Elections

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOn PoliticsThe Brewing Voting Rights ClashRepublicans are reuniting — and re-energized — as they pursue a longstanding political goal.March 2, 2021, 6:47 p.m. ETCredit…Antonio de LucaThe 2020 election was a wild one. And under the strange circumstances, Republicans wound up turning against one another on an issue that tends to unite them: voting access and elections.Some Republican officials fought to restrict access to the ballot amid the pandemic, while others endorsed mail-in voting and other methods to make voting easier. After the election, some Republicans backed President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud, while a number of state-level officials — such as Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and his secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — defended the integrity of their own election systems.But now that the election is behind us, Republicans are reuniting on this issue, leading efforts around the country to restrict access to the vote. And in many cases they’re weaponizing Trump’s fabrications from 2020 to justify doing it. In Georgia this week, the Republican-led state legislature is moving forward with a bill to restrict absentee voting and limit early voting on weekends.The G.O.P. has one big advantage here: a newly cemented 6-to-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, which is broadly seen as receptive to restrictions on voting, even if it didn’t support Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. The justices heard oral arguments today in a challenge to the Voting Rights Act stemming from policies in Arizona during the 2020 election, and the court appeared sympathetic to the Republican plaintiffs’ arguments.Democrats, meanwhile, are equally unified in their efforts to preserve widespread voting access, particularly in Black and brown communities that are most heavily targeted by restrictive voting laws. The House today held a debate on the For the People Act, known as H.R. 1, which among other things would create a basic bill of rights for voting access. The legislation is expected to pass the chamber tomorrow along party lines.To put this all in perspective, I called Wendy Weiser, who studies these issues as the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U.’s law school. She took time out of a whirlwind news day on the voting front to answer a few questions for On Politics. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.Hi, Wendy. Let’s begin with the news from Georgia. What is the significance of the legislation making its way through the state legislature there, and is it part of a trend?The bill in Georgia is one of the most significant and restrictive voter suppression bills in the country, but it is not unique right now. We’ve been tracking the legislation to restrict and also to expand voting access across the country for over a decade, and right now we have well over 250 bills pending in 43 states across the county that would restrict access to voting. That is seven times the number of restrictive voting bills we saw at the same time last year. So it is a dramatic spike in the push to restrict access to voting.So we’ve seen this is a growing movement. It’s not brand-new this year, it wasn’t invented by Donald Trump, but it was certainly supercharged by his regressive attack on our voting systems. We’re seeing its impact in Georgia, but also across the country.Republicans have been talking about voter fraud, and attempting to limit access to the ballot, for many years. How much is the current surge in restrictive voting legislation related to Donald Trump and the conspiracy theories he pushed last year, during and after the campaign?Many of these bills are fueled by the same rhetoric and grievances that were driving the challenges to the 2020 election. In addition to expressly referencing the big lie about widespread voter fraud and that Trump actually won the election, they’re targeting the methods of voting that the Trump campaign was complaining about. So, for example, the single biggest subject of regressive voter legislation in this session — roughly half the bills — is mail voting.That is new this year. We’ve been tracking efforts to restrict access to voting for a very long time, and absentee voting has not been the subject of legislative attack before. It was the politicization of that issue in the 2020 election, principally by the Trump campaign and allies, that I think helped elevate that issue to a grievance level that would cause it to be the subject of legislative attack.The Supreme Court today heard oral arguments in a challenge to the Voting Rights Act, brought by the attorney general of Arizona. What is at stake in that case?On a narrow level, the case is challenging two provisions of an Arizona law that made it harder for voters of color in Arizona to participate in the election process, but the case’s significance is much broader. The plaintiffs and the Republican National Committee are actually arguing to dramatically scale back the strength of the nationwide protections against voting discrimination in the federal Voting Rights Act.About eight years ago, the Supreme Court gutted the most powerful provision of the Voting Rights Act, the preclearance provision, which applied to states with a history of discrimination. That led to disastrous outcomes across the country, but it did not invalidate the nationwide protections against discrimination in voting, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. So this is the next shoe, which I hope will not drop.At a time when voting rights in America are under significant attack, more than they have been in decades — an attack through racially targeted efforts to restrict access to voting — we need the protections of the Voting Rights Act more than ever. So this is absolutely the wrong direction to go in.With the Voting Rights Act in peril, Democrats in Congress are moving forward with legislation to ensure people’s access to the ballot. What are their proposals?There are two major pieces of voting rights legislation that are moving through Congress. The one that was not voted on today is called the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and it would restore the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act, which requires a federal review of changes in certain states to see if they’re discriminatory. It would also make other improvements to the Voting Rights Act to make it more effective.The other bill, which was voted on today, is called the For the People Act, H.R. 1. It would create a baseline level of voter access rules that every American could rely on for federal elections. This one would address almost comprehensively the attacks on voting rights that we’re seeing in state legislatures across the country. So, for example, in many states we’re seeing attempts to eliminate no-excuse absentee voting. H.R. 1 would require all states to offer no-excuse absentee voting. Every state would then offer that best practice of voting access, and it would no longer be manipulated, election by election, by state legislators to target voters they don’t like.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. 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] reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storySupreme Court Seems Ready to Sustain Arizona Voting LimitsThe court also signaled that it could tighten the standards for using the Voting Rights Act to challenge all kinds of voting restrictions.Election workers counting ballots in Phoenix in November. The case before the Supreme Court could determine the fate of scores if not hundreds of laws addressing election rules in the coming years.Credit…Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesMarch 2, 2021Updated 6:35 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The Supreme Court seemed ready on Tuesday to uphold two election restrictions in Arizona and to make it harder to challenge all sorts of limits on voting around the nation.In its most important voting rights case in almost a decade, the court for the first time considered how a crucial part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 applies to voting restrictions that have a disproportionate impact on members of minority groups. The court heard the case as disputes over voting rights have again become a flash point in American politics.The immediate question for the justices was whether two Arizona measures ran afoul of the 1965 law. One of the measures requires election officials to discard ballots cast at the wrong precinct. The other makes it a crime for campaign workers, community activists and most other people to collect ballots for delivery to polling places, a practice critics call “ballot harvesting.”Several members of the court’s conservative majority said the restrictions were sensible, commonplace and at least partly endorsed by a bipartisan consensus reflected in a 2005 report signed by former President Jimmy Carter and James A. Baker III, who served as secretary of state under President George Bush.The Biden administration, too, told the justices in an unusual letter two weeks ago that the Arizona measures appeared to be lawful. But the letter disavowed the Trump administration’s position that the relevant section of the Voting Rights Act should not be widely used to keep states from enacting more restrictive voting procedures.Much of the argument on Tuesday centered on that larger issue in the case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, No. 19-1257, of what standard courts should apply to challenges under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The court’s answer to that question could determine the fate of scores if not hundreds of laws addressing election rules in the coming years.As Republican-controlled state legislatures increasingly seek to impose restrictive new voting rules, Democrats and civil rights groups are turning to the courts to argue that Republicans are trying to suppress the vote, thwart the will of the majority and deny equal access to minority voters and others who have been underrepresented at the polls.“More voting restrictions have been enacted over the last decade than at any point since the end of Jim Crow,” Bruce V. Spiva, a lawyer for the Democratic National Committee, which is challenging the two Arizona measures, told the justices. “The last three months have seen an even greater uptick in proposed voting restrictions, many aimed squarely at the minority groups whose participation Congress intended to protect.”Though the Voting Rights Act seeks to protect minority voting rights, as a practical matter litigation under it tends to proceed on partisan lines. When Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked a lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party why his client cared about whether votes cast at the wrong precinct should be counted, he gave a candid answer.“Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” said the lawyer, Michael A. Carvin. “Politics is a zero-sum game, and every extra vote they get through unlawful interpretations of Section 2 hurts us.”Jessica R. Amunson, a lawyer for Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, a Democrat, said electoral contests should not turn on voting procedures.“Candidates and parties should be trying to win over voters on the basis of their ideas,” Ms. Amunson said, “not trying to remove voters from the electorate by imposing unjustified and discriminatory burdens.”Section 2 took on additional prominence after the Supreme Court in 2013 effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, its Section 5, which required prior federal approval of changes to voting procedures in parts of the country with a history of racial and other discrimination.Until then, Section 2, which allows after-the-fact challenges, had mostly been used in redistricting cases, where the question was whether voting maps had unlawfully diluted minority voting power. Its role in addressing the denial of the right to vote itself has been subject to much less attention.Over two hours of arguments by telephone, the justices struggled to identify a standard that would allow courts to distinguish lawful restrictions from improper ones.The court did not seem receptive to a rigorous test proposed by Mr. Carvin, the lawyer for the Arizona Republican Party, who said that ordinary election regulations are not subject to challenges under Section 2. Most justices appeared to accept that regulations that place substantial burdens on minority voters could run afoul of the law.But there was some dispute about what counted as substantial and what justifications states could offer for their restrictions. The court’s more conservative members seemed inclined to require significant disparities unconnected to socioeconomic conditions and to accept the need to combat even potential election fraud as a sufficient reason to impose restrictions on voting.Justice Elena Kagan tested the limits of Mr. Carvin’s argument, asking whether much longer lines at polling places in minority neighborhoods could be challenged under the law. He said yes. He gave the same answer when asked about locating all polling places at country clubs far from minority neighborhoods.But he said cutting back on Sunday voting, even if heavily relied on by Black voters, was lawful, as was restricting voting to business hours on Election Day.Mark Brnovich, Arizona’s attorney general, a Republican, proposed a vaguer standard, saying that the disparate effect on minority voters must be substantial and caused by the challenged practice rather than some other factor.Asked by Justice Kagan whether the four hypothetical restrictions she had posed to Mr. Carvin would survive under that test, Mr. Brnovich did not give a direct answer.He did say that the number of ballots disqualified for having been cast in the wrong district was very small and that Arizona’s overall election system makes it easy to vote.Ms. Amunson, the lawyer for Arizona’s secretary of state, urged the justices to strike down the challenged restrictions.“Arizona already has a law prohibiting fraudulent ballot collection,” she said by way of example. “What this law does is it criminalizes neighbors helping neighbors deliver ballots with up to two years in jail.”Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked her a series of hypothetical questions about early voting, ballot forms and deadlines for mailed ballots. Ms. Amunson gave a general answer.“You have to take a functional view of the political process and look to a holistic view of how it is actually affecting the voter on the ground,” she said.Justice Alito appeared unsatisfied. “Well, those are a lot of words,” he said. “I really don’t understand what they mean.”Several justices suggested that most of the standards proposed by the lawyers before them were quite similar. “The longer this argument goes on,” Justice Kagan said, “the less clear I am as to how the parties’ standards differ.”Justice Stephen G. Breyer echoed the point. “Lots of the parties on both sides are pretty close on the standards,” he said.Justices Kagan and Breyer, both members of the court’s liberal wing, may have been playing defense, hoping the court’s decision, expected by July, would leave Section 2 more or less unscathed.But Justice Alito said he was wary of making “every voting rule vulnerable to attack under Section 2.”“People who are poor and less well educated on balance probably will find it more difficult to comply with just about every voting rule than do people who are more affluent and have had the benefit of more education,” he said.Justice Barrett appeared to agree. “All election rules,” she said, “are going to make it easier for some to vote than others.”But Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said he could think of two workable standards for applying the law. “One factor would be if you’re changing to a new rule that puts minorities in a worse position than they were under the old rule,” he said, “and a second factor would be whether a rule is commonplace in other states that do not have a similar history of racial discrimination.”Last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled that both Arizona restrictions violated Section 2 because they disproportionately disadvantaged minority voters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to ReadNew Books to Watch For This Month25 Book Review GreatsNew in PaperbackListen: The Book Review PodcastAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBooks of The TimesA Closely Reported Look at Joe Biden’s ‘Lucky’ Path to the White HouseMarch 2, 2021, 11:40 a.m. ETCredit….AmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.About midway through “Lucky,” the journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes describe the concerns that some Democrats had last summer about Joe Biden, by then the party’s presidential nominee: How could they hope to win with “an agenda and a person so bland it made cardboard taste flavorful”?Considering that this agenda and person constitute a driving narrative force in “Lucky,” the line reads like a coded admission that the authors — tasked with parsing the flavor of cardboard over the course of more than 400 pages — had their work cut out for them.Allen and Parnes have published two previous books, both of them about Hillary Clinton, including the best-selling “Shattered,” which recounted how the Clinton campaign bungled what should have been a winnable election against Donald Trump in 2016 by succumbing to incompetence and infighting.Jonathan AllenCredit…Stuart Hovell“Shattered” arrived in the spring of 2017, when bewildered Democrats were still asking what happened. “Lucky” arrives at a completely different moment. A string of tell-alls about Trump’s White House have recounted a level of backbiting and chaos that made the inner workings of the Clinton campaign look like a Swiss timepiece by comparison. Within the last year alone, a pandemic has killed more than 500,000 Americans and the White House demanded crackdowns on protests against police brutality. Less than two months have passed since Trump supporters invaded the Capitol. I’m guessing that a number of readers felt so inundated by the unrelenting news cycle of the Trump era that their receptors for campaign-trail intrigues have been worn down to calloused nubs.It’s understandable that Allen and Parnes would do everything they could to amp up the drama — not an easy feat, given the cardboard. With their new book, they promise to explain “how Joe Biden barely won the presidency.” Biden’s margin of victory — 7 million votes, or 4.5 percent — was considerable by modern American standards. But the quirks of the American system, including the gauntlet of the primaries and the peculiarities of the Electoral College, meant that there were a number of moments when Biden’s chances were nearly sunk — moments that “Lucky” recounts in full.The book reminds us that back in April 2019, when Biden announced he was running, he wasn’t an obvious favorite in a crowded field of Democratic aspirants. (“Lucky” reports that Clinton was so unimpressed with everyone’s prospects that she briefly considered running … again.) Biden had already sought and failed to secure the nomination twice, in 1988 and 2008. He was 76 years old — not even a boomer like Trump, previously the oldest president sworn into a first term, but a member of the Silent Generation. Biden had always rambled and repeated himself, and during the early days of his campaign he was rambling and repeating himself more than ever.Although he brandished his record as a consensus-builder in the Senate, he had a habit of hurling insults at potential voters. At one town hall, as if he were intent on reminding the audience of both his age and his temper, Biden called a young woman “a lying dog-faced pony soldier.”But Joe Biden was always a favorite of Joe Biden. One of the themes in this book is how unwaveringly confident he was in his chances — “a great strength and a weakness that could leave him sounding a little self-delusional,” Allen and Parnes write. (Barack Obama, in his recent memoir, describes him as someone who “wasn’t always self-aware.”) Biden believed he could win even during the dark days of the early Democratic primaries more than a year ago, when his campaign was running out of money and he placed abysmally in Iowa and New Hampshire before coming in a distant second to Bernie Sanders in Nevada.Amie ParnesCredit…Chip SomodevillaSure, Biden realized that some progressive voters might take issue with parts of his long Senate record, including his adamant opposition to busing in the 1970s, his treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings and his authorship of the 1994 crime bill. But Biden was banking on his likability, Allen and Parnes say. That, and the hunch that an American populace exhausted by an erratic Trump just wanted someone experienced, steady and familiar at the wheel.He also benefited from a Democratic establishment that was so averse to Sanders that it closed ranks around Biden as other centrist contenders — Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar — dropped out of the race. Biden, with his “bland message and blank agenda,” was “not what most Democratic voters had envisioned as a Trumpslayer,” Allen and Parnes write. But a hard-won endorsement from Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, a central figure in the Congressional Black Caucus, helped turn Biden’s fortunes around. “Lucky” portrays the Biden campaign as stuck in traffic until Super Tuesday, when it started hitting a string of green lights.This luck persisted through the pandemic, which revealed Biden’s ability to empathize with a grieving public while showcasing President Trump’s determination to do the opposite. As Anita Dunn, an adviser to the Biden campaign, put it: “Covid is the best thing that ever happened to him.”It’s a ghoulish sentiment, the kind of candid cynicism that one expects from a political ticktock like this. But it also highlights something else. Amid all the fund-raising, the polling, the minute movements of the horse race enumerated in this book, people were dying. Americans were suffering. California was burning. The world, in other words, was happening — all while enormous political energy and billions of dollars got sucked into the maw of endless campaigning.A future researcher will undoubtedly find it useful to have a page and a half of exacting detail about what everyone was thinking when a fly landed on Mike Pence’s head during the vice-presidential debate, or to learn how Biden’s people insisted on watering down one of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s jokes during the Democratic convention. Given how the American political system currently works, the granular politicking ably recounted in “Lucky” is a necessity — but what becomes unintentionally clear is how wasteful so much of it is.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Harassment Claims Against CuomoWhat We KnowCuomo’s ApologySecond AccusationThird AccusationMayoral Candidates ReactAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCuomo Could Be Compelled to Testify in Sexual-Harassment InquiryThe attorney general’s investigation into the governor will give her far-ranging subpoena powers to request documents and call witnesses.Gov. Andrew Cuomo is navigating one of the most perilous periods of his more than 10 years in office.Credit…Patrick Dodson for The New York TimesMarch 2, 2021Updated 8:18 a.m. ETWhen a team of outside investigators begins to examine sexual harassment allegations lodged against Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, its scope may be far broader than first anticipated.The team, which will be hired by Letitia James, the New York State attorney general, will have far-reaching subpoena powers to request troves of documents and compel witnesses, including the governor, to testify under oath.The independent inquiry may also scrutinize not just the sexual harassment accusations made by two former aides last week, but potential claims from other women as well.In the end, which is likely to be months from now, the investigators will be required to produce a final report, the results of which could be politically devastating for Mr. Cuomo.“The end game is that a report that found him culpable would bring pressure to bear on him personally, on his regime, on the Legislature to act,” said Nina Pirrotti, a lawyer who specializes in employment law and sexual harassment cases. “But I don’t exactly know how it will play out.”Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, is navigating one of the most precarious and uncertain periods of his more than 10 years in office, just months after he had emerged as a national leader early in the coronavirus pandemic.The governor is facing a federal probe into his administration’s decision to withhold data on nursing home deaths, a scandal that has led to calls for impeachment and has spurred state legislators to seriously consider curbing the emergency powers they granted him at the beginning of the pandemic.But the harassment accusations could be even more damaging for a governor who has prided himself on advancing protections for women in the workplace.The first accusation came from Lindsey Boylan, who used to work for his administration. Ms. Boylan published an essay on Wednesday that detailed a series of unsettling encounters she said she had with Mr. Cuomo, including an instance when she said he gave her an unsolicited kiss on the lips.Then, on Saturday, The New York Times published an article about Charlotte Bennett, a 25-year-old former entry-level staffer in the governor’s office who accused him of asking invasive questions, including whether she was monogamous and had sex with older men. She said she interpreted the remarks as sexual advances.Mr. Cuomo’s office denied Ms. Boylan’s allegations at the time. On Sunday, following Ms. Bennett’s account, Mr. Cuomo issued a statement in which he denied propositioning or touching anyone inappropriately, but apologized for workplace comments that he said “have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation.”On Monday, following a public back-and-forth over who would conduct the investigation, Ms. James received the governor’s authorization to open an inquiry under a section of state law that allows her office to “inquire into matters concerning the public peace, public safety and public justice.”The claims from both women are now at the center of that investigation, the contours of which are still materializing but could prod deeply into the inner workings of the governor’s office and how sexual misconduct allegations are handled there.Mr. Cuomo’s office has indicated that the governor’s office would “voluntarily cooperate fully” and that it had instructed all state employees to do so as well.Investigators will ultimately produce a public report, which is bound to include a summary and analysis of their findings, maybe even recommendations. Experts said the civil inquiry could look at whether Mr. Cuomo violated the state’s human rights laws and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, a federal law that protects against harassment because of a person’s sex.“These women do have the option, potentially, to bring claims against their employer, the State of New York, for Governor Cuomo’s conduct,” Ms. Pirrotti said, adding that the facts in the report could help victims recover economic and emotional distress damages.As investigators corroborate details, she said the inquiry could “widen and widen” to include other sexual harassment claims that might surface during the investigation. On Monday, a third woman, Anna Ruch, came forward and said that she was “confused and shocked and embarrassed” when Mr. Cuomo asked to kiss her at a wedding reception.In a referral letter on Monday to the attorney general, Beth Garvey, a special counsel and senior adviser to the governor, said the inquiry would broadly look into “allegations of and circumstances surrounding sexual harassment claims made against the governor.”Ms. James, a Democrat, said her office would oversee “a rigorous and independent investigation” but would hire a law firm to spearhead it, a move that many saw as an attempt to avoid any appearance that politics would influence the investigation. The governor endorsed Ms. James’s run for attorney general in 2018, and she has been rumored as a potential candidate to challenge Mr. Cuomo in a primary next year, when he would be up for re-election.Ms. James had not selected an independent law firm as of Monday.Letitia James, the state attorney general, has said her office will hire a law firm to spearhead the investigation.Credit…Mary Altaffer/Associated PressLawyers from the firm would be deputized and will have the power to subpoena witnesses, as well as any documents, records, papers and books relevant to the investigation. Failure to comply with a subpoena could result in a misdemeanor.Kevin Mintzer, a Manhattan-based lawyer who has represented numerous women in sexual harassment cases, said that while there was no single way to conduct an investigation like the one Mr. Cuomo will face, he would expect it to proceed along the same lines used by those run by plaintiffs’ lawyers like himself and by companies undertaking internal inquiries.First, Mr. Mintzer said, investigators are likely to assemble any relevant documents, including emails and text messages that bear not only the accusations brought by Ms. Boylan and Ms. Bennett, but also on those made by any other potential accusers. Then, Mr. Mintzer said, witness interviews could follow, as investigators decide who they want to speak with formally and under oath.At some point, the focus of the probe will turn directly to Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Mintzer said, though that is likely to happen only once investigators are fully versed in the case.“Before they question the governor — an event of obvious significance — they will be well prepared with what the documents and other people have said,” said Mr. Mintzer.The contents of the report are likely to determine Mr. Cuomo’s fate, but some state legislators have already signaled that impeachment proceedings could be considered.“We’ll wait for the report, but I do believe that something needs to be done ultimately and whether or not the governor can continue is an open question,” State Senator Michael Gianaris, a Democrat and deputy majority leader in the upper chamber, told NY1 on Monday.Some critics have also raised questions about the governor’s potential influence over the investigation.Some noted that, under state law, the governor would be required to receive a weekly report on the investigation. The law also says the governor must countersign any checks used to pay for the inquiry, which the Legislature is supposed to provide funds for.“I think Letitia James is independent, but the way the structure is set up, it’s hard to retain independence when you have to report to the governor and the governor is involved with the finances,” said State Senator Todd Kaminsky, a Democrat from Long Island and a former prosecutor. “It’s especially perverse when it is the governor himself who is under the microscope.”Mr. Kaminsky has introduced legislation to allow the state attorney general to independently commence criminal investigations without a referral, likening it to the authority local district attorneys possess. “It’s not revolutionary,” he said.Ms. Garvey, the special counsel to the governor, told Ms. James in the referral letter that the governor would waive the weekly reports “due to the nature of this review.” Mr. Kaminsky, however, questioned whether such an exception was permitted under state law.It is not clear how long the investigation might take. Mr. Mintzer said that the timeline would likely be driven as much by political considerations as by legal issues.“This is a matter of immense public interest and people want to get to the bottom of it,” he said, “and I’m sure that will be the mandate from the attorney general.”Jonah E. Bromwich and Alan Feuer contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyThe Ezra Klein ShowWhat a More Responsible Republican Party Would Look LikeThe conservative wonk Ramesh Ponnuru and Ezra Klein discuss child allowances, Trump’s legacy and the future of the G.O.P.More episodes ofThe Ezra Klein ShowMarch 2, 2021  •  More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to ReadNew Books to Watch For This Month25 Book Review GreatsNew in PaperbackListen: The Book Review PodcastAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionShould Black Northerners Move Back to the South?Campaigning in GeorgiaCredit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.March 2, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETTHE DEVIL YOU KNOWA Black Power ManifestoBy Charles M. BlowLeading up to the 2020 presidential election, Stacey Abrams, LaTosha Brown and other grass-roots activists successfully registered an unprecedented number of Black voters in Georgia who had been stymied in the past by voter-suppression tactics. Their work brought key victories to Democratic candidates in the state and demonstrated the political power of Southern Black women.Georgia’s recent presidential and Senate elections are relevant to the argument of the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow in “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.” There are two Black Americas, he says. One is the world of those who remained in the postslavery South. The other is inhabited by those who fled the South for refuge in what he terms “destination cities” across the North and West during the Great Migration. But these cities are now broken, according to Blow, and the Great Migration has been a “stinging failure.” Blow, a son of Louisiana who recently moved back south — to Atlanta — says Black Americans must bridge this divide.In what he believes would be “the most audacious power play by Black America in the history of the country,” Blow calls for African-Americans to reverse-migrate south, to collectively dismantle white supremacy by using their ancestral homeland as a political base. He imagines a New South where “our trauma history is not our total history.” That Black people have been returning south for at least the past 40 years, he adds, demonstrates that there is fertile ground for his idea in the region, intellectually and materially.His is a familiar argument, revitalized by the South’s recent political developments. A genesis for Blow’s Black power proposition could have been the Black Belt nation thesis, proposed by Black Communists in the 1920s, or the agenda of the Republic of New Afrika in the 1960s. But Blow instead builds upon the political thought of the freethinking white hippies who moved to Vermont in the early 1970s with the intent of transforming the state’s conservative electoral politics. They succeeded, he says; young Black people today should follow their blueprint.Seeing Georgia flip blue in the 2020 election became Blow’s “proof of concept,” and for him, one thing now seems clear: The path to lasting Black power is through the vote. Forming a “contiguous band” of Black voters across the South — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, in particular — would “upend America’s political calculus and exponentially increase” Black citizens’ influence in American politics. The weakness in Blow’s plan is that it requires faith in a political system that has consistently failed Black Americans at nearly every turn.For Blow, however, the reality that Black Northerners have no recourse but to leave is a painful truth that crystallized for him one night in 2015 when he learned that his son, a student at Yale, had been stopped at gunpoint by a university police officer. Stories like this fuel the book’s searing account of police violence, systemic racial disparities and social unrest in cities like New York, Minneapolis and Portland. This is where Blow is at his best.As a historian, I wish he had spent more time exploring the nuances of the Black migration framework the book hinges upon. Blow’s claim that the Great Migration “hit the South like a bomb,” causing an intellectual and cultural brain drain that stunted its growth, rings hollow. It obscures the truth that the region was an incubator of radical political activism — often led by its most disenfranchised citizens — during the Great Migration and beyond. The New South to which Blow is now beckoning people to return was created largely by the Black visionaries and community builders who remained in the rural and urban South.A strength of “The Devil You Know” is its affirmation of Black Americans as a formidable political bloc with whom the nation must reckon. The book is a helpful introduction for those seeking to make sense of fractious political debates about race and voting rights in the South, and the broken promises of American democracy.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }N.Y.C. Mayoral RaceWho’s Running?11 Candidates’ N.Y.C. MomentsAn Overview of the Race5 TakeawaysAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhy These 2 N.Y.C. Mayoral Candidates Are on a Collision CourseEric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, and Ray McGuire, a former Citi executive, have become fast rivals in the New York City mayoral race.Ever since Ray McGuire, right, entered New York’s mayoral race, he has vied with Eric Adams, left, to capture Black political influencers and voters.Credit…Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesMarch 2, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETJust a few days after Raymond J. McGuire officially joined the New York City mayor’s race in December, a courtesy call came in from one of his Democratic rivals, Eric Adams.Mr. Adams, who, like Mr. McGuire, is Black, offered some provocative words of wisdom.“Being in politics is just like being in a prison yard,” Mr. Adams said, according to several people familiar with the video call. “You need to put a wall around your family because you might get shanked.”Mr. Adams’s campaign described the sentiment as “friendly advice.” Several people in Mr. McGuire’s campaign saw it differently, characterizing it as a “veiled threat” from a front-runner trying to intimidate a new challenger.For two years, Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, had been regarded as one of the favorites in the 2021 mayor’s race.He was a former police officer who had nuanced views of how social justice demands could coexist with policing needs. He had broad support in Brooklyn, and had raised more than $8 million to fuel his campaign — more than anyone else in the field.In a field of progressive rivals, he had appeared to be the leading Black moderate, representing a key city constituency. But now his stature in the race is suddenly being challenged.Mr. McGuire, a former global head of corporate and investment banking at Citi, quickly began making inroads among political power brokers in the Black community. He hired Basil Smikle, a former executive director of the State Democratic Party, to be his campaign manager; other Black political operatives who have strong connections to Representative Gregory W. Meeks, chairman of the Queens Democratic Party, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, also signed on.The filmmaker Spike Lee, whose brand is the borough of Brooklyn, narrated Mr. McGuire’s campaign announcement. Mr. McGuire raised $5 million in just three months, and landed the endorsement of Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man whose death in 2014 after being placed in a police chokehold became a flash point for the Black Lives Matter movement.“Eric came into this race believing that he would run a race of inevitability, not just as the borough president of Brooklyn, but the senior Black candidate in the race,” Mr. Smikle said. “Now, that’s not the case.”Mr. McGuire, talking with Councilman Rafael Salamanca in the Bronx, has raised $5 million in three months.Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York TimesMr. McGuire and Mr. Adams have quickly become rivals, and their interactions as well as several interviews with people familiar with their relationship reveal a complicated story born at the intersection of race and class.It’s a natural rivalry between two successful Black men from humble beginnings who took different paths — Mr. McGuire through the Ivy League and the upper echelons of Wall Street, Mr. Adams through night school and the upper ranks of the New York Police Department — to become candidates for mayor.For Mr. Adams, the comparison is slightly irksome, adding to a perception that he might lack the polish to lead the city. He does not have the white-shoe law firm experience of Mr. Jeffries, the power broker and No. 5 House Democrat who The Washington Post once suggested was “Brooklyn’s Barack Obama,” or Mr. McGuire’s experience managing multibillion-dollar transactions.“Coming where I come from, I think people didn’t think I’d put it together, but now I have more money to spend on a campaign than any Black person running for office in New York City’s history,” Mr. Adams said.Four Black and Afro-Latino candidates sit among the Democratic mayoral primary’s top echelon, the most in recent memory. All talk extensively about how being Black and brown in America has affected their lives and will affect how they govern.Initial polls suggest that Mr. Adams is running second to Andrew Yang, the former 2020 presidential candidate; Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer who served as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s legal counsel, is roughly in fourth place; Mr. McGuire trails behind, along with Dianne Morales, an Afro-Latina who led a nonprofit in the Bronx dedicated to eradicating poverty.Ms. Wiley and Ms. Morales are also further behind in fund-raising; neither has yet qualified for the city’s generous matching-funds program. But while the two are competing for the progressive vote, they have largely stayed out of each other’s way, even naming the other as their second choice for mayor.Mr. Adams and Mr. McGuire, on the other hand, seem destined for a collision course.“I can’t remember a time where you had this many strong African-American candidates, because what normally occurs is one will emerge out of a group of several with everybody else standing down,” said Mr. Jeffries, who has not decided if he will endorse anyone in the race. “There’s no expectation that will happen in this particular instance.”Evan Thies, a spokesman for Mr. Adams, described the prison yard remarks during the video call as “nothing more than friendly advice about the intense world of city politics.”“To infer otherwise,” he continued, “is an example of the kind of bias that Eric has been fighting his entire life.”But Mr. Adams’s video call in December was not the only time he had directed criticism at Mr. McGuire. At a forum in January, Mr. Adams said that he “didn’t go to the Hamptons” when the pandemic struck New York City — an apparent jab at Mr. McGuire, who said he had spent a total of three weeks in the Hamptons with his family last summer.The remarks were similar to ones Mr. Adams made at a virtual meeting with the Fred Wilson Democratic Club in Queens in December, when he said that he didn’t attend Harvard and didn’t need to introduce himself to voters.Mr. McGuire, who left his job at Citigroupto run for mayor, has also sought to draw a contrast with his rivals, often saying that he has not been “termed out” and isn’t “looking for a promotion” — a likely reference to Mr. Adams and Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, who are both barred by city law from running for third consecutive terms.As moderate Democrats, Mr. Adams and McGuire share several policy positions. Both are in favor of revamping Police Department protocols, but have not called for defunding the police. Mr. Adams was originally in favor of a plan from Mr. de Blasio to scrap the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, but changed his position and now believes — as Mr. McGuire does — that the test should not be the only criteria for admission.One area where they differ is on taxing the wealthy. Mr. Adams wants to increase taxes on those who earn more than $5 million per year for two years, and use the money to help the city recover from the pandemic. Mr. McGuire, who has business community support, has said that wealthy New Yorkers such as himself should pay their fair share but also believes that the city has to grow itself out of its financial deficit.Mr. Adams has tried to accentuate his working-class background, telling voters that he washed dishes before becoming a police officer.Credit…Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesThe Black electorate in New York City is diverse, made up of Caribbean-Americans and African-Americans; of native New Yorkers, immigrants and transplants from other states. In the 2013 mayoral race, Mr. de Blasio won partly because of his enormous popularity among Black voters: Ninety-six percent of Black New Yorkers voted for him, according to exit polls, a higher percentage than David N. Dinkins captured in 1989 when he was elected as the city’s first Black mayor.In the 2013 Democratic primary, Mr. de Blasio garnered 18,000 more votes in predominantly African-American neighborhoods than a Black rival, the former city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., largely based on how they proposed handling the policing tactic of stop and frisk.Given the financial difficulty wrought by the pandemic, Mr. McGuire’s financial pedigree may help with voters in places like central Brooklyn and southeast Queens, said Anthony D. Andrews Jr., the leader of the Fred Wilson Democratic Club in Southeast Queens. He said that residents there are concerned about the city’s unequal property tax system and whether government jobs will be eliminated.“Some people will say the complexity of the city requires someone with a certain kind of education to be able to manage a $100 billion enterprise,” said Marc H. Morial, the former mayor of New Orleans and current president of the National Urban League, who knows both men. “But there may be other people who say, ‘Is that guy in touch with me? Does he know my pain?’”Mr. McGuire, who was urged by business leaders to run for mayor, has tried to accentuate his rise from a modest upbringing in his stump speeches. He was so poor growing up, he has said, that he washed and reused aluminum foil, and pressed scraps of soap together until they formed a bar.Having never met his father, Mr. McGuire was raised by his mother and his grandparents in a house full of foster siblings on the “wrong side of the tracks” in Dayton, Ohio. He found his way to a prestigious private school, went on to earn three degrees at Harvard, and became one of the highest-ranking Black executives on Wall Street, a mentor to young people of color and a behind-the-scenes patron of Black causes.“A Black man who grew up the way I grew up, I know exactly what they are going through,” Mr. McGuire said. “I know about the struggle.”Mr. Adams has touched on similar hardships of his youth, recalling at mayoral forums that neighbors used to leave food and clothes outside his family’s home. He said he first took an interest in becoming an officer after he was beaten by the police as a teenager.Mr. Adams worked his way up the ranks of the Police Department and founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, an advocacy group to confront institutional racism in the profession. He attended night school to attain a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, and has taken to saying that he will be a “blue-collar” mayor.“I’m not fancy,” Mr. Adams said at a recent Queens County Democratic Party forum. “I was a dishwasher. I worked in a mailroom.”“Acknowledging the problems Black people face,” Mr. Adams said, “is different from understanding the problems.”Mr. Adams was recently endorsed by four wrongfully convicted men, dozens of ministers and leaders from the city’s African community. Four Black City Council members, including I. Daneek Miller, co-chairman of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, have also endorsed Mr. Adams.Of Mr. Adams’s supporters on the Council, another caucus member, Laurie A. Cumbo, the majority leader, has been among the most forceful in her criticism of Mr. McGuire.At a mayoral forum, Ms. Cumbo, who represents a Brooklyn district, questioned whether Mr. McGuire had made a “visible commitment to the community” before deciding to run for mayor. She criticized his charitable work in the art world as too “highbrow,” and said that he should make sure that his campaign was “more in alignment with the people.”Not long after, Mr. Adams and Mr. McGuire appeared at a Martin Luther King’s Birthday celebration in Harlem. Hoping to keep the peace, Mr. Adams pulled Mr. McGuire aside and told him that Ms. Cumbo’s comments were not coordinated with his campaign.Ms. Cumbo was not interested in peacemaking.“Ray McGuire is running a ‘Hello, my name is Ray McGuire’ kind of campaign,” she said. “Eric is running a ‘Hey sis, I just saw your mom yesterday getting the vaccine’ kind of campaign.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPolitical memoTrumpism Grips a Post-Policy G.O.P. as Traditional Conservatism FadesDespite falling from power in Washington, the Republican Party has done little soul-searching or reflection on a new agenda, instead focusing on attacking Democrats and the news media.Merchandise bearing former President Donald J. Trump’s name was widely available at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., last week.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMarch 1, 2021Updated 9:15 p.m. ETORLANDO, Fla. — For decades, the same ritual took place in the aftermath of Republican electoral defeats.Moderate, establishment-aligned party officials would argue that candidates had veered too far right on issues like immigration, as well as in their language, and would counsel a return to the political center. And conservatives would contend that Republicans had abandoned the true faith and must return to first principles to distinguish themselves from Democrats and claim victory.One could be forgiven for missing this debate in the aftermath of 2020, because it is scarcely taking place. Republicans have entered a sort of post-policy moment in which the most animating forces in the party are emotions, not issues.This shift was on vivid display last weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where the annual gathering’s Trumpification and the former president’s vow to exact revenge against his intraparty critics dominated headlines.But just as striking was what wasn’t said at the event. There was vanishingly little discussion of why Republicans lost the presidency, the House and the Senate over the last four years, nor much debate about what agenda they should pursue to rebuild the party.The absence of soul-searching owes in part to the Republicans’ surprise gains in the House and the denialism of many activists that they lost the White House at all, a false claim perpetuated with trollish gusto by former President Donald J. Trump himself on Sunday, to the delight of the crowd.The former president was, however, hardly the only high-profile Republican to demonstrate that confronting Democrats and the news media, while harnessing the grievance of the party rank and file toward both, is the best recipe for acclaim within today’s G.O.P.“We can sit around and have academic debates about conservative policy, we can do that,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said to an ovation in his CPAC remarks. “But the question is, when the klieg lights get hot, when the left comes after you: Will you stay strong, or will you fold?”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was the first speaker at the conference on Friday.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThis is the party Mr. Trump has remade — and it’s why so many traditional Republicans are appalled, or at least alarmed, that Trumpism is replacing conservatism.“The future of the Republican Party depends on debating and advancing big ideas rooted in our belief in limited government constitutionalism,” said Representative Chip Roy of Texas, arguing that the party needed to orient itself around “the case for freeing the American people from the mandates, shutdowns, regulations and taxes pushed by a powerful government.”Mr. Roy appeared on one of the few CPAC panels focused on government spending, once a central issue on the right, and used his time to plead with the audience. “There’s nothing more important right now than this,” he said. “We are allowing Washington, D.C., to take over our lives but we’re paying the bill.”If those in the audience felt the same sense of urgency, they didn’t show it.In his remarks later in the day, Mr. Trump sought to explain “Trumpism” — “what it means is great deals,” he ventured — but his would-be heirs plainly recognize that the core of his appeal is more affect than agenda.Beyond the former president, no two Republicans in attendance drew a more fervent response than Mr. DeSantis and Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, two former House members turned first-term governors.Neither sketched out a new policy agenda or presented a fresh vision for a party that has won the national popular vote just once in over 30 years. Rather, they drew repeated ovations for what they share in common: a shared sense of victimhood over media criticism for their handling of the coronavirus crisis and a pugnacious contempt for public health experts who have urged more aggressive restrictions in their states.“I don’t know if you agree with me, but Dr. Fauci is wrong a lot,” Ms. Noem said in her remarks, referring to the country’s top infectious disease expert. The statement brought attendees to their feet, even as she glossed over her state’s high mortality rate during the pandemic.Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota criticized Dr. Anthony S. Fauci in her speech at the conference on Saturday.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesSince the dawn of the modern conservative movement in the mid-20th century, there has been an element of victimhood politics on the right — a sense that powerful liberal forces are arrayed against conservatives, and that Republicans can send a message with their vote.“Annoy the Media: Re-elect Bush” was one of the more popular stickers in the 1992 campaign of George H.W. Bush, who is now frequently remembered as the gentlemanly antithesis of Mr. Trump. Yet within the Republican Party, there were always debates — intense, immense and highly consequential.In the 1970s, the party clashed over the United States’ role in the world, splitting over control of the Panama Canal and whether the Soviet Union should be confronted with an open hand or a clenched fist. In the 1980s and ’90s, the abortion battles raged, with opposition to Roe v. Wade emerging as a litmus test for many on the right.In the second Bush administration and the years after, Republicans were divided over immigration and, once again, on America’s footprint overseas.Notably, many of these clashes played out at CPAC. In 2011, Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana at the time, used a high-profile speech at the gathering to warn against the growing peril of “the new red menace” — red ink, not the Red Army — that was aimed at conservatives upset by the heavy spending of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.Former Representative Ron Paul of Texas, and then his son, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, used the conclaves to challenge Bush-style interventionism, delighting youthful audiences and prompting them to flood the straw poll balloting on their behalf.Not coincidentally, the three top finishers in this year’s straw poll were the three who most prominently flouted coronavirus restrictions: Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Noem.“They are perceived as Trump-friendly, new, young outsiders,” Amanda Carpenter, a former Senate G.O.P. aide who now writes for The Bulwark website, said of Mr. DeSantis, 42, and Ms. Noem, 49.Interviews with conference attendees suggested that many of them were drawn to the two governors primarily for their style.Sany Dash, who was selling merchandise at a CPAC booth, explained that she liked Ms. Noem “because she fights back,” adding: “I feel like she’s a female Trump, except not crass or rude.”“He’s got just the right amount of Trumpiness to him,” Brad Franklin, a recent college graduate, said of Mr. DeSantis.Others pointed out how the Florida governor had been criticized by the news media for his handling of the coronavirus even though the state has suffered fewer deaths per capita than a number of states with Democratic governors.Ms. Noem singled out one of those governors, Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, in her remarks on Saturday, prompting a cascade of boos.Something strikingly different happened, though, when Ms. Noem touched on policy just long enough to lament the rising national debt.“We have forgotten principles that we once held dear,” she said. Nobody applauded.Elaina Plott More