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      Tuesday’s primaries offered a glint of hope for Democrats this fall | Lloyd Green

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      Tuesday’s primaries offered a glint of hope for Democrats this fallLloyd GreenKansas voters affirmed a women’s right to choose. Meanwhile, Republicans across the US elevated extremist candidates who may be unpopular in general elections Republican candidates from Arizona to Pennsylvania ought to worry. On Tuesday, voters in Kansas rejected efforts to gut a woman’s right to choose. In 2020, Donald Trump trounced Joe Biden there 56-42. Two years later, an anti-choice referendum went down in defeat 59-41. Suburban moms and dads had thundered; turnout soared. The supreme court’s wholesale attack on Roe backfired.The competing opinions authored by Justices Alito, Thomas and Kavanaugh may gift the Democrats a two-seat gain in the Senate, and doom Republican pick-ups of governorships in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Grasp more than you can hold, and you will be left with nothing, the Talmud says. On primary day, the high court’s decision in Dobbs seems to have energized plenty of otherwise loyal Republicans. By the numbers, 65% of Americans believe the constitution enshrines a right of privacy even as they hold doubts about abortion.Trump-endorsed Senate hopefuls JD Vance (Ohio), Mehmet Oz (Pennsylvania), Herschel Walker (Georgia) and Blake Masters (Arizona) must now answer for the Republicans’ war on autonomy. Vance also wants to ban pornography as he gives a greenlight to guns and embraces Marjorie Taylor Greene. He claims smut harms fertility rates.A recent Fox News poll shows Democrats with double-digit leads in Pennsylvania’s Senate and governor’s races. Doug Mastriano, the Keystone state’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, came under recent fire for his embrace of Christian nationalism and ties with antisemitic figures. And Dr Oz is Dr Oz.Tudor Dixon, the Trump-backed winner of Tuesday’s Michigan Republican gubernatorial primary, believes that a 14-year-old raped by a relative should be forced to carry her pregnancy to term. “Yeah, perfect example,” she told an interviewer.Her remarks now are a centerpiece of incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer’s re-election efforts. Dixon opposes exceptions to an abortion ban in cases of rape and incest. She trailed Whitmer by 11 points in a July poll.The Michigan Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative may also appear on the fall ballot. Once upon a time opponents of Roe claimed the ruling was wrong because it was “anti-democratic”.Adding fuel to this Great Lakes dumpster fire, Matt DePerno, Michigan’s prospective Republican attorney general, openly mused about restricting accessibility to contraception. At a Republican debate, he questioned the validity of Griswold, the pertinent 1965 supreme court ruling. For good measure, DePerno previously spearheaded efforts to undo Biden’s 150,000-vote win in Michigan.Tuesday’s contests were also about the 45th president exacting revenge and promoting the “big lie” – that he was defrauded of victory.To be sure, not all Republicans were buying what the former guy was selling. But he had greater success than Kansas’s pro-lifers. Trumpism remains very much alive.In the state of Washington, incumbents Jaime Herrera Beutler and Dan Newhouse stand on the verge of rebuffing primary bids by Trump-endorsed challengers. Both Representatives Herrera Beutler and Newhouse voted to impeach the ex-reality show host over his role in the January 6 insurrection.On the other hand, Michigan’s Representative Peter Meijer, who voted for Trump’s impeachment, lost to John Gibbs, a Trump-backed challenger. Gibbs had received a boost from congressional Democrats, as part of an audacious strategic move to empower Republicans they think will lose in the general elections. Meijer, a supermarket chain scion, lost by four points.With the rightwing Gibbs as the Republican nominee, the Democrats may actually pick up a House seat. Had Meijer emerged with the Republican nod, he would have been favored. All this raises the question of whether Democratic talk about putting the country ahead of party is partisan blather.Elsewhere, Trump claimed the head of Republican Rusty Bowers, the outgoing speaker of the Arizona senate. He had opposed efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and appeared before the January 6 select committee.Days after Bowers testified, Trump declared: “Bowers must be defeated, and highly respected David Farnsworth is the man to do it.”Farnsworth believes that Satan stole the 2020 election. Really.“This is a real conspiracy headed up by the devil himself,” he explained at a debate.Along with Farnsworth, Mark Finchem, a diehard election denier and conspiracy theorist, notched the Arizona Republican nomination for secretary of state. He too had Trump’s blessing.As for the state’s Republican primary for governor, Kari Lake holds a two-point lead with more than 80% of precincts reporting. Like Finchem and Farnsworth, Lake garnered a Trump endorsement and rejects Biden’s legitimacy as president. Whether she actually wins the primary and can prevail against Democrat Katie Hobbs, the current secretary of state, remains to be seen.With Kansas’s resounding no vote, Democrats have good reason to make abortion a major issue for the midterms. Of course, as Republicans learned on Tuesday, it is all too easy to go off the deep-end.
      Lloyd Green is a regular contributor and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
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      ‘We could feel it’: Kansans celebrate upset abortion rights victory

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      ‘We could feel it’: Kansans celebrate upset abortion rights victoryOrganizers said treating reproductive rights as a non-partisan issue was key to success in a Republican-leaning state In a conference room at the Sheraton in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, people screamed, whooped, cheered and cried as a vote to protect abortion rights in Kansas’s state constitution came down late on Tuesday night.And it wasn’t just Democrats.James Quigley, 72, a retired doctor and a Republican from Johnson county, sat on his own drinking a glass of white wine after hearing the news. “Abortion is a much more nuanced issue than anti-choice individuals would have you think,” he told the Guardian. “It is deeply personal, sometimes tragic, but also sometimes a liberating decision – and we should trust women, their physicians, and their God on that,” he said.“We could feel it – we’ve been feeling it for weeks,” said Marcia Corbett, 71, a swing voter and local business owner, before the vote came in.The result had been eagerly awaited, as Kansas was the first state in the country to put abortion rights on the ballot since Roe v Wade, which federally guaranteed them, was overturned by the supreme court. It came after weeks of uncertainty, in a race in which misinformation abounded and tactics got ugly.01:01The victory – and its sheer scale in a usually reliably Republican and socially conservative state like Kansas – has sent shockwaves through the United States and provided a shot in the arm for efforts to protect abortion rights under siege across America.In Kansas, that fight had gotten dirty. On Tuesday, a former Republican congressman was linked to messages targeting voters with an anonymous, misleading text encouraging people to vote yes to protect abortion – when in fact a yes vote would have overturned a constitutional right to abortion. Vandals also spray-painted the walls of a Catholic church weeks earlier, with the phrase, “My body, my choice.”Nor had victory seemed certain on the day of the vote.On Tuesday, as voting began, the mood seemed amicable in Douglas county on a hot, sticky day, where temperatures consistently threatened to hit the hundreds. Polling booths in Lawrence and Eudora saw a steady drip of voters, even in the middle of the day, with dozens of voters lining up to vote at any given time. Many were unaffiliated, but turned up just to vote in the referendum.At the Eudora community center in Douglas county, Patrick Perry, 43, a mechanic and registered Republican, said he was voting no. A veteran who had fought in Iraq, he said he was voting due to his own “personal circumstances” – his wife needed an abortion in a medical emergency during their marriage, in a pregnancy that would have otherwise taken her life. But he didn’t expect Kansas to side with him. “We’re a Republican state,” he said. “And we don’t generally vote that way.”But on a night of huge turnout, Kansas voted to protect abortion in the state’s constitution, with the no vote securing a whopping 59% to 41% of the anti-abortion movement.At the beginning of the night, the mood had been cautiously hopeful at the Kansas for Constitutional Freedom event in Overland Park, with the no vote ahead from the start. “We’re in the lead, and no is better than yes!” a young girl said to her mother, from next-door Missouri. The two had been canvassing together for weeks.The Democratic congresswoman Sharice Davids stood up to speak early in the night, telling the audience of about 100 people: “The [supreme court] decision definitely felt like a gut punch to a lot of people in our community … But we stood up and got to work.”Following speeches, all eyes in the room were on a television projection blaring MSNBC’s elections statistics guru Steve Kornacki, whose voice was barely audible over the sounds of people chattering, drinking and bursting into cheers whenever a county’s no vote was called.“Imagine how good we are going to feel when we beat the anti-abortion movement and the Republicans, who lied at every turn,” state congresswoman Stephanie Clayton said.“I feel really good right now,” said Leslie Butsch, who had tears in her eyes by 8.30pm. She was watching as the vote in Johnson county first showed signs of leaning heavily towards no, after weeks of spending her evenings knocking on doors there. An hour later, when the result came through, she was one of the few people without a celebratory drink in her hand – she’d just spent all her cash tipping the bar staff in a flurry of happiness.“I feel overwhelmed with gratitude. Today we learned that organizers are more powerful than ever. We did the impossible,” she said.State senator Dinah Sykes burst into tears when the vote was called, covering her mouth and showing friends goosebumps on her arms. “It’s just amazing. It’s breathtaking that women’s voices were heard and [that] we care about women’s health,” she said.She knew that the vote would be close in a state that gave Trump a 15 percentage point lead over Biden in the 2020 election. “But we were close in a lot of rural areas and that really made the difference – I’m just so grateful,” she said.Ashley All, the spokesperson for KCF, said the success of their campaign was testament to non-partisanship – and other states should take heed. “It will be interesting for other states to watch this, and see this is not a partisan issue,” she said.Joe Biden made a statement on the result late on Tuesday. “Voters in Kansas turned out in record numbers to reject extreme efforts to amend the state constitution to take away a woman’s right to choose and open the door for a statewide ban,” the president said.“This vote makes clear what we know: the majority of Americans agree that women should have access to abortion and should have the right to make their own healthcare decisions.”Meanwhile, the defeated anti-abortion group Kansans for Life sent out an email to supporters following the vote, sharing their dismay. For a movement that has been on the rise in America – since before Roe was overturned, and after – it was clear they had suffered a powerful blow.“The mainstream media propelled the left’s false narrative, contributing to the confusion that misled Kansans about the amendment,” it said, and vowed to fight on. “Our movement and campaign have proven our resolve and commitment. We will not abandon women and babies.”TopicsKansasAbortionUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Kansas: celebrations after voters uphold right to abortion – video

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      Kansans delivered a win for abortion rights in the US on Tuesday night when they voted to continue to protect abortion in the state constitution. A deeply conservative and usually reliably Republican state, Kansas was the first in the US to put abortion rights to a vote since the US supreme court ruled to overturn Roe v Wade in late June

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      Kansas Votes to Preserve Abortion Rights Protections in Its Constitution

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      OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — Kansas voters resoundingly decided against removing the right to abortion from the State Constitution, according to The Associated Press, a major victory for the abortion rights movement in one of America’s reliably conservative states.The defeat of the ballot referendum was the most tangible demonstration yet of a political backlash against the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that had protected abortion rights throughout the country. The decisive margin came as a surprise, and after frenzied campaigns with both sides pouring millions into advertising and knocking on doors throughout a sweltering final campaign stretch.“The voters in Kansas have spoken loud and clear: We will not tolerate extreme bans on abortion,” said Rachel Sweet, the campaign manager for Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, which led the effort to defeat the amendment.told supporters that a willingness to work across partisan lines and ideological differences helped their side win.“The voters in Kansas have spoken loud and clear: We will not tolerate extreme bans on abortion,” Ms. Sweet said.At a campaign watch party in suburban Overland Park, abortion rights supporters yelled with joy when MSNBC showed their side with a commanding lead.“We’re watching the votes come in, we’re seeing the changes of some of the counties where Donald Trump had a huge percentage of the vote, and we’re seeing that just decimated,” said Jo Dee Adelung, 63, a Democrat from Merriam, Kan., who knocked on doors and called voters in recent weeks.She said she hoped the result sent a message that voters are “really taking a look at all of the issues and doing what’s right for Kansas and not just going down party lines.”The vote in Kansas, three months before the midterm elections, was the first time American voters weighed in directly on the issue of abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer. The referendum, watched closely by national figures on both sides of the abortion debate, took on added importance because of Kansas’ location, abutting states where abortion is already banned in nearly all cases. More than $12 million has been spent on advertising, split about evenly between the two camps. The amendment, had it passed, would have removed abortion protections from the State Constitution and paved the way for legislators to ban or restrict abortions.“We’ve been saying that after a decision is made in Washington, that the spotlight would shift to Kansas,” said David Langford, a retired engineer from Leawood, Kan., who wants the amendment to pass, and who reached out to Protestant pastors to rally support.The push for an amendment was rooted in a 2019 ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court that struck down some abortion restrictions and found that the right to an abortion was guaranteed by the State Constitution. That decision infuriated Republicans, who had spent years passing abortion restrictions and campaigning on the issue. They used their supermajorities in the Legislature last year to place the issue on the 2022 ballot.That state-level fight over abortion limits took on far greater meaning after the nation’s top court overturned Roe, opening the door in June for states to go beyond restrictions and outlaw abortions entirely. The Roman Catholic Church and other religious and conservative groups spent heavily to back the amendment, while national supporters of abortion rights poured millions of dollars into the race to oppose it.Canvassers supporting Amendment 2 left literature at a resident’s door last week in Olathe, Kan.Chase Castor for The New York TimesSupporters of the amendment have said repeatedly that the amendment itself would not ban abortion, and Republican lawmakers have been careful to avoid telegraphing what their legislative plans would be if it passed.“Voting yes doesn’t mean that abortion won’t be allowed, it means we’re going to allow our legislators to determine the scope of abortion,” said Mary Jane Muchow of Overland Park, Kan., who supported the amendment. “I think abortion should be legal, but I think there should be limitations on it.”If the amendment had passed, though, the question was not whether Republicans would try to wield their commanding legislative majorities to pass new restrictions, but how far they would go in doing so. Many Kansans who support abortion rights said they feared that a total or near-total abortion ban would be passed within monthsAbortion is now legal in Kansas up to 22 weeks of pregnancy.“I don’t want to become another state that bans all abortion for any reason,” said Barbara Grigar of Overland Park, Kan., who identified herself as a moderate and said she was voting against the amendment. “Choice is every woman’s choice, and not the government’s.”A Pew Research Center survey published last month found that a majority of Americans said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and that more than half of adults disapproved of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe.Kansas has been a focal point of the national abortion debate at least since 1991, when protesters from across the country gathered in Wichita and blocked access to clinics during weeks of heated demonstrations that they called the Summer of Mercy.At times, the state has seen violence over the issue. In 1986, a Wichita abortion clinic was attacked with a pipe bomb. In 1993, a woman who opposed abortion shot and injured Dr. George Tiller, one of only a few American physicians who performed late-term abortions. In 2009, another anti-abortion activist shot and killed Dr. Tiller at his Wichita church.In recent years, and especially in the weeks since Roe fell, Kansas has become a haven of abortion access in a region where that is increasingly rare.Even before the Supreme Court’s action, nearly half of the abortions performed in Kansas involved out-of-state residents. Now Oklahoma and Missouri have banned the procedure in almost all cases, Nebraska may further restrict abortion in the next few months, and women from Arkansas and Texas, where new bans are in place, are traveling well beyond their states’ borders.Kansas is reliably Republican in presidential elections, and its voters are generally conservative on many issues, but polling before the referendum suggested a close race and nuanced public opinions on abortion. The state is not a political monolith: Besides its Democratic governor, a majority of Kansas Supreme Court justices were appointed by Democrats, and Representative Sharice Davids, a Democrat, represents the Kansas City suburbs in Congress.Representative Sharice Davids speaks at an election watch party hosted by Kansans for Constitutional Freedom in Overland Park, Kansas.Arin Yoon for The New York TimesMs. Davids’s district was once a moderate Republican stronghold, but it has been trending toward Democrats in recent years. Her re-election contest in November in a redrawn district may be one of the most competitive House races in the country, and party strategists expect the abortion debate to play an important role in districts like hers that include swaths of upscale suburbs.Political strategists have been particularly attuned to turnout in the Kansas City suburbs, and are seeking to gauge how galvanizing abortion is, especially for swing voters and Democrats in a post-Roe environment.“They’re going to see how to advise their candidates to talk about the issue, they’re going to be looking at every political handicap,” said James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist. “Every campaign consultant, everybody is watching this thing like it’s the Super Bowl.”As the election approached, and especially since the Supreme Court decision, rhetoric on the issue became more heated. Campaign signs on both sides have been vandalized, police officials and activists have said. In the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, vandals targeted a Catholic church, defacing a building and a statue of Mary with red paint.Before the vote on Tuesday, which coincided with primary elections, Scott Schwab, the Republican secretary of state, predicted that around 36 percent of Kansas voters would participate, up slightly from the primary in 2020, a presidential election year. His office said that the constitutional amendment “has increased voter interest in the election,” a sentiment that was palpable on the ground.“I like the women’s rights,” said Norma Hamilton, a 90-year-old Republican from Lenexa, Kan. Despite her party registration, she said, she voted no. More

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      Kansas votes to protect abortion rights in state constitution

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      Kansas votes to protect abortion rights in state constitutionKansas is the first state to put abortion rights to a vote since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade Kansans secured a huge win for abortion rights in the US on Tuesday night when they voted to continue to protect abortion in the state constitution.The race was called by a host of US groups like NBC News, the New York Times and Decision Desk HQ.The move will be seen as huge a loss for the anti-abortion movement and a major win for abortion rights advocates across America, who will see the result as a bellwether for popular opinion.Kansas – a deeply conservative and usually reliably Republican state – is the first US state to put abortion rights to a vote since the US supreme court ruled to overturn constitutional protections for abortion in late June.The state will remain a safe haven for abortion in the midwest, as one of the few states in the region where it remains legal to perform the procedure. Many other states have undertaken moves to make abortion largely illegal since June.Joe Biden issued a statement welcoming the result. “This vote makes clear what we know: the majority of Americans agree that women should have access to abortion and should have the right to make their own health care decisions,” the US president said.The Kansas state senator Dinah Sikes, a Democrat, cried as the vote came in, and turned to her friends and colleagues, showing them goosebumps on her arm.“It’s just amazing. It’s breathtaking that women’s voices were heard and we care about women’s health,” she told the Guardian, after admitting she had thought the vote would be close. “But we were close in a lot of rural areas and that really made the difference – I’m just so grateful,” she said.‘I’m not a radical’: Kansas split ahead of critical post-Roe abortion voteRead moreThe “No” campaign – which was protecting abortion rights – was strongly ahead in the referendum with 62% of the vote with the majority of ballots counted. That means millions of dollars lost for the Catholic church who contributed more than $3m trying to eradicate abortion rights in Kansas, according to campaign finance records.Kansans turned out to vote in heavy numbers on Tuesday, in a referendum brought by the Kansas Republican legislature that was criticized for being misleading, fraught with misinformation and voter suppression tactics.After failing to get a more directly named referendum, “Kansas No State Constitutional Right to Abortion”, on the ballot in 2020, Republicans switched tactics, naming this amendment “Value Them Both”.The vote was scheduled for August, when voter turnout is historically low, particularly among independents and Democrats, and the wording on the ballot paper was criticized for being unclear.Why the language on the Kansas abortion ballot is so confusingRead more“The ballot mentions a state constitutional right to abortion funding in Kansas, but that funding has never really been on the table,” Mary Ziegler, a US abortion law expert from the University of California, Davis told the Guardian on Monday.Kansans for Life, one of the main backers for a “yes” vote, told church congregants on 27 July that removing protections for abortion in Kansas would prevent late-term abortions, lack of parental consent and tax payer funding for abortion, despite none of these being the law in Kansas. Abortions in Kansas are limited to 22 weeks in the cases of life threatening or severely compromised physical complications.It was a tense and bitterly fought campaign that saw churches vandalized and yard signs stolen, in a state where the abortion doctor George Tiller was murdered by anti-abortion activists in 2009.But on Tuesday night scenes of jubilation broke out at a watch party for the victorious No campaign in Kansas City. “We’re free!” shouted Mafutari Oneal, 56, who was working at the bar after the vote was called and a rush of drinks orders came in.“I don’t want no government telling me what to do. I’m so happy,” she said.In a speech just after victory was sealed, Rachel Sweet, the campaign manager for Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, said the win had come against all the odds.“We knew it was stacked against us from the moment we started but we did not despair – we did it, and these numbers speak for themselves,” Sweet said.“We knocked tens of thousands of doors and had hundreds of thousands of phone calls … We countered millions of dollars in misinformation,” she said. “We will not tolerate extreme bans on abortion in our state.”Ashley All, the spokesperson for KCF, who led the “No” campaign alongside Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, told the Guardian that the key to driving voter turnout was not seeing abortion as a partisan issue in Kansas.“We demonstrated Kansas’ free state roots,” she said. “It will be interesting for other states to watch this and see this is not a partisan issue. Everyone from Republicans, to unaffiliated voters to hardcore libertarians came out to say: ‘No, we don’t want the government involved in what we do with our bodies’.”TopicsUS newsKansasAbortionUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Justice department sues Idaho over state’s near-total abortion ban

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      Justice department sues Idaho over state’s near-total abortion banLawsuit is DoJ’s first piece of litigation aimed at protecting abortion access since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade The Biden administration’s Department of Justice is suing Idaho over the state’s near-total abortion ban, set to take effect on 25 August.The lawsuit is the justice department’s first piece of litigation aimed at protecting abortion access since the US supreme court in June overturned the landmark Roe v Wade decision that established federal abortion rights nearly 50 years earlier.During a press conference on Tuesday, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced the lawsuit alongside representatives from the justice department’s reproductive rights taskforce.Garland said Idaho’s abortion ban violates federal law which mandates that medical providers offer emergency care in the face of serious health consequences – not just in life-saving circumstances. The law makes no exceptions for abortions, regardless of what any state law says.Under Idaho’s law, abortions are only legal for victims of rape or incest as well as to save the life of a pregnant person. Doctors who do not provide sufficient evidence that an abortion was provided under those circumstances could face two to five years in prison and the forfeiture of their medical licenses.“The justice department is going to use every tool we have to ensure reproductive freedom,” Garland told reporters on Tuesday.More than half of US states have either banned or are expected to ban abortion after the supreme court’s decision earlier this summer returned regulation of abortion to the state level.Bans like the one Idaho has imposed are forcing patients seeking abortions to travel hundreds of miles from home, among other consequences.TopicsIdahoAbortionUS politicsHealthWomennewsReuse this content More

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      We Are Living in Richard Nixon’s America. Escaping It Won’t Be Easy.

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      It seems so naïve now, that moment in 2020 when Democratic insiders started to talk of Joe Biden as a transformational figure. But there were reasons to believe. To hold off a pandemic-induced collapse, the federal government had injected $2.2 trillion into the economy, much of it in New Deal-style relief. The summer’s protests altered the public’s perception of race’s role in the criminal justice system. And analyses were pointing to Republican losses large enough to clear the way for the biggest burst of progressive legislation since the 1960s.Two years on, the truth is easier to see. We aren’t living in Franklin Roosevelt’s America, or Lyndon Johnson’s, or Donald Trump’s, or even Joe Biden’s. We’re living in Richard Nixon’s.Not the America of Nixon’s last years, though there are dim echoes of it in the Jan. 6 hearings, but the nation he built before Watergate brought him down, where progressive possibilities would be choked off by law and order’s toxic politics and a Supreme Court he’d helped to shape.He already had his core message set in the early days of his 1968 campaign. In a February speech in New Hampshire, he said: “When a nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is torn apart by lawlessness,” he said, “when a nation which has been the symbol of equality of opportunity is torn apart by racial strife … then I say it’s time for new leadership in the United States of America.”There it is — the fusion of crime, race and fear that Nixon believed would carry him to the presidency.Over the course of that year, he gave his pitch a populist twist by saying that he was running to defend all those hard-working, law-abiding Americans who occupied “the silent center.”A month later, after a major Supreme Court ruling on school integration, he quietly told key supporters that if he were elected, he would nominate only justices who would oppose the court’s progressivism. And on the August night he accepted the Republican nomination, he gave it all a colorblind sheen. “To those who say that law and order is the code word for racism, there and here is a reply,” he said. “Our goal is justice for every American.”In practice it didn’t work that way. Within two years of his election, Nixon had passed two major crime bills laced with provisions targeting poor Black communities. One laid the groundwork for a racialized war on drugs. The other turned the criminal code of Washington, D.C., into a model for states to follow by authorizing the district’s judges to issue no-knock warrants, allowing them to detain suspects they deemed dangerous and requiring them to impose mandatory minimum sentences on those convicted of violent crimes.And the nation’s police would have all the help they needed to restore law and order. Lyndon Johnson had sent about $20 million in aid to police departments and prison systems in his last two years in office. Nixon sent $3 billion. Up went departments’ purchases of military-grade weapons, their use of heavily armed tactical patrols, the number of officers they put on the streets. And up went the nation’s prison population, by 16 percent, while the Black share of the newly incarcerated reached its highest level in 50 years.Nixon’s new order reached into the Supreme Court, too, just as he said it would. His predecessors had made their first nominations to the court by the fluid standards presidents tended to apply to the process: Dwight Eisenhower wanted a moderate Republican who seemed like a statesman, John Kennedy someone with the vigor of a New Frontiersman, Johnson an old Washington hand who understood where his loyalties lay. For his first appointment, in May 1969, Nixon chose a little-known federal judge, Warren Burger, with an extensive record supporting prosecutorial and police power over the rights of the accused.When a second seat opened a few months later, he followed the same pattern, twice nominating judges who had at one point either expressed opposition to the integration of the races or whose rulings were regarded as favoring segregation. Only when the Senate rejected both of them did Nixon fall back on Harry Blackmun, the sort of centrist Ike would have loved.Two more justices stepped down in September 1971. Again Nixon picked nominees who he knew would be tough on crime and soft on civil rights — and by then, he had a more expansive agenda in mind. It included an aversion to government regulation of the private sector — and so one pick was the courtly corporate lawyer Lewis Powell, who had written an influential memo that year to the director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce advocating a robust corporate defense of the free enterprise system. Another item on Nixon’s agenda was to devolve federal power down to the states. William Rehnquist, an assistant attorney general committed to that view, was his other pick. The two foundational principles of an increasingly energized conservatism were set into the court by Nixon’s determination to select his nominees through a precisely defined litmus test previous presidents hadn’t imagined applying.Our view of the Burger court may be skewed in part because Nixon’s test didn’t include abortion. By 1971, abortion politics had become furiously contested, but the divisions followed demography as well as political affiliation: In polling then (which wasn’t as representative as it is today), among whites, men were slightly more likely than women to support the right to choose, the non-Catholic college-educated more likely than those without college degrees, non-Catholics far more likely than Catholics, who anchored the opposition. So it wasn’t surprising that after oral arguments, three of the four white Protestant men Nixon had put on the court voted for Roe, and that one of them wrote the majority opinion.Justice Blackmun was still drafting the court’s decision in May 1972 when Nixon sent a letter to New York’s Catholic cardinal, offering his “admiration, sympathy and support” for the church stepping in as “defenders of the right to life of the unborn.” The Republican assemblywoman who had led New York’s decriminalization of abortion denounced his intervention as “a patent pitch for the Catholic vote.” That it was. In November, Nixon carried the Catholic vote, thanks to a move that gave the abortion wars a partisan alignment they hadn’t had before.Nixon’s version of law and order has endured, through Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, George H. W. Bush’s Crime Control Act of 1990 and Bill Clinton’s crime bill to broken windows, stop-and-frisk and the inexorable rise in mass incarceration. The ideological vetting of justices has increased in intensity and in precision.Mr. Trump’s term entrenched a party beholden to the configurations of politics and power that Nixon had shaped half a century ago. The possibility of progressive change that seemed to open in 2020 has now been shut down. The court’s supermajority handed down the first of what could be at least a decade of rulings eviscerating liberal precedents.Crime and gun violence now outstrip race as one of the electorates’ major concerns.Mr. Trump, in a speech on Tuesday, made it clear that he would continue to hammer the theme as he considers a 2024 run: “If we don’t have safety, we don’t have freedom,” he said, adding that “America First must mean safety first” and “we need an all-out effort to defeat violent crime in America and strongly defeat it. And be tough. And be nasty and be mean if we have to.”An order so firmly entrenched won’t easily be undone. It’s tempting to talk about expanding the court or imposing age limits. But court reform has no plausible path through the Senate. Even if it did, the results might not be progressive: Republicans are as likely as Democrats to pack a court once they control Congress, and age limits wouldn’t affect some of the most conservative justices for at least another 13 years. The truth is the court will be remade as it always has been, a justice at a time.The court will undoubtedly limit progressive policies, too, as it has already done on corporate regulation and gun control. But it’s also opened up the possibility of undoing some of the partisan alignments that Nixon put into place, on abortion most of all. Now that Roe is gone, the Democrats have the chance to reclaim that portion of anti-abortion voters who support the government interventions — like prenatal and early child care — that a post-Roe nation desperately needs and the Republican Party almost certainly won’t provide.Nothing matters more, though, than shattering Nixon’s fusion of race, crime and fear. To do that, liberals must take up violent crime as a defining issue, something they have been reluctant to do, and then to relentlessly rework it, to try to break the power of its racial dynamic by telling the public an all-too-obvious truth: The United States is harassed by violent crime because it’s awash in guns, because it has no effective approach to treating mental illness and the epidemic of drug addiction, because it accepts an appalling degree of inequality and allows entire sections of the country to tumble into despair.Making that case is a long-term undertaking, too, as is to be expected of a project trying to topple half a century of political thinking. But until Nixon’s version of law and order is purged from American public life, we’re going to remain locked into the nation he built on its appeal, its future shaped, as so much of its past has been, by its racism and its fear.Kevin Boyle, a history professor at Northwestern University, is the author of, most recently, “The Shattering: America in the 1960s.”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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      in Elections

      A New Yorker’s Opposition to Abortion Clouds Her House Re-Election Bid

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      Representative Nicole Malliotakis, the city’s lone Republican House member, has tried to maintain some distance from the Supreme Court ruling on abortion.As the lone Republican in the New York City congressional delegation, Representative Nicole Malliotakis has adopted certain stances that would make her an understandable outlier in a deeply Democratic city.Just days after taking office in early 2021, she voted to discard the legitimate 2020 election results, voting for a debunked conspiracy theory that claimed President Donald J. Trump actually won the election. She followed up by voting against Mr. Trump’s second impeachment as a result of the deadly Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021.But as she seeks re-election in November, Ms. Malliotakis has tried to tread a finer line around guns and abortion, two polarizing social issues that have taken on added prominence in light of recent Supreme Court decisions. (In June, the court overturned the federal right to abortion, as well as a New York law governing concealed weapons.)On guns, for example, Ms. Malliotakis has voiced some support for new regulations, even voting for several Democratic gun control bills proffered in the wake of the massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas. She later, however, voted against the omnibus bill package, contending that it was “constitutionally suspect” and “represented a partisan overreach.”Ms. Malliotakis opposes abortion rights, favoring restrictions on using taxpayer funding for the procedure and on late-term abortions. But she has said that she believes that abortion should be allowed under certain circumstances, such as when the life of the mother is at risk.But Ms. Malliotakis has also tried to maintain some distance from the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, saying in a recent interview that she “didn’t weigh in on it.” Yet earlier this month, the congresswoman voted against a pair of bills that would have banned states from restricting abortions and prohibited them from blocking access to out-of-state abortion services.Republicans, who are expected to fare well in November’s midterm elections, have long fought to overturn Roe. Yet some of the party’s candidates have not rushed to embrace the Dobbs ruling, wary of alienating voters who, according to polls, may be swayed by social issues in ways that help Democrats.Ms. Malliotakis is a prime example. Her district encompasses Staten Island and a swath of southwest Brooklyn, some of the city’s most conservative areas. Yet New York remains an overwhelmingly Democratic city, and the recent Supreme Court rulings were profoundly unpopular here.So, like many of her Republican colleagues, Ms. Malliotakis, a first-term congresswoman, is instead trying to steer the conversation toward bottom-line issues like inflation and high gas prices.“People are struggling putting gas in their tanks, putting food on their tables, paying their bills,” Ms. Malliotakis said in a recent interview.New York’s 2022 ElectionsAs prominent Democratic officials seek to defend their records, Republicans see opportunities to make inroads in general election races.N.Y. Governor’s Race: This year, for the first time in over 75 years, the state ballot appears destined to offer only two choices: Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, and Representative Lee Zeldin, a Republican. Here is why.10th Congressional District: Half a century after she became one of the youngest women ever to serve in Congress, Elizabeth Holtzman is running once again for a seat in the House of Representatives.12th Congressional District: As Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, two titans of New York politics, battle it out, Suraj Patel is trying to eke out his own path to victory.“For some people who are single-issue individuals, it could potentially have an impact,” she added, of her statements on guns and abortion. “But I know that crime and pocketbook issues are the most important issues to the people I represent.”Ms. Malliotakis is expected to easily win her Republican primary next month against John Matland, a badly underfunded rival, setting her up for a likely rematch against Max Rose, the former Democratic congressman whom she unseated in 2020.Mr. Rose, a combat veteran who was wounded in Afghanistan and awarded the Bronze Star, has sought to tie Ms. Malliotakis to the extreme elements of the Republican Party, including Mr. Trump, and to the Capitol riot by the president’s supporters, saying he is running to protect “the soul of America.”“Everything that our country was built upon wasn’t just spit at: They tried to destroy it,” he said during a campaign walkabout on July 11 in Bay Ridge. “And even after — even after — Nicole, and everyone else in Congress who were almost killed, they still voted to decertify.”He is also openly derisive of Ms. Malliotakis’s seeming duality on some hot-button issues, mocking her limited embrace of gun control, for example, as nothing more than “a few ceremonial votes.”“When it came time for the package to be voted on, as she always does, she played both sides,” he said, referring to the omnibus bill. “Voted for it before she voted against it. Who knows what’s going on here?”Max Rose, right, has tried to highlight Ms. Malliotakis’s position on abortion, portraying her as being on “the wrong side of history.”Amir Hamja for The New York TimesMr. Rose has also held a handful of public events after the Supreme Court ruling on abortion — including one at Ms. Malliotakis’s Brooklyn district office in Bay Ridge — to portray her as out of touch with her district, even on Staten Island, saying the congresswoman is “on the wrong side of history.”“I generally do believe that when it comes down to it, people are on the side of women having the opportunity to make those decisions for themselves,” he said. In recent weeks, Mr. Rose continued that line of attack, saying the congresswoman had “tweeted over 180 times and issued 13 press releases” since the Dobbs decision, but “has said nothing about millions of women losing control over their bodies.”When asked specifically about the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe, Ms. Malliotakis demurred.“My constituents, they know that nothing is going to change in New York,” she said. “The Supreme Court interprets the Constitution, so we have to accept the Supreme Court’s decision regardless.”Ms. Malliotakis’s comments have also given fodder to her opponents on the right, including Mr. Matland, a health care worker who lost his job for refusing to be vaccinated, and who is seeking to oust Ms. Malliotakis in the Aug. 23 primary with a low-budget, anti-establishment campaign.Mr. Matland, who is making his first run for public office, said that Ms. Malliotakis has “often alienated the Republican base,” and that she has only been voted into office because of her name recognition — she served five terms in the State Assembly and ran unsuccessfully in 2017 for mayor of New York City — and her district’s aversion to Democratic candidates.“People say ‘I only voted for her’ — and I’m guilty of this myself — ‘because I thought she was a much better option than Max Rose,’” Mr. Matland said, adding, “And that’s the exact reason we have primaries: so we can get a better option.”John Matland is challenging Ms. Malliotakis in the Republican primary on Aug. 23.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesConsidering the likelihood of a tough year for Democrats nationally, most observers think that Mr. Rose will have an uphill battle in November, assuming he wins his primary in August against two challengers: Brittany Ramos DeBarros, a progressive community activist, and Komi Agoda-Koussema, an educator.Mr. Rose’s campaign was also dealt a setback earlier this year when a state judge threw out new Democrat-drawn congressional lines that could have tilted the district heavily in his favor. The refashioned lines, drawn by a redistricting expert in May, left the district looking largely the same, though its section of Brooklyn — about half as populous as the Staten Island portion — did favor President Biden over Mr. Trump by about 12 points in the 2020 election.Ms. Malliotakis accused Mr. Rose of entering the race only “because he thought they were going to change the lines in his favor.” “The good news about reruns is we know how they end,” Ms. Malliotakis said of her rematch against Mr. Rose.Vito Fossella, the Republican who serves as the Staten Island borough president, echoed that sentiment, saying he didn’t “see how the dynamics” of the race have changed much since 2020, and suggesting that abortion and guns would not be major issues for Staten Island voters.“On balance, what people care about is ‘Are we safe? Are we comfortable economically? Do we have a brighter future?’” said Mr. Fossella, who is a supporter of Ms. Malliotakis.A path to re-election for Ms. Malliotakis, 41, will likely include a big win on the island’s South Shore, a Republican stronghold, to offset the more liberal neighborhoods in the north. And for South Shore residents like Edward Carey, a retired banking executive who winters in Florida but has a house in the Eltingville neighborhood, Ms. Malliotakis is already a sure thing. He noted the backing of Mr. Fossella, as well as other factors.“She’s a Republican, she’s a woman, she’s young,” said Mr. Carey, 83, a registered Republican who said the last Democrat he voted for was John F. Kennedy. “That’s good enough for me.”Ms. Malliotakis may be headed for a November rematch with Mr. Rose, whom she unseated in 2020.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesStill, State Senator Diane J. Savino, a moderate Democrat who has represented the north part of Staten Island for nearly two decades, said “you cannot pinpoint Staten Island voters.”“It’s not that they’re Republican or Democrat, left-leaning or right-leaning: It’s whether or not that candidate speaks to what touches Staten Islanders,” she said, noting the island’s recent history of vacillating between parties. “Anybody who thinks that they can put their finger on the pulse of Staten Island voters doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”She also criticized Ms. Malliotakis for being wishy-washy on critical issues, but noted that voters don’t seem to care.“Up until now, Nicole has skirted on this,” Ms. Savino said, referring to Ms. Malliotakis’s anti-abortion votes in Washington and Albany. “No one ever holds her accountable. So I don’t think that’s going to drive voters here. What’s going to drive voters is whether or not they think they’re going to have someone who is going to fight for them in Washington.”Vin DeRosa, a patron at Jody’s Club Forest, a popular bar near the North Shore where Mr. Rose has been known to drink, is a registered Democrat but said he considers himself an independent who “votes for the person” rather than the party line.Mr. DeRosa, a retired telecommunications professional, said that he had voted for Mr. Rose in 2020, and that he likely would again, if only because of Ms. Malliotakis’s association with Mr. Trump.“I’m not sure I want a congressperson who has to call Mar-a-Lago,” Mr. DeRosa said, “to find out what to do.” More