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      Four Opinion Writers on How the G.O.P. Fringe Took Over American Politics

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      Lawmakers in Ohio this week proposed legislation that would restrict discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, borrowing from Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. It’s the latest in a raft of culture-war legislation in Republican statehouses aimed against abortion, transgender rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and critical race theory.Meanwhile, Democrats are struggling to advance a national agenda amid spiraling inflation and energy prices.The Times columnists Jamelle Bouie and Ezra Klein join the Times Opinion podcast hosts Jane Coaston and Lulu Garcia-Navarro to discuss these and other issues.Their conversation, recorded Thursday morning, is available in the audio file and the transcript below.Four Opinion Writers on How the G.O.P. Fringe Took Over American PoliticsThe following conversation has been edited.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Ezra, I’m going to start with you. The thing that strikes me about these Republican bills is that they’re staking ground on some things that are not necessarily popular with the majority of voters. That would seem to suggest to me that there’s political risk in doing them, but instead these laws have been copied from G.O.P. statehouse to G.O.P. statehouse. Why do you think that’s happening, in your view?Ezra Klein: So I think there are a couple of levels you can think about these bills on. One is to think about what you might imagine as the modal Republican strategy for a year like this. Every Republican could spend the next couple of months just saying, “Huh, gas prices are pretty high, aren’t they?” And that would be it. They would win the midterms. It would be done.And instead, the Republican Party, in part due to the incentives of modern media, in part due to the example offered by Donald Trump and how he shot to prominence and then ultimately to the presidency, has become extraordinarily attention-hungry among its rank-and-file legislators. And so if you can create the next culture-war kernel by passing a really brutal piece of legislation — and these are brutal pieces of legislation that will hurt a lot of very just ordinary kids who need some help — then you can catapult to the center of the national debate.So I don’t think Mitch McConnell wants to be having this conversation. I don’t think Kevin McCarthy wants to be having this conversation. I think they want to talk about how Joe Biden is a failure. But the Republican Party doesn’t have that kind of control over its own structure and its own institutional members now. And so at a time when there’s a lot of tailwinds for them, they are nevertheless pulled along by the more extreme and attention-driven members of their own caucus.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: It’s kind of like applying the attention economy to legislation. Jamelle, what are your thoughts?Jamelle Bouie: I largely agree that this is an attempt to do something like what Trump did: capture attention, generate energy amongst one’s most fervent supporters. Sort of draw the opposition into an argument and hope that you’re able to frame the argument in your direction, and capture the attention of people who may just be marginally paying attention to the whole thing.There’s a good case to make that Republicans can be successful at this precisely because they have this very sophisticated media apparatus: not just Fox News, but a broad constellation of outlets and different modes of delivery that allow them to, if not shape a message from its inception, then shape how its supporters receive any given message or any given piece of information.Having said that, I do think that Republicans are making something of a strategic mistake based on a misunderstanding of how Donald Trump was able to get into a position to win the presidency in the first place. And that is, Trump — as much as he calibrates anything — calibrated the kinds of offense that he caused. And so he both leveraged and utilized nativism, and racism, and these sorts of things, but he also presented himself as pretty liberally minded on L.G.B.T. rights, even though that his likely appointments and nominations were not going to be that. He himself presented himself as, I’m a New York libertine, so of course I have no problem with the L.G.B.T. community.He presented himself obviously as more of a moderate on economic policy, on the social safety net, which also appealed to voters who like Medicare, and like Medicaid, and like Social Security, and don’t want to give those things up to vote for a Republican. And I think that the Republican politicians, Republican officials, they may be generating a lot of fervent enthusiasm amongst their strongest supporters. But it’s unclear to me whether this is going to really make an impact with voters at large.I mean, I live in Virginia, and we just had our gubernatorial election last year. And for as much attention as the C.R.T. stuff got in the Virginia gubernatorial race, later analysis suggests that it wasn’t the C.R.T. stuff that drove Glenn Youngkin’s victory. It was traditional kind of midterm backlash to the party in power. And also, Youngkin ran on lowering the grocery tax and increasing teacher pay. So, bread-and-butter issues are what helped attract a lot of voters to him.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: So you’re saying that maybe these very controversial things that the G.O.P. is enacting are kind of a sideshow to what really matters for voters. Jane, I want you to jump in, because G.O.P. strategy aside, these laws are having real-world consequences, as Ezra said, that will be hard to undo. It wasn’t so long ago that same-sex marriage was legalized in this country, and it seemed that things had turned a corner. Why do you think this is the issue the G.O.P. are trying to mainstream, and where do you think it’s going?Jane Coaston: Well, I mean it’s because we live in hell.But it is interesting how repetitive this strategy is. I went back to some old Times pieces talking about the Southern Baptist Convention’s boycott of Disney, because Disney started offering same-sex health care benefits in 1995. I think that for anyone who is L.G.B.T. and over the age of 30, this all seems very repetitive.Ezra noted that one of the challenges that the G.O.P. is having now is that they’ve got this wave of people who are just screaming, “OK, groomer,” at literally any L.G.B.T. person on the internet. And then you’re having National Review articles, like, “Maybe don’t say that?” And no one’s listening.But I think that part of this is because these issues have to do, one, with a conceit of what L.G.B.T. people are and how L.G.B.T. people become L.G.B.T. I think we’ve seen over the last couple of days, some social conservatives who essentially argue that bills like in Florida, which keep being posited as being about sex ed — they aren’t about sex ed. There’s no mention of sex education or sexual activity in that bill. It mentions sexual orientation and gender identity. But the idea is that if you simply do not ever let people know that there is such thing as gay or trans people, then people will not be gay or trans.Rod Dreher, the conservative writer said that, oh, no, no, when we’re talking about grooming, we’re not talking about pedophiles — which is ridiculous. But he essentially said that, oh, it means that an adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity to inspire confusion in them, which just reminds me of Anita Bryant in 1978, essentially arguing that homosexuals must recruit, and that all children are cisgender and heterosexual until something happens.I guess I just keep thinking, like, I saw the movie “Mannequin” once when I was a kid. And that was it! It just did it. I saw Kim Cattrall and that was it, I was off to the races.But I also think that for as much as Trump held a Pride flag and made some bones out of performatively not caring about the “debate” about L.G.B.T. rights and L.G.B.T. people, that’s not to say that people within the conservative caucus stopped caring. They are still mad about Bostock. They’re still mad about Obergefell.For people who are troubled by trans rights, and specifically the rights of trans kids, I think that you’re seeing a lot of people who are like, “Oh, you’re just being homophobic. You’re yelling at teachers who mention that they’re gay. You’re very upset about gay and lesbian kids, gay and lesbian parents.” That’s something that we keep needing to relearn: that there is no part of the L.G.B.T. community that’s OK for some social conservatives. It’s not as if like, “Trans rights went too far, but we’re totally fine with gay couples. We’re totally fine with everything like that.” That might have been how it was parlayed, but that was never true.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: You all seem to agree on this fundamental point that there’s a great deal of danger for the G.O.P. in pushing these culture-war issues.Jane Coaston: I mean, I want to be clear here because I don’t think that the danger is not to the Republican Party. I think that there’s a good chance that at the end of this year they win in the midterms having an entirely different messaging set. What I do think is that the real risk is to L.G.B.T. people and to see L.G.B.T. people as a danger once again. This is the caravan, but even more so because this has been going on for 50 years.Ezra Klein: I want to add something also to that, that Jane’s comments jogged for me, because one of the dangers is the composition and motivating energies of the Republican coalition. And I think a story you could tell about conservatives over the past 10, 15, 20 years is this constant mainstreaming, this constant effort to figure out how to harness the energy of the most toxic parts of their coalition that two years earlier they were pushing to the side. So birtherism is a relatively fringe movement that becomes the core of the party. They nominate the guy who is leading the birther charge a few years after most of the more sober politicians are pushing it to the side. And this, “OK, groomer” stuff, this is the mainstreaming of QAnon. I think it’s important to be very clear about this.I mean, to coin a term here — I’m in California, so there’s a fair amount, or was a fair amount, of Woo-Anon out there, like yoga-doing QAnon followers — but this is “Trad-Anon,” right? This is a point where the traditional Christian conservative coalition is finding a way to meet the QAnon energy and come up with this strange —Jane Coaston: It’s a secular fundamentalist religion. It’s QAnon, but they’ve taken — you don’t hear talk about traditional marriage anymore. You don’t hear talking about sincerely held religious beliefs. This is not the RFRA fight of 2015, 2016. This is QAnon, but an areligious QAnon.Ezra Klein: Well, it’s both, right? Because on the one hand, you have a Rod Dreher version of it, which is very, very Christian, “We’re trying to protect traditional gender roles.” It’s why he’s out there tweeting that Viktor Orban in Hungary is now the leader of the entire West. And on the other side you have this groomer thing, which is an attempt to take QAnon’s view — which is one reason it’s resonating on the far right — that all of politics is an effort by Democrats to protect pedophiles and then find some way to sort of wink, wink that you’re on board with that view of politics while saying it’s actually a little bit about something else.And so this is just one of the dimensions of it that I find really unnerving. Countries live or fall on how well they police the fringes in their political parties. And the Republican Party is so unbelievably bad at doing it. And every two years you think they can’t possibly be worse at not keeping out the worst elements of their party. And they show you, no, no, no, no, they’re going to bring those people into the core, too.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Jamelle, I want to ask you this, though, because we’ve been talking a lot about the G.O.P., but what can be said about the Democrats? Because what is always fascinating to me is that you have Democrats that have policies that enjoy broad support. But they can’t seem to get their agenda passed while they are in power. I mean, one thing is the G.O.P. and what they’re doing. But it seems like the Democrats can’t seem to get traction on things that enjoy broad support.Jamelle Bouie: I think there are a few things here. I mean, in terms of getting policies through Congress, they just don’t have the votes. They’re reliant on their majority in the Senate — in particular on one senator, Joe Manchin, whose entire political brand kind of depends on him publicly being an obstacle to Democratic priorities, and then another senator, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who seems to want to try to cultivate a kind of John McCain maverick energy, which for her also means publicly and visibly standing in the way of Democratic priorities.And so I think this picture would look very different if there was one more or two more senators, right? If Cal Cunningham in North Carolina had won, if Susan Collins’s opponent in Maine had won, we’d be looking at a very different situation than we are now.But I think beyond the problem of winning elections and having a larger majority, which is just ultimately what the issue is here, I do think Democrats have adopted a faulty idea of what is going to drive political success. It’s very clear that the idea Democrats had going into 2021 was if they just delivered economic growth, and they delivered policies, and they kept their heads down and did hard work, then that would produce a public that was inclined to re-elect Democrats.But what seems to be happening, what Republicans seemed to have figured out, is that the actual popularity of the things you’re saying may be a little less important than your ability to seize attention, drive conversations, create a strong impression in the minds of people. And I don’t think Democrats have really been doing that. And I think that the arguments over these bills are actually a good example of it.I think the Democratic Party is having a hard time figuring out exactly how to go about pushing against this stuff because it runs into this theory of the case they have. There doesn’t seem to be an inclination to really just swing — to make what may sound like outlandish accusations, but that push strongly against the messaging and the rhetoric coming from the Republican Party.Ezra Klein: I think that Jamelle gets that right, on both the levels. The reason the Democrats can’t pass bills is they don’t have enough votes to pass them. It’s as simple as that. It’s not a messaging problem, fundamentally. Although, I will say that the point of Joe Biden is that he was going to be good at negotiating with egotistical, hard-to-deal-with members of the U.S. Senate.And I do worry about a sense of resignation that has set in at the White House around Joe Manchin. I would like to see more constant efforts at trying than I’m currently seeing. They seem to be letting their poor relationship with Manchin simply deteriorate when they need to be figuring out how to fix it. And at least from my reporting, what I can tell, I’m not seeing it.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: But Ezra, I want to ask you this about the Democrats. I mean, it is a numbers game. Of course it is. But on the other hand, I don’t see Democratic leaders really standing up and saying, this is the ground that I’m going to die on, this is the hill that has to be crested, in the same way that the Republicans are on these very controversial bills.Ezra Klein: So, one, I don’t think that it’s the national Republicans who are trying to make the controversial bills the center of it. But to this broader point you’re making, and to something Jamelle said, the Democratic leaders have had a theory that they’re going to push popular bills. They’re going to try to pass those bills and they’re going to try to run on them.And that theory basically has failed. They passed the American Rescue Plan. It was a very popular bill. They tried to run using it to generate more momentum for Build Back Better. They did not get Build Back Better passed, and now the child tax credit is expiring. And now they’ve fundamentally lost agenda control.So it’s like, the agenda is now Russia, which is a world event. They can’t do anything about that. And I think broadly speaking, Joe Biden’s been doing a good job, with the exception of occasional ad-libs. And then there’s inflation, which they’re also really struggling with and to some degree bear some responsibility for.What they are not doing is the other side of populism, which I think of as unpopularism. And agenda control in American politics comes from courting, choosing, engaging in controversy. For something to dominate the news, it needs the energy of not just support but opposition. That’s why some of these G.O.P. bills in Florida and elsewhere are dominating the news in the way they are.There are things that Joe Biden could do that would have that internal electricity. They could cancel student loan debt. I don’t know that they think that’s a good idea at the moment. But if they decided to actually try, which is something Chuck Schumer wants them to do, something Elizabeth Warren wants them to do, that would be controversial enough that it would reshape the agenda. American politics would be seized by arguments over whether or not canceling student loan debt is a good idea, and that might be territory more favorable to them. I do not myself understand what fights Democrats want the 2022 election to be over. They seem to me to be in a fundamentally quite reactive place right now —Jamelle Bouie: Yes.Ezra Klein: — responding to world events, responding to every month’s economic news drop. And at some point, if they want to do anything differently than that, they’re not just going to have to choose which popular things they say. They’re going to have to choose which controversial things they say, such that Republicans and others engage on the other side, and the locus of American political conflict moves back onto ground they’ve chosen.Jamelle Bouie: An example of this, pulling from what we’ve been talking about, is if Joe Biden were to, on Friday, give a national speech — from the Oval Office, from the Rose Garden, wherever, a big national set piece speech denouncing the Republican Party as embracing gross homophobia, this would be controversial. People would get upset. But it would seize the agenda. It would reorient things toward talking about these issues on ground that might be more favorable to Democrats. And I see no indication that Democratic leaders are even thinking in those terms.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Jane, I want to think about this idea of unpopularism, that the Democrats, as Ezra says, are not wanting to push something that might not have broad support. But of course, there is someone who loves to do that a lot: Trump. And I am wondering about what you see his role is coming up in the 2022 midterms. Because we have him endorsing a lot of candidates, including Sarah Palin for Congress this week, targeting some major G.O.P. incumbents who have stood up to him, like Lisa Murkowski and Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, all the while still peddling the big lie. How much influence do you see him having these days? And how should we regard Trump as a force in politics, a force in society — and, I guess, are those two the same thing?Jane Coaston: I know that I’m probably the only extreme sports fan on here. But I feel like sometimes when we’re talking about Democratic strategy, it’s like, if only they would run the offense we think they should run, they would win. I actually don’t know what Democrats should do or what would be best. There’s what I would want them to do, and I don’t know if it would work.But as to Trump, I think what you’re going to see is actually a decline in his influence, because he absolutely will not move on past the 2020 election. He can’t do it. He is physically unable to do so. And you’re seeing with his endorsements in the upcoming cycle — actually a number of his endorsements aren’t doing very well.You’re seeing this in Georgia. You’re seeing this in other places, with Herschel Walker or something like that where, yes, Mitch McConnell has said that he’s got his support, but there is some concern, I think, on the ground that that could be another losing race. Because, again, if your litmus test for Trump has nothing to do with anything that is taking place in 2022, but all has to do with whether or not you’re willing to say that Trump actually won the 2020 election …He is a losing one-term president who is existing interminably as a losing one-term president. It is important to note that Democrats want him to be more influential than he actually is because he is a major vote-driver for Democrats, as we’ve seen in Georgia and elsewhere.And so I think that you’re seeing a lot of Republicans who are like, “Can we move on, can we move on,” and Donald Trump will not. Donald Trump will talk about how, oh, Ron DeSantis is fine, but I would absolutely beat him in 2024. He will do interviews. He will put out very bad failing social media networks. And so I think how he should be considered is, he is an angry man who won’t move on and who won’t go away. And no matter what Republicans want him to say or want him to do, he will not be on any party line that is not his own.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Trump’s influence is solidified in one very particular place, and that’s on the conservative Supreme Court. And today, a big win for Democrats — the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. I want to bring her into this because it actually fits into what we’ve been discussing. Because the G.O.P. slammed her in the hearings with a lot of partisan attacks about C.R.T., asking her to define what a woman is and QAnon-adjacent questions about child pornography. And yet, in polling, people said that they hated the attacks, and she has a majority of support. So, Jamelle, what should we take away from that?Jamelle Bouie: We should take away from that that these attacks are not some sort of, pardon the expression, trump card. That when you have someone like Judge Jackson, who looks like a perfectly lovely woman, and is obviously very qualified and obviously very successful, and you have Ted Cruz shouting about how she is friendly to criminals and child pornographers. I think that for ordinary people who aren’t paying super close attention — they’re really just taking in images and impressions — it just looks ridiculous. And it seems unconvincing.To go back to what we’ve been talking about, I think that something similar may happen with these bills. Screaming that your kids’ gay third-grade teacher is a pedophile or a groomer when you know that this person has been absolutely lovely to you, your child and your family — it’s not going to fly, I think, for most people or for people outside of this narrow bubble.One thing I will say about the experience of Judge Jackson and her nomination and how this has all played out, is I think it is a point in favor of the argument that back in 2016 President Barack Obama made a grave mistake in nominating Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court in an attempt to find bipartisan support. Not because Garland was not qualified to be on the court — although I think I have somewhat idiosyncratic views about what it means to be qualified — but because Garland didn’t engender really any kind of popular support in his favor. No one was excited by him. Just another boring guy you put on the Supreme Court.I think what Jackson has in her favor is simply that she’d be the first Black woman on the court. And that excites people. That makes people enthusiastic. And that makes people much more willing to buckle down in her defense than they would otherwise be.And so I think one lesson to take away from this, should Joe Biden get another Supreme Court nomination, either in the next two years or if he serves another term, is that for as much as it’s clear that Democratic Party elites and people at the highest echelons of this stuff very much believe that a Supreme Court nominee must be someone with a lot of judicial experience, etc., etc., they should also be looking for people who would actually excite the public, who would get people interested and excited about what’s going on in the court. Those are the sorts of nominees they should be looking for and putting forth and putting in public. Even if that nominee may fail, the mere fact of generating that enthusiasm is an important thing.I think this actually connects to our broader conversation about Democrats, which is that Democrats need to stop thinking of politics as some sort of mechanistic system in which, like, Good Input A gets you Good Result B. It’s much more fluid, much more chaotic in that oftentimes you just need to swing. You need to aim at people’s passions and see what happens. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe it won’t. But I think connecting the people’s passions and their enthusiasms, can be much more successful than trying to be openly and outwardly and ostentatiously respectable.Ezra Klein: Democrats are very taken, I think in general at the moment, with something political scientists like to call the median voter theorem, which is to say that the key thing in politics is getting to that median voter, the voter right in the middle, who’s the most ideologically moderate, and convincing them. And if you get that 50 percent plus one, or maybe you correct for the Senate bias, or it’s 55 percent plus one — whatever it might be — then you win.And there is some truth to that. I think that a lot of folks on the left and critics of Democrats underrate the importance of ideology and policy positioning in politics. There really are moderates. But the flip side of that, to what Jamelle is saying, is that you have to reach the median voter. They have to hear what it is you’re saying. And the thing about the voters you need to reach is they’re often not paying super close attention. The people who are paying super close attention almost, by definition, have already made up their minds, otherwise they would not be paying such close attention because they wouldn’t care that much.And so you need to do things that don’t just control the agenda but actually echo through the country. And that requires you to have not just a theory of what it is voters will find popular, but what it is that they will talk about, what it is the media will talk about. And this maybe goes to a big through line of this whole conversation. Democrats have a lot of theories of policy. They have a lot of theories of politics. They just do not have a theory of attention. And what I would say for the Trumpist Republican Party is it mostly doesn’t have a theory of policy. It has a middling theory of politics, and it is overwhelmed by its own theory of attention. And I don’t think there’s some kind of grand strategic plan happening over there.But I think that one way to think about the asymmetry, or maybe the inversion of the two sides right now, is that Republicans know how to get attention, but they don’t know how to be strategic about it. And Democrats know how to be strategic, but they don’t know how to get attention.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I want to pivot to a piece of news that is less domestic culture wars, and more of a global culture war. The Boston Marathon announced this week that Belarusian and Russian citizens who reside in those countries are not allowed to run in the race as a response to the war. The Boston Athletic Association, which runs the Boston Marathon, announced that they were “horrified and outraged” by the war, and they believe that they must do what they can to “support the people of Ukraine.”I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I’d like to hear yours. I’m going to start with Jane, as I know you’re a sports aficionado. So I want your thoughts on this.Jane Coaston: I personally think that this is not quite like freedom fries territory. But I do think it seems to be targeted at a very small group of people — as you said, it was Belarusian and Russian citizens who do reside in those countries. But Belarusian and Russian citizens who don’t reside in those countries will be allowed to run, but they’re not going to recognize their affiliation or flags.I think it’s worth remembering that the process to enter or qualify for the Boston Marathon started for many people a year ago. You do not just decide to run the Boston Marathon. You are either running for a charity or you have a time in another marathon that qualifies you to run in Boston. And I’m trying to think, what is this going to do? Vladimir Putin is not going to be like, “Oh, no, a Russian citizen was not able to run a 2:03 at the Boston Marathon. I will ne’er sin no more!”I think that there is an element to so much of our politics, especially on foreign policy, where we’ve got the “we got to do something” impulse. But one of the challenges is that there isn’t something that the Boston Marathon organizers, or people who run an opera house, or people who work in the art world — there’s not something they could do exactly that will in their view adequately punish the aggressions of the Russian government. It falls flat. And I think it’s kind of repulsive.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I have to say, Jane, I agree with you. I think this was a real misstep. I don’t know that banning citizens of particular countries because they actually live in the countries of their citizenship, and those leaders are autocratic and there isn’t the freedom to protest or do any of the things that you would think of in a democracy, is actually beneficial to the cause of freeing Ukraine. But I’m interested in, Jamelle, your thoughts, and then Ezra.Jamelle Bouie: I don’t disagree. It makes no real conceptual sense why you would do this. So Russian and Belarusian citizens who live in their countries cannot run in the Boston Marathon. OK. That doesn’t put any pressure on the leaders of those countries. If anything, it may encourage the view amongst the citizenry that the West is against them, that the West isn’t simply against the government or to the government’s actions, but actually actively against the citizens themselves. And it may prompt people to double down in their support for the government. So it just seems counterproductive.Issue a statement. Condemn. Say that government officials can’t participate, they can’t watch, they can’t be there. If you want to go as far as to say, you can’t fly the flag, I actually think that’s probably fair because the flag is a symbol of the government as well. But banning the citizens, like Jane said, it seems like just doing something for the sake of doing something, and it doesn’t really seem very constructive. It doesn’t even seem like it was particularly well thought-out, like anyone was thinking about what you actually are trying to accomplish by doing this.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Ezra?Ezra Klein: I have a hard-and-fast rule that on any sports story I just think whatever Jane thinks. So on the specifics of this, I think whatever Jane thinks, and everything she said sounded correct to me.From a consequentialist perspective, we need to think a bit about whether we are creating pressure on citizens in these countries to pressure their governments, or whether we are hardening their support for their governments. And recognizing that they live in highly censored, highly manipulated media ecosystems, I think we have to be pretty thoughtful about whether we’re just giving grist to their leaders to manipulate them more. And for the people who are only half in and out of that ecosystem — because Russian and Belarusian control over media is not absolute — whether we’re actually doing things that are going to make those wavering feel more nationalistic.There’s a very big difference between strategically trying to win over a population and just trying to punish a country because it at a certain point just feels like we need to keep punishing. And, look, I want to punish Putin and those behind this war in every way that is possible. And I broadly support the sanctions, despite the tremendous pain they’re causing, because I do think that they are creating pressure in the long-run for Putin to end this. But I don’t know that doing things that actually target Russian citizens — without any obvious mechanism for pressuring the regime — makes a lot of sense.And I’m worried about some of the news I hear and some of the polling I see coming out of Russia. You can only believe what you can believe in it, but that there is rising support for Putin, that there is a rising belief that the entire West is arrayed against Russia. And that this might actually, in terms of the domestic political pressures Putin faces, be making him more worried about the hard-liners who think he needs to go further, further, further and show Russian strength in the face of Western opposition rather than what our initial effort was, which was to try to get the more Westernized Russians — these oligarchs with their lofts in London — to pressure Putin to bring an end to this. So I worry that our view of this has, without anybody noting it, kind of flipped. And we may not be creating the incentive system that we had hoped to.Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a Times Opinion podcast host. Ezra Klein is the host of “The Ezra Klein Show” and a Times columnist. Jane Coaston is the host of “The Argument” podcast. Jamelle Bouie is a Times columnist.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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Times Opinion audio produced by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Alison Bruzek and Phoebe Lett. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker and Alex Ellerbeck. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and mixing by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, and editorial support from Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to Lauren Kelley and Patrick Healy. More

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      Oklahoma lawmakers pass bill to make performing an abortion illegal

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      Oklahoma lawmakers pass bill to make performing an abortion illegal State house approves bill that would make performing an abortion a felony and punishable by 10 years in prison Oklahoma lawmakers overwhelmingly passed a bill to make performing an abortion a felony punishable by 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. That is likely to land the bill on the desk of the Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, who has promised to sign all anti-abortion legislation.Oklahoma’s bill is just one in a raft of Republican bills to severely restrict or ban abortion, all timed before a widely anticipated supreme court case that disrupts nearly 50 years of established protections for abortion rights. If Oklahoma’s bill passes into law, it will take effect this summer.“When [patients] hear this is happening, and probably will happen soon, they are in shock,” said Dr Iman Alsaden, medical director of Planned Parenthood Great Plains.“The implications of all of this is there’s going to be a few states that are relied on to provide abortion care to people, and those people who do not live in those states will have to wait enormously long wait times,” said Alsaden. “You’re just looking at really making people jump through extraordinary hoops.”More than 781,000 women of reproductive age live in Oklahoma. However, the bill is also expected to have an outsized impact on the nearly 7 million women of reproductive age who live in Texas. Thousands of pregnant Texans have relied on legal abortion in Oklahoma since Texas outlawed abortion after six weeks gestation in September 2021.Since Texas outlawed most abortion services, Planned Parenthood Great Plains’s caseload of Texas patients has gone from about four dozen from September to December 2020, to more than 1,100 in the same three-month period in 2021. Demand from patients in Texas has been so great it has already displaced some Oklahoma patients, Alsaden said, who she has seen travel to Kansas for care.Alsaden said Planned Parenthood Great Plains intended to challenge any abortion bans in court. However, the fate of any such challenge and others like it are uncertain.Before former president Donald Trump took office, federal courts routinely blocked abortion bans. However, Trump was able to confirm three conservative justices, which tipped the balance of the supreme court to the right.Since then, the supreme court has shown a willingness to severely restrict or perhaps overturn the right to terminate a pregnancy, even though the majority of Americans support legal abortion. A supreme court decision in a crucial abortion rights case is expected in June.“These legislators have continued their relentless attacks on our freedoms,” said Emily Wales, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains Votes, a related reproductive rights advocacy group.“These restrictions are not about improving the safety of the work that we do. They are about shaming and stigmatizing people who need and deserve abortion access.”Republican legislators who sponsored the bill emphasized that the punishments outlined were for doctors, “not for the woman”, said the Oklahoma state representative Jim Olsen.Notably, the bill was also unusual for being revived from the 2021 legislative session. During hearings in 2021, Olsen said he felt ending abortion was a moral duty and compared terminating a pregnancy to slavery.Also Tuesday, the Oklahoma house adopted a resolution to recognize aborted fetuses as lives lost and urged citizens to fly flags at half-staff on 22 January, the day the supreme court established a legal right to abortion through the landmark 1973 case Roe v Wade.“All of these laws are rooted in paternalism and racism and white supremacy, and they disproportionately affect people who are Black and brown and low-income, and they do that under the guise of quote-unquote helping people,” said Alsaden.“If you wanted to help someone, there is something basic you need to do when you are helping them – which is listen to what they need,” she said.TopicsOklahomaAbortionHealthRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Five sets of fetal remains found in anti-abortion activist’s home, DC police say

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      Five sets of fetal remains found in anti-abortion activist’s home, DC police sayLauren Handy claims she gained access to organ bank at university in Seattle but authorities haven’t disclosed source of fetuses Five sets of human fetal remains were recovered from the Washington DC home of an anti-abortion activist after a raid, the capital’s Metropolitan police department confirmed to the Guardian on Thursday.The activist, a woman named Lauren Handy, 28, is a leader of the group Progressive Anti-Abortion uprising (PAAU) and has described herself as a “Catholic anarchist” in the past.Local television station WUSA9 reported remains were carried out in red biohazard bags on Wednesday. Handy’s only comment at the time was: “People will freak out when they hear.”Although the authorities have not disclosed the source of the fetal remains, Handy recently claimed to have gained access to an organ bank at the University of Washington in Seattle. Separately, she was indicted on Wednesday for forcing entry into a Washington DC abortion clinic in 2020 October.“On March 9th myself & [sic] fellow activists gained access to University of Washington’s fetal organ labs & freezers,” Handy claimed on Twitter on 23 March. She also retweeted pictures posted by PAAU that show the contents of a walk-in deep freezer.The university said it plans to release a statement but would not confirm whether the pictures were authentic. It also said that university authorities were investigating whether anything was missing from the lab.On Wednesday, federal prosecutors indicted Handy on charges of blockading a Washington DC abortion clinic, where she allegedly claimed to be a patient to gain entry. She and eight co-defendants could face up to 11 years in prison and $350,000 in fines if found guilty.The news comes as conservative states across the country rush to limit women’s access to abortion, in anticipation of a forthcoming supreme court decision expected to severely curtail women’s right to terminate a pregnancy.Conversely, some Democratic-led states have worked to enshrine the right to abortion in state law.Current federal law requires states to allow abortion until a fetus can survive outside the womb, generally regarded as 24 weeks gestation, because of a decision in the 1973 landmark supreme court case Roe v Wade.TopicsAbortionWashington DCUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Idaho copies extreme Texas law and bans abortion after six weeks

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      Idaho copies extreme Texas law and bans abortion after six weeksOutrage as state becomes first in US to pass ban modelled on Texas law that allows family members to sue abortion providers Idaho has become the first US state to pass an abortion ban modeled after a controversial Texas law that prohibits abortions after about six weeks or when a heartbeat is detected.Blue states seek to protect abortion rights before supreme court decisionRead moreThe news comes with abortion rights under assault across the US – despite clear majority support for such rights. The conservative-dominated US supreme court is thought likely to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling which established the right, later this year.On Monday, Idaho house members passed the ban 51-14. No Democrats supported the legislation. The Senate has approved the bill and the Republican governor, Brad Little, is expected to sign it.Abortion rights groups called on Little to use his veto.Planned Parenthood called the bill a copycat of the Texas bill that became law last May and was controversially left in place by the supreme court.“Idaho’s anti-abortion lawmakers ignored public opinion and rushed through this legislation, looking to capitalize on the US supreme court’s failure to block Texas’s ban,” Planned Parenthood said, adding that the bill’s proponents have been open about wanting Idaho to become “the next Texas”.Jennifer M Allen, chief executive of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates, an Idaho nonprofit, said: “Little must do the right thing, listen to the medical community and veto this legislation before it forces Idaho patients to leave the state for critical, time-sensitive care or remain pregnant against their will.”The Idaho bill would also allow family members to sue doctors who perform procedures after six weeks of pregnancy, before most people know they are pregnant. The bill provides a minimum reward of $20,000 plus legal fees within four years of the abortion for successful suits, compared to minimum $10,000 and legal costs under the Texas law.Unlike the Texas law, the Idaho bill provides some exceptions in cases of rape or incest. While a rapist could not sue practitioners under Idaho’s new bill, family members could. Victims would have to file a police report and provide it to a doctor before they could get the procedure.“This bill is not clever, it’s absurd,” said Democratic representative Lauren Necochea, adding that the rape and incest exemptions were “not meaningful”.Last year, Little signed a “heartbeat” bill into law, but it included a “trigger provision” that stopped it being in effect until a federal court approved it, which has not happened.Several Republican-run states have taken steps to restrict abortion rights. Among them, bills in Missouri would permit lawsuits against those who help someone cross state lines to get an abortion. Terminating non-viable pregnancies would be a criminal offense.The Oklahoma senate recently passed six anti-abortion measures, including a copycat of the Texas ban. In February, the Arizona senate passed an abortion ban that would prohibit the procedure after 15 weeks, similar to the law passed in Mississippi, which is expected to lead the supreme court to overturn Roe v Wade.TopicsIdahoAbortionUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Biden’s State of the Union address: a perfect summation of his presidency | Moira Donegan

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      Biden’s State of the Union address: a perfect summation of his presidencyMoira DoneganThe US president has good intentions, with only halting, sporadic, uncreative, and trepidatious efforts to actually enact them There’s always something a bit grim about the State of the Union. A setpiece of American political theater, the annual speech by the president to a joint session of Congress is choreographed to eliminate any chance of accidental sincerity. The president speaks in carefully calibrated spin; every word sounds like it has been focus-grouped. Members of the opposition party make a show of their animosity, vamping for the cameras with either staid, dignified displeasure or ravenous hatred, depending on where they are running for re-election. No one’s mind is changed and little new information is delivered. By its nature, the speech is meant to describe the status quo. It is not meant to change it.State of the Union: Joe Biden pledges to make Putin pay for Ukraine invasionRead moreThis year, President Biden had a particularly grim task. After months and months of negotiations with Senator Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, proved fruitless, his sweeping economic agenda, the Build Back Better Plan, appears to be dead. The two voting rights bills that would have helped secure the franchise for Black Americans and protect the integrity of future elections were killed when Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, declined to support an exemption to the filibuster, meaning that the erosion of voting rights in Republican-controlled states is likely to advance unchallenged. Many economic indicators are strong, but with inflation running rampant, this means little to working families, who see their paychecks covering less and less of what they need. This spring, the US supreme court will hand down opinions that will drastically reshape American government and American lives, including the case from Mississippi, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, that will overturn Roe v Wade. The midterms are coming, and in Europe, a pointless and brutal war of self-aggrandizement has been launched by an erratic and mendacious dictator with a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons.Perhaps it was to be expected, then, that Biden’s speech was wide-ranging in tone, frenziedly ambitious in its agenda, and light on specifics. He opened with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, condemning the murderous ambitions of Vladimir Putin and praising the courage of the unexpectedly resilient Ukrainian military and civilian volunteer forces to rapturous applause. The Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, was in attendance as a guest of the first lady, and she received the night’s first standing ovation, her hand placed over her heart from her balcony seat, as lawmakers below fluttered her country’s blue and yellow flag. Homages to the Ukrainian struggle were everywhere in the House chamber, with a number of women lawmakers dressed in blue and yellow ensembles, men and women alike wearing stickers of the Ukrainian flag on their lapels, and others fielding subtler signals of solidarity: when the camera lingered on Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, she had a cloth sunflower, the Ukrainian national symbol, pinned to her collar.Biden boasted of the devastating impact of western economic sanctions on the Russian economy, reaffirmed his support for Nato, and vowed to deploy the justice department to seize yachts belonging to Putin’s friends. Promisingly, it seems as if concerns over growing Russian aggression might spark a renewed interest in energy independence that could help the US and Europe break their addiction to Russian oil and gas. Speaking of the recent return of significant numbers of American troops to Central Europe for the first time in years, Biden reaffirmed his commitment to preventing a direct military confrontation with Russia, and emphasized that the troops would be there not to attack the Russians, but to protect Nato allies. One suspects that Putin will not appreciate the distinction.When Biden moved on to domestic policy, the crowd quickly became divided. As he touted his American Rescue Plan, last year’s Covid relief package, boos erupted from the Republican side when Biden noted that the 2017 Republican tax cuts had primarily benefitted the very rich. It was a theme he maintained as he turned to his bipartisan infrastructure law, the $1tn legislative achievement that provides funds for the maintenance and repair of the nation’s physical infrastructure – roads, bridges, airports, commuter trains, and internet. Biden touted a series of shovel-ready projects he claims will go into effect this year and emphasized the bill’s ability to encourage the return of the American manufacturing sector.Domestic manufacturing was largely his prescription for fighting inflation, too. Biden introduced his broader economic agenda with a call to make more stuff in the US, and to use the federal government’s purchasing power to support those American-made goods. This segue led into a litany of briefly visited agenda items, such as allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices; cutting the cost of childcare for working class families so that more women could return to the paid workforce; establishing a 15% minimum corporate tax rate; and supporting the labor-strengthening Pro Act.Many of these proposals seemed less like Biden was putting forward achievable goals for the next year of his presidency and more like he was shifting through the wreckage of his disastrous Build Back Better negotiations with Manchin, searching for some workable leftovers. Most of the items he proposed had already been presented to Congress; none of them had been able to get through the obstructionism of the Republican party and the Manchin-Sinema block. These things would substantially improve the lives of Americans, but it was clear he had no plan for how to implement any of them.This was true especially for abortion rights. Though reproductive choice advocates had long urged Biden to say the word “abortion” in public – he has never done so as president – he referred tonight only offhandedly to the importance of reproductive rights. There was no mention of the fact that Roe v Wade has been nullified in the state of Texas for six months, as of Tuesday. There was no mention of the fact that the Reproductive Health Act, an attempt to legislatively secure the federal right to an abortion, failed in the Senate this week. There was no mention of the fact that of the five supreme court justices present at the speech, three of them – John Roberts, Brett Kavanagh, and Amy Coney Barrett – will vote to eliminate that right in a few short months. “We have to protect a woman’s right to choose,” said Biden, not offering any ideas as to just how that right might be protected. The camera cut momentarily to Amy Coney Barrett, who pursed her lips as thin as paper.In this way, the speech was a perfect summation of Biden’s presidency: good intentions, with only halting, sporadic, uncreative, and trepidatious pursuit of actually enacting them. Unlike his predecessor, Biden tends to stay on script, but the State of the Union speech featured several ad libs – a product, some suspected, of the multiple revisions the speech was subjected to at the last minute, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine placed new demands on the broadcast. The last of these was probably the most apropos: “Go get him,” Biden told the nation. Him who? Get him how? It didn’t make sense, but so little of this does.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsJoe BidenOpinionUS politicsAbortionUS economyUS domestic policyUS foreign policyUkrainecommentReuse this content More

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      How the Fight Over Abortion Rights Has Changed the Politics of South Texas

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      In the Laredo region, long a Democratic stronghold, that single issue appears to be driving the decision for many voters, the majority of whom are Catholic.LAREDO, Texas — Like the majority of her neighbors in the heavily Latino community of Laredo, Angelica Garza has voted for Democrats for most of her adult life. Her longtime congressman, Henry Cuellar, with his moderate views and opposition to abortion, made it an easy choice, she said.But as up-and-coming Democratic candidates in her patch of South Texas have leaned ever more liberal, Ms. Garza, a dedicated Catholic, cast a ballot for Donald Trump in 2016, primarily because of his anti-abortion views.In choosing Mr. Trump that year and again in 2020, Ms. Garza joined a parade of Latino voters who are changing the political fabric of South Texas. In the Laredo region, where about nine out of 10 residents are Catholic, many registered voters appear to be driven largely by the single issue of abortion.“I’m willing to vote for any candidate that supports life,” said Ms. Garza, 75. “That’s the most important issue for me, even if it means not voting for a Democrat.”With a pivotal primary election just a week away, Ms. Garza is ready to to turn away from Democrats. Pointing at a wall covered in folkloric angel figurines at the art store she owns in Laredo, she explained why: “They are babies, angels, and I don’t think anyone has the right to end their life. We have to support life.”Angelica Garza voted for Donald Trump in 2016 because of his anti-abortion views.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesVoters like Ms. Garza are worrying Democratic leaders, whose once tight grip and influence on the Texas-Mexico border region has loosened in recent electoral cycles. Republicans have claimed significant victories across South Texas, flipping Zapata County, south of Laredo on the bank of the Rio Grande, and a state district in San Antonio. They also made gains in the Rio Grande Valley, where the border counties delivered so many votes for Mr. Trump in 2020 that they helped negate the impact of white voters in urban and suburban areas of the state who voted for Joe Biden.Much is at stake in Laredo, the most populous city of the 28th Congressional District, where Latinos are a majority, and which stretches from the eastern tip of San Antonio and includes a western chunk of the Rio Grande Valley. Since the district was drawn nearly three decades ago, the seat has been held by Democrats. Mr. Cuellar has represented the district since 2005. His moderate and sometimes conservative views — he was the only Congressional Democrat to vote against a U.S. House bill that would have nullified the state’s near-total ban on abortion that went into effect last September — have frequently endeared him to social conservatives and Republicans.But he now finds himself locked in a tight fight against a much more liberal candidate backed by the progressive wing of the party that includes Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Mr. Cuellar, whose home was raided last month by the F.B.I. as part of an investigation that neither he nor the government has disclosed, beat his opponent, Jessica Cisneros, by four percentage points in 2020.Should he lose the primary on March 1 to Ms. Cisneros, a 28-year-old immigration lawyer who supports abortion rights, the path to flip the House of Representatives could very well run through South Texas, as Republicans have vowed an all-in campaign focused on religious and other conservative values. More

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      The Supreme Court Fails Black Voters in Alabama

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      You know the Rubicon has been crossed when the Supreme Court issues a conservative voting rights order so at odds with settled precedent and without any sense of the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts feels constrained to dissent.This is the same John Roberts who in 1982, as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, fought a crucial amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; whose majority opinion in 2013 gutted one-half of the Voting Rights Act and who joined an ahistoric opinion last summer that took aim at the other half; and who famously complained in dissent from a 2006 decision in favor of Latino voters in South Texas that “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”Yes, that Chief Justice Roberts. What the 5-to-4 majority did was that far out of line.The unsigned order that drew the chief justice’s dissent Monday night blocked the decision by a special three-judge Federal District Court ordering the Alabama Legislature to draw a second congressional district in which Black residents constitute a majority. Alabama’s population is 27 percent Black. The state has seven congressional districts. The lower court held that by packing some Black voters into one district and spreading others out over three other districts, the state diluted the Black vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act.The Supreme Court will hear Alabama’s appeal of the district court order in its next term, so the stay it granted will mean that the 2022 elections will take place with district lines that the lower court unanimously, with two of the three judges appointed by President Donald Trump, found to be illegal.Chief Justice Roberts objected that the ordinary standards under which the Supreme Court grants a stay of a lower court opinion had not been met. “The district court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction,” he wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, also dissented in a more extensive opinion that accused the majority of using the court’s emergency “shadow docket” not only to intervene improperly on behalf of the state but also to change voting rights law in the process.This is no mere squabble over procedure. What happened Monday night was a raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point. It bears emphasizing that the majority’s agenda of cutting back on the scope of the Voting Rights Act is Chief Justice Roberts’s agenda too. He made that abundantly clear in the past and suggested it in a kind of code on Monday with his bland observation that the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But in his view, that was an argument to be conducted in the next Supreme Court term while permitting the district court’s decision to take effect now.While the majority as a whole said nothing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh took it upon himself to offer a kind of defense. Only Justice Samuel Alito joined him. Perhaps the others — Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — chose not to sign onto his rude reference to Justice Kagan’s “catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket.’ ” Or perhaps his “To reiterate: The court’s stay order is not a decision on the merits” rang a little hollow when, as Justice Kagan pointed out, “the district court here did everything right under the law existing today” and “staying its decision forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution.”In other words, when it comes to the 2022 elections, for Black voters in Alabama the Supreme Court’s procedural intervention is the equivalent of a ruling on the merits.Or maybe the others couldn’t indulge in the hypocrisy of Justice Kavanaugh’s description of the standards for granting a stay. The party asking for a stay, he wrote, “ordinarily must show (i) a reasonable probability that this court would eventually grant review and a fair prospect that the court would reverse, and (ii) that the applicant would likely suffer irreparable harm absent the stay.”But wait a minute. Weren’t those conditions clearly met back in September when abortion providers in Texas came to the court seeking a stay of the Texas vigilante law, S.B. 8, which was about to go into effect? That law, outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and authorizing anyone anywhere in the country to sue a Texas abortion provider for damages, was flagrantly unconstitutional, and the law was about to destroy the state’s abortion infrastructure. But did Justice Kavanaugh or any of the others in Monday’s majority vote to grant the requested stay? They did not. Chief Justice Roberts did.It’s impossible not to conclude that what we see at work is not some neutral principle guiding the Supreme Court’s intervention but simply whether a majority likes or doesn’t like what a lower court has done. In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh sought to avoid that conclusion by arguing that when it comes to election cases, the Supreme Court will more readily grant a stay to counteract “late judicial tinkering with election laws.” But there was no late “tinkering” here. The legislature approved the disputed plan in November, after six days of consideration, and the governor signed it. The district court conducted a seven-day trial in early January and on Jan. 24 issued its 225-page opinion. The election is months away — plenty of time for the legislature to comply with the decision.Disturbing as this development is, it is even more alarming in context. Last July, in a case from Arizona, the court took a very narrow view of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon against vote denial measures, policies that have a discriminatory effect on nonwhite voters’ access to the polls. That case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was brought under the act’s Section 2, which prohibits voting procedures that give members of racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Justice Alito’s opinion for a 6-to-3 majority set a high bar for showing that any disputed measure is more than just an ordinary burden that comes with turning out to vote.It was an unusual case, in that Section 2 has much more typically been used as it was in Alabama, to challenge district lines as causing vote dilution. Obviously, at the heart of any Section 2 case is the question of how to evaluate the role of race. In its request for a stay, Alabama characterized the district court of having improperly “prioritized” race, as opposed to other districting factors, in ordering a second majority Black district. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, representing the Alabama plaintiffs, called this a mischaracterization of what the district court had actually done when it took account of the compactness and cohesion of the Black community and the history of white Alabama voters refusing to support Black candidates.Stripped to its core, Alabama is essentially arguing that a law enacted to protect the interests of Black citizens bars courts from considering race in evaluating a redistricting plan. Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion contained a warning that granting the stay amounted to a tacit acceptance of that startling proposition. She said the stay reflected “a hastily made and wholly unexplained prejudgment” that the court was “ready to change the law.”The battle over what Section 2 means has been building for years, largely under the radar, and now it is front and center. The current Supreme Court term is all about abortion and guns. The next one will be all about race. Along with the Alabama case, Merrill v. Milligan, the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions cases are also on the docket — to be heard by a Supreme Court that, presumably, for the first time in history, will have two Black justices, and all in the shadow of the midterm elections. The fire next time.Linda Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008. She is the author of “Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court.”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: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Tens of thousands ‘march for life’ in Washington as fate of Roe v Wade looms

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      Tens of thousands ‘march for life’ in Washington as fate of Roe v Wade loomsCourt’s conservative supermajority appears open to reversing Roe, overturning nearly 50 years of precedent since 1973 decision In 1974, on the first anniversary of the Roe v Wade supreme court decision, abortion opponents gathered on the National Mall in Washington to “march for life”. They vowed to return each year until the ruling, which established the right to abortion, was no longer the law of the land.Supreme court declines to speed challenge to Texas abortion limitsRead moreOn Friday, anti-abortion activists from across the country braved sub-zero temperatures and the coronavirus pandemic to assemble in Washington, more hopeful than ever that this would be their last march to a court where the fate of Roe will soon be decided.“We are hoping and praying that this year, 2022, will bring a historic change for life,” Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, told a crowd tens of thousands strong and waving signs that read “I am the post-Roe generation” and “The future is anti-abortion”.Praising followers for standing against what she called the “single-most critical rights abuse of our time”, Mancini said they sent a clear message to the supreme court: “Roe is not settled law.”Chris Smith, a Republican congressman from New Jersey, described the mood as one of “fresh hope and heightened expectations”. The court’s conservative supermajority appears open to reversing Roe, thereby overturning nearly 50 years of precedent since the 1973 decision.“There’s optimism in the air, there is a sense that a significant hurdle to protect the unborn is about to move,” he said.The rally took place a day before the 49th anniversary of the Roe decision. The theme of the march, also in its 49th year, was “equality begins in the womb.” Speakers told rally-goers that their cause was bound up with the struggles for racial justice and gender equality and described abortion as “the ultimate form of discrimination”.The march typically draws about 100,000 abortion opponents by the busload to Washington. But this year’s march took place amid a wave of Omicron infections in the nation’s capital that limited turnout.Some activists said on social media they would not attend because of a new mandate in Washington requiring anyone over the age of 12 to show vaccination proof before entering restaurants, conference centers and other public places.Still, the event attracted a large and enthusiastic crowd, priests, pastors and busloads of high school students, among them. Together after the rally they marched to the supreme court singing hymns and chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Roe v Wade has got to go!”The jubilant demonstration comes as the supreme court reviews a case involving a Mississippi law which bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a direct challenge to Roe. At oral arguments, several members of the court’s conservative bloc appeared open to not only upholding the ban, but to overruling Roe entirely. A decision is expected by the end of June, months before the midterm elections.“We’ve been building to this moment,” said Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation of Virginia who spoke on a virtual panel organized by the March. Her group was active in helping confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court, part of a decades-long legal strategy by abortion opponents to remake the nation’s federal court system.“We heard justices say that precedent shouldn’t be upheld if it was incorrectly decided in the first place,” Cobb said. “That’s a big deal.”Several Republican lawmakers appeared on stage and virtually to voice their unwavering support for the anti-abortion cause, declaring that the movement was “winning this battle”.Last year, states enacted more than 100 new abortion restrictions, a record, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports reproductive rights and tracks state-level legislation. The group has called 2021 “the worst year for abortion rights in almost half a century”, and estimates that 26 US states are “certain or likely” to immediately ban abortion if Roe is overturned.And conservative states are already laying the groundwork for new restrictions as fights over issues like telemedicine and abortion pills gain momentum.Though the anti-abortion movement has made significant legal and policy gains in recent decades, public opinion polls have consistently found that a majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances.“If Roe falls, the battle lines will change,” Mancini said. “But make no mistake, the fight for life will need to continue in the states.”Kelly and Greg King, a married couple from Los Angeles, who were attending the event for a third time, said the supreme court decision would likely push their state to expand abortion access. They worry about plans to make California a “sanctuary” for out-of-state patients seeking reproductive care in a post-Roe legal landscape.Clear-eyed about the state’s progressive politics, Kelly King said she would focus her efforts on “changing hearts” rather than changing policy.“Abortion has become … ” Kelly King said, searching for the word. “Normalized,” her husband chimed in. “Yes, normalized,” she said. “That’s the problem.”Hours before marchers arrived on the National Mall, the supreme court declined to accelerate a legal challenge to a Texas law that has effectively banned abortions in the second-largest state.Yet among the speakers, there were few references to that victory or to the Texas law, which is deeply unpopular, including among Republicans.Pro-choice supporters also marked the anniversary, using the occasion to “sound the alarm” on the threat posed to reproductive rights.Mini Timmaraju, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, warned that a “small but vocal minority” was “determined to undermine the will of the majority of people in this country who support reproductive freedom”.“They falsely claim to be supporters of ‘equality’ all while working ardently to block abortion access and end the legal right to abortion,” she said in a statement. “Make no mistake – this movement’s end goals would only criminalize and endanger people based on pregnancy outcomes, furthering inequality.”At the White House, press secretary Jen Psaki noted the anniversary of Roe v Wade during her press briefing, saying that “reproductive healthcare has been under extreme and relentless assault ever since, especially in recent months”.She said the Biden administration was committed to working with Congress to pass federal legislation essentially enshrining into law a woman’s right to an abortion. The Democratic-controlled House passed the bill last year, but it remains stalled in the Senate, where it faces a Republican filibuster.“We’re deeply committed to making sure everyone has access to care and we will defend it with every tool we have,” Psaki said.At the rally, the presence of Make America Great Again hats was a reminder of the mutually beneficial relationship forged between Christian conservatives and Donald Trump, who became the first sitting president to attend the event in 2020.As they gathered, Trump voiced his allegiance: “As you gather together today for the March for Life, I am with you in spirit!”While many of the speakers anticipated the end of Roe, several demonstrators said they would continue to attend future marches until its mission “to make abortion unthinkable” was achieved.“I just pray every year that this is the last year we’re here,” said Janice LePage, who works for the youth ministry in the Archdiocese of St Louis. “I’m praying that the following year will be a march of celebration.”TopicsAbortionWashington DCUS politicsnewsReuse this content More