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      Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First

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      In the spring of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party used tanks and troops to crush a pro-democracy protest in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Most of the West, across traditional partisan lines, was aghast at the crackdown that killed at least hundreds of student activists. But one prominent American was impressed.“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,” Donald J. Trump said in an interview with Playboy magazine the year after the massacre. “Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”It was a throwaway line in a wide-ranging interview, delivered to a journalist profiling a 43-year-old celebrity businessman who was not then a player in national politics or world affairs. But in light of what Mr. Trump has gone on to become, his exaltation of the ruthless crushing of democratic protesters is steeped in foreshadowing.Mr. Trump’s violent and authoritarian rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail has attracted growing alarm and comparisons to historical fascist dictators and contemporary populist strongmen. In recent weeks, he has dehumanized his adversaries as “vermin” who must be “rooted out,” declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” encouraged the shooting of shoplifters and suggested that the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, deserved to be executed for treason.As he runs for president again facing four criminal prosecutions, Mr. Trump may seem more angry, desperate and dangerous to American-style democracy than in his first term. But the throughline that emerges is far more long-running: He has glorified political violence and spoken admiringly of autocrats for decades.Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., brought one of the sets of indictments that Mr. Trump faces.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesAs a presidential candidate in July 2016, he praised the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as having been “so good” at killing terrorists. Months after being inaugurated, he told the strongman leader of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, that his brutal campaign of thousands of extrajudicial killings in the name of fighting drugs was “an unbelievable job.” And throughout his four years in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump blew through boundaries and violated democratic norms.What would be different in a second Trump administration is not so much his character as his surroundings. Forces that somewhat contained his autocratic tendencies in his first term — staff members who saw their job as sometimes restraining him, a few congressional Republicans episodically willing to criticize or oppose him, a partisan balance on the Supreme Court that occasionally ruled against him — would all be weaker.As a result, Mr. Trump’s and his advisers’ more extreme policy plans and ideas for a second term would have a greater prospect of becoming reality.A Radical AgendaTo be sure, some of what Mr. Trump and his allies are planning is in line with what any standard-issue Republican president would most likely do. For example, Mr. Trump would very likely roll back many of President Biden’s policies to curb carbon emissions and hasten the transition to electric cars. Such a reversal of various rules and policies would significantly weaken environmental protections, but much of the changes reflect routine and longstanding conservative skepticism of environmental regulations.Other parts of Mr. Trump’s agenda, however, are aberrational. No U.S. president before him had toyed with withdrawing from NATO, the United States’ military alliance with Western democracies. He has said he would fundamentally re-evaluate “NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission” in a second term.He has said he would order the military to attack drug cartels in Mexico, which would violate international law unless its government consented. It most likely would not.He would also use the military on domestic soil. While it is generally illegal to use troops for domestic law enforcement, the Insurrection Act allows exceptions. After some demonstrations against police violence in 2020 became riots, Mr. Trump had an order drafted to use troops to crack down on protesters in Washington, D.C., but didn’t sign it. He suggested at a rally in Iowa this year that he intends to unilaterally send troops into Democratic-run cities to enforce public order in general.“You look at any Democrat-run state, and it’s just not the same — it doesn’t work,” Mr. Trump told the crowd, calling cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco crime dens. “We cannot let it happen any longer. And one of the other things I’ll do — because you’re supposed to not be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I’m not waiting.”Mr. Trump’s plans to purge undocumented immigrants include sweeping raids, huge detention camps, deportations on the scale of millions per year, stopping asylum, trying to end birthright citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented parents and invoking the Insurrection Act near the southern border to also use troops as immigration agents.Mr. Trump has sweeping plans to deal with undocumented immigrants.Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York TimesMr. Trump would seek to expand presidential power in myriad ways — concentrating greater authority over the executive branch in the White House, ending the independence of agencies Congress set up to operate outside of presidential control and reducing civil service protections to make it easier to fire and replace tens of thousands of government workers.More than anything else, Mr. Trump’s vow to use the Justice Department to wreak vengeance against his adversaries is a naked challenge to democratic values. Building on how he tried to get prosecutors to go after his enemies while in office, it would end the post-Watergate norm of investigative independence from White House political control.In all these efforts, Mr. Trump would be backed in a second term by a well-funded outside infrastructure. In 2016, conservative think tanks were bastions of George W. Bush-style Republicanism. But new ones run by Trump administration veterans have sprung up, and the venerable Heritage Foundation has refashioned itself to stay in step with Trumpism.A coalition has been drawing up America First-style policy plans, nicknamed Project 2025. (Mr. Trump’s campaign has expressed appreciation but said only plans announced by him or his campaign count.) While some proposals under development in such places would advance longstanding Republican megadonor goals, such as curbing regulations on businesses, others are more tuned to Mr. Trump’s personal interests.The Center for Renewing America, for example, has published a paper titled “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent.” The paper was written by Jeffrey Clark, whom Mr. Trump nearly made acting attorney general to aid his attempt to subvert the election and is facing criminal charges in Georgia in connection with that effort.Asked for comment, a spokesman for Mr. Trump did not address specifics but instead criticized The New York Times while calling Mr. Trump “strong on crime.”Weakened GuardrailsEven running in 2016, Mr. Trump flouted democratic norms.He falsely portrayed his loss in the Iowa caucuses as fraud and suggested he would treat the results of the general election as legitimate only if he won. He threatened to imprison Hillary Clinton, smeared Mexican immigrants as rapists and promised to bar Muslims from entering the United States. He offered to pay the legal bills of any supporters who beat up protesters at his rallies and stoked hatred against reporters covering his events.In office, Mr. Trump refused to divest from his businesses, and people courting his favor booked expensive blocks of rooms in his hotels. Despite an anti-nepotism law, he gave White House jobs to his daughter and son-in-law. He used emergency power to spend more on a border wall than Congress authorized. His lawyers floated a pardon at his campaign chairman, whom Mr. Trump praised for not “flipping” as prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to get him to cooperate as a witness in the Russia inquiry; Mr. Trump later did pardon him.Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, received White House posts despite an anti-nepotism law.Al Drago for The New York TimesBut some of the most potentially serious of his violations of norms fell short of fruition.Mr. Trump pressured the Justice Department to prosecute his adversaries. The Justice Department opened several criminal investigations, from the scrutiny of former Secretary of State John Kerry and of the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey Jr. to the attempt by a special counsel, John Durham, to find a basis to charge Obama-era national security officials or Mrs. Clinton with crimes connected to the origins of the Russia investigation. But to Mr. Trump’s fury, prosecutors decided against bringing such charges.And neither effort for which he was impeached succeeded. Mr. Trump tried to coerce Ukraine into opening a criminal investigation into Mr. Biden by withholding military aid, but it did not cooperate. Mr. Trump sought to subvert his 2020 election loss and stoked the Capitol riot, but Vice President Mike Pence and congressional majorities rejected his attempt to stay in power.There is reason to believe various obstacles and bulwarks that limited Mr. Trump in his first term would be absent in a second one.Some of what Mr. Trump tried to do was thwarted by incompetence and dysfunction among his initial team. But over four years, those who stayed with him learned to wield power more effectively. After courts blocked his first, haphazardly crafted travel ban, for example, his team developed a version that the Supreme Court allowed to take effect.Four years of his appointments created an entrenched Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court that most likely would now side with him on some cases that he lost, such as the 5-to-4 decision in June 2020 that blocked him from ending a program that shields from deportation certain undocumented people who had been brought as children and grew up as Americans.Republicans in Congress were often partners and enablers — working with him to confirm judges and cut corporate taxes, while performing scant oversight. But a few key congressional Republicans occasionally denounced his rhetoric or checked his more disruptive proposals.In 2017, then-Senator Bob Corker rebuked Mr. Trump for making reckless threats toward North Korea on Twitter, and then-Senator John McCain provided the decisive vote against Mr. Trump’s push to rescind, with no replacement plan, a law that makes health insurance coverage widely available.It is likely that Republicans in Congress would be even more pliable in any second Trump term. The party has become more inured to and even enthusiastic about Mr. Trump’s willingness to cross lines. And Mr. Trump has worn down, outlasted, intimidated into submission or driven out leading Republican lawmakers who have independent standing and demonstrated occasional willingness to oppose him.Mr. McCain, who was the 2008 G.O.P. presidential nominee, died in 2018. Former Representative Liz Cheney, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, riot and helped lead the committee that investigated those events, lost her seat to a pro-Trump primary challenger. Senator Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee and the only G.O.P. senator who voted to convict Mr. Trump at his first impeachment trial, is retiring.Representative Liz Cheney, center right, helped lead the investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and later lost a primary challenge to a pro-Trump candidate.Doug Mills/The New York TimesFear of violence by Trump supporters also enforces control. In recent books, both Mr. Romney and Ms. Cheney said that Republican colleagues, whom they did not name, told them they wanted to vote against Mr. Trump in the Jan. 6-related impeachment proceedings but did not do so out of fear for their and their families’ safety.Personnel Is PolicyPerhaps the most important check on Mr. Trump’s presidency was internal administration resistance to some of his more extreme demands. A parade of his own former high-level appointees has since warned that he is unfit to be president, including a former White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly; former defense secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark T. Esper; the former national security adviser John R. Bolton; former Attorney General William P. Barr; and others.Mr. Trump in turn has denounced them all as weak, stupid and disloyal. He has privately told those close to him that his biggest mistakes concerned the people he appointed, in particular his choices for attorney general. The advisers who have stuck with him are determined that if he wins a new term, there will be no officials who intentionally stymie his agenda.In addition to developing policy papers, the coalition of think tanks run by people aligned with Mr. Trump has been compiling a database of thousands of vetted potential recruits to hand to a transition team if he wins the election. Similar efforts are underway by former senior Trump administration officials to prepare to stock the government with lawyers likely to find ways to bless radical White House ideas rather than raising legal objections.Such staffing efforts would build on a shift in his final year as president. In 2020, Mr. Trump replaced advisers who had sought to check him and installed a young aide, John McEntee, to root out further officials deemed insufficiently loyal.Depending on Senate elections, confirming particularly contentious nominees to important positions might be challenging. But another norm violation Mr. Trump gradually developed was making aggressive use of his power to temporarily fill vacancies with “acting” heads for positions that are supposed to undergo Senate confirmation.In 2020, for example, Mr. Trump made Richard Grenell — a combative Trump ally and former ambassador to Germany — acting director of national intelligence. Two prior Trump-era intelligence leaders had angered Mr. Trump by defending an assessment that Russia had covertly tried to help his 2016 campaign and by informing Democratic leaders it was doing so again in 2020. Mr. Grenell instead won Mr. Trump’s praise by using the role to declassify sensitive materials that Republicans used to portray the Russia investigation as suspicious.Richard Grenell was one of the acting heads named by Mr. Trump for positions that are supposed to undergo Senate confirmation. He became acting director of national intelligence.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesAfter Mr. Trump left office, there were many proposals to codify into law democratic norms he violated. Ideas included tightening limits on presidents’ use of emergency powers, requiring disclosure of their taxes, giving teeth to a constitutional ban on outside payments and making it harder to abuse their pardon power and authority over prosecutors.In December 2021, when Democrats still controlled the House, it passed many such proposals as the Protecting Our Democracy Act. Every Republican but one — then-Representative Adam Kinzinger, who was retiring after having voted to impeach Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6 riot — voted against the bill, which died in the Senate.The debate on the House floor largely played out on a premise that reduced its urgency: Mr. Trump was gone. Democrats argued for viewing the reforms as being about future presidents, while Republicans dismissed it as an unnecessary swipe at Mr. Trump.“Donald Trump is — unfortunately — no longer president,” said Representative Rick Crawford, Republican of Arkansas. “Time to stop living in the past.” More

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      McCarthy Eyes Exit From House After Speakership Loss

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      The California Republican is still angry at his ouster and has struggled to acclimate. His colleagues expect him to retire, but he has taken his time deciding.At an emotional evening news conference immediately after he was removed as speaker of the House, Representative Kevin McCarthy gave an inconclusive answer about whether he would remain in Congress.“I’ll look at that,” he said then.Over the past two months, Mr. McCarthy has given the life of a rank-and-file member a hard look and discovered it to be a painful existence after having been at the pinnacle of his party in the House for more than a decade.These days, Mr. McCarthy, famous for his preternaturally sunny California disposition, has been hard to cheer up. He no longer attends the conference meetings he used to preside over, and at times has struggled to contain his anger at the Republicans who deposed him. (He denied the accusation from one of them, Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, that he elbowed him in the kidney in a basement hallway of the Capitol.)He has also struggled to make peace with the idea that it’s time to go, even as California’s Dec. 8 filing deadline to run for re-election draws near and his colleagues expect him to leave.“When you spend two decades building something, it’s difficult to end that chapter,” said Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, one of Mr. McCarthy’s closest friends in Congress. “His life has been building the Republican majority and attaining the third-highest office in the land. It is difficult for any mortal to deal with an abrupt end and determine his next chapter.”But the current chapter has grown increasingly untenable for him.As he has made his way around the Capitol contemplating his options for the future and cycling through various stages of grief over his merciless political downfall, Mr. McCarthy has retained small perks from his old life that serve mostly as painful reminders of all that has been taken away.He still has the kind of security detail furnished to the person second in line to the presidency, but he has been removed from the speaker’s suite of offices in the middle of the Capitol that serve as the building’s power center. He has participated in high-profile engagements, such as a recent speech to the Oxford Union and an interview at the New York Times DealBook summit, but those were booked before his ouster.Many colleagues still consider him a skillful convener of people with institutional knowledge about the workings of a Republican majority he helped build. But his inexperienced successor, Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, has not sought him out for any advice on managing the fractious Republican conference. And Mr. McCarthy has had to watch from the sidelines as Mr. Johnson has made some of the same choices that led to his own downfall — such as working with Democrats to avert a government shutdown — and, at least so far, paid little price.Mr. McCarthy has labored to acclimate.“After any stressful situation, it takes a while for the body to normalize,” Mr. McHenry said of the former speaker. “And when you talk about the extremes of political ambition, which is required to attain the speakership, it is even more dramatic to wring those chemicals out of your body to return to being a normal human.”On Instagram, where Mr. McCarthy recently shared pictures of his dogs hanging out in his Bakersfield, Calif., district office, many of the people commenting on the picture chimed in to remind him that despite his handle, “@SpeakerMcCarthy,” he was the speaker no more. (The title is technically his for life.)House Republicans are beginning to move past Mr. McCarthy’s removal as they navigate business with Mr. Johnson at the helm. But Mr. McCarthy has not finished processing his defenestration. He is someone who has never enjoyed being alone, and an emptier schedule leaves more time to spend in one’s own head.As unpleasant as it may be to hang around Congress in his diminished state, Mr. McCarthy has been forthright about the difficulty of deciding whether to leave politics, and when.“I just went through losing, so you go through different stages,” Mr. McCarthy said in a brief interview after his DealBook appearance on Wednesday in New York City. “I have to know that when I go, that there’s a place for me, and what am I going to do, and is that best?”Mr. McCarthy booked a speaking engagement at the DealBook summit while he was still speaker. Amir Hamja/The New York TimesMr. McCarthy said he was taking his time in making a decision about whether to leave Congress, in part because he did not want to make a hasty decision he might come to regret.“I have to know that if I decided that wasn’t for me and I leave, I don’t want a year from now to think ‘Aw, I regret — I shouldn’t have left,’” he said. “So if I take a little longer than most people normally, that’s just what I’m going through.”Some center-leaning Republicans are pressing him to stay.“You have a lot of members who haven’t been here that long,” said Sarah Chamberlain, the president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, an outside organization allied with the congressional caucus of the same name. “You need some senior statesmen to teach the members how the process works, and he’s one of the last ones left.”Ms. Chamberlain added, “On a personal level, I can completely understand if he decides to leave. On an institutional level, it would be a shame to lose him.”If Mr. McCarthy were to exit Congress right away, it would also shrink the already-slim Republican majority, which went from four to three seats with the expulsion on Friday of Representative George Santos of New York. (As Mr. Johnson presided over the vote to oust Mr. Santos, Mr. McCarthy did not show up to register a position.)Still, it is highly unusual for a former speaker to choose to stick around. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has broken with tradition and embraced her emeritus status, describing herself as “emancipated” from the pressures of her old job.In September, the 83-year-old San Francisco Democrat surprised some of her colleagues by announcing she would run for another term. But Ms. Pelosi is at the end of a career that made history — she was the first woman to hold the post of speaker — and was able to leave her post, which she held for a cumulative eight years, on her own terms. The new generation of Democratic leaders in the House treats her with reverence and continues to solicit her advice on big decisions.In contrast, the awkward position of Mr. McCarthy, 58, who held the top job for little more than eight months and made history as the first speaker ever ousted, has been all too clearly on display.Ever since January, when Mr. McCarthy agreed to rule changes to appease the hard right in order to win the gavel, he and his allies had anticipated that his speakership could end exactly the way it finally did. But that has not left him feeling any less bitter about it.Though Mr. McCarthy denied intentionally shoving Mr. Burchett, he responded angrily to the accusation.“If I hit somebody, they would know it,” he told reporters, his voice rising with irritation. “If I kidney punched someone, they would be on the ground.”He has gone on television to scold Mr. Burchett and the other colleagues who brought him down, and pushed the Republican conference to exact some retribution against them even though there appears to be little appetite to do so.“I don’t believe the conference will ever heal if there’s no consequences for the action,” Mr. McCarthy told CNN in a recent interview. He also said that Mr. Burchett and Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who also voted to oust him, “care a lot about press, not about policy.”Despite his inner turmoil and painful power detox, Mr. McCarthy has made it clear that he aims to use his remaining time, influence and campaign money to help his party keep control of the House. That may also serve a rejuvenating purpose for him if he chooses to intervene in congressional races to try to defeat the Republican members who voted to oust him and bolster the candidacies of those aligned with him.“I may not be speaker,” he said during a recent appearance on “Fox & Friends.” “But I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure Republicans win.”Robert Jimison More

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      DeSantis Super PAC Suffers Another Big Staff Loss, This Time Its Chairman

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      The departure of Adam Laxalt, a longtime friend of the Florida governor, is the latest shake-up inside Never Back Down as it faces questions over the group’s strategy and spending.The main super PAC supporting Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign has been rocked by another significant departure, as Adam Laxalt, a friend and former roommate of the Florida governor, has stepped down as chairman of the group.Mr. Laxalt, who unsuccessfully ran to become a Republican senator in Nevada in 2022, lived with Mr. DeSantis when he was training as a naval officer. He joined Never Back Down in April, soon after his own campaign ended and before Mr. DeSantis officially joined the presidential race, in a move that was widely seen as Mr. DeSantis and his wife seeking to have someone they trusted monitoring the activities of the well-funded group. He also suffered the unexpected death of his mother over the summer, a friend said.“After nearly 26 straight months of being in a full-scale campaign, I need to return my time and attention to my family and law practice,” Mr. Laxalt wrote in a letter to the board on Nov. 26 that was reviewed by The New York Times. He said in the note that he was still committed to Mr. DeSantis’s becoming president.The departure represents the second major departure from Never Back Down in the last two weeks. On the eve of Thanksgiving, the group’s chief executive, Chris Jankowski, resigned. In a statement put out by the group after the resignation, Mr. Jankowski said that his differences at the group went “well beyond” strategic arguments, without explaining more.It was Mr. Laxalt who announced that Kristin Davison, previously the chief operating officer, would replace Mr. Jankowski in an email that evening. “We look forward to hitting the ground running with all of you after the holiday,” Mr. Laxalt wrote.But now Mr. Laxalt is gone, as well.With the Iowa caucuses less than seven weeks away, people associated with the DeSantis campaign encouraged the creation of a new outside group called Fight Right to take over negative attacks on his closest competition in the nomination contest, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      George Santos Is Gone. What Happens to His Seat in Congress?

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      The expulsion of George Santos from Congress on Friday swept away one major political headache for Republicans, but it immediately set the stage for another: The party will have to defend his vulnerable seat in a special election early next year.The race in New York is expected to be one of the most high-profile and expensive off-year House contests in decades. It has the potential to further shrink Republicans’ paper-thin majority and offer a preview of the broader battle for House control next November.With towering stakes, both parties have been preparing for the possibility for months, as Mr. Santos’s fabricated biography unraveled and federal criminal charges piled up. More than two dozen candidates have already expressed interest in running, and labor unions, super PACs and other groups have begun earmarking millions of dollars for TV ads.“It’s going to be like a presidential election for Congress,” said Steve Israel, a Long Island Democrat who once led his party’s House campaign arm. “It becomes ground zero of American politics.”Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has 10 days to formally schedule the contest after Friday’s lopsided vote to remove Mr. Santos. But both parties expect the election to take place in mid-to-late February, just over a year after he first took the oath of office.Unlike in a normal election, party leaders in Washington and New York — not primary voters — will choose the Democratic and Republican nominees. They were moving quickly to winnow the field of potential candidates, and could announce their picks in a matter of days.George Santos Lost His Job. The Lies, Charges and Questions Remaining.George Santos, who was expelled from Congress, has told so many stories they can be hard to keep straight. We cataloged them, including major questions about his personal finances and his campaign fund-raising and spending.Democrats were expected to coalesce around Thomas R. Suozzi, a tested centrist who held the seat for six years before Mr. Santos but gave it up for a failed run for governor in 2022. Mr. Suozzi, 61, is a prolific fund-raiser and perhaps the best-known candidate either party could put forward. Anna Kaplan, a former state senator, is also running and has positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left.The Republican field appeared to be more fluid. Party leaders said they planned to interview roughly 15 candidates, though officials privy to the process said they were circling two top contenders, both relative newcomers: Mike Sapraicone, a retired New York Police Department detective, and Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born former member of the Israel Defense Forces.Political analysts rate the district, stretching from the outskirts of New York City into the heart of Nassau County’s affluent suburbs on Long Island, as a tossup. President Biden won the district by eight points in 2020, but it has shifted rightward in three consecutive elections since, as voters fearful about crime and inflation have flocked to Republicans.Democratic strategists said they would continue to use the embarrassment of Mr. Santos to attack Republicans, blaming them for aiding the former congressman’s rise. But recapturing the seat may be more difficult than many Democrats once hoped.Local Republicans moved decisively to distance themselves from Mr. Santos last January, and the strategy has shown signs of working. When Long Island voters went to the polls for local contests last month, they delivered a Republican rout that left Democrats scrambling to figure out how to rehabilitate a tarnished political brand.“Anyone who thinks a special election on Long Island is a slam dunk for Democrats has been living under a rock for the last three years,” said Isaac Goldberg, a strategist who advised the losing Democratic campaign against Mr. Santos in 2022.“Politics is a pendulum,” he added. “Right now, it’s on one side, and it’s unclear when it’s going to swing back.”Republicans face their own challenges, though, particularly in an idiosyncratic contest likely to favor the party that can turn out more voters. Democratic voters in the district have spent months bemoaning their ties to Mr. Santos and are highly motivated to elect an alternative. It is unclear if Republican supporters will feel the same urgency their leaders do.“It’s been a frustrating year,” said Joseph Cairo, the G.O.P. party chairman in Nassau County. “I look at this as just the beginning to right a mistake, to move forward, to elect a Republican to serve the people the proper way, to elect somebody who is for real — not make believe.”The outcome promises to have far-reaching implications for the current Congress and the next.After Mr. Santos’s ouster, Republicans have a razor-thin majority. Thinning it further could hamper their short-term ambitions to pursue an impeachment inquiry into President Biden and negotiate around a major military aid package for Israel.Whoever emerges as the winner in February would also likely become the front-runner for next fall’s elections and lend their party momentum as they prepare to fight over six crucial swing seats in New York alone, including a total of three on Long Island.Democrats believe Mr. Suozzi, who is currently working as a lobbyist, is best positioned to deliver. In his stints as a congressman and Nassau County executive, he took conservative stances on public safety and affordability that are popular among suburban voters. And his combative primary campaign for governor just last year may help him shake the anti-Democratic sentiment that has sunk other candidates.Jay Jacobs, the Democratic leader for the state and Nassau County, said he still intended to screen multiple candidates, including Ms. Kaplan, a more progressive former state senator who remains in the race, even as other candidates dropped out and coalesced behind Mr. Suozzi.Ms. Kaplan could get a boost from Ms. Hochul, who faced Mr. Suozzi in an ugly 2022 primary fight, during which he questioned her husband’s ethics and referred to her as an unqualified “interim governor.”The governor has pushed Mr. Jacobs and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, to reconsider whether Mr. Suozzi was their strongest candidate, particularly given his hesitancy to fully embrace abortion rights in the past, according to four people familiar with the conversations.But it is unclear if the governor would have the power to block Mr. Suozzi. Mr. Jeffries personally worked to lure the former congressman into the race earlier this fall, and Mr. Suozzi is close friends with Mr. Jacobs, who has told associates he is the likely pick.Republicans are proceeding more cautiously. They are wary of repeating their experience with Mr. Santos, who secured the party’s backing in 2020 and 2022 despite presenting them with a fraudulent résumé and other glaring fabrications that they failed to catch.This time, Republicans appear to only be considering candidates already known to party officials, and plan to engage a research firm to more formally vet potential nominees.Campaign strategists in Washington were said to favor Mr. Sapraicone, the former police detective who made a small fortune as the head of a private security company. Mr. Sapraicone, 67, could afford to spend a portion of it in a campaign, but he would also enter a race with almost no name recognition or electoral experience.Local Republicans were pushing Ms. Pilip, a potentially mold-breaking rising star with a remarkable biography. She moved to Israel from Ethiopia as a refugee in the 1990s, later served in the Israel Defense Forces and flipped a legislative seat in Nassau County in her 40s as a mother of seven.Other wild card candidates included Elaine Phillips, the Nassau County comptroller; Kellen Curry, an Air Force veteran and former banker; and Jack Martins, a well-known state senator who has run for the seat before.Mr. Santos himself could theoretically run for the seat as an independent. But the task would be arduous and might jeopardize a more urgent priority: fighting charges that could put him in prison for up to 22 years. More

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      These Candidates Might Run to Replace George Santos

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      There were once no fewer than 20 candidates vying to challenge Representative George Santos in his re-election bid in Long Island and Queens. But if he is ousted, party leaders are expected to quickly winnow the field to just two who would face off in a special election early next year.New York State rules allow Democrats and Republicans to forgo messy primaries for special elections. The candidates will emerge instead from a mostly secretive backroom process led by the respective party chairmen in Queens and Nassau Counties.Here are the leading contenders.Democrats:Thomas R. Suozzi is widely seen as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. He held the seat before Mr. Santos but gave it up for a failed run for governor in 2022. Mr. Suozzi, 61, is a powerful fund-raiser, a committed centrist and perhaps the best-known candidate in either party. He is also close to leaders in New York and Washington who will pick the nominee, with the notable exception of Gov. Kathy Hochul, whom he tried to unseat.Anna Kaplan, a former state senator, has been a prolific fund-raiser and has positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left. Ms. Kaplan, 58, fled Iran with her Jewish family as a teenager before entering politics. She flipped a State Senate seat to Democratic control in 2018, but lost it in the Republicans’ 2022 wave.Party officials might also consider Robert Zimmerman, a public relations executive who lost to Mr. Santos in 2022, and Austin Cheng, a health care executive who has never run for public office.Republicans:It is less clear whom Republicans might choose, but party officials said Mike Sapraicone was near the top of the list. Mr. Sapraicone, 67, is a former New York Police Department detective who made a small fortune as the head of a private security company. Both attributes could be helpful in a region where public safety has been a top electoral concern and TV ads are expensive.Mazi Pilip, a Nassau County legislator, has not declared her candidacy but is also said to be under consideration. Ms. Pilip is a rising star on Long Island with a remarkable biography: She moved to Israel from Ethiopia as a refugee in the 1990s, served in the Israel Defense Forces and was elected to local office in New York in her 40s as a mother of seven. Like Mr. Sapraicone, she has relatively little political experience.Jack Martins would offer party leaders a more proven alternative. He has served two tours in the State Senate, has sharply criticized former President Donald J. Trump and knows how to connect with suburban voters. But Mr. Martins, 56, would have to give up a lucrative law partnership to serve in Congress, and has said little about his intentions.Other wild-card candidates include Elaine Phillips, the Nassau County comptroller; Jim Toes, a Manhasset financial services executive; and Kellen Curry, an Air Force veteran and former banker who entered the race in April. More

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      How Trump and His Allies Plan to Wield Power in 2025

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      Donald J. Trump and his allies are already laying the groundwork for a possible second Trump presidency, forging plans for an even more extreme agenda than his first term.Former President Donald J. Trump declared in the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign: “I am your retribution.” He later vowed to use the Justice Department to go after his political adversaries, starting with President Biden and his family.Beneath these public threats is a series of plans by Mr. Trump and his allies that would upend core elements of American governance, democracy, foreign policy and the rule of law if he regained the White House.Some of these themes trace back to the final period of Mr. Trump’s term in office. By that stage, his key advisers had learned how to more effectively wield power and Mr. Trump had fired officials who resisted some of his impulses and replaced them with loyalists. Then he lost the 2020 election and was cast out of power.Since leaving office, Mr. Trump’s advisers and allies at a network of well-funded groups have advanced policies, created lists of potential personnel and started shaping new legal scaffolding — laying the groundwork for a second Trump presidency they hope will commence on Jan. 20, 2025.In a vague statement, two top officials on Mr. Trump’s campaign have sought to distance his campaign team from some of the plans being developed by Mr. Trump’s outside allies, groups led by former senior Trump administration officials who remain in direct contact with him. The statement called news reports about the campaign’s personnel and policy intentions “purely speculative and theoretical.”The plans described here generally derive from what Mr. Trump has trumpeted on the campaign trail, what has appeared on his campaign website and interviews with Trump advisers, including one who spoke with The New York Times at the request of the campaign.Trump wants to use the Justice Department to take vengeance on his political adversaries.If he wins another term, Mr. Trump has said he would use the Justice Department to have his adversaries investigated and charged with crimes, including saying in June that he would appoint “a real special prosecutor to go after” President Biden and his family. He later declared in an interview with Univision that he could, if someone challenged him politically, have that person indicted.Allies of Mr. Trump have also been developing an intellectual blueprint to cast aside the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department investigatory independence from White House political direction.Foreshadowing such a move, Mr. Trump had already violated norms in his 2016 campaign by promising to “lock up” his opponent, Hillary Clinton, over her use of a private email server. While president, he repeatedly told aides he wanted the Justice Department to indict his political enemies, including officials he had fired such as James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director. The Justice Department opened various such investigations but did not bring charges — infuriating Mr. Trump and leading to a split in 2020 with his attorney general, William P. Barr.He intends to carry out an extreme immigration crackdown.Mr. Trump is planning an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.Bolstered by agents reassigned from other federal law enforcement agencies and state police and the National Guard, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement would carry out sweeping raids aimed at deporting millions of people each year. Military funds would be used to erect sprawling camps to hold undocumented detainees. A public-health emergency law would be invoked to shut down asylum requests by people arriving at the border. And the government would try to end birthright citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented parents.Trump has plans to use U.S. military force closer to home.While in office, Mr. Trump mused about using the military to attack drug cartels in Mexico, an idea that would violate international law unless Mexico consented. That idea has since taken on broader Republican backing, and Mr. Trump intends to make the idea a reality if he returns to the Oval Office.While the Posse Comitatus Act generally makes it illegal to use federal troops for domestic law enforcement purposes, another law called the Insurrection Act creates an exception. Mr. Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act to use troops to crack down on protesters after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, but was thwarted, and the idea remains salient among his advisers. Among other things, his top immigration adviser has said they would invoke the Insurrection Act at the southern border to use soldiers to intercept and detain undocumented migrants.Trump and his allies want greater control over the federal bureaucracy and work force.Mr. Trump and his backers want to increase presidential power over federal agencies, centralizing greater control over the entire machinery of government in the White House.They have adopted a maximalist version of the so-called unitary executive theory, which says the president can directly command the entire federal bureaucracy and that it is unconstitutional for Congress to create pockets of independent decision-making authority.As part of that plan, Mr. Trump also intends to revive an effort from the end of his presidency to alter civil-service rules that protect career government professionals, enabling him to fire tens of thousands of federal workers and replace them with loyalists. After Congress failed to enact legislation to block such a change, the Biden administration is developing a regulation to essentially Trump-proof the federal work force. However, since that is merely an executive action, the next Republican president could simply undo it the same way.Trump allies want lawyers who will not restrain him.Politically appointed lawyers sometimes frustrated Mr. Trump’s desires by raising legal objections to his and his top advisers’ ideas. This dynamic has led to a quiet split on the right, as Trump loyalists have come to view the typical Federalist Society lawyer — essentially a mainstream Republican conservative — with disdain.In a potential new term, Mr. Trump’s allies are planning to systematically install more aggressive and ideologically aligned legal gatekeepers who will be more likely to bless contentious actions. Mr. Trump and his 2024 campaign declined to answer a series of detailed questions about what limits, if any, he would recognize on his powers across a range of war, secrecy and law enforcement matters — many raised by his first term — in a New York Times 2024 presidential candidate survey. More

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      Trump’s Allies Want a New Breed of Lawyer if He Returns to Power

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      Close allies of Donald J. Trump are preparing to populate a new administration with a more aggressive breed of right-wing lawyer, dispensing with traditional conservatives who they believe stymied his agenda in his first term.The allies have been drawing up lists of lawyers they view as ideologically and temperamentally suited to serve in a second Trump administration. Their aim is to reduce the chances that politically appointed lawyers would frustrate a more radical White House agenda — as they sometimes did when Mr. Trump was in office, by raising objections to his desires for certain harsher immigration policies or for greater personal control over the Justice Department, among others.Now, as Trump allies grow more confident in an election victory next fall, several outside groups, staffed by former Trump officials who are expected to serve in senior roles if he wins, have begun parallel personnel efforts. At the start of Mr. Trump’s term, his administration relied on the influential Federalist Society, the conservative legal network whose members filled key executive branch legal roles and whose leader helped select his judicial nominations. But in a striking shift, Trump allies are building new recruiting pipelines separate from the Federalist Society.These back-room discussions were described by seven people with knowledge of the planning, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. In addition, The New York Times interviewed former senior lawyers in the Trump administration and other allies who have remained close to the president and are likely to serve in a second term.The interviews reveal a significant break within the conservative movement. Top Trump allies have come to view their party’s legal elites — even leaders with seemingly impeccable conservative credentials — as out of step with their movement.“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell T. Vought, a former senior Trump administration official who runs a think tank with close ties to the former president. He argued that many elite conservative lawyers had proved to be too timid when, in his view, the survival of the nation is at stake.Such comments may surprise those who view the Federalist Society as hard-line conservatives. But the move away from the group reflects the continuing evolution of the Republican Party in the Trump era and an effort among those now in his inner circle to prepare to take control of the government in a way unseen in modern presidential history.Two of the allies leading the push are Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s former senior adviser, and John McEntee, another trusted aide whom the then-president had empowered in 2020 to rid his administration of political appointees perceived as disloyal or obstructive.The nonprofit groups they are involved in are barred by law from supporting a candidate, and none of the work they are doing is explicitly tied to Mr. Trump. But Mr. Miller and Mr. McEntee remain close to the former president and are expected to have his ear in any second term.Mr. Trump himself, focused for now on multiple criminal and civil cases against him, appears disengaged from these efforts. But he made clear throughout his term in office that he was infuriated by many of the lawyers who worked for him, ranting about how they were “weak” and “stupid.”By the end of his term, lawyers he appointed early in his administration had angered the White House by raising legal concerns about various policy proposals. But Mr. Trump reserved his deepest rage for the White House and Justice Department legal officials who largely rejected his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, according to people who spoke with him. Casting about for alternative lawyers who would tell him what he wanted to hear, Mr. Trump turned for that effort to a group of outside lawyers, many of whom have since been indicted in Georgia.People close to the former president say they are seeking out a different type of lawyer committed to his “America First” ideology and willing to endure the personal and professional risks of association with Mr. Trump. They want lawyers in federal agencies and in the White House who are willing to use theories that more establishment lawyers would reject to advance his cause. This new mind-set matches Mr. Trump’s declaration that he is waging a “final battle” against demonic “enemies” populating a “deep state” within the government that is bent on destroying America.Several of Mr. Trump’s key allies — including Stephen Miller, his former senior adviser — are drawing up lists of lawyers they plan to hire if the former president returns to the White House in 2025.Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThere were a few lawyers like that in Mr. Trump’s administration, but they were largely outnumbered, outranked and often blocked by more traditional legal conservatives. For those who went to work for Mr. Trump but grew disillusioned, the push to systematically install Trump loyalists who may see the law as malleable across a second Trump administration has been a cause for alarm.John Mitnick was appointed by Mr. Trump as general counsel of the Homeland Security Department in 2018. But he was fired in 2019 as part of a broad purge of the agency’s leaders — whom Mr. Trump had installed — and was replaced by one of Mr. Miller’s allies.Mr. Mitnick predicted that “no qualified attorneys with integrity will have any desire to serve as political appointees” in a second Trump term, and that instead it would be “predominantly staffed by opportunists who will rubber-stamp whatever Trump and his senior White House staff want to do.”In many ways, the Federalist Society has become synonymous with the Republican establishment, and its members’ most common interests — including pushing an originalist interpretation of the Constitution and federal statutes — can be distinct from the whims and grievances of Mr. Trump himself. Its membership dues are low, and politically ambitious Republican lawyers of various stripes routinely join it or attend its events. Many of the more aggressive lawyers the Trump allies are eyeing have their own links to it.But after both the legal policy fights inside the Trump administration and the refusal by the group’s most respected luminaries to join Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the phrase “Federalist Society” became a slur for some on the Trump-aligned right, a shorthand for a kind of lawyerly weakness.Hard-right allies of Mr. Trump increasingly speak of typical Federalist Society members as “squishes” too worried about maintaining their standing in polite society and their employment prospects at big law firms to advance their movement’s most contentious tactics and goals.“Trump and his administration learned the hard way in their first term that the Democrats are playing for keeps,” said Mike Davis, a former congressional aide who helped shepherd judicial nominees during the Trump administration and has become a close ally of the 45th president. “And in the Trump 47 administration, they need much stronger attorneys who do not care about elite opinion who will fight these key cultural battles.”The chilling of the relationship between Mr. Trump and Leonard Leo, a leader of the Federalist Society, embodies a broader rift between Mr. Trump and conservative legal elites.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesA Fraught UnionWhen Mr. Trump wrested the 2016 Republican presidential nomination from the party’s old guard, it was unclear whether social conservatives would turn out in the general election to vote for a thrice-married New Yorker who had cultivated a playboy reputation and once described himself as “very pro-choice.” But Mr. Trump won their support by essentially striking a deal with legal conservatives: He agreed to fill Supreme Court vacancies from a list of prospects compiled by a small number of movement stalwarts.This group helping to shape the judiciary included Leonard A. Leo — arguably the most powerful figure in the conservative legal movement and a leader of the Federalist Society — and Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign general counsel and first White House counsel. With a seat already open after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the move worked: Exit polls showed that court-focused voters helped secure Mr. Trump’s narrow victory.Along with the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Mr. Leo and Mr. McGahn — and later Pat A. Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s second White House counsel — created an assembly line for turning Federalist Society-style lawyers into appeals court judges and Supreme Court justices.But the union between Mr. Trump and the conservative legal establishment could be more fraught than it sometimes appeared. As his presidency wore on, Mr. Trump attacked and sidelined many of the lawyers around him. That included Mr. Leo.One episode, described by a person familiar with the incident, illustrates the larger chill.In January 2020, Mr. Leo was having dinner at Mar-a-Lago when Mr. Trump strode up to his table. The president stunned Mr. Leo, publicly berating him and accusing him of recommending the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who appointed a special counsel to investigate ties between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.Taken aback, Mr. Leo protested that he had actually suggested someone else for the position — Mr. Cipollone. Mr. Trump walked away without apologizing.Nearly a year later, when Mr. Trump was trying to enlist legal assistance for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, he reached out three times to Mr. Leo. But Mr. Leo declined to take or return Mr. Trump’s calls, and has since only dealt with him through others.A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to repeated requests for comment.In a statement, Mr. Leo said, “I have nothing to say regarding his current efforts, but I’m just grateful that President Trump transformed the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary in his first term.”Mr. Mitnick’s experience underscores the style of lawyering that Trump allies saw as too cautious. His role as the top lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security put him in the path of increasingly aggressive policy proposals from a top White House adviser to Mr. Trump, Mr. Miller.Mr. Miller, who is not a lawyer, is known for his vehement opposition to immigration. Mr. Mitnick and Mr. Miller are said to have clashed, directly and indirectly, over legal risks raised by regulatory and policy actions emanating from the White House, including separating migrant children from their parents and transporting migrants to so-called sanctuary cities.In 2019, the White House purged the leadership ranks of the Homeland Security Department, firing Mr. Mitnick. Mr. Trump ultimately installed as his replacement Chad Mizelle, who had been out of law school just seven years but was a close Miller ally.Like numerous other positions filled later in Mr. Trump’s term, Mr. Mizelle was appointed as “acting” general counsel, sidestepping a Senate vetting and confirmation process that would most likely have closely scrutinized whether he was qualified for the job.With Mr. Mizelle acting as the department’s top lawyer when the Covid-19 pandemic arose, the Trump administration seamlessly invoked emergency powers to flatly refuse to consider the petition of any asylum seeker arriving at the southern border.Seeking ‘America First’ LawyersMr. Miller has stayed close to Mr. Trump and is expected to play an even more important role in shaping policy if Mr. Trump returns to power.While out of office, Mr. Miller has been running a foundation focused on suing the Biden administration and recruiting a new generation of “America First” lawyers, with some from attorney general and solicitor general offices in Texas and other Republican-controlled states. “America First” Republicans are often opposed to both legal and illegal immigration, protectionist on trade and skeptical of international alliances and military intervention overseas.One first-term Trump lawyer who would most likely serve in a second term is Mark Paoletta, who served as general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget and worked closely with Mr. Vought, the agency’s director. The O.M.B. team saw itself as an island of facilitators within an executive branch they believed was too quick to tell Mr. Trump that his ideas were unachievable or illegal.“The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is,” said Russell Vought, a former senior Trump administration official.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTogether, Mr. Vought and Mr. Paoletta came up with the idea of having Mr. Trump declare a national emergency and invoke special powers to spend more taxpayer money on a border wall than Congress was willing to appropriate.Mr. Paoletta also believed that Mr. Trump could have exerted greater personal control over the Justice Department, although Mr. Paoletta said in an interview that he did not advocate using the presidency’s command over federal law enforcement for partisan and personal score-settling. He and other advisers likely to follow Mr. Trump back into power view White House authority to direct the Justice Department as proper under the so-called unitary executive theory. It holds that presidents can directly command the entire federal bureaucracy and that pockets of independent decision-making authority are unconstitutional.“I believe a president doesn’t need to be so hands-off with the D.O.J.,” Mr. Paoletta said, adding: “It’s not an independent agency, and he is the head of the executive branch. A president has every right to direct D.O.J. to look at items that are his policy priorities and other matters of national importance.”Mr. Trump is not known for pondering legal philosophy. But he has found common cause with lawyers who have a sweeping view of presidential power.In his 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump has promised to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after” President Biden and his family — shattering the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence. More than any legal policy statement on his campaign website, retribution may be the closest thing to a governing philosophy for Mr. Trump as he seeks a second term.‘Legal Creativity’Mr. Trump has rarely looked closely at a lawyer’s area of specialty. Instead, he has often looked at whether a particular lawyer can help him gain something he wants. He spent much of his first term railing against the lawyers who worked for him and wondering aloud why none of them could live up to the memory of his notoriously ruthless mentor, Roy Cohn, who represented Mr. Trump in his early business career in New York.When he sought to overturn the 2020 election, Mr. Trump was unsatisfied with his government lawyers, including his second White House counsel, Mr. Cipollone, who largely rejected his efforts to subvert the results. Mr. Trump turned to a different set of outside lawyers.Those lawyers included Rudolph W. Giuliani, John C. Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Sidney K. Powell, all of whom have since been indicted in Georgia in a racketeering case that charged the former president and 18 of his allies with conspiring to overturn his election loss there in 2020. Ms. Powell, Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Ellis have pleaded guilty.Mr. Trump was also infuriated that the justices he had put on the Supreme Court declined to repay his patronage by intervening in the 2020 election. As Mr. Trump criticized the court, Mr. Leo with the Federalist Society is said to have told associates he was disappointed that the former president’s rhetoric made his judicial appointment record look “transactional,” aimed at advancing Mr. Trump’s personal interests rather than a broader philosophical mission.Jeffrey Clark, a former high-ranking Justice Department official, was criminally charged in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss in that state.Pool photo by Susan WalshIn the same way, Mr. Trump had a falling-out with his attorney general, William P. Barr, who refused to falsely say that the Justice Department had evidence of widespread voter fraud. After Mr. Barr resigned, his deputy and successor, Jeffrey A. Rosen, also refused to throw the department’s weight behind Mr. Trump’s claims. Mr. Trump then explored the idea of installing Jeffrey Clark — an official who was willing to raise concerns about purported election fraud — as acting attorney general.Mr. Clark has also been indicted in the Georgia case, but remains in favor with Mr. Trump and has met with the former president at his private clubs. Over the summer, at Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Mr. Clark attended a fund-raiser for the people who have been imprisoned for rioting at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Clark will most likely be in contention for a senior Justice Department position in any second Trump administration, depending on the outcome of his legal travails. He has written a constitutional analysis, titled “The U.S. Justice Department Is Not Independent,” that amounts to an intellectual blueprint for direct presidential control of federal law enforcement.He declined to comment. On a conservative podcast last year, Mr. Clark said that “extraordinary times call for extraordinary, responsive legal creativity.” More

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      Democrats Need to Pick Up the Pace of Putting Judges on the Bench

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      With the outcome of the 2024 elections for the president and control of the Senate very much up in the air, Democrats must make a concerted effort to fill federal judicial vacancies before next November.Republicans did this very effectively before the end of the Trump presidency, leaving few vacancies for President Biden to fill when he took office. Now the Democrats must emulate that approach. And they must do so now.At the moment, there are two vacancies without nominees on appeals courts and 37 on district courts. Because the evaluation process of nominees takes time, it is imperative that the Biden administration quickly name nominees to those and future vacancies. The Senate then must work expeditiously to confirm those deemed suitable for the lifetime appointments.Mr. Biden has nominated 186 people to Article III judgeships, which include the Supreme Court and the federal appeals and district courts, according to the White House. At this point in their tenures, George W. Bush had nominated 211, followed by Mr. Trump’s 206, according to the Heritage Foundation’s Judicial Appointment Tracker. There have been inexplicable and troubling delays in this process. For example, two years ago, Judge Diana Motz of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., announced that she would take senior status, a form of semiretirement, when a successor was confirmed. She took senior status last year, though no replacement had been named at that time. And still no one has been nominated for this important judgeship.Time may be running out for the Biden administration.It is critical for federal judges who would like to be replaced by a Democratic president to take senior status so that Mr. Biden can appoint their successors with sufficient time to allow them to be confirmed by the current Senate. A federal judge or justice may take senior status after meeting the age and service requirements of the “Rule of 80” — the judge must be at least 65 years old, and the judge’s age and years of service must add up to 80. A total of 121 federal judges are now eligible for senior status but have not announced their plans, according to the group Balls and Strikes, which tracks that information. Of those, 44 were appointed by Democratic presidents. By Jan. 20, 2025, the date of the next presidential inauguration, that number could rise to 69.There is little reason for judges not to take senior status. They can continue to hear cases, even carry a full load of cases. And taking senior status allows the president to fill that seat on the bench. The judge can condition taking senior status on the confirmation of a successor. A senior judge typically is not allowed to participate in en banc decisions, where all (or a significant number) of the judges on the court review a matter that is particularly significant or complex. But that is the main restriction on what a senior judge may do.We are long past the time when it could be said that judges appointed by Republican and by Democratic presidents were indistinguishable. This was made clear in an analysis of Supreme Court rulings published in July 2022 by the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight, which found the partisan divide among the current justices “is deeper than it’s been in the modern era.”And this partisan divide is not confined to the Supreme Court. There are often huge differences between how judges in the lower courts who were appointed by Democratic and by Republican presidents decide cases. For example, a federal appeals court recently upheld Tennessee and Kentucky laws prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors, with the two Republican-appointed judges siding with the states and a judge initially nominated by President Bill Clinton dissenting. Whether it is reproductive rights or gun rights or employee rights, or in countless other areas, the outcome often depends on which president appointed the judge or judges hearing the case.For that reason, I wrote an opinion article in The Los Angeles Times in March 2014 urging Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then 81, to retire so that President Barack Obama could replace her while there was a Democratic Senate and someone with progressive values would take her seat. She took offense at the suggestion, also raised by others, and remained on the bench until she died in September 2020, when President Trump replaced her with the conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Ginsburg gambled, and America lost.Likewise, I think of the liberal federal court of appeals judges who did not take senior status, though they were eligible during the Obama presidency. For example, Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit declined to take senior status; when he died at age 87 in 2017 President Trump replaced him with a conservative judge. By the time another liberal Ninth Circuit judge, Harry Pregerson, decided to take senior status in late 2015, he was 92, and though Mr. Obama quickly nominated a replacement, it was late in his term and got caught up in politics and President Trump ended up appointing another conservative to the seat.Creating vacancies will matter only if Mr. Biden quickly names replacements and the Senate confirms the nominees. If the president is not re-elected, the Republican president will fill any vacancies that exist upon taking office. And regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, if the Republicans take control of the Senate, the confirmation of judicial candidates nominated by a Democratic president will be far more difficult. That is why immediate action is imperative.A president’s most long-lasting legacy is arguably the judges he appoints. Many will serve for decades after the president leaves office. Republicans have tended to recognize this much more than Democrats. That needs to change, and quickly.Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.Source photographs by John Slater and SergeyChayko/Getty ImagesThe 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