s attacks. (The latter is probably more pipe dream than wish.)Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi: The Senate majority leader and House speaker want mostly the same thing: to successfully negotiate passage of an enormous social policy bill, the Build Back Better Act, that would remake the social safety net and environmental policy.But there is precious little maneuvering room when you need the votes of liberal firebrands as well as the most conservative members of the caucus, like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.Schumer has literally no votes to spare, which means every Democratically aligned senator holds de facto veto power. He also needs all 50 of those senators to stay healthy and present, not just for the Build Back Better bill but also other priorities like confirming judges and an attempt to pass voting-rights legislation.Wish list: Democratic health and unity; passage of the Build Back Better Act.Joe Manchin: The Senate’s most conservative and consequential Democrat recently declared on Fox News — yes, Fox News — that he was a no on the Build Back Better Act. It sent the White House scrambling and delivered a potentially fatal setback to the party’s signature legislation.Wish list: If Democrats knew for sure, it would already be in the bill.Kevin McCarthy: The House Republican leader has already started to be cast as the next speaker — presuming his party retakes the chamber — but his ascent would depend on more than just a Republican majority in 2022. Mr. McCarthy had to abandon his speakership ambitions in 2015. To succeed in 2023, he faces what Politico recently described as a “vexing speaker math problem”: a cohort of members yearning for an alternative, including some floating Trump himself. That may be far-fetched. But it is a sign of how hard it would be for McCarthy to navigate a majority as narrow as the one Pelosi has.Wish list: winning a big enough G.O.P. majority in 2022 to lead and run the House.Kamala Harris: The history-making vice president has faced a rash of negative media coverage in her first year and discovered, as Mark Z. Barabak of The Los Angeles Times put it, that the “vice presidency is an inherently subordinate position and one that sits ripe for ridicule.” Some of her most senior communications advisers are departing, and 2022 offers the chance at a reset, especially given the uncertainty — despite the White House’s public proclamations otherwise — that Biden will seek re-election in 2024, the year he will turn 82.Wish list: greater staff stability and a more positive portrayal in the press.Donald J. Trump: The former president may be off social media, but he has not receded from the political scene. He has been issuing statements from his new PAC at Twitterlike speed, endorsing a raft of candidates and continuing to raise money online by the bucketload, all while he is under investigation in New York for his business practices.He is talking out loud about running for president again. But for a politician who wants relevance, why would he say anything else?Wish list: vengeance on the few Republicans who voted for his impeachment; continued dominance of the Republican Party.Happy Holidays from the On Politics team! We’re off next week, but we have exciting news: On Politics, which is also available as a newsletter, is relaunching in the new year with new authors, Blake Hounshell and Leah Askarinam. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]. More

Capitol rioters hit with severe sentences and sharp reprimands from judgesSome of the longest sentences have gone to rioters charged with ‘assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon’ Judges across the US have been handing down stiff sentences and hard words in recent weeks for extremist supporters of Donald Trump who took part in the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol.Since a federal judge sentenced Jacob Chansley, the US Capitol rioter nicknamed the “QAnon shaman” for his horned headdress, to 41 months in prison last month, more US judges have been delivering strict sentences to defendants charged over their roles in the attacks earlier this year.Since the riots, federal prosecutors have brought cases against 727 individuals over their involvement in the deadly riots. With hundreds facing criminal charges, Trump has come under growing scrutiny from the House select committee investigating the attacks.The longest sentence so far was handed down to a Florida man who threw a wooden plank and fire extinguisher at police officers during the riots. On 17 December, Judge Tanya Chutkan sentenced Robert Palmer to 63 months of jail time, describing the prison term as “the consequence of those actions”.According to Chutkan, individuals who attempted to “violently overthrow the government” and “stop the peaceful transition of power” would be met with “absolutely certain punishment”.At his hearing, Palmer said he was “really, really ashamed” of his behavior, adding that he was “absolutely devastated” to see the “coldness and calculation” that he used to attack Capitol police.On Tuesday, a Washington state man was sentenced to 46 months of prison time for assaulting police officers with a speaker and a metal baton during the riots. According to court documents, Devlyn Thompson helped move police shields up against a line of rioters in a tunnel, as well as hit police officers.US District Judge Royce Lamberth told Thompson, “The violence that happened that day was such a blatant disregard to the institutions of government … You’re shoving and pushing … and participating in this riot for hours.”Thompson is the second rioter, after Palmer, to be sentenced for the felony of assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon. More than 140 other rioters face the same charge.Lamberth also sentenced an 81-year-old Army veteran on the same day to three years of probation for illegally breaching the Capitol.Gary Wickersham, one of the oldest of more than 700 rioters facing charges, was sentenced to 90 days of home detention, and will also have to pay a $2,000 fine and $500 for building damage.Defense lawyers argued against any confinement, saying that Wickersham would be unable to visit his grandchildren during his “golden years”.During his hearing, Wickersham asked for “mercy” from Lamberth and explained that he went to the Capitol because “you get bored” sitting at home.“Mr Wickersham, I appreciate what you’ve done here. I think you have led the way for others to recognize that the jig is up,” said Lamberth. The 78-year-old judge also told Wickersham that he is “the first defendant I’ve had that’s older than me in quite some time”.On Tuesday, a Pennsylvania man was also sentenced over his involvement in the riots after his wife accidentally implicated him in a Facebook status. US District Judge James Boasberg sentenced Gary Edwards to one year of probation, 200 hours of community service, as well as a $2,500 fine and $500 in damage fees.In a since deleted Facebook post, Edward’s wife wrote, “Okay ladies, let me tell you what happened as my husband was there inside the Capitol,” adding, “these were people who watched their rights being taken away, their votes stolen from them, their state officials violating the constitution of their country.”According to authorities, Edwards took pictures, helped teargassed protesters and entered an office of an unidentified congressional official.“There really is no more serious and profound action democracy takes than the certifying of a lawful and fair election,” Boasberg said. “And to the extent anyone would interfere with that, particularly with force of violence, they strike at the root of democracy,” he added.That message would seem to go for organizers of the 6 January events as well as participants in the violence.On 22 November, US District Judge Royce Lamberth sentenced Capitol rioter Frank Scavo to 60 days in prison, one of the strictest sentences handed down to a misdemeanor defendant and more than four times the prosecutor’s recommendation of two weeks.Scavo, a Trump supporter from Pennsylvania and former school board official, was found guilty of chartering buses to transport approximately 200 residents from Pennsylvania to the Capitol on 6 January.TopicsUS Capitol attackSentencingnewsReuse this content More

WASHINGTON — The president needed the senator from West Virginia on his side, but he wasn’t sure he needed his vice president to get him there.It was summertime, and President Biden was under immense pressure to win the support of Senator Joe Manchin III, whose decisive vote in a 50-50 chamber made him the president’s most delicate negotiating partner. Mr. Biden had invited Mr. Manchin to the Oval Office to privately make the case for his marquee domestic policy legislation. Just before Mr. Manchin arrived, he turned to Vice President Kamala Harris.What he needed from her was not strategy or advice. He needed her to only say a quick hello, which she did before turning on her heel and leaving the room.The moment, described as an exchange of “brief pleasantries” by a senior White House official and confirmed by two other people who were briefed on it, was a vivid reminder of the complexity of the job held by Ms. Harris: While most presidents promise their vice presidents access and influence, at the end of the day, power and responsibility are not shared equally, and Mr. Biden does not always feel a need for input from Ms. Harris as he navigates some of his most important relationships.In Ms. Harris’s case, she came to the job without strong ties to key senators; one person briefed on the Oval Office meeting said it would be more productive if the discussion between Mr. Biden and Mr. Manchin remained private. It is unclear that the president had much sway on his own, either, given the senator’s decision this week to break with the White House over the domestic policy bill.But without a headlining role in some of the most critical decisions facing the White House, the vice president is caught between criticism that she is falling short and resentment among supporters who feel she is being undercut by the administration she serves. And her allies increasingly are concerned that while Mr. Biden relied on her to help him win the White House, he does not need her to govern.“I think she was an enormous help to the ticket during the campaign,” said Mark Buell, one of Ms. Harris’s earliest fund-raisers since her first race for district attorney in San Francisco. “I would like to see her employed in the same way, now that they’re implementing their objectives or goals.”The urgency surrounding her position is tied to whether the president, who at 79 is the oldest person to hold the office, will run for re-election in 2024. He told ABC News on Wednesday that he would run again if he was in good health. But questions about Ms. Harris’s readiness for the top job are starting far earlier than is usual for an administration in its first year.Ms. Harris declined requests for an interview, but White House officials said that her relationship with Mr. Biden is a partnership.“The vice president has diligently worked alongside the president coordinating with partners, allies and Democratic members of the House and Senate to advance the goals of this administration,” said Sabrina Singh, Ms. Harris’s deputy press secretary.An early front-runner whose presidential ambitions fizzled amid a dysfunctional 2020 campaign, Ms. Harris was pulled onto the Biden ticket for her policy priorities that largely mirrored his, and her ability as a Black woman to bolster support with coalitions of voters he needed to win the presidency. But according to interviews with more than two dozen White House officials, political allies, elected officials and former aides, Ms. Harris is still struggling to define herself in the Biden White House or meaningfully correct what she and her aides feel is an unfair perception that she is adrift in the job.Ms. Harris was pulled onto the Biden ticket for her policy priorities that largely mirrored his, and after her presidential campaign fizzled.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesFaced with declining approval ratings, a series of staff departures and a drumbeat of criticism from Republicans and the conservative news media, she has turned to powerful confidantes, including Hillary Clinton, to help plot a path forward.Ms. Harris has privately told her allies that the news coverage of her would be different if she were any of her 48 predecessors, all of whom were white and male. She also has confided in them about the difficulties she is facing with the intractable issues in her portfolio, such as voting rights and the root causes of migration. The White House has pushed back against scathing criticism on both fronts, for what activists say is a lack of attention.“I think it’s no secret that the different things she has been asked to take on are incredibly demanding, not always well understood publicly and take a lot of work as well as a lot of skill,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in an interview. “You have to do everything except one thing, which is take credit.”Even in the best of times, the constraints of the job often make the vice president an afterthought, and not everyone asked to serve accepts it. (“I do not propose to be buried until I am really dead and in my coffin,” Daniel Webster, a former secretary of state, said in the 1840s about declining the job.)By all accounts, Ms. Harris and President Biden have a warm relationship.Al Drago for The New York TimesBut the complexity of the issues she has been assigned, and the long-term solutions they require, should have prompted the West Wing to defend Ms. Harris more aggressively to the public, said Representative Karen Bass, Democrat of California and the former chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.“What the White House could’ve done is been clearer with the expectations of what was supposed to happen under her watch,” she said.Other Democrats say their frustrations run deeper.Ms. Harris, who spent much of her four years in the Senate running for the presidency, was at odds with Mr. Manchin after she gave a series of interviews in West Virginia that he interpreted as unwelcome infringement on his home turf. Asked about the meeting in the Oval Office over the summer, a spokeswoman for Mr. Manchin said that the senator enjoys “a friendly and respectful working relationship” with the vice president.Ms. Harris, who spent much of her four years in the Senate running for the presidency, did not come to Washington with strong ties to lawmakers, particularly the senators whose votes have been critical to Mr. Biden’s domestic agenda.Doug Mills/The New York TimesRepresentative Henry Cuellar, a moderate from Texas and one of the more prominent voices on border issues in the Democratic Party, said his experiences with Ms. Harris’s team had been disappointing. When Mr. Cuellar heard Ms. Harris was traveling to the border in June, he had his staff call her office to offer help and advice for her visit. He never received a call back.“I say this very respectfully to her: I moved on,” Mr. Cuellar said. “She was tasked with that job, it doesn’t look like she’s very interested in this, so we are going to move on to other folks that work on this issue.”In the future, Mr. Cuellar said he would go straight to the West Wing with his concerns on migration rather than the vice president’s office.Of the White House, Mr. Cuellar said, “at least they talk to you.”Ms. Harris’s aides have pointed to her work lobbying other countries and companies to join the United States in a commitment to invest about $1.2 billion to expand digital access, climate resilience and economic opportunity in Central America. But little progress has been made on curbing corruption in the region.On voting rights, Ms. Harris, who asked Mr. Biden if she could lead the administration’s efforts on the issue, has invited activists to the White House and delivered speeches. But her office has not developed detailed plans to work with lawmakers to make sure that two bills that would reform the system will pass Congress, according to a senior official in her office.Since arriving in Washington, Ms. Harris has sought the counsel of other women — including Mrs. Clinton, the first female Democratic presidential nominee — who have achieved historical political success to help her find a path.“There is a double standard; it’s sadly alive and well,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview. “A lot of what is being used to judge her, just like it was to judge me, or the women who ran in 2020, or everybody else, is really colored by that.”The two speak every few months on the phone; in November, Mrs. Clinton visited Ms. Harris in her West Wing office.Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden speaking after winning the election on Nov. 7, 2020.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMs. Bass pointed out that the double standard goes beyond Ms. Harris’s gender.“I know, and we all knew, that she would have a difficult time because anytime you’re a ‘first,’ you do,’” Ms. Bass said. “And to be the first woman vice president, to be the first Black, Asian woman, that’s a triple. So we knew it was going to be rough, but it has been relentless, and I think extremely unfair.”Before her trip to Vietnam and Singapore in August, Ms. Harris called Mrs. Clinton and several former female secretaries of state, including Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright. She has had several private conversations with Angela Merkel, who has recounted the challenges she faced as the first female chancellor of Germany.For this article, Ms. Harris’s office supplied dozens of examples of her work. She was sent to France to further repair frosty relations after an embarrassing diplomatic spat, a trip that the White House has hailed as a success. She has attended over 30 events focused on promoting the president’s domestic agenda, and her mark is on the final infrastructure bill on issues like clean water policy, broadband access and investments to combat wildfires. (Voting rights is another.)President Emmanuel Macron of France greeted Ms. Harris at the Élysée Palace in Paris in November.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThe president also gave Ms. Harris credit for her interest in relieving student loan debt as he agreed on Wednesday to extend a moratorium on federal loan repayments until May 1, a decision that was hailed by activists and Democratic lawmakers who have pleaded with the administration to do more.And yet, as the White House struggles to push through major legislation, Mr. Biden has relied on his own experience — 36 years in the Senate and eight years as vice president — to try to pull the United States out of the coronavirus pandemic and deliver on a towering set of economic promises. And Ms. Harris is facing questions about where she fits into the White House’s biggest priorities.By all accounts, she and the president have a warm relationship. In meetings, the two often play off each other, with Mr. Biden allowing her to jump in and ask questions that go beyond what he has asked for; one adviser likened it to them playing “good cop, bad cop.” Alongside the president, Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor, has quizzed economic experts and immigration officials, at times asking them to better explain their reasoning.Still, her allies are concerned that she is sometimes treated as an afterthought.When the president worked late hours on a Friday night last month to win approval from lawmakers for his bipartisan infrastructure plan, a White House statement said only that he was working with a group of policy and legislative aides.The vice president’s team, surprised her name had been omitted, informed the news media that she had also been there, placing calls to lawmakers. Asked about the exclusion, a White House spokesman said the initial statement issued to the public was based on information gathered before the vice president had arrived to join Mr. Biden and his senior staff. The White House issued a statement hours later noting Ms. Harris’s presence.In recent weeks, she has seen a string of departures from the communications office; a number of other officials departed earlier this year.The urgency surrounding Ms. Harris’s position is tied to whether the president, who at 79 is the oldest person to hold the office, will run for re-election in 2024.Tom Brenner for The New York TimesGil Duran, who worked for Ms. Harris when she was California attorney general in 2013, said she could be insulting and unprofessional. Mr. Duran said he quit after five months on the job when Ms. Harris declined to attend a briefing before a news conference, but then berated a staff member to the point of tears when she felt unprepared.“A lot of us would still be with her if she was the Kamala Harris we thought she would be,” Mr. Duran said.The White House had no comment when asked about the episode.Aware of the criticism of her, Ms. Harris has been focused on promoting her own agenda in a series of interviews and appearances.But Ms. Bass said the immediate challenge was the midterm elections next year, when Republicans could take back control of the House. But as for Ms. Harris’s presidential ambitions?“I think she is the front-runner,” Ms. Bass said. “I think she’ll be the front-runner.” More

In his nine months in office, Attorney General Merrick Garland has done a great deal to restore integrity and evenhanded enforcement of the law to an agency that was badly misused for political reasons under his predecessor. But his place in history will be assessed against the challenges that confronted him. And the overriding test that he and the rest of the government face is the threat to our democracy from people bent on destroying it.Mr. Garland’s success depends on ensuring that the rule of law endures. That means dissuading future coup plotters by holding the leaders of the insurrection fully accountable for their attempt to overthrow the government. But he cannot do so without a robust criminal investigation of those at the top, from the people who planned, assisted or funded the attempt to overturn the Electoral College vote to those who organized or encouraged the mob attack on the Capitol. To begin with, he might focus on Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and even Donald Trump — all of whom were involved, in one way or another, in the events leading up to the attack.Almost a year after the insurrection, we have yet to see any clear indicators that such an investigation is underway, raising the alarming possibility that this administration may never bring charges against those ultimately responsible for the attack.While the Justice Department has filed charges against more than 700 people who participated in the violence, limiting the investigation to these foot soldiers would be a grave mistake: As Joanne Freeman, a Yale historian, wrote this month about the insurrection, “Accountability — the belief that political power holders are responsible for their actions and that blatant violations will be addressed — is the lifeblood of democracy. Without it, there can be no trust in government, and without trust, democratic governments have little power.”The legal path to investigate the leaders of the coup attempt is clear. The criminal code prohibits inciting an insurrection or “giving aid or comfort” to those who do, as well as conspiracy to forcibly “prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” The code also makes it a crime to corruptly impede any official proceeding or deprive citizens of their constitutional right to vote.Based purely on what we know today from news reports and the steady stream of revelations coming from the House select committee investigating the attack, the attorney general has a powerful justification for a robust and forceful investigation into the former president and his inner circle. As White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows was intimately involved in the effort to overturn the election. He traveled to Georgia last December, where he apparently laid the groundwork for the phone call in which the president pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes.” Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio reportedly promoted a scheme to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject duly certified Joe Biden electors. And from their war room at the Willard Hotel, several members of the president’s inner circle hatched the legal strategy to overturn the results of the election.The president himself sat back for three hours while his chief of staff was barraged with messages from members of Congress and Fox News hosts pleading with him to have Mr. Trump call off the armed mob whose violent passion he had inflamed. That evidence, on its own, may not be enough to convict the former president, but it is certainly enough to require a criminal investigation.And yet there are no signs, at least in media reports, that the attorney general is building a case against these individuals — no interviews with top administration officials, no reports of attempts to persuade the foot soldiers to turn on the people who incited them to violence. By this point in the Russia investigation, the special counsel Robert Mueller had indicted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates and secured the cooperation of George Papadopoulos after charging him with lying to the F.B.I. The media was reporting that the special counsel’s team had conducted or scheduled interviews with Mr. Trump’s aides Stephen Miller and Mr. Bannon, as well as Attorney General Jeff Sessions.Of course, there is no way to know for sure whether Mr. Garland’s Department of Justice is investigating the leaders of the attack behind closed doors. Justice Department policy does not permit announcing investigations, absent exceptional circumstances. Mr. Garland, unlike his predecessor, plays by the book, keeping quiet about investigations until charges are filed. But the first of the rioters to plead guilty began cooperating with the Justice Department back in April. If prosecutors have been using their cooperation to investigate the top officials and operatives responsible for the siege of the Capitol and our democracy, there would likely be significant confirmation in the media by now.It is possible that the department is deferring the decision about starting a full-blown investigative effort pending further work by the House select committee. It is even conceivable that the department is waiting for the committee’s final report so that federal prosecutors can review the documents, interviews and recommendations amassed by House investigators and can consider any potential referrals for criminal prosecution.But such an approach would come at a very high cost. In the prosecution business, interviews need to happen as soon as possible after the events in question, to prevent both forgetfulness and witness coordination to conceal the truth. A comprehensive Department of Justice probe of the leadership is now more urgently needed than ever.It is also imperative that Mr. Trump be included on the list of those being investigated. The media has widely reported his role in many of the relevant events, and there is no persuasive reason to exclude him.First, he has no claim to constitutional immunity from prosecution. The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel has recognized such immunity only for sitting presidents because a criminal trial would prevent them from discharging the duties of their office. Mr. Trump no longer has those duties to discharge.Nor is exclusion of the former president remotely justified by the precedent President Gerald Ford set in pardoning Richard Nixon to help the country “heal” from Watergate. Even our proud tradition of not mimicking banana republics by allowing political winners to retaliate against losers must give way in the wake of violence perpetrated to thwart the peaceful transition of power. Refusing to at least investigate those who plot to end democracy — and who would remain engaged in efforts to do so — would be beyond foolhardy.Furthermore, the pending state and local investigations in New York and Atlanta will never be able to provide the kind of accountability the nation clearly needs. The New York case, which revolves around tax fraud, has nothing to do with the attack on our government. The Atlanta district attorney appears to be probing Mr. Trump’s now infamous call to Mr. Raffensperger. But that is just one chapter of the wrongdoing that led up to the attack on the Capitol.Significantly, even if the Atlanta district attorney is able to convict Mr. Meadows and Mr. Trump for interfering in Georgia’s election, they could still run for office again. Only convicting them for participating in an insurrection would permanently disqualify them from office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.Some have expressed pessimism that the Department of Justice would be able to convict Mr. Trump. His guilt would ultimately be for a jury to decide, and some jurors might believe he deluded himself into believing his own big lie and thus genuinely thought he was saving, rather than sabotaging, the election. But concerns about a conviction are no reason to refrain from an investigation. If anything, a federal criminal investigation could unearth even more evidence and provide a firmer basis for deciding whether to indict.To decline from the outset to investigate would be appeasement, pure and simple, and appeasing bullies and wrongdoers only encourages more of the same. Without forceful action to hold the wrongdoers to account, we will likely not resist what some retired generals see as a march to another insurrection in 2024 if Mr. Trump or another demagogue loses.Throughout his public life, Mr. Garland has been a highly principled public servant focused on doing the right thing. But only by holding the leaders of the Jan. 6 insurrection — all of them — to account can he secure the future and teach the next generation that no one is above the law. If he has not done so already, we implore the attorney general to step up to that task.Laurence H. Tribe (@tribelaw) is a university professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. Donald Ayer (@DonaldAyer6) was a U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration and deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration. Dennis Aftergut (@dennisaftergut) is a former assistant U.S. attorney.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