Elections

The nation’s balance of power is at stake as both senators from Georgia face runoff elections in early January. The campaigns have been bitter, and they stand to get more so.But here is one matter that the four candidates agree on, even if some of them have come to it begrudgingly: Owning and trading individual shares of stock has stopped making sense.One of the two Republican incumbents, Kelly Loeffler, sold all of her stock this year. Her trading in the early days of the pandemic, in the wake of a private Senate briefing, had come under scrutiny. The other, David Perdue, sold all but three stocks after his trades also generated controversy.Ms. Loeffler’s Democratic challenger, the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, owns only mutual funds and thinks all members of Congress should do the same. Jon Ossoff, the Democrat trying to take Mr. Perdue’s seat, also supports a stock ownership ban and would sell the more than $500,000 of Apple shares he owns if he won.The potential for the reduction of conflicts of interest, or the appearance of them, is all for the good. But here’s the other thing that many of our 535 elected representatives should learn: Shunning stock trading is a better way to build bigger balances.I learned this the hard way, albeit with much less money than the senators are playing around with. In 1994, I was in and out of a regional bank stock, but even when a bigger institution bought the company, I didn’t make much more money than I would have in a mutual fund that owned every stock in the market. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in 2001, I bought a stock related to airport security with similarly middling results.Then, in 2002, I went to work for The Wall Street Journal, where strict rules kept reporters away from any individual securities. In the absence of owning any stock aside from that of the newspaper’s parent company, editors could assign reporters to anything without worrying about conflicts. Hopefully, staff would also steer clear of the temptation to try to trade on information that was about to be in the articles. The New York Times had similar rules when I arrived in 2008, and they remain in place.It was a relief, frankly. No knock on people who enjoy gambling and trade stocks as a hobby (using only money they can afford to lose), but trying to predict a stock’s performance and outsmart other investors just wasn’t my idea of a good time.Then, as I learned more on the job about the stock market, I realized how much better my odds of long-term financial security were going to be if I didn’t trade stocks or try to beat the market. Far better to stick to mutual funds that simply owned most or all of a particular market segment.The evidence is everywhere, and someone ought to spend 15 minutes shoving it under the nose of every member of Congress who shows up in Washington for the first time. Where to start?Extremely active investors, as Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue were, might begin with the classic 2000 paper “Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth,” which used the records of over 66,000 households to show that the annual returns of people who traded the most were 6.5 percentage points lower than the overall market.Next, they could move on to what a different set of academics believed was the first-ever analysis of the actual portfolios of members of Congress between 2004 and 2008. It turned out they weren’t great at this investing thing and would have done better in basic index funds. If they had invested $100 that way, they would have ended that harrowing period with $80. Instead, the average member who felt above average ended up with $69.Stocks bounce around a lot. Past performance is no indication of future success. If you don’t believe it, check out the Stock Pickers chart on the site of a firm called Index Fund Advisors. It re-ranks the performance of 18 household-name stocks over each of 20 years, before your very eyes.To take this thought further, consider a bit of analysis from Dimensional Fund Advisors: If you examine the entire top 10 percent of stocks each year since 1994, fewer than a fifth, on average, make the top 10 the next year. “Investors with concentrated portfolios may actually miss out on the very stocks that deliver the best of what the market has to offer,” the firm notes.In fact, according to a different bit of research, the best-performing 4 percent of stocks contributed the stock market’s entire net gain since 1926. Buy index funds, the logic of which is apparent in several research notes on Vanguard’s website, and you’ll get every security that makes up whatever the 4 percent might be for the next 100 years.So why do so many individuals use other strategies instead? One reason could be ignorance. Or hubris born of the past decade, when stocks have mostly gone up. Also, plenty of people like gambling. And now that companies like Robinhood have lowered the transaction costs of active trading, it’s just so tempting to press one’s luck, especially when you’re bored during a pandemic.I suspect something else is at work with the Georgia senators. Both denied using inside information they got on the job to inform their trades (and were cleared when investigators looked into it), and both said they had outside advisers trading without their knowledge.But the success and drive that allowed Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue to succeed in business and gave them the confidence to run for office could easily extend to a wrongheaded investment strategy. If you’re a person who keeps winning in life, it’s tempting to talk yourself into believing you can pick investments that outperform an index fund — or pick advisers who can do so for you, even after you compute the impact of their fees on your returns.Congress could make this issue go away, and some members have introduced bills that would restrict stock ownership. It could also create or extend workarounds for the newly elected that would make it easier for people like Mr. Ossoff to enter public service and sell a bunch of Apple stock without generating a large tax bill.But let’s be real. Bills like that aren’t going to be a high priority anytime soon. Better, then, that members of Congress erase any perception of impropriety on their own — and protect their portfolios to boot — by getting out of individual stocks altogether, voluntarily.I tip my cap to the four candidates in Georgia, to varying degrees, for doing this already or getting close. I look forward to asking every new member of Congress to do the same thing come January. More

WASHINGTON — Christopher Krebs is a 43-year-old former Microsoft executive who had the unenviable government job of protecting the nation’s election machinery from manipulation by Russia or other foreign hackers. It turns out, though, that some of the most dangerous interference has come not from the Kremlin but from the White House, where the president called the election “rigged” before a single vote was cast.Mr. Krebs’s organization, the Department of Homeland Security’s new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has systematically shot down Mr. Trump’s false claims — that mail-in ballots would lead to extensive fraud and that voting machines were programmed to give votes to Joseph R. Biden Jr. — as part of its “rumor control” initiative to keep Americans from doubting the integrity of the election system.To no one’s surprise, speculation swept through cybercircles in Washington on Thursday that Mr. Krebs was high on President Trump’s list of officials to be fired after his agency, known as CISA, released a statement from a government-led coordinating council saying that “there is no evidence” any voting systems were compromised and that the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history.” This occurred only hours after Mr. Trump had repeated a baseless report that a voting machine system had “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide.”As of Friday night, Mr. Krebs was still employed, and still at his office, and shrugging it all off. As a father of five children, ages 2 through 10, he says he is used to living in chaos.His department’s rumor control website, he said, was never devised with the president in mind. It was instead for “inoculating the American public” to make clear that even if there were fake websites created by the Russians and Iranians to stir up divisions before the election, “it wouldn’t mean that votes were affected, or tabulations were wrong.” A case in point: An Iranian effort to imitate the far-right Proud Boys was caught by American intelligence, and threatening emails the group had supposedly sent voters were debunked.If anyone believed the warnings about false information posted on the website were about the president, he said, that was their interpretation. “We’ll stand up for all our work,” he said.Few in the White House are buying it. In the West Wing, Mr. Krebs’s agency is regarded as a deep-state stronghold, an antagonist that has contradicted Mr. Trump’s false claims that fraud was rampant, software mistakes were vast and the election was stolen. It did not help that as Mr. Krebs gave speeches and interviews around the country about election security, he rarely, if ever, mentioned Mr. Trump’s name.All of this has put Mr. Krebs in a highly public political standoff that he had no way to see when he started at the Department of Homeland Security as a contractor during its infancy in the George W. Bush administration.He said his closest connection to computers growing up in Atlanta was Nintendo games. “I could wire stuff up,” he said, “but coding wasn’t really available” at his high school. He went on to the University of Virginia, where he was a pole-vaulter, and the George Mason University law school.At homeland security, he worked in what was then called the National Protections and Programs Directorate, a predecessor bureaucracy in the days before protecting computer networks seemed central to the department’s mission.He ended up as a political employee until President Barack Obama’s election sent him back to the private sector, at consulting companies and ultimately in Microsoft’s Washington office, where he directed cyberpolicy.He joined as North Korea’s hacking of Sony was underway and developed a reputation for crisis management as one breach after another unfolded across American companies and government networks. Among the policies he worked on at Microsoft was a 2015 cybersecurity information act, which formalized the mechanism by which private companies like Microsoft could share threat intelligence with the federal government and vice versa. Lobbyists watered down the bill at every pass, but Mr. Krebs was determined to see it through.Just after the 2018 midterm elections, Mr. Trump signed into law the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act, elevating a dedicated digital security agency in the Department of Homeland Security with more budget and resources. Mr. Krebs was named as director and charged with defending an election for a president who did not want to discuss what the Russians did in 2016 and helping states, including his native Georgia, that did not want federal help.Election 2020 More

WASHINGTON — Career Justice Department prosecutors pushed back this week against a memo by Attorney General William P. Barr that opened the door to politically charged election fraud investigations, saying in a pair of messages that Mr. Barr thrust the department into politics and falsely overstated the threat of voter fraud.The protests were the latest rebuke of Mr. Barr by his own employees, who have in recent months begun criticizing his leadership both privately and publicly. They argued that Mr. Barr has worked to advance President Trump’s interests by wielding the power of the department to shield his allies and attack his enemies.On Friday, 16 federal prosecutors across the country who were assigned to monitor elections for signs of fraud wrote to Mr. Barr that they had found no evidence of “substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities.” They also asked him to rescind the memo, saying it thrust the department into partisan politics and was unnecessary because no one has identified any legitimate suspicions of mass voter fraud.The memo “is not based in fact,” the monitors wrote.Issued Monday amid the president’s efforts to falsely claim widespread voter fraud, the memo allows prosecutors to investigate “substantial allegations” of fraud before the results of the presidential race are certified, disregarding longstanding department policies intended to keep law enforcement investigations from affecting the outcome of an election.“It was developed and announced without consulting nonpartisan career professionals in the field and at the department,” the prosecutors wrote of the memo. “The timing of the memorandum’s release thrusts career prosecutors into partisan politics.” The Washington Post earlier reported their letter.On Thursday, a top career prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington said in an email sent to Mr. Barr via Richard P. Donoghue, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office, that the memo should be rescinded because it went against longstanding practices, according to two people with knowledge of the email.The prosecutor, J.P. Cooney, also said that the fact that Richard Pilger, a longtime department employee who oversees election fraud crimes, chose to step down from that position over the memo was deeply concerning, the people said.In response, Mr. Donoghue told Mr. Cooney that he would pass on his complaint but that if it leaked to reporters, he would note that as well. Given that the email was born out of a concern for integrity, Mr. Donoghue said in his reply that he would assure officials “that I have a high degree of confidence that it will not be improperly leaked to the media.”A department spokeswoman declined to comment about Mr. Cooney’s message. Asked about the prosecutors’ letter to Mr. Barr, she said that his memo directed prosecutors to “exercise appropriate caution and maintain the department’s absolute commitment to fairness, neutrality and nonpartisanship.”Others inside the department pointed out that Mr. Barr’s memo was carefully worded and contained caveats that made it unlikely that a prosecutor could meet the threshold to open a case and begin investigating.“Specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries,” Mr. Barr wrote in his memo. “Nothing here should be taken as any indication that the department has concluded that voting irregularities have impacted the outcome of any election.”Department lawyers often engage in heated debates over policies, investigations and prosecutions, but they rarely put their criticisms in writing and then send them to top officials.But Mr. Barr’s memo churned up rancor among prosecutors who work on election fraud, in large part because Mr. Trump himself was making false claims about widespread voter fraud. Even the specter of such an investigation into votes for the presidential race could shade the integrity of the election.Mr. Pilger, the prosecutor who oversees election fraud at the department’s headquarters in Washington, stepped down from his supervisory role in protest a few hours after it was issued; and other lawyers affected by the memo began to devise plans for how to push back on Mr. Barr’s authorization and what to do should a U.S. attorney announce an election-related investigation, according to three people with knowledge of these discussions.Even as the department’s officials and career prosecutors argued about the memo, Mr. Trump’s legal cases related to the election began to unravel on Friday. A state judge in Michigan rejected an attempt by Republicans to halt the certification of the vote in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, pending an audit. And lawyers for Mr. Trump withdrew election-related lawsuits in Pennsylvania and Arizona. More

President Trump suffered multiple legal setbacks in three key swing states on Friday, choking off many of his last-ditch efforts to use the courts to delay or block President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.In quick succession, Mr. Trump was handed defeats in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Michigan, where a state judge in Detroit rejected an unusual Republican attempt to halt the certification of the vote in Wayne County pending an audit of the count.The legal losses came as Mr. Biden was declared the victor in Georgia and a day after an agency in the president’s own Department of Homeland Security flatly contradicted him by declaring that the election “was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence” any voting systems malfunctioned.On Friday, 16 federal prosecutors who had been assigned to monitor the election also directly debunked claims of widespread fraud, saying in a letter to Attorney General William P. Barr that there was no evidence of substantial irregularities.In his first public remarks of the week, Mr. Trump ignored the developments during an appearance in the Rose Garden. But he showed a momentary crack in his previously relentless insistence that he would eventually be proclaimed the winner of the campaign, saying at one point, “Whatever happens in the future, who knows, which administration, I guess time will tell.”Mr. Trump’s bad day at the bar began at dawn when news emerged that lawyers from the Ohio-based law firm Porter Wright Morris & Arthur had abruptly withdrawn from a federal lawsuit they had filed only days earlier on his behalf in Pennsylvania. The firm’s withdrawal followed internal tensions at the firm about its work for Mr. Trump and concerns by some lawyers that Porter Wright was being used to undercut the integrity of the electoral process.Then, shortly after noon, a lawyer for the Trump campaign effectively dropped its so-called Sharpiegate lawsuit in Arizona. That lawsuit had claimed that some ballots cast for Mr. Trump were invalidated after voters in Maricopa County had used Sharpie pens, causing “ink bleeds.” The lawyer, Kory Langhofer, acknowledged that not enough presidential votes were at stake in the case to affect the outcome of the race.The lawsuit, which stemmed from a viral rumor that falsely claimed Arizona’s voting machines were incapable of tabulating ballots filled out with Sharpies, was already on the rocks. At a hearing on Thursday, Mr. Langhofer told the court that the county’s vote count had been affected merely by “good-faith errors,” not by fraud, as Mr. Trump has been claiming for days.“We are not saying anyone is trying to steal the election,” Mr. Langhofer said.With victories in Arizona and Georgia, Mr. Biden has matched the 306 electoral votes that Mr. Trump racked up four years ago. Mr. Biden was declared the winner of Arizona’s 11 electoral votes on Thursday night after he finished more than 11,000 votes ahead of Mr. Trump. At the court hearing earlier that day, a Maricopa County elections official testified that only 191 presidential votes in the county might have been affected by Mr. Langhofer’s suit.Around 2 p.m. Friday, the state court judge in Michigan, Timothy M. Kenny, dealt Mr. Trump another blow by denying an emergency motion filed by two Republican poll workers who had asked him to halt the certification of the vote in Wayne County — home to Detroit — pending an audit of the count. States have to certify the results of the election — confirming that the vote tabulation was accurate — in order to apportion their Electoral College votes.The ruling by Judge Kenny meant that the formal completion of the vote in Wayne County — and the broader vote in Michigan — could continue on pace. Some legal scholars have suggested that delaying certification of the vote in key states is part of a last-ditch strategy by the Trump campaign to throw the election to Republican-led state legislatures.At a hearing this week in Detroit, lawyers for the city had asked Judge Kenny not to delay certification out of concern about this gambit. In his ruling, the judge noted that the audit requested by the two Republican plaintiffs, Cheryl Costantino and Edward McCall, would have been “unwieldy” and forced the rest of Michigan to wait.“It would be an unprecedented exercise of judicial activism for this court to stop the certification process,” Judge Kenny added.In a lawsuit filed last week, Ms. Costantino and Mr. McCall had made wide-ranging claims of irregularities during the vote count at Detroit’s TCF Convention Center.They charged that some poll workers in the heavily Democratic city were coaching voters to cast their ballots for Mr. Biden, that some Republican poll challengers were not given adequate access to monitor the vote count, and that loads of ballots were improperly brought into the convention center in the middle of the night.Election 2020 More

The ruler broods, alone with his rage and shame, undone by rejection, his mind, like Macbeth’s, “full of scorpions,” plotting to overturn facts and destroy American democracy. His lackeys, and only they remain, try to humor the master in his labyrinth.Donald Trump, departing president, lost in an election that a division of the Department of Homeland Security has now called “the most secure in American history,” with no “evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.”Mr. President, get the boxes, get the tape, pack your bags and be gone.He can’t. He won’t. It’s not in the man. Truth is unbearable. Fraud! Rigged! Trump can no more accept defeat than recall the fact that he took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”His only vow is to preserve, protect and defend himself. He has never been able to see beyond that orange face in the mirror. No Bible offers consolation to this man, no creed, no truth, no sense of decency, not even Fox News now, nothing.With his victory in Arizona and Georgia confirmed, Joe Biden, the president-elect, has 306 electoral votes, 36 more than the 270 needed to take the White House. He will end up with about 80 million popular votes, the most any candidate has ever gotten, and over five million more than Trump.No recount can turn these numbers around. No evidence has emerged to back Trump’s lawsuits challenging the outcomes. Biden did not squeak this victory. He won clearly, period.Even Ted Olson, who successfully argued for then-candidate George W. Bush in the 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, says it’s over and Biden is president-elect, The National Law Journal reported. “And we have — I do believe the election is over — and we do have a new president,” Olson said. “And we do because a large number of people expressed disapproval, whether one agrees with that or not, of the manner, style and techniques of this particular president.”Except that it’s not over. Desperation drives Trump to look, still, for a means to secure what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called “a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, says it’s not over. They are complicit in a power grab.It’s come to this in the United States of America. Trump has always been a danger to democratic institutions and the rule of law. He’s empowered dictators across the world. I’ve witnessed elections stolen in places like Iran. I never thought I would see an attempt to deny the will of the American people.My colleague Maggie Haberman described a recent White House meeting where Trump pressed to know “whether Republican legislatures could pick pro-Trump electors in a handful of key states and deliver him the electoral votes he needs to change the math and give him a second term.”This is Trump’s so-called Hail Mary plan. In plain language, it’s a potential political coup. Biden beat Trump by 148,000 votes in Michigan, 58,000 votes in Pennsylvania, 36,000 votes in Nevada, 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, 14,000 votes in Georgia and 11,000 votes in Arizona. For Trump to win, as Andrew Prokop wrote in Vox, he needs to “change the outcome in at least three of those states — a very tall order.”Article II of the Constitution says that the states must appoint electors to the Electoral College “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” The state legislatures of Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania are Republican-controlled. How does this look to a man like Trump who, as my friend Greg Schwed, a lawyer, put it to me, has never “failed to take the path that would preserve his vanity and power, no matter what law or tradition it would violate?”It looks like possible salvation.Republican legislators may feel beholden to Trump. Some of them might conclude they’re finished if they do not do his bidding. These legislators might — might — decide to ignore the popular vote, perhaps by declaring the mail-in ballots invalid, even in the absence of a hint of voter fraud, and thus install a slate of Trump electors, claiming he won with the “legal” popular vote. The Electoral College votes Dec. 14 to choose officially the next president.This potential maneuver is preposterous and vile. Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania all have Democratic governors, who would try to veto or block such a move. The attorney general of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, has already declared that for the State Legislature “there is no legal mechanism to act alone and appoint electors. None.”Or, in theory, legislatures could try to change the law overnight, if enough Republicans have taken leave of their consciences and concluded American democracy is expendable. I will not attempt to describe the mess that could ensue in Congress, except to say that it would be murky, and there’s a 6-to-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court.This is a column I never thought I would write. But better to write it than to be blindsided. The world needs an American democracy restored, rid of its brooding ruler, and led by the man who won, Joe Biden. End of story.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

LONDON — As the polls closed on Election Day in America, my family group chat thrummed with anticipation. Maps were shared. Probabilities mocked. We argued over exit polls, safe seats and swing votes, breaking off occasionally to ask what, precisely, the Electoral College was.This was not the usual way of things. We’re Irish. My family — my 10 siblings, their partners, my cousin and my father — are spread among Ireland, England and Germany, and we ordinarily use WhatsApp to share photos of grandchildren. But, in a shift familiar to many families around the world, we spent one week in November as an improbably fast-paced American electoral information hub.Following American politics used to mean keeping up with the big-ticket items: announcements of war, confessions of extramarital affairs, the wearing of tan suits. But Donald Trump changed that.Trying to ignore the Trump administration is a bit like trying to ignore a small fire on your person. “Did you see Donald’s gone on a Covid drive?” my father asked, as President Trump’s motorcade whisked him to greet his supporters outside Walter Reed hospital in October. “Why doesn’t he go door-to-door, while he’s at it?”Disgust with Mr. Trump has driven most of Joe Biden’s support in our family, more than the latter’s oft-stated fondness for his ancestral roots. We would have seen the election the same way were it Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren vs. Mr. Trump: as the final, nerve-shredding boss battle. We just didn’t expect that it would last four days and feel roughly as long as the four years that preceded it.As the count entered its second day, my father feigned indifference. He said he found CNN, with its flashy graphics and fast-talking anchors, not to his taste. He watched his local bulletins, with presenters who act like bank managers who’ve won a competition to present the news.But he couldn’t stay away. “Your man with the map is very good,” he was saying by Thursday night. He was initially incapable of remembering the names of the anchors and so referred to them by the names of television presenters they vaguely resembled: Anderson Cooper became Paul O’Grady, an English television presenter who hosts “For the Love of Dogs”; John King was reborn as Roy Walker, a quiz show host from Belfast.Soon, however, my father was more intimately acquainted with the anchors of CNN than he is with his 11 children. He related their key points and compared their styles, and referred to counties like DeKalb and Allegheny in the commonplace way he usually reserves for the townlands of rural Donegal.By Friday, grandchildren had been forgotten entirely, the finger paintings of our WhatsApp group were replaced with district maps. And our tentative stabs at comprehension soon grew into the solid pronouncements of seasoned wonks.“Pennsylvania is flying now,” said my sister Dearbhaile. And Nevada, my brother Conall said, looked a certainty, even when one factored military votes into the usual Democrat advantage with mail-in ballots.We puzzled over the gains Trump had made among Hispanic voters, which we, shockingly, had not foreseen. “Maybe,” said my brother Dara, in the sole moment of self-examination any of us managed the whole week, “it’s more difficult for us to grasp because we come from a place where identity politics is all there is.”With our newly refined understanding of American politics, we began to look between and beyond the numbers, taking cues from more subtle variations. “John King is back on shift!” gasped my sister Caoimhe on Friday. “It must be close.”On Saturday afternoon our time, Wolf Blitzer crossed the spaceship floor of CNN’s studio to announce Mr. Biden as victor. The game, or this part of it, was over. We greeted the news like it was an acquittal for a crime we had not committed, gasped at the commentary for another hour or so, and promptly switched off CNN for the first time in four, long days.The images we shared afterward were from an Irish news program that ended its election coverage with elegiac footage of Mr. Biden’s win, overlaid with audio from one of his most prominent campaign videos, in which he recites “The Cure at Troy” by Seamus Heaney. Distances collapsed as the man we’d just watched win the presidency 3,000 miles away spoke the words of a poet born half an hour from our family home.Then time resumed its gentle gallop. Pages peeled from the calendar once more. My father’s dog died. I turned 35. The grandchildren resumed their position at the summit of our group chat’s interest. A week on, our CNN obsession seems like a relic of the ancient past. Chancing on the network on a channel hop evokes only the melancholy stab of a fondly remembered, but increasingly distant, summer romance. We hope our wider attentions to Washington will soon follow that diving arc.We’ll always have the week we spent in thrall to the beating, flashing heart of American news, and the catharsis of its eventual end.Not that the Biden win had surprised all of us by that stage. My father had called Maricopa County days before.Séamas O’Reilly (@shockproofbeats) writes for The Irish Times and The Observer and is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Did You Hear Mammy Died?”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

WASHINGTON — The Secret Service’s Uniformed Division has sustained a coronavirus outbreak, according to four people briefed on the matter, the latest blow to a beleaguered agency that has faced challenges in performing its duties during the pandemic.The outbreak is at least the fourth to strike the agency since the pandemic began, further hobbling its staffing as it continues to provide full protection to President Trump and prepares for the number of people it is charged with protecting to grow because of the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr.At least 30 uniformed Secret Service officers tested positive in recent weeks for the virus, and the agency asked about another 60 to quarantine, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing personnel matters. At least a handful of agents also tested positive or were forced to isolate, two of the people said.The Washington Post first reported the outbreak.It was unclear how the officers contracted the virus. Many traveled to Trump or Biden campaign events in the final weeks of the election, the people said. Several senior White House officials and Trump allies also contracted the virus after attending an election night party at the White House.A spokeswoman said the Secret Service kept up its duties during the campaign season and that it was taking precautions, including testing, contact tracing and isolating people as needed, to respond to Covid-19.“The health and safety of our work force is paramount,” said the spokeswoman, Julia McMurray.Officers in the Uniformed Division have different responsibilities from the famed Secret Service agents who guard presidents and their families. The officers provide protection for physical locations like the White House and the vice president’s home at the Naval Observatory in Washington. They also screen crowds at public events. The division — which has 1,600 officers — was widely faulted after fence jumpers breached the White House grounds during former President Barack Obama’s second term.Many officers and agents privately expressed concerns in the final weeks of the presidential race about traveling to campaign events across the country. They feared contracting the virus at the events or while traveling, according to two people briefed on the matter.The pandemic has been particularly taxing on law enforcement agencies whose officers come in direct contact with people to do their work. In the first few months of the outbreak, one in six New York Police Department officers were out sick or on quarantine.The pandemic has created unique problems for the Secret Service as the nature of its work — especially during a presidential campaign — forces the agency to deploy its agents across the country, including to events held by Mr. Trump where social distancing was rarely practiced and wearing masks was not required.In the most glaring example of the dangers agents faced, Mr. Trump held a rally in June at an indoor arena in Tulsa, Okla. One of Mr. Trump’s allies who attended the event, Herman Cain, died from the virus six weeks after the rally.In August, at least 11 employees at the Secret Service’s training facility in Maryland tested positive for the virus. The agency had shuttered the facility earlier in the year to develop procedures to mitigate transmission of the coronavirus. But several trainees were believed to have contracted the virus during training exercises and at a nearby hotel where they practiced no social distancing.Earlier in the summer, two members of the Secret Service who were dispatched to provide security at the Tulsa rally tested positive. Around that time, Vice President Mike Pence canceled a trip to Florida after members of his detail showed symptoms of the virus.The latest outbreak comes at a time when the Secret Service’s resources are already stretched. During a transition, the agency is expected to provide more protection for the president-elect and vice president-elect and their families while continuing its regular duties of protecting the president and his family.During his hospitalization for the coronavirus in October, Mr. Trump had an agent drive him past a group of supporters outside the hospital. Medical experts said Mr. Trump was likely contagious at the time and that the agents who were in a hermetically sealed Chevy Suburban with him could have easily been infected, even though they were covered in the same kind of personal protective equipment used by medical professionals.Annie Karni contributed reporting. More

WASHINGTON — In an unusually caustic and politically tinged speech, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told a conservative legal group that liberals posed a growing threat to religious liberty and free speech.The remarks, made at the Federalist Society’s annual convention Thursday night, mirrored statements Justice Alito has made in his judicial opinions, which have lately been marked by bitterness and grievance even as the court has been moving to the right. While Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has tried to signal that the Supreme Court is apolitical, Justice Alito’s comments sent a different messageComing as they did just weeks after Justice Amy Coney Barrett succeeded Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, giving conservatives a 6 to 3 majority, the remarks alarmed some on the left. But legal experts said there were few clear lines governing what justices may say off the bench.“There’s a difference between what a justice can do and what a justice would be well advised to do,” said Vikram D. Amar, the dean of the University of Illinois College of Law. “I tend to think that John Roberts has a much better instinct toward circumspection.”“Other than an ethical line about prejudging cases and avoiding the appearance of bias,” Professor Amar said, “it’s a matter of what you think a good judge should do and the image a judge should cultivate.”Still, it was jarring, some legal commentators said, to hear political sentiments, even ones echoing judicial opinions, during a webcast aimed at conservative lawyers.“Justice Alito’s speech Thursday was more befitting a Trump rally than a legal society,” said Gabe Roth, the executive director of Fix the Court, a nonprofit group that has called for stricter ethics rules for the Supreme Court.Others said it was unexceptional for justices to describe positions they had already taken in their judicial work.“It’s one thing for a justice to speak publicly about an open issue on which the justice hasn’t yet ruled,” Ed Whelan, the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote on National Review’s Bench Memos blog. “It’s a very different — and much less remarkable — thing for a justice to restate positions that he has already formally adopted.”Mr. Whelan noted that Justice Ginsburg had criticized President Trump in an interview during the 2016 campaign for refusing to release his tax returns and went on to sit on cases concerning their disclosure. Justice Antonin Scalia, by contrast, recused himself from a case the Pledge of Allegiance after discussing the case in public.Mr. Trump has repeatedly credited the Federalist Society with helping draw up his lists of potential nominees to the Supreme Court. All three of his appointees — Justices Barrett, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh — appeared on those lists.Public appearances by justices before friendly audiences are commonplace, and several of the court’s more liberal justices have appeared before the American Constitution Society, a liberal group. But the comments they make on such occasions are generally anodyne.At last year’s Federalist Society convention, Justice Kavanaugh’s keynote speech largely consisted of expressions of gratitude to people who had helped him weather his confirmation hearings.Justice Alito’s comments were more pointed, and they were consistent with his sense that his views have not been given the respect they deserve. He felt bruised by some of the questions at his confirmation hearings in 2006, after a career in the Justice Department and on the federal appeals court in Philadelphia.He was not pleased when President Barack Obama criticized the court’s Citizens United campaign finance decision at the State of the Union address in 2010 with six justices present. Mr. Obama said the decision had “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections.”Justice Alito responded by mouthing the words “not true.” He has not attended another State of the Union address.On Thursday, Justice Alito focused on the effects of the coronavirus, which he said “has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty.”“I am not diminishing the severity of the virus’s threat to public health,” he said. “All that I’m saying is this, and I think that it is an indisputable statement of fact: We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020.”Justice Alito was particularly critical of a ruling from the Supreme Court in July that rejected a Nevada church’s challenge to state restrictions on attendance at religious services.The state treated houses of worship less favorably than it did casinos, he said. Casinos were limited to 50 percent of their fire-code capacities, while houses of worship were subject to a flat 50-person limit.“Deciding whether to allow this disparate treatment should not have been a very tough call,” Justice Alito said. “Take a quick look at the Constitution. You will see the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment, which protects religious liberty. You will not find a craps clause, or a blackjack clause, or a slot machine clause.”The ruling was decided by a 5-to-4 vote, with Justice Ginsburg in the majority. Her replacement by Justice Barrett may alter the balance on the court in similar cases, including a pending one from Brooklyn.The Nevada decision was based in part on a 1905 Supreme Court decision concerning an outbreak of smallpox in Cambridge, Mass., the home of Harvard University.“Now I’m all in favor of preventing dangerous things from issuing out of Cambridge and infecting the rest of the country and the world,” said Justice Alito, who attended Princeton and Yale Law School. “It would be good if what originates in Cambridge stayed in Cambridge.”Justice Alito went on to quote, with disdain, Mark Tushnet, a Harvard Law School professor.The professor, Justice Alito said, had written: “The culture wars are over; they lost, we won.”This was evidence, Justice Alito said, of liberal orthodoxy.“For many today, religious liberty is not a cherished freedom,” he said. “It’s often just an excuse for bigotry, and it can’t be tolerated.”In an interview on Friday, Professor Tushnet said Justice Alito’s criticism of the statements he made in a blog post four years ago indicated that the points he made were correct.“The very intensity of Justice Alito’s remarks seems to me to confirm my judgment about who won the culture wars,” Professor Tushnet said. “His are in fact the observations of a person who hasn’t come to grips with the fact that he’s been on the losing side of many culture war issues.”In his remarks on Thursday, Justice Alito said the right to free speech was under threat, too.“Tolerance for opposing views is now in short supply at many law schools and in the broader academic community,” he said.He recalled the days of the comedian George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” monologue, which had been the subject of a 1978 Supreme Court decision allowing the government to restrict the use of vulgar language on broadcast television.“Today you can see shows on your TV screen in which the dialogue appears at times to consist almost entirely of those words,” Justice Alito said. “Carlin’s list seems like a quaint relic.”“But it would be easy to put together a new list called ‘things you can’t say if you are a student or a professor at a college or university or an employee of many big corporations.’ And there wouldn’t be just seven items on that list,” he said. “Seventy times seven would be closer to the mark.”A prime example, he said, was opposition to same-sex marriage.“You can’t say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman,” Justice Alito said. “Until very recently that’s what the vast majority of Americans thought. Now it’s considered bigotry.” More