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AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPolitical memoA Quiet Life Out of the Spotlight? Not for This Former PresidentMost presidents leave the White House and adopt low profiles. Donald Trump is returning to the national stage with a prominent appearance at a conservative conference on Sunday.A statue of former President Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday. His grip on the Republican Party remains strong.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFeb. 27, 2021Updated 4:50 p.m. ETFor decades, the normal course of action for presidents departing the White House has been to lie low and let their successors have the stage to themselves in their first months in office.But Donald J. Trump was never a normal president. And less than two months after he departed Washington as a twice-impeached leader whose supporters stormed the Capitol to try to thwart the certification of a democratic election, Mr. Trump will attract a national spotlight as the final act at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday.“His presidency was unlike any other, so why would we expect his post-presidency to be like any other?” said James Carville, the Democratic strategist most associated with former President Bill Clinton’s success in 1992. When Mr. Clinton left office in early 2001, it was also as an impeached president. But Mr. Clinton took at least some time out of view before emerging with a philanthropic group that he went on to build up for years.Of Mr. Trump, Mr. Carville said, “It would have been utterly surprising if he would have gone away and worked on a memoir or taught a Zoom class at a state university.”Mr. Trump is set to deliver a closing speech at CPAC that is expected to be a withering critique of President Biden’s first few weeks in office, touching on topics ranging from shuttered schools to immigration policy, said an adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the unfinished speech.He isn’t expected to deliver a lengthy list of his own accomplishments in office and will aim to sound more like the candidate he was in 2016 than the campaigner he was in 2020, the adviser said. And there will be some focus on the future of the Republican Party.When former President Barack Obama left office, he was photographed kite-surfing in February 2017, a relaxed smile on his face. His predecessor, George W. Bush, made clear his disdain for Washington and his eagerness to escape it. Karl Rove, the architect of Mr. Bush’s campaign, called it “highly unusual” for a former president not to give the incoming chief executive a grace period of his own silence.Mr. Trump has been relatively selective in speaking publicly since he left the White House, after being cautioned by advisers not to say anything that might make him a larger target for the various prosecutors considering or pursuing investigations related to him. Without his Twitter feed and the presence of reporters assigned to cover the presidency, the attention that Mr. Trump craves so deeply has been in short supply.Yet his grip on the Republican Party remains strong. Members of Congress, fearing backlash from Mr. Trump’s voters, have made plain their desire to move past any discussion of responsibility for months of helping Mr. Trump spread the baseless claim that the election was stolen from him by shadowy forces in the Democratic Party.He was widely hailed on the first day of the CPAC convention Friday.“Let me tell you right now,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said, “Donald J. Trump ain’t goin’ anywhere.” Even Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader who at one point let it be known that he might vote to convict Mr. Trump in his second impeachment trial, told Fox News this week that he would support Mr. Trump if he were to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024.To that end, Mr. Trump is serious at the moment about running for president a third time in 2024. While some aides expect that he ultimately won’t go through with another bid, his musings could have a chilling effect on his party.“There was never a consideration of, Should George H.W. Bush run again?” said Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, which organizes the conference. Mr. Trump is “in a different place, and he’s also still incredibly popular with the people who voted for him.”Mr. Trump has discussed with aides the possibility of writing a book. And he has started putting together a political operation with long-serving aides including Bill Stepien, the campaign manager at the end of 2020; Justin Clark, the counsel on his campaign; and Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, his former campaign manager and deputy campaign manager. Brad Parscale, who was removed as the 2020 campaign manager last summer, remains in the Trump circle and is handling Mr. Trump’s email system.Jason Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior adviser, remains close to him. And Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., is set to take a more active role in his political organization than he previously had.Most members of that group had an hourslong meeting on Thursday with Mr. Trump, for whom few former aides are ever permanently cast aside.The former president is setting up a process for people looking to receive his endorsement, but he has made it clear that he is also determined to extract vengeance against Republicans who crossed him by questioning his lies about the election or by voting in support of impeachment. On Friday, he endorsed a former aide, Max Miller, as a primary challenger to Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, who voted in favor of impeachment.What remains to be seen at CPAC is whether Mr. Trump will attempt to revive his false statements about a “rigged” 2020 election. His advisers are imploring him not to, and they say the hope is that Mr. Trump will focus on suggesting changes to election rules across the country.Even if he doesn’t say it himself, CPAC — once a forum for conservative ideas with a strong libertarian strain — has been transformed into a cult of personality around Mr. Trump. So far at the four-day gathering, a golden statue of Mr. Trump has been pushed around the Orlando, Fla., venue, with no apparent sense of irony. The event is being held away from Washington, its customary home, because regulations intended to slow the spread of Covid-19 are more lax in Florida.Mr. Trump’s false claims of voter fraud have already gotten a boost at the gathering; a panel titled “How Judges & Media Refused to Look at the Evidence” was conducted on Friday.In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Mr. Rove wrote that Mr. Trump should steer away from his desire to discuss payback against other Republicans.“Mr. Trump took this approach in his disastrous campaign stop the night before the Jan. 5 Georgia Senate runoffs,” Mr. Rove wrote. “If he repeats it at CPAC, he’ll be speaking to the shrinking share of the electorate that believes his every claim.” He urged Mr. Trump to take a “more constructive” approach.Few Republicans believe that Mr. Trump has the discipline to drop his desire for attention for long, if at all. Already, he has shown flashes of behaving like the political gadfly in search of attention he was in the years leading up to his run in 2016.When Mr. Trump was considering a bid for president as early as 2011, he used his Twitter feed and his frequent Fox News appearances to inject himself into nearly every topic in the news cycle. Mr. Trump’s advisers insist that he says he is happier without his Twitter feed.But just a few weeks out of office, Mr. Trump has at times relied on the same impulse: getting media attention for topics in the news, such as the death of the radio host Rush Limbaugh or the car accident that felled the golfer Tiger Woods, to speak to an audience that is already supportive of him.“In 2013 and 2014, Mr. Trump wanted ‘to be part of the action,’” recalled Sam Nunberg, a former adviser to the Trump campaign in 2016. Now, as a former president, Mr. Nunberg said, Mr. Trump “has ‘to be part of the action’ to keep his precarious grip as the leading contender for the 2024 G.O.P. primary.”“The reality is that speaking at CPAC so soon after becoming only the 10th president to lose re-election is a sign of weakness,” Mr. Nunberg said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn Statehouses, Stolen-Election Myth Fuels a G.O.P. Drive to Rewrite RulesRepublican legislators want big changes to the laws for elections and other aspects of governance. A fight over the ground rules for voting may follow.Poll workers preparing absentee ballots for tabulation in Lansing, Mich.Credit…Bryan Denton for The New York TimesFeb. 27, 2021Updated 1:44 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Led by loyalists who embrace former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen election, Republicans in state legislatures nationwide are mounting extraordinary efforts to change the rules of voting and representation — and enhance their own political clout.At the top of those efforts is a slew of bills raising new barriers to casting votes, particularly the mail ballots that Democrats flocked to in the 2020 election. But other measures go well beyond that, including tweaking Electoral College and judicial election rules for the benefit of Republicans; clamping down on citizen-led ballot initiatives; and outlawing private donations that provide resources for administering elections, which were crucial to the smooth November vote.And although the decennial redrawing of political maps has been pushed to the fall because of delays in delivering 2020 census totals, there are already signs of an aggressive drive to further gerrymander political districts, particularly in states under complete Republican control.The national Republican Party joined the movement this past week by setting up a Committee on Election Integrity to scrutinize state election laws, echoing similar moves by Republicans in a number of state legislatures.Republicans have long thought — sometimes quietly, occasionally out loud — that large turnouts, particularly in urban areas, favor Democrats, and that Republicans benefit when fewer people vote. But politicians and scholars alike say that this moment feels like a dangerous plunge into uncharted waters. The avalanche of legislation also raises fundamental questions about the ability of a minority of voters to exert majority control in American politics, with Republicans winning the popular vote in just one of the last eight presidential elections but filling six of the nine seats on the Supreme Court.The party’s battle in the past decade to raise barriers to voting, principally among minorities, young people and other Democrat-leaning groups, has been waged under the banner of stopping voter fraud that multiple studies have shown barely exists. “The typical response by a losing party in a functioning democracy is that they alter their platform to make it more appealing,” Kenneth Mayer, an expert on voting and elections at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said. “Here the response is to try to keep people from voting. It’s dangerously antidemocratic.”The most conspicuous of the Republicans’ efforts are a slew of bills raising barriers to casting votes, particularly mail-in ballots.Credit…Robert Nickelsberg for The New York TimesConsider Iowa, a state that has not been a major participant in the past decade’s wars over voting and election rules. The November election saw record turnout and little if any reported fraud. Republicans were the state’s big winners, including in the key races for the White House and Senate.Yet, in a vote strictly along party lines, the State Legislature voted this past week to cut early voting by nine days, close polls an hour earlier and tighten rules on absentee voting, as well as strip the authority of county auditors to decide how election rules can best serve voters.State Senator Jim Carlin, a Republican who recently announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, made the party’s position clear during the floor debate: “Most of us in my caucus and the Republican caucus believe the election was stolen,” he said.State Senator Joe Bolkcom, a Democrat, said that served as justification for a law that created “a voting system tailored to the voting tendency of older white Republican voters.”“They’ve convinced all their supporters of the big lie. They don’t see any downside in this,” he said in an interview. “It’s a bad sign for the country. We’re not going to have a working democracy on this path.”The issues are particularly stark because fresh restrictions would disproportionately hit minorities just as the nation is belatedly reckoning with a racist past, said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the chief executive of the voting advocacy group Fair Fight Action. The Republican push comes as the rules and procedures of American elections increasingly have become a central issue in the nation’s politics. The Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal-leaning law and justice institute at New York University, counts 253 bills in 43 states that seek to tighten voting rules. At the same time, 704 bills have been introduced with provisions to improve access to voting.The push also comes as Democrats in Congress are attempting to pass federal legislation that would tear down barriers to voting, automatically register new voters and outlaw gerrymanders, among many other measures. Some provisions, such as a prohibition on restricting a voter’s ability to cast a mail ballot, could undo some of the changes being proposed in state legislatures.Such legislation, combined with the renewed enforcement of federal voting laws, could counter some Republican initiatives in the 23 states where the party controls the legislature and governor’s office. But neither that Democratic proposal nor a companion effort to enact a stronger version of the 1965 Voting Rights Act stands any chance of passing unless Democrats modify or abolish Senate rules allowing filibusters. It remains unclear whether the party has either the will or the votes to do that.“Most of us in my caucus and the Republican caucus believe the election was stolen,” State Senator Jim Carlin of Iowa said of Donald J. Trump’s loss to President Biden.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesOn the legal front, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on Tuesday in an Arizona election lawsuit that turns on the enforcement of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. That section is the government’s main remaining weapon against discriminatory voting practices after the court struck down another provision in 2013 that gave the Justice Department broad authority over voting in states with histories of discrimination.Those who back the Republican legislative efforts say they are needed to restore flagging public confidence in elections and democracy, even as some of them continue to attack the system as corrupt. In Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, for example, the chairs of House election committees refused for weeks or months to affirm that President Biden won the election. The chairs in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin urged U.S. House members or former Vice President Mike Pence to oppose the presidential electors certified after Mr. Biden won those states’ votes.Some respected Republican lawmakers reject charges that election proposals are bad-faith attempts to advance Republican power. “These are really big tweaks. I get that,” said State Senator Kathy Bernier, who heads an election committee in Wisconsin. “But we do this routinely every session.” Ms. Bernier said the party’s election-law bills, two of which would strengthen ID requirements for absentee ballots and limit ballot drop boxes to one per municipality, were honest efforts to make voting more secure.That said, proposals in many states have little or nothing to do with that goal. Georgia Republicans would sharply limit early voting on Sundays, when many Black voters follow church services with “souls to the polls” bus rides to cast ballots. On Friday, a State Senate committee approved bills to end no-excuse absentee voting and automatic voter registration at motor vehicle offices.Iowa’s legislation, passed this past week, also shortens the windows to apply for absentee ballots and petition for satellite polling places deployed at popular locations like college campuses and shopping centers.Bills in some states to outlaw private donations to fund elections are rooted in the unproven belief, popular on the right, that contributions in 2020 were designed to increase turnout in Democratic strongholds. The nonprofit Center for Technology and Civic Life distributed the $400 million that the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated to underwrite coronavirus protective equipment, polling place rentals, drop boxes and other election needs.Unsurprisingly, some of the most vigorous efforts by Republicans are in swing states where last year’s races for national offices were close.An early voting site for Georgia’s Senate runoff at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta in December. Credit…Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockRepublicans in Georgia, which Mr. Biden won by roughly 12,000 votes, lined up this week behind a State Senate bill that would require vote-by-mail applications to be made under oath, with some requiring an additional ID and a witness signature.Arizona Republicans are backing bills to curtail the automatic mailing of absentee ballots to voters who skip elections, and to raise to 60 percent the share of votes required to pass most citizen ballot initiatives. Legislatures in at least five other Republican-run states are also considering bills making it harder to propose or pass citizen-led initiatives, which often involve issues like redistricting or tax hikes where the party supports the status quo.And that is not all: One Arizona Republican has proposed legislation that would allow state lawmakers to ignore the results of presidential elections and decide themselves which candidate would receive the state’s electoral votes.In Wisconsin, where gerrymanders of the State Legislature have locked in Republican control for a decade, the Legislature already has committed at least $1 million for law firms to defend its redistricting of legislative and congressional seats this year. The gerrymander proved impregnable in November; Democrats received 46 percent of the statewide vote for State Assembly seats and 47 percent of the State Senate vote, but won only 38 percent of seats in the Assembly and 36 percent in the Senate.In New Hampshire, where Republicans took full control of the Legislature in November, the party chairman, Stephen Stepanek, has indicated he backs a gerrymander of the state’s congressional map to “guarantee” that at least one of the state’s two Democrats in the U.S. House would not win re-election.“Elections have consequences,” he told the news outlet Seacoastonline. He did not respond to a request for comment.And in Nebraska, one of only two states that award electoral votes in presidential contests by congressional district, conservatives have proposed to switch to a winner-take-all model after Mr. Biden captured an electoral vote in the House district containing Omaha, the state’s sole Democratic bastion.Conversely, some New Hampshire Republicans would switch to Nebraska’s current Electoral College model instead of the existing winner-take-all method. That would appear to help Republicans in a state where Democrats have won the past five presidential elections.Pennsylvania’s Legislature is pushing a gerrymander-style apportionment of State Supreme Court seats via a constitutional amendment that would elect justices by regions rather than statewide. That would dismantle a lopsided Democratic majority on the court by creating judicial districts in more conservative rural reaches.Many Republicans argue — and some election experts at times agree — that fears about restrictive election laws among Democrats and civil liberties advocates can be overblown. Republicans point to record turnout in November as proof that restrictive laws do not suppress votes.Ms. Bernier of Wisconsin, for example, said she saw little problem with a bill that would allot one ballot drop box for voters in towns like New Berlin, with 40,000 residents, and one for voters in Milwaukee, with 590,000 residents. There were no drop boxes at all, she noted, until state officials made an emergency exception during the pandemic.“The Legislature could say that no drop boxes are necessary at all,” she said. Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford University political scientist and election expert, said he disagreed. Presidential elections always draw more voters, he said, but the grunt work of democracy often occurs in off-year votes for lesser offices where interest is lower. In those elections, “if there are barriers placed in the way of voters, they’re not going to turn out,” he said.Mike Noble, a Phoenix public-opinion expert, questioned whether the Arizona Legislature’s Trumpian anti-fraud agenda has political legs, even though polls show a level of Republican belief in Mr. Trump’s stolen election myth that he calls “mind-boggling.”Republicans who consider themselves more moderate make up about a third of the party’s support in Arizona, he said, and they are far less likely to believe the myth. And they may be turned off by a Legislature that wants to curtail absentee ballot mailings in a state where voters — especially Republicans — have long voted heavily by mail.“I don’t see how a rational person would see where the benefit is,” he said.Some other Republicans apparently agree. In Kentucky, which has some of the nation’s strictest voting laws, the solidly Republican State House voted almost unanimously on Friday to allow early voting, albeit only three days, and online applications for absentee ballots. Both were first tried during the pandemic and, importantly, were popular with voters and county election officials.If that kind of recognition of November’s successes resonated in other Republican states, Mr. Persily and another election scholar, Charles Stewart III of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote in a recent study, it could bode well for easing the deep divisions over future election rules. If the stolen election myth continues to drive Republican policy, Mr. Persily said, it could foretell a future with two kinds of elections in which voting rights, participation and faith in the results would be significantly different, depending on which party had written the rules.“Those trajectories are on the horizon,” he said. “Some states are adopting a blunderbuss approach to regulating voting that is only distantly related to fraud concerns. And it could mean massive collateral damage for voting rights.”Susan C. Beachy More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Loyalists Spurn ‘Failed Republican Establishment of Yesteryear’At an annual gathering of conservatives, devotees of Donald J. Trump pledged their fealty to him and issued grave warnings about the political left.Attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference posed for photos with a metallic statue of former President Donald J. Trump on Friday in Orlando, Fla.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesElaina Plott and Feb. 26, 2021, 7:57 p.m. ETORLANDO, Fla. — One month after Donald J. Trump left office, thousands of his conservative allies and other far-right leaders on Friday began trying to center the Republican Party around the grievances of his presidency, pushing false claims about the American voting system, denouncing what they called liberal cancel culture and mocking mask-wearing.Gathering at the first major conference of pro-Trump conservatives since his defeat, the politicians and activists sought to affirm their adherence to a conservatism as defined by Mr. Trump, and the need to break with many of the policies and ideas that had animated the American right for decades.Some speakers at the event, the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference, went as far as to declare the traditional Republican Party all but dead. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is seen as a possible candidate for president in 2024, vowed that conservatives would never return to “the failed Republican establishment of yesteryear.” Others firmly asserted Mr. Trump’s standing as the party’s leader and waved off the talk among some Republicans about moving on from the former president.“Let me tell you right now,” said Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, “Donald J. Trump ain’t goin’ anywhere.”The line earned the loudest applause of the conference’s events on Friday morning, the start of a three-day affair that will culminate with a speech by Mr. Trump on Sunday afternoon.To the extent the speakers addressed policy at all, it was to stake out hard-line positions on China, immigration and, to a degree, the laissez-faire economic policies that had allowed tech giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google to amass so much power.But the conference’s opening-day agenda was anchored chiefly in grave warnings about an impending breakdown of American society at the hands of “woke mobs” and “Marxist leftists”; complaints about censorship of conservatives; a false insistence that the 2020 presidential election had been “rigged”; and a suspicion of anyone who did not share their resolve to fight back and stand with Mr. Trump.At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., on Friday, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas made light of his recent trip to Cancún, Mexico, which drew criticism as he fled the state during a deadly winter storm.CreditCredit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAs the conference got underway, Democrats in Washington neared a House vote on a coronavirus relief package worth nearly $2 trillion that has blanket Republican opposition. Yet even as the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, sporting a “No Pelosi Payoffs” button, railed against the measure in the Capitol on Friday, there was scant mention of it or anything else related to President Biden’s agenda.The Republican speakers, instead, won applause by focusing on the themes that animated the party during Mr. Trump’s presidency — the us-versus-them politics, the preoccupation with personality over policy — all while scarcely even mentioning Mr. Biden’s name.It was not until Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, took the stage near the end of Friday’s sessions that anyone offered an extended critique of Mr. Biden’s first month in office. Yet the former president’s eldest son spent nearly as much time ridiculing Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the third-ranking House Republican and a Trump critic, as he did confronting the current president.“Liz Cheney and her politics are only slightly less popular than her father at a quail hunt,” said the younger Mr. Trump, a nearly 15-year-old reference to a hunting accident that didn’t quite land with the college students dotting the audience.Other speakers used their time to belittle Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who voted twice to impeach Mr. Trump, drawing laughs and applause.After days of Republicans proclaiming there would be no civil war in the party, the attacks represented a stark reminder that Mr. Trump and his closest associates are determined to purge their critics.If that was not clear enough from the rhetoric onstage in Orlando, the former president signaled his determination to exact vengeance by releasing a statement Friday afternoon announcing his support for a former aide, Max Miller, who is attempting to unseat Representative Anthony Gonzalez, an Ohio Republican. Mr. Gonzalez voted last month to impeach Mr. Trump.“We represent the pro-Trump, America-first wing of the conservative movement,” declared Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who in January traveled to Wyoming to call for Ms. Cheney’s ouster. “Turns out populism is popular.”A cutout of President George Bush at the convention. Some speakers went as far as to declare the traditional Republican Party all but dead.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMr. DeSantis suggested that the current threat posed by the left was too dangerous for conservatives to concern themselves with the finer points of policy.“We can sit around and have academic debates about conservative policy, we can do that,” he said. “But the question is, when the Klieg lights get hot, when the left comes after you: Will you stay strong, or will you fold?”For Republicans eyeing a presidential bid in 2024, Mr. Trump’s influence was deeply felt, with Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Cruz and others stressing their willingness to “fight.” It was unclear what, exactly, they were pledging to fight for, but everyone seemed to agree on what they were mobilizing against.Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri had hardly finished reminding the audience that he had objected to the certification of Mr. Biden’s election before the crowd erupted in cheers and offered him a standing ovation. “I stood up, I said, ‘We ought to have a debate about election integrity,’” Mr. Hawley said.Notably, though, Mr. Hawley used more of his speech to lash tech companies than he did to defend Mr. Trump or litigate the election.“The Republican Party, once upon a time we were the party of trustbusters,” he said. “We invented the concept. It’s time to reclaim that legacy.”Similarly, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas — another potential 2024 presidential candidate whose ambitions Mr. Trump could block — took aim at what he portrayed as the excesses of the left.“There is no more pernicious threat to America than the rejection of our founding principles, and our heritage and our traditions,” he said, vowing to “never bend the knee to a politically correct mob.”For all their base-pleasing rhetoric, though, Mr. Cotton and Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who also addressed the conference, were rewarded with only polite applause for their policy-oriented statements from an audience seemingly not ready to move on from last year’s election.When Mr. Hawley attempted a riff on “Joe Biden’s America,” someone in the audience yelled: “Trump!”Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, took aim at what he portrayed as the excesses of the left.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesFor his part, Mr. Cruz used much of his speech to focus on a more pressing matter: damage control.His appearance came just days after he traveled to Cancún, Mexico, for a vacation in the midst of a deadly snowstorm in Texas, and Mr. Cruz tried to defuse the controversy with humor.“I got to say, Orlando is awesome,” he said while opening his speech. “It’s not as nice as Cancún — but it’s nice!”Mr. Cruz had been roundly criticized by prominent Democrats for abandoning his constituents in a time of strife. But among Friday’s attendees, the moment made for a winning laugh line.In an address titled “Bill of Rights, Liberty and Cancel Culture,” Mr. Cruz urged the left and the media to “lighten up” about many of the issues that have defined America in the past year.Shortly before Mr. Cruz’s speech, CPAC organizers had been jeered by the audience when they paused the program to plead with them to wear their masks. Still, Mr. Cruz went ahead in making fun of pandemic-era rules like mask-wearing in restaurants, and he also joked about the protests against police brutality that spread across major cities last summer, some of which became violent.There had been no such demonstrations in Houston, he said, “because let’s be very clear: If there had been, they would have discovered what the people of Texas think about the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.” Again, the audience laughed.At previous incarnations of this convention, particularly in the aftermath of Republican losses, there were vows to return to first principles.In an illustration of how Mr. Trump has transformed the party, however, there was strikingly little mention of curbing spending at a moment when congressional Democrats are moving to restore earmarks.Similarly, the policy issues that were raised were more oriented around race and identity than the sort of Christian conservatism that once shaped the G.O.P. Abortion was barely mentioned, and there was little talk of sexuality, even though House Democrats passed a bill broadening L.G.B.T. rights on Thursday.Mr. Gaetz did mock the decision to remove the gender prefix from the Mr. Potato Head brand. Yet even that reference was in the spirit of what he suggested was a more pressing issue. “Mr. Potato Head was America’s first transgender doll and even he got canceled,” he said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRepublicans Grapple With Raising the Minimum WageThe politics of a $15 minimum wage are increasingly muddled, but some Republicans are gravitating toward a higher base pay, citing the economic needs of working-class Americans.A grocery store cashier in Charlottesville, Va., on Friday. The state is among those with the highest share of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage.Credit…Eze Amos for The New York TimesAlan Rappeport and Feb. 26, 2021Updated 7:44 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The policy debate over raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour is the latest fault line between Democrats, who largely support the idea, and Republicans, who generally oppose such a sharp increase as bad for business.But it is also revealing new fissures in the Republican Party, which is straining to appeal to its corporate backers, some of whom believe that more than doubling the minimum wage would cut deeply into their profits, and the working-class wing, which fueled President Donald J. Trump’s rise and would stand to gain from a pay increase.After decades of either calling for the abolishment of a federal minimum wage or arguing that it should not be raised, Republicans are beginning to bow to the realities facing the party’s populist base with proposals that acknowledge the wage floor must rise. President Biden is likely to try to capitalize on that shift as he tries to deliver on his promise to raise the minimum wage, even if it does not make it into the $1.9 trillion aid package because of a ruling Thursday evening by the Senate parliamentarian.For years, Republicans have embraced the economic arguments that were laid out in a letter this month to Congress by Americans for Tax Reform, the Club for Growth and other conservative groups that promote free enterprise. They point to studies that assert mandated wage increases would lead to job losses, small-business closures and higher prices for consumers. And they make the case that the economic trade-offs are not worth it, saying that more jobs would be lost than the number of people pulled from poverty and that those in states with a lower cost of living — often conservative-leaning states — would bear the brunt of the fallout.In 2016, as Republicans moved further to the right, moderate candidates such as Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor, and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, argued forcefully that the federal minimum wage did not need to be raised above $7.25, which is where it still stands today. Mr. Bush said the matter of wages should be left to the private sector, while Mr. Rubio warned about the risk of making workers more costly than machines.But Republicans have at times grappled with the challenging politics of a position that so clearly sides with business interests. In the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, said that he believed that the federal minimum wage should rise in step with inflation, as measured by the national Consumer Price Index.And after arguing early on in his 2016 campaign that wages were already too high, Mr. Trump later said he could support a $10 minimum wage.That is the number that Mr. Romney, now a Republican senator from Utah, and Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, introduced in a plan that would gradually raise the minimum wage to $10 over four years and then index it to inflation every two years.On Friday, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, went a step further by matching the proposal that Democrats have made for a $15 minimum wage. His plan comes with a big caveat, however, and would apply only to businesses with annual revenue of more than $1 billion.“Megacorporations can afford to pay their workers $15 an hour, and it’s long past time they do so, but this should not come at the expense of small businesses already struggling to make it,” Mr. Hawley said.The proposal drew a sharp rebuke from David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, who suggested that Mr. Hawley was adopting bad policies in a bid to appeal to Mr. Trump’s voters. He said that his organization would not support Republicans who promoted minimum wage increases and said that they should be pushing for payroll tax cuts to give workers more take-home pay.“This is another example of his ambition driving him to these populist positions that completely violate any principles he has about free markets,” Mr. McIntosh said in an interview.While the talking points surrounding the minimum wage have remained largely the same over the years, the politics are shifting partly because the federal wage floor has stagnated for so long — and a growing economic literature has suggested that the costs of higher wage floors may not be as significant as analysts once worried they might be.After rising gradually over the decades, the minimum has held steady at $7.25 an hour since 2009. Prices have gradually increased since then, so the hourly pay rate goes a shorter distance toward paying the bills these days: Today’s $7.25 is equivalent to $5.85 in 2009 buying power, adjusted by consumer price inflation.Given how low it is set, a relatively small share of American workers actually make minimum wage. About 1.1 million — 1.5 percent of hourly paid workers and about 0.8 percent of all workers — earned at or below the $7.25 floor in 2020.A restaurant worker last week in Brooklyn. The politics of the minimum wage are shifting partly because the federal wage floor has stagnated for so long.Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York TimesStates with the highest share of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum are often Southern — like South Carolina and Louisiana — and skew conservative. About seven in 10 states that have an above-average share of workers earning at or below the minimum wage voted Republican in the 2020 presidential election.While only a slice of the work force earns at or below the minimum, lifting the federal base wage to $15 would bolster pay more broadly. The $15 minimum wage would lift pay for some 17 million workers who earn less than $15 and could increase pay for another 10 million who earn just slightly more, based on a recent Congressional Budget Office analysis.Still, raising wages for as many as 27 million Americans is likely to come at some cost. The budget office, drawing on results from 11 studies and adjustments from a broader literature, estimated that perhaps 1.4 million fewer people would have jobs in 2025 given a $15 minimum wage.Some economists who lean toward the left have questioned the budget office’s conclusion.In research that summarized 55 different academic studies of episodes where a minimum wage was introduced or raised — 36 in the United States, 11 in other developed countries — Arindrajit Dube at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that even looking at very narrow slices of workers who were directly affected, a 10 percent increase in minimum wage might lead to a 2 percent loss in employment. Looking at the effects for low-wage workers more broadly, the cost to jobs was “minute.”More recent work from Mr. Dube has found next to no employment impact from state and local minimum wage increases.Yet many Republicans have seized on the budget office’s job loss figure.In a column titled “How Many Jobs Will the ‘Stimulus’ Kill?” Stephen Moore, an adviser and ally of Mr. Trump’s, and the conservative economist Casey B. Mulligan suggest that the $15 federal minimum wage will cost a million jobs or more. Mr. Moore said in an email that they were relying on the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate.Still, a variety of economic officials emphasize that the cost to jobs of a higher minimum wage are not as large as once believed, and that the federal minimum wage has not kept up with inflation.“Higher minimum wages clearly do help the workers who are affected,” John C. Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said during a virtual speech on Thursday. “There are some job losses,” but recent evidence suggests that it is not as many as once expected.There is precedent for raising the minimum wage toward $15, because as the federal base pay requirement has stagnated, states and localities have been increasing their own pay floors. Twenty states and 32 cities and counties raised their minimum wages just at the start of 2021, based on an analysis by the National Employment Law Project, and in 27 of those places, the pay floor has now reached or exceeded $15 an hour.The drive toward $15 started in 2012 with protests by fast-food workers and was initially treated as something of a fringe idea, but it has gained momentum even in states that are heavily Republican. Florida — which Mr. Trump won in November 2020 — voted for a ballot measure mandating a $15 minimum wage by 2026.Like in many of those local cases, Democrats are proposing a gradual increase that would phase in over time. Janet L. Yellen, the Biden administration’s Treasury secretary and former Fed chair, suggested in response to lawmaker questions after her confirmation hearing that the long runway could help mitigate any costs.“It matters how it’s implemented, and the president’s minimum wage will be phased in over time, giving small businesses plenty of time to adapt,” Ms. Yellen wrote.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAs a Weakened Cuomo Looks to a 4th Term, Challengers See OpportunityThe growing uncertainty over Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s political fortunes is a sharp turnaround from last year, when some supporters dreamed of a presidential bid. Potential challengers have noticed.Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is facing a federal inquiry into its handling of nursing homes in the pandemic.Credit…Pool photo by Seth WenigFeb. 26, 2021Updated 12:25 p.m. ETAs Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo confronts one of the most seemingly perilous moments in his decade as governor, private conversations are beginning to unfold about what it would take to mount a viable challenge against him next year, and who might be best positioned to take him on.The New York City public advocate, Jumaane D. Williams, has had conversations with allies in recent weeks about the possibility of seeking higher office. Party insiders hang on every public utterance of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, searching for signs of her future ambitions.Progressive activists and operatives are trading a flurry of texts, calls and tweets, glued to each fresh controversy unfolding around the governor, and speculating about what the political landscape would look like if he ultimately does not seek a fourth term in 2022. He and his team have said that he intends to run.Those discussions are in their earliest stages, and in some cases are rooted more in hopes than current realities. But they illustrate a growing sense of uncertainty around Mr. Cuomo, marking a striking turnaround from last year, when some Democrats dreamed of putting him on the presidential ticket.“Everybody who has ever wanted to be governor has started to go, ‘Oh, what do I need to do if this thing opens up?’” Bill Hyers, a veteran Democratic strategist who managed Mayor Bill de Blasio’s successful 2013 campaign, said this week. “There’s a lined-up coalition who want to defeat him. If he takes two more steps backward, then his challenge will be credible.”Mr. Cuomo’s administration faces a federal inquiry and legislative backlash in Albany concerning its handling of nursing homes in the pandemic. A number of accusations of bullying behavior have surfaced from lawmakers and former staff members, pushing questions of his temperament into public view.On Wednesday, a former aide issued a detailed on-the-record accusation of sexual harassment, prompting some officials and New York City mayoral candidates to call for an investigation. His team denies the allegation.And this week, a Marist poll found that his approval rating had dipped below 50 percent, though other polls have shown him in a much stronger position with Democrats.The governor’s unsettled future burst into public view at a news conference on Wednesday, where Mr. de Blasio — who has a toxic relationship with Mr. Cuomo and major political challenges of his own — did not rule out a run for governor, in response to a question from The New York Times. A former de Blasio staffer recalled that several years ago, the mayor would mention the idea of challenging Mr. Cuomo as one eventual possibility (though the mayor has middling approval numbers in his own city and little demonstrated support outside it).On the Republican side, Representative Tom Reed, a co-chairman of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, has said that he is “seriously considering” a run, and party activists and officials have mentioned other possible contenders, including Representatives Elise Stefanik from the North Country and Lee Zeldin from Long Island. Their records of strong support for former President Donald J. Trump would be a major liability in a statewide race.Representative Tom Reed, a Republican co-chairman of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, has said he is “seriously considering” running for governor.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesNational Republicans are aware of the challenges of running in heavily Democratic New York, barring significant weakening of Mr. Cuomo, but they are watching possibilities for that race closely, they say.Any serious threat to Mr. Cuomo would be more likely to emerge in a Democratic primary.“Any elected official that does not respond to the mandate of the people deserves a primary, myself included,” State Senator Alessandra Biaggi, a sharp critic of Mr. Cuomo’s, said in an interview late last week. She said she did not believe Mr. Cuomo had responded to that mandate.“Right now, his leadership is not hitting the mark,” she said. “And I think that New York deserves the best leadership, and we don’t have any more time. We are out of time, with below-average leaders who refuse to have integrity.”Asked if she would consider running for governor herself, she replied, “No, not today.” As for next year, she insisted that “that is not even what I’m concerned with right now,” as she navigates the needs of her Bronx and Westchester district, which has been hit hard by the pandemic.Certainly, even Mr. Cuomo’s biggest detractors are cleareyed about just how difficult it would be to challenge the governor.He defeated his last two primary opponents by around 30 percentage points each. He is a ruthless campaigner with a huge war chest and a lengthy record of achievements, and he has significant strength in communities of color. Many New Yorkers harbor good will toward him for his efforts to reassure the state in the early months of the pandemic, and it is unclear how much the turbulence of recent weeks resonates with voters now, much less how it will play out next year. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is in his last year in office, would not rule out a run for governor in 2022.Credit…Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images“In the past there have been many challenges that started with perceived fanfare, that ended in a fizzle,” said Jefrey Pollock, Mr. Cuomo’s pollster. “The governor’s record as one of the most progressive governors in the country is the thing that’s going to carry him to re-election, to first a primary victory and then victory in the general.”Democratic strategists eager to challenge Mr. Cuomo have a particular focus on who could connect with Black voters, a constituency that has been vital to Mr. Cuomo’s success in the past.Ms. James, who released a major report about how the Cuomo administration undercounted nursing home resident deaths tied to Covid-19, is the first Black woman to hold statewide office. She has led a number of progressive charges in office, and she has generated significant discussion among liberal leaders and strategists.People who have known her over the years see her as politically risk-averse and are skeptical, at this point, that she would challenge Mr. Cuomo, who has been a key ally.But a number of strategists note that the position of attorney general has often been a launching point for governor — as it was for Mr. Cuomo — and believe she would be formidable if he was not running, or if there are drastic changes to his political fortunes. A spokeswoman for Ms. James declined to comment.“I do know that there are others who say that attorney general stands for ‘aspiring governor,’’’ Ms. James said in an interview with The New York Times DealBook/DC Policy Project this week, saying she did not view her role as a “political job.”“At this point in time, my focus, again, is representing the interests of the citizens of the great State of New York,” she said.Then there are a number of prominent progressive state legislators who have clashed with Mr. Cuomo for years, like Ms. Biaggi, who has been an especially visible critic of his handling of the nursing homes controversy.State Senator Alessandra Biaggi, one of the most outspoken Democratic critics of Mr. Cuomo, also would not rule out challenging the governor next year.Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York TimesState Senator Jessica Ramos, another Cuomo critic, is also mentioned in some circles as a potential contender. But in a phone call on Thursday, she alluded to the significant financial hurdles any challenger would face.“We definitely need a true progressive governor, and I would love to see working people in New York coalesce around one candidate,” she said. “The part I think is a very serious challenge is when it comes to fund-raising, when we’re trying to represent those who have nothing.”Some progressives are also discussing the future of Mr. Williams, the public advocate, who is running for re-election this year but has spoken with allies about the possibility of running for governor or lieutenant governor. Mr. Williams, who lost a 2018 bid for lieutenant governor by around 6.6 percentage points, has been thought to be more likely to pursue that post again if he runs for another office. The Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader, said that he cornered Mr. Williams on the subject ahead of an event honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.Jumaane Williams is running for re-election this year as the New York City public advocate, but may consider a run for higher office in 2022.Credit…Mark Lennihan/Associated Press“In my office, getting ready to go out, I said to Jumaane, ‘You thinking of running for lieutenant governor again?’” Mr. Sharpton said. “He just smiled, didn’t deny, didn’t agree.”But allies have reached out to Mr. Williams in recent weeks about running for governor, too, according to a person familiar with the conversations.“The activists and folks like us would be very excited to see someone like Jumaane Williams run for governor,” said Jonathan Westin, who leads the progressive group New York Communities for Change. “If he ran, he could really give him a run for his money in a lot of Black and brown neighborhoods across New York.”Many strategists, officials and others looking at the race don’t expect the potential primary field to take shape for some months, and Mr. Cuomo’s many defenders across the party remain bullish on his chances.“Anybody is vulnerable, but anybody who primaries him does so at their peril,” said Keith L.T. Wright, the leader of the New York County Democrats.But as scrutiny over Mr. Cuomo’s behavior mounts, there remains the broader question of whether others in Albany may begin to turn on him — as they turned on ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer when he was in the midst of a scandal — or if ultimately many Democrats will close ranks.“In order for him to be vulnerable, you’ve got to come with the candidate,” Mr. Sharpton said. “There is a lot of bad press, but I don’t see the candidate.”Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

In alarming testimony to a House subcommittee, the acting chief of Capitol police, Yogananda Pittman, said threats were circulating that directly targeted Joe Biden’s first formal speech to a joint session of Congress – the date of which has not yet been announced.
Militia groups involved in the 6 January insurrection want to stage another attack aiming to ‘blow up’ the complex and kill lawmakers, Pittman has warned
Capitol attack groups want to ‘blow up Capitol’ during Biden speech, police warn More

Militia groups involved in the 6 January insurrection want to stage another attack around Joe Biden’s upcoming address to Congress, aiming to “blow up” the complex and kill lawmakers, the acting chief of the US Capitol police has warned.In alarming testimony to a House subcommittee, Yogananda Pittman said that threats were circulating that directly targeted the president’s first formal speech to a joint session of Congress. A date for the event has not yet been announced.“We know that members of the militia groups that were present on Jan 6 have stated their desires that they want to blow up the Capitol and kill as many members as possible,” Pittman said.The police chief’s warning was made in the context of her trying to justify to Congress why exceptional security measures put in place in the wake of the 6 January assault needed to remain until alternatives could be devised. A large area around the Capitol is still surrounded by a 7ft non-scalable fence, and thousands of National Guard members continue to be deployed.“Based on that information, we think that it’s prudent that Capitol Police maintain its enhanced and robust security posture until we address those vulnerabilities going forward,” she said.Her words are also likely to be taken seriously as a clear indication of the ongoing threat posed by the armed militia members who took part in the storming of the Capitol in which five people died and almost 140 police officers were injured. Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter and military veteran, was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer.Several of the most prominent armed militia and extremist groups in the US were at the forefront of the Capitol riot. The assault followed an incendiary rally by Donald Trump to promote his “big lie” that the November election was stolen from him by Biden.A number of militia members have been arrested and charged as part of the giant federal investigation into the events of 6 January. In an indictment handed down last week against six alleged members of the Oath Keepers militia, the justice department charged that the group had planned for several months to prevent Congress from certifying the electoral college results of the presidential election.Several members of the far-right Proud Boys have also been charged with criminal conspiracy.This week’s congressional hearings are the start of what is expected to be a slew of official investigations into the drastic security failures that gave rise to the breach of the Capitol complex. In her testimony Pittman confirmed that some 800 rioters had entered the building and that the total number who were present amounted to as many as 10,000.Pittman has stepped up to lead the Capitol police force after the chief at the time of the storming, Steven Sund, resigned days after the catastrophe. In his evidence to Congress earlier this week, Sund said: “These criminals came prepared for war”.The FBI and other law enforcement agencies are tracking closely far-right online chatter for early warnings on any possible repeat attacks in Washington or other cities. In addition to Biden’s upcoming congressional address, law enforcement will also be on alert on the days leading up to 4 March – the date set by the extreme conspiracy theory QAnon for Trump to return to Washington to start a second term as president.Followers of the crank movement have been growing increasingly agitated by the fantasy around Trump’s comeback on 4 March, the date on which US presidents were originally inaugurated. More