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    11 Democrats Vie for Rhode Island House Seat

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    The vote on Tuesday will almost certainly determine who will succeed former Representative David Cicilline, and could hold clues to what voters are looking for in the run-up to 2024.Days before a Democratic primary that will almost certainly decide who represents her in Congress, Linda Vaughan Dubois of Rumford, R.I., still had not decided on a candidate.“There’s so many,” she said at a recent meet-and-greet at an East Providence sports bar for Gabriel Amo, a Rhode Island native who worked in the Biden and Obama administrations and is one of 11 Democrats competing in the race to represent this deep-blue district in the country’s smallest state.Not wanting to “waste” her vote on a candidate who had no chance of winning, Ms. Vaughan Dubois, an intensive care nurse for infants who described herself as a moderate, said she was tracking down each of her top candidates to see what they were like in person.As Rhode Islanders return from their state’s well-loved beaches after the long Labor Day weekend, they will cast votes on Tuesday in a special primary election to determine who will replace former Representative David N. Cicilline, the seven-term Democrat who stepped down in May to become president of the Rhode Island Foundation.Gabriel Amo speaking to Linda Vaughan Dubois at a campaign event last week. Ms. Vaughan Dubois said she was tracking down each of her top candidates to see what they were like in person.Sophie Park for The New York TimesHis resignation, a surprise to much of the Rhode Island political world, gave rise to a crowded and chaotic contest during an otherwise sleepy summer political season. With 11 Democrats and two Republicans comprising a historically diverse field, the candidates regularly bump into one another at community festivals, ice cream socials, meet-and-greets and more as they try to prove themselves to voters.“It was like with the Patriots when Tom Brady left,” said Rich Luchette, a political strategist who advised Mr. Cicilline for almost a decade. “Everybody who was sitting behind Tom Brady felt like they should be the starting quarterback.”The fate of the seat in Rhode Island’s solidly blue First Congressional District almost certainly will not change the balance of power in the House, now controlled by Republicans. But the outcome of the election, which has pitted factions of the Democratic Party against each other, could hold clues about what Democrats are looking for in the run-up to next year’s elections, particularly in a state where former president Donald J. Trump over-performed in 2020.The race — and its diverse field — “reflects the rapidly changing nature of the Democratic Party nationally,” said Wendy Schiller, a professor of political science at Brown University. “There are a lot of groups that have been excluded from power that are now vying for power successfully, and you wonder how it can all be harnessed” to drive voter turnout next year.While there has been no independent public polling indicating who is favored to win, two candidates have emerged as leaders after a series of controversies that have shaken the race.Aaron Regunberg, a progressive former state representative widely seen as the front-runner, is backed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Mr. Amo, a more centrist Democrat who is seen as a top alternative to Mr. Regunberg, has been endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus, the former White House chief of staff Ron Klain and former Representative Patrick J. Kennedy, who represented the district before Mr. Cicilline.Senator Bernie Sanders headlined for Aaron Regunberg, to the right of Mr. Sanders, at a rally last week.Sophie Park for The New York TimesState Senator Sandra Cano has attracted a broad range of local endorsements. And Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos, who began the race as the only candidate who had won a statewide election, may still be in contention despite a scandal related to forged signatures on the nomination forms she filed to run.That was just one measure of the turbulence of the race. Don Carlson, another Democrat who had sought the nomination, dropped out just nine days before the primary. He suspended his campaign after an investigative report by WPRI, a Providence news station, found that Williams College had asked him not to return to teach there after he was accused of sending a text to a student in which he “suggested a relationship modeled on a website where people can pay to go on dates.” He has sought to clarify his conduct.Whoever wins the most votes in the Democratic primary on Tuesday is virtually assured of winning the general election. But with so many candidates dividing the vote, and no independent public polling, political observers say it’s difficult to predict how the election may go and how close it will be. Mr. Cicilline has stayed out of the contest, declining to throw his support behind any candidate.“It’s been rough,” Ms. Matos said. “I knew this was going to be a tough campaign. It has been really hard. But you know, it is worth it.”Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos saw her campaign slump after criminal investigations were opened into fraudulent signatures on her nomination papers. Sophie Park for The New York TimesIn East Providence, Ms. Vaughan Dubois said she was deciding between Mr. Amo and Mr. Regunberg, and above all was looking for someone who had “some experience” and could “play with the big boys — who don’t play nice.”That is at the heart of Mr. Amo’s pitch to voters, which emphasizes his professional background and his Ocean State roots. He frequently brings up his experience serving two presidents in the White House and former Gov. Gina Raimondo, now the U.S. secretary of commerce, in the Rhode Island State House.“People here in Rhode Island deserve a congressperson who can get the job done,” Mr. Amo said in an interview. “They want people who are not running to make a point. They want effectiveness.”Mr. Amo, a more centrist Democrat, is seen as a top alternative to Mr. Regunberg.Sophie Park for The New York TimesHe said that Mr. Regunberg would “go to Washington and grandstand to make a political statement.”Mr. Regunberg dismissed the attacks as expected in the final week before an election. He has criticized Mr. Amo for accepting contributions from corporate lobbyists.Mr. Regunberg has pledged not to accept corporate PAC or lobbyist money, and, as a former state legislator and activist, has made the case that he would be a liberal leader in Washington in the mold of Mr. Sanders, who headlined a rally for him last weekend.“This is a district that can support someone who’s actually going to organize” and push progressive policies in Washington, Mr. Regunberg said at the rally, where he addressed around 650 attendees — including young families, people donning “Bernie” merch and supporters from nearby Massachusetts — who had lined up on the sidewalk outside a historic theater in Providence to see him and Mr. Sanders.Although there has been no independent public polling indicating who is favored to win, Mr. Regunberg is widely seen as the front-runner.Sophie Park for The New York TimesLike Mr. Cicilline, who led the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, Mr. Regunberg said corporate power was at the root of numerous political and economic crises, from climate change to prescription drug pricing, and the main issue for the Democratic Party to show voters it is taking on in order to win back control of Congress and re-elect President Biden in 2024.“2024 is an existential-threat-to-our-democracy kind of election,” Mr. Regunberg said in an interview at a vegan bakery in Pawtucket, R.I. “Substantively, we need to be taking on corporate power. But I also think, politically, it’s really important that we be showing that we’re the party that’s standing up for regular people.”But Mr. Regunberg also faced controversy during his campaign after his father-in-law, a top executive at the investment firm Janus Henderson, created and invested $125,000 in a super PAC on his behalf.Ms. Matos filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, accusing Mr. Regunberg of violating campaign finance law by coordinating with the super PAC. Mr. Regunberg has denied any wrongdoing.Ms. Matos, a moderate once seen as the front-runner in the race, saw her campaign slump after she was engulfed this summer in multiple criminal investigations into the fraudulent signatures on her nomination papers. Still, she maintains support from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and a number of local unions.The race has spurred several historic bids, including seven candidates who would be the first person of color to represent a state whose Hispanic or Latino population increased 40 percent from 2010 to 2020, and three who would be the first Democratic woman.State Senator Sandra Cano has attracted a broad range of local endorsements.Sophie Park for The New York TimesMs. Cano, a Colombian American state senator who has worked her way up through local government, said the diversity reflects “the progress that our community is making” and is “something that we need to celebrate.”Ms. Cano immigrated to the United States from Colombia under political asylum, an experience she said has been at the core of her desire to be involved in politics.“My democratic values have always carried with me,” she said, “because I came from an unhealthy democracy.” More

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      in Elections

      Is Donald Trump Ineligible to Be President?

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      How does a democracy protect itself against a political leader who is openly hostile to democratic self-rule? This is the dilemma the nation faces once again as it confronts a third presidential run by Donald Trump, even as he still refuses to admit he lost his second.Of course, we shouldn’t be in this situation to begin with. The facts are well known but necessary to repeat, if only because we must never become inured to them: Abetted by a posse of low-rent lawyers, craven lawmakers and associated crackpots, Mr. Trump schemed to overturn the 2020 election by illegal and unconstitutional means. When those efforts failed, he incited a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol, causing widespread destruction, leading to multiple deaths and — for the first time in American history — interfering with the peaceful transfer of power. Almost two years later, he continues to claim, without any evidence, that he was cheated out of victory, and millions of Americans continue to believe him.The best solution to behavior like this is the one that’s been available from the start: impeachment. The founders put it in the Constitution because they were well acquainted with the risks of corruption and abuse that come with vesting great power in a single person. Congress rightly used this tool, impeaching Mr. Trump in 2021 to hold him accountable for his central role in the Jan. 6 siege. Had the Senate convicted him as it should have, he could have been disqualified from holding public office again. But nearly all Senate Republicans came to his defense, leaving him free to run another day.There is another, less-known solution in our Constitution to protect the country from Mr. Trump: Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars from public office anyone who, “having previously taken an oath” to support the Constitution, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or gave “aid or comfort” to America’s enemies.On its face, this seems like an eminently sensible rule to put in a nation’s governing document. That’s how Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, who has drafted a resolution in Congress enabling the use of Section 3 against Mr. Trump, framed it. “This is America. We basically allow anyone to be president,” Mr. Cicilline told me. “We set limited disqualifications. One is, you can’t incite an insurrection against the United States. You shouldn’t get to lead a government that you tried to destroy.”This was also the reasoning of the 14th Amendment’s framers, who intended it to serve as an aggressive response to the existential threat to the Republic posed by the losing side of the Civil War. Section 3 was Congress’s way of ensuring that unrepentant former Confederate officials — “enemies to the Union” — were not allowed to hold federal or state office again. As Representative John Bingham, one of the amendment’s lead drafters, put it in 1866, rebel leaders “surely have no right to complain if this is all the punishment the American people shall see fit to impose upon them.”And yet despite its clarity and good sense, the provision has rarely been invoked. The first time, in the aftermath of the Civil War, it was used to disqualify thousands of Southern rebels, but within four years, Congress voted to extend amnesty to most of them. It was used again in 1919 when the House refused to seat a socialist member accused of giving aid and comfort to Germany in World War I.In September, for the first time in more than a century, a New Mexico judge invoked Section 3, to remove from office a county commissioner, Couy Griffin, who had been convicted of entering the Capitol grounds as part of the Jan. 6 mob. This raised hopes among those looking for a way to bulletproof the White House against Mr. Trump that Section 3 might be the answer.I count myself among this crowd. As Jan. 6 showed the world, Mr. Trump poses a unique and profound threat to the Republic: He is an authoritarian who disregards the Constitution and the rule of law and who delights in abusing his power to harm his perceived opponents and benefit himself, his family and his friends. For that reason, I am open to using any constitutional means of preventing him from even attempting to return to the White House.At the same time, I’m torn about using this specific tool. Section 3 is extraordinarily strong medicine. Like an impeachment followed by conviction, it denies the voters their free choice of those who seek to represent them. That’s not the way democracy is designed to work.And yet it is true, as certain conservatives never tire of reminding us, that democracy in the United States is not absolute. There are multiple checks built into our system that interfere with the expression of direct majority rule: the Senate, the Supreme Court and the Electoral College, for example. The 14th Amendment’s disqualification clause is another example — in this case, a peaceful and transparent mechanism to neutralize an existential threat to the Republic.Nor is it antidemocratic to impose conditions of eligibility for public office. For instance, Article II of the Constitution puts the presidency off limits to anyone younger than 35. If we have decided that a 34-year-old is, by definition, not mature or reliable enough to hold such immense power, then surely we can decide the same about a 76-year-old who incited an insurrection in an attempt to keep that power.So could Section 3 really be used to prevent Mr. Trump from running for or becoming president again? As a legal matter, it seems beyond doubt. The Capitol attack was an insurrection by any meaningful definition — a concerted, violent attempt to block Congress from performing its constitutionally mandated job of counting electoral votes. He engaged in that insurrection, even if he did not physically join the crowd as he promised he would. As top Democrats and Republicans in Congress said during and after his impeachment trial, the former president was practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of Jan. 6. The overwhelming evidence gathered and presented by the House’s Jan. 6 committee has only made clearer the extent of the plot by Mr. Trump and his associates to overturn the election — and how his actions and his failures to act led directly to the assault and allowed it to continue as long as it did. In the words of Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, Mr. Trump “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.”A few legal scholars have argued that Section 3 does not apply to the presidency because it does not explicitly list that position. It is hard to square that claim with the provision’s fundamental purpose, which is to prevent insurrectionists from participating in American government. It would be bizarre in the extreme if Mr. Griffin’s behavior can disqualify him from serving as a county commissioner but not from serving as president.It’s not the legal questions that give me pause, though; it’s the political ones.First is the matter of how Republicans would react to Mr. Trump’s disqualification. An alarmingly large faction of the party is unwilling to accept the legitimacy of an election that its candidate didn’t win. Imagine the reaction if their standard-bearer were kept off the ballot altogether. They would thunder about a “rigged election” — and unlike all the times Mr. Trump has baselessly invoked that phrase, it would carry a measure of truth. Combine this with the increasingly violent rhetoric coming from right-wing media figures and politicians, including top Republicans, and you have the recipe for something far worse than Jan. 6. On the other hand, if partisan outrage were a barrier to invoking the law, many laws would be dead letters.The more serious problem with Section 3 is that it is easy to see how it could morph into a caricature of what it is trying to prevent. Keeping specific candidates off the ballot is a classic move of autocrats, from Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela to Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus to Vladimir Putin. It sends the message that voters cannot be trusted to choose their leaders wisely — if at all. And didn’t we just witness Americans around the country using their voting power to repudiate Mr. Trump’s Big Lie and reject the most dangerous election deniers? Shouldn’t we let elections take their course and give the people the chance to (again) reject Mr. Trump at the ballot box?To help me resolve my ambivalence, I called Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who sits on the Jan. 6 committee and taught constitutional law before joining Congress. He acknowledged what he called an understandable “queasiness” about invoking Section 3 to keep Mr. Trump off the ballot. But Mr. Raskin argued that this queasiness is built into the provision. “What was the constitutional bargain struck in Section 3?” he asked. “There would be a very minor incursion into the right of the people to elect exactly who they want, in order to obtain much greater security for the constitutional order against those who have demonstrated a propensity to want to overthrow it when it is to their advantage.”The contours of the case for Mr. Trump’s disqualification might get stronger yet, as the Justice Department and state prosecutors continue to pursue multiple criminal investigations into him and his associates and as the Jan. 6 committee prepares to release its final report. While he would not be prohibited from running for office even if he was under criminal indictment, it would be more politically palatable to invoke Section 3 in that case and even more so if he was convicted.I still believe that the ideal way for Mr. Trump to be banished for good would be via the voters. This scenario is democracy’s happy ending. After all, self-government is not a place; it is a choice, and an ongoing one. If Americans are going to keep making that choice — in favor of fair and equal representation, in favor of institutions that venerate the rule of law and against the threats of authoritarian strongmen — they do it best by themselves. That is why electoral victory is the ultimate political solution to the ultimate political problem. It worked that way in 2020, when an outright majority of voters rejected Mr. Trump and replaced him with Joe Biden.But it’s essential to remember that not all democracies have happy endings. Which brings us to the most unsettling answer to the question I began with: Sometimes a democracy doesn’t protect itself. There is no rule that says democracies will perpetuate themselves indefinitely. Many countries, notably Hungary and Turkey, have democratically undone themselves by electing leaders who then dismantled most of the rights and privileges people tend to expect from democratic government. Section 3 is in the Constitution precisely to help ensure that America does not fall into that trap.Whether or not invoking Section 3 succeeds, the best argument for it is to take the Constitution at its word. “We undermine the importance of the Constitution if we pick and choose what rules apply,” Mr. Cicilline told me. “One of the ways we rebuild confidence in American democracy is to remind people we have a Constitution and that it has in it provisions that say who can run for public office. You don’t get to apply the Constitution sometimes or only if you feel like it. We take an oath. We swear to uphold it. We don’t swear to uphold most of it. If Donald Trump has taught us anything, it’s about protecting the Constitution of the United States.”Surely the remedy of Section 3 is worth pursuing only in the most extraordinary circumstances. Just as surely, the events surrounding Jan. 6 clear that bar. If inciting a violent insurrection to keep oneself in office against the will of the voters isn’t such a circumstance, what is?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