Elections

Joe Biden unveiled what he called a ‘once-in-a-generation’ investment in American infrastructure, promising the nation his $2tn plan would create the ‘strongest, most resilient, innovative economy in the world’. Biden’s proposal to the nation still struggling to overcome the coronavirus pandemic would rebuild 20,000 miles of roads and highways and repair the 10 most economically significant bridges in the country. Biden added other projects would confront the climate crisis, curb wealth inequality and strengthen US competitiveness

Biden unveils ‘once-in-a generation’ $2tn infrastructure investment plan
Biden’s $2tn infrastructure plan aims to ‘finally address climate crisis as a nation’
Biden’s big infrastructure bet could define his legacy – for better or worse More

Rita Hart withdrew her request to have Congress overturn one of the closest elections in American history, after politically vulnerable Democrats came under attack by Republicans over the review.WASHINGTON — Rita Hart, a Democrat who ran for Congress in 2020 in southeastern Iowa and lost by only six votes, withdrew her request on Wednesday to have the House overturn the election results, ending a bitter dispute that had threatened to become a political liability for her party.The decision cemented Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a Republican doctor, as the winner of one of the closest House contests in American history. It also spared Democratic leaders from having to weigh in on whether to throw out the results of a contested vote months after President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election fueled a partisan clash and a deadly riot at the Capitol.Republicans had signaled that they were ready to turn the dispute into a political cudgel against the majority party, and some vulnerable Democrats who had come under attack on the issue in their districts were deeply uncomfortable with the prospect of intervening.In a statement on Wednesday, Ms. Hart repeated her claim that voters had been “silenced” but acknowledged that the contest had become politically contentious.“Despite our best efforts to have every vote counted, the reality is that the toxic campaign of political disinformation to attack this constitutional review of the closest congressional contest in 100 years has effectively silenced the voices of Iowans,” she said. “It is a stain on our democracy that the truth has not prevailed, and my hope for the future is a return to decency and civility.”Ms. Hart’s campaign had identified 22 ballots that they believed were legally cast but “wrongfully” uncounted by state election officials during a districtwide recount in the fall. Rather than taking her case to court in Iowa before the election was certified, Ms. Hart opted to wait and appeal the results to the House Administration Committee, invoking a 1960s law.With Democrats in control of the chamber, they would have run the review and had the power to order their own recount and a vote by the full House on whether to unseat Ms. Miller-Meeks in favor of their own candidate, which would have added to their eight-seat majority.“I’m deeply appreciative that we’re ending this now,” Ms. Miller-Meeks said in a recorded statement on Wednesday evening. “It’s time to move forward, to unite as one group of people supporting Iowa’s Second Congressional District.”Democratic leaders had argued that they were obliged to take the appeal seriously, but Republicans mobilized, accusing them of hypocrisy and trying to steal an election that had been verified by state officials. To drive home the point, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, flew to Iowa on Wednesday before Ms. Hart’s announcement to rail against what he called an attempted political power grab intended to pad Democrats’ margin of control.“Iowans made a decision,” Mr. McCarthy said. “And it’s their voice, and they have a right to have Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who they elected, to continue to serve them.”The dispute was a particularly tricky issue for politically vulnerable House Democrats, who have become targets of a coordinated pressure campaign on the matter. Republicans’ campaign arm found that the issue polled overwhelmingly favorably for them in the competitive districts they hope to flip in 2022.The National Republican Congressional Committee specifically targeted Representative Cindy Axne, Democrat of Iowa, releasing radio ads in her district accusing her of being complicit in an attempt to overturn the will of the state’s voters.An affiliated political action committee, American Action Network, announced last week that it would “spend mid-five figures on phone calls” in swing districts held by Democrats urging voters to oppose Ms. Hart’s efforts. More

Prominent Black executives had called on companies to publicly oppose a wave of similarly restrictive voting bills that Republicans are advancing in almost every state. More

Marwan Barghouti, who is imprisoned for murder, filed his own candidates for the Palestinian elections, posing a challenge to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president.JERUSALEM — A popular Palestinian militant broke with the political party that controls the Palestinian Authority late Wednesday, escalating a power struggle and dimming the party’s hopes of retaining a monopoly on power in parliamentary elections.The militant, Marwan Barghouti, 61, was long a revered figure in Fatah, the secular party that runs the Palestinian Authority and was co-founded by Yasir Arafat, the former Palestinian leader. Though serving multiple life sentences in an Israeli prison for five counts of murder, Mr. Barghouti commands considerable respect among many party cadres and is considered a potential future candidate for Palestinian president.On Wednesday night, Fatah members acting on his behalf broke with the party, forming a separate electoral slate that will compete against Fatah in the elections in May and posing a direct challenge to Fatah’s 85-year-old leader, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority.Mr. Barghouti’s faction joined forces with another longtime protagonist of Palestinian politics, Nasser al-Kidwa, a nephew of Mr. Arafat and a former Palestinian envoy to the United Nations, who split from Fatah this year.Analysts believe their alliance could split Fatah’s vote, possibly acting as a spoiler that could benefit Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls Gaza.“This is a dramatic and major development,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a former adviser to Mr. Abbas and a senior analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a research group in Washington. “This is as big of a challenge as can be raised to Abbas’s election strategy and more generally to his control over Fatah.”Mr. Abbas, who has led the Palestinian Authority for 16 years, called for new elections in January in the hope of reasserting his democratic legitimacy and re-establishing a unified Palestinian administration. The authority manages parts of the occupied West Bank, while Hamas runs the Gaza Strip.The authority has not held elections since 2006 for its parliament, the Palestinian Legislative Council. Mr. Abbas has repeatedly postponed them, at least partly because he feared losing to Hamas, which wrested control of the Gaza Strip from the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority in 2007.Mr. Abbas hoped new elections might finally lead to reconciliation with Hamas. Instead, they have exposed a major power struggle within Fatah itself.“This is one of the most significant political developments in Fatah since Abbas became president in 2005,” said Mr. al-Omari. “Barghouti and Kidwa are a combination that can’t be easily dismissed by the Fatah leadership. They have a very deep reservoir of legitimacy in the party and they represent a major challenge to Abbas’s hold on power in it.”Mr. Barghouti ran for president of the Palestinian Authority in 2004, before withdrawing and supporting Mr. Abbas. He had been a leader of the Palestinian uprisings in late 1980s and early 2000s, and was convicted in 2004 for involvement in the killings of five Israelis.He was sentenced to five life terms and campaigned for office from his jail cell.Fatah’s supporters will now be forced to choose among three Fatah-linked factions — the official party, the Barghouti-al-Kidwa alliance, and a third splinter group led by an exiled former security chief, Muhammad Dahlan.Members of Mr. Barghouti’s alliance said they had created the new faction to revitalize Palestinian politics, which has increasingly become a one-man show centered around Mr. Abbas, who has ruled by decree for more than a decade.“The Palestinian political system can no longer only be reformed,” said Hani al-Masri, a member of the new alliance, at a news briefing on Wednesday night. “It needs deep change.”A Fatah official dismissed the group as “turncoats.”“Even with our prophet Mohammed, there were turncoats,” said Jibril Rajoub, the secretary-general of the Fatah Central Committee, at a separate press briefing outside in Ramallah, West Bank. “Fatah is strong and sticking together.”Mr. Abbas has canceled elections in the past, and some believe he may seek to do so again in the coming weeks.But at this point, a cancellation would be “very expensive, politically,” said Ghassan Khatib, a Ramallah-based political analyst and a former minister under Mr. Abbas. “There is a high political price for that.”Mr. Abbas’s best hope would be for the Israeli authorities to intervene in the elections, Mr. Khatib said. Hamas has already accused Israel of arresting some of its leaders and warning them not to participate in the election, which Israel denies. And Palestinian officials say that the Israeli government has yet to respond to a request to allow voting in East Jerusalem.This dynamic that could give Mr. Abbas a pretext to cancel the vote.Mr. Abbas “needs an excuse that can justify such a decision,” Mr. Khatib said. More

Two US Capitol Police officers have filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump, accusing him of inciting the deadly 6 January insurrection and saying he was responsible for physical and emotional injuries they suffered as a result.James Blassingame, a 17-year veteran of the force, and Sidney Hemby, an 11-year veteran, filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in US district court for the District of Columbia seeking damages of at least $75,000 each.“This is a complaint for damages by US Capitol Police officers for physical and emotional injuries caused by the defendant Donald Trump’s wrongful conduct inciting a riot on January 6, 2021, by his followers trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election,” the lawsuit said.Trump has denied responsibility for the rioting, which left five people dead, including a police officer. His office did not immediately return a call for comment on the lawsuit.Before the January insurrection occurred, Trump encouraged his supporters to “fight like hell” and march to the US Capitol building during a rally in Washington held on the same day. The former president was impeached, for a historic second time in his presidency, over his incitement of the insurrection – but was acquitted by the Senate in a 57 to 43 vote.The lawsuit cites the former Republican president’s conduct before and beyond the November presidential election, which Joe Biden won, including comments in speeches, on Twitter and during presidential debates.It said Trump stoked violence throughout the 2020 presidential campaign and escalated his false assertion that the election was rigged after the election was called for Biden.“During his 2016 campaign, and throughout his presidency, Trump had threatened violence towards his opponents, encouraged his followers to commit acts of violence, and condoned acts of violence by his followers, including white supremacists and far rightwing hate groups,” it said.The lawsuit also cited Trump’s encouragement to supporters to come to the Capitol on 6 January and so-called “Stop The Steal” campaign in the months after the election, including a tweet on 19 December: “Big protest on DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.“The lawsuit states: “Trump’s December 19th tweet about the January 6th rally was taken by many of his supporters as a literal call to arms.”Both officers suffered physical injuries and emotional injuries during the insurrection, according to the complaint. Hemby suffered neck and back injuries and was sprayed with chemicals, and remains in physical therapy, according to the complaint. Blassingame also suffered head and back injuries during the attack and has since experienced depression.“He is haunted by the memory of being attacked, and of the sensory impacts – the sights, sounds, smells and even tastes of the attack remain close to the surface,” the complaint states. “He experiences guilt of being unable to help his colleagues who were simultaneously being attacked; and of surviving where other colleagues did not.”The lawsuit follows other civil lawsuits filed by a handful of Democrats.Eric Swalwell, Democratic congressman and a former impeachment manager in Trump’s second trial, sued over Trump’s conduct during the insurrection. Swalwell’s lawsuit also targets the former president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and his son, Donald Trump Jr, as well as extremist groups associated with the riot, alleging violations of the anti-terrorism act.The former president and members of his circle have also been sued by the Democrat Bennie Thompson over alleged violations of a post-civil war statute designed against white supremacist violence by the Ku Klux Klan. The suit is being backed by the civil rights advocacy group the NAACP. More

Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherRepublican-led legislatures are racing to restrict voting rights, in a broad political effort that began in the state of Georgia. To many Democrats, it’s no coincidence that Georgia — once a Republican stronghold — has just elected its first Black senator: Raphael Warnock. Today, we speak to the senator about his path from pastorship to politics, the fight over voting rights and his faith that the old political order is fading away.On today’s episodeAstead W. Herndon, a national political reporter for The New York Times.Mr. Warnock was previously a pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.Getty ImagesBackground readingGeorgia Republicans passed a sweeping law to restrict voting access in the state, making it the first major battleground to overhaul its election system since the turmoil of the 2020 presidential contest.Last year, Mr. Warnock ran for office in a state where people in predominantly Black neighborhoods waited in disproportionately long lines. Several Black leaders have said Georgia’s new law clearly puts a target on Black and brown voters.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Astead W. Herndon contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Theo Balcomb, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Alix Spiegel, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano and Soraya Shockley.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Laura Kim, Erica Futterman and Shreeya Sinha. More

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement may help Mr. Lander solidify his support among the city’s progressive voters.There is little question that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez holds extraordinary influence on New York City’s political landscape, with her endorsement carrying outsize weight, especially with the city’s economic future and political direction in flux.So far, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has not weighed in on this year’s mayoral race. But she has decided to lend her name to support a Democratic candidate in a different citywide contest: Brad Lander, a councilman from Brooklyn who is running for comptroller.The endorsement may solidify the progressive lane for Mr. Lander, whose path to victory in the June 22 primary became more difficult after the last-minute entrance of the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson. “Brad understands that for government to be able to deliver the bold transformative change we need, it has to work for and with the people,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez told The New York Times in a statement released on Tuesday.The endorsement is a further sign that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez intends to use her influence to shape elections in New York City, mirroring a trend that has already been seen across the country.She has endorsed several women running for Congress from Nebraska to California, but also put her name behind Tiffany Cabán, who almost scored an upset victory in the Queens district attorney’s race. She recently endorsed Jumaane D. Williams, the popular public advocate in New York City, who is expected to cruise to re-election.Mr. Williams, whom Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed multiple times, said a nod from her is “a signal to what I’m calling the bold left, the bold progressives.”He added: “It means people who are willing to take some political risk against what is normally established.”Mr. Williams has yet to endorse in the comptroller contest.Mr. Lander, a co-founder of the City Council’s progressive caucus, has said that he wants to use the office of comptroller to help New York City become more equitable as it recovers from the financial damage caused by the pandemic. He has pledged to use the powers of the office, including being the fiduciary over $248 billion in pension money, to fight climate change.Mr. Lander has won endorsements from unions, progressive groups and politicians such as Representative Jamaal Bowman and Ms. Cabán and was recently endorsed by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.Brad Lander, a Brooklyn councilman, has also been endorsed by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesBut to certain New York Democrats, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s backing may mean more than any of the others.“She models better than anyone else in politics the transformative potential in making government work for everyone,” Mr. Lander said. “She is the most popular politician in New York City. Everyone wants her on their team.”Other leading candidates running for comptroller are Brian Benjamin, a state senator representing Harlem and the Upper West Side; Zach Iscol, a nonprofit entrepreneur and former Marine who dropped out of the mayor’s race; David Weprin, a state assemblyman from Queens; Kevin Parker, a state senator from Brooklyn; and Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, a former CNBC anchor who ran in a congressional primary against Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.On Monday, Mr. Johnson received the endorsement of Ruben Diaz Jr., the former mayoral candidate and outgoing borough president of the Bronx.The value of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement for Mr. Lander is not so much about fund-raising: He is already close to raising the maximum allowed to be spent in the primary under campaign finance rules. Instead, his campaign is looking to tap into her network of supporters and her facility with platforms like Instagram Live, Twitter and Twitch to gather votes and to explain ranked-choice voting and make it clear why the office of comptroller is critical to the city’s future.In her statement endorsing Mr. Lander, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez cited his “track record of working in deep partnership with communities to ensure no one is left behind,” which is also an issue that several mayoral candidates have tried to claim as their own.Mr. Lander did not know if Ms. Ocasio-Cortez planned to get involved in the mayor’s race, but he said he came away from his conversations with her convinced that “she is starting to look at her role in this spring’s elections more holistically.”Bruce Gyory, a Democratic strategist who is not working for any candidate in the race, said Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement in the comptroller’s race could be a signal that she could endorse someone for mayor. “If that foreshadowing is correct and she does help make a winner in both the mayor’s race and the comptroller’s race, then she will be even more formidable,” he said. More

And it isn’t all about the filibuster.Every 10 years, after the collection of census data, states are required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional districts to ensure that they remain equal in population.The process — as readers of this newspaper know — is vulnerable to gerrymandering, in which districts are redrawn to give favored parties, office holders or constituencies an advantage in elections.At the moment, Democrats control the House by a slim 219-211 majority, with five seats vacant. The loss of just five seats in 2022 would flip control to the Republican Party, which would then be empowered to block President Biden’s agenda.Both geographically and politically, the deck is stacked against Democrats, forcing the party and its leader to adjust election strategies every 10 years.This time around, states with Republican governors and Republican legislative majorities contain more than twice as many congressional districts as states under full Democratic control.Further compounding Democratic difficulties, Jowei Chen and Jonathan Rodden, political scientists at the University of Michigan and Stanford, write in the 2013 paper “Unintentional Gerrymandering”:In many urbanized states, Democrats are highly clustered in dense central city areas, while Republicans are scattered more evenly through the suburban, exurban, and rural periphery.As a result, according to Chen and Rodden, “when districting plans are completed, Democrats tend to be inefficiently packed in homogeneous districts.”Despite winning the White House and the Senate, Democrats suffered a major setback in 2020 as their plans to wrest control of one or both branches of key state legislatures fell short. Democrats failed to take control of the statehouses in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Iowa and Texas, and of both branches in North Carolina — all states with large congressional delegations.Still, there is hope.First and foremost, Democrats have become competitive in many of the high-growth areas that benefit from redistricting; they have done so by pulling ahead of Republicans among voters with college degrees, who make up a disproportionate share of these prosperous communities.In addition, a total of 18 states have switched from partisan to independent redistricting. And finally, Republican attempts at voter suppression have proven at times to backfire, prompting higher turnout among minorities and increased Democratic Party mobilization.“One might be tempted to think that seat gains largely driven by economic prosperity favor Republicans while seat losses are found in impoverished and declining Democratic areas,” SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor and James G. Gimpel, political scientists at the University of Maryland, write in their Feb. 21 article “Reapportioning the U.S. Congress: The shifting geography of political influence.”In practice, Gaynor and Gimpel argue, Democrats have “adapted most impressively to compete and win in the newly emergent districts in Florida and the Far West,” narrowly eking out victories for control of Congress.As states await census data to guide redistricting, there is one wild card in the mix: the possible enactment of voting rights reform, HR 1 or the For the People Act of 2021 — the measure that passed the House on March 3 on a 220-210 vote, but faces the threat of a filibuster in the Senate.I asked Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard whose specialties include election law, about the bill. He emailed me to say thatThe voting legislation currently before Congress would revolutionize the redistricting process if it passed. It would require all states to use truly independent commissions, effective immediately. Separate from this structural reform, the bill would also include quantitative partisan bias thresholds that maps wouldn’t be allowed to exceed. These thresholds would have real teeth.At the same time, Stephanopoulos continued, the legislation would put the brakes on voter suppression laws:The bill affirmatively requires a series of participation-enhancing policies for congressional elections: automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, at least 15 days of early voting, expanded mail-in voting, restrictions on voter purges, restrictions on photo ID requirements, etc.David Lublin, a political scientist at American University, similarly described the transformative potential of HR1 in an email:The proposed legislation before Congress could have a huge effect in two ways. First, by putting in place a new trigger for the Voting Rights Act, Section 5 would become operative again and the Biden administration could use it to block discriminatory maps as well as an array of laws designed to suppress voting.Second, Lublin continued, by preventingmembers of either party from using district boundaries to entrench their advantage through redistricting. Even though Republicans would undoubtedly benefit from the geographic concentration of Democrats and racial redistricting, it would prevent egregious abuses.In the case of Republican voter suppression laws, Nicholas Valentino and Fabian G. Neuner, political scientists at Michigan and Arizona State Universities, found in their February 2016 paper “Why the Sky Didn’t Fall: Mobilizing Anger in Reaction to Voter ID Laws” thatSurprisingly, empirical evidence for significant demobilization, either in the aggregate or among Democrats specifically, has thus far failed to materialize. We suspect strong emotional reactions to the public debate about these laws may mobilize Democrats, counterbalancing the disenfranchising effect.In an email, Neuner cautioned that “our research is about short-term evocations of anger that may spur mobilization and it is not clear how long such anger can be sustained.”Black voters have proven exceptionally determined in the face of electoral adversity, including Supreme Court rulings weakening the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and voter suppression legislation.Kyle Raze, a graduate student in economics at the University of Oregon, studied turnout patterns in the wake of the 2013 Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County v. Holder. The court declared Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to get preclearance from the Justice Department for any change in election law, unconstitutional. Shelby opened the door to the enactment of voter suppression measures.Raze, in his February 2021 paper, “Voting Rights and the Resilience of Black Turnout,” writes thatDespite well-founded fears to the contrary, the Shelby decision does not appear to have widened the turnout gap between Black and White voters in previously covered states.Instead, Raze foundan accumulating body of evidence that suggests that voters mobilize in response to increases in the cost of voting when those increases are perceived as threats to the franchise.While 2020 census data is not yet complete, it will determine the specific allocation of House seats to each state. Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, provided The Times with estimates of the number of House seats over which each party will exercise redistricting control. Levitt wrote in an email:It looks like Democrats will control 73 congressional seats this cycle, Republicans will control 188, and 167 will be under split partisan control, plus 7 in states with one district.These numbers represent a considerable improvement for Democrats compared with a decade ago, Levitt observes, when the party “controlled 44 seats, with Republicans controlling 213.”The Gaynor-Gimpel article I discussed earlier describes the shape of old and new districts in past decennial redistricting. In the two most recent reapportionments, based on the 2000 and 2010 census results, clear patterns emerge. More