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      Climate and the Republican Convention

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      Here’s where the party stands on global warming, energy and the environment.It’s official: Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for the presidential election this November, and Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio is his running mate.The long-awaited announcement of the vice-presidential candidate came as the Republican National Convention opened in Milwaukee on Monday and Trump made his first public appearance since the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania on Saturday.Climate change was not on the agenda. But the convention’s first day, which was focused on the economy, offered fresh signs of what a new Trump presidency might look like in terms of climate policy.Today, I want to share with you some of the reporting my colleague Lisa Friedman has been doing on the Republican ticket and what to expect when it comes to climate and the environment. Lisa has covered environmental policy from Washington for more than a decade.For Republican leaders, it’s all about energyJune was the Earth’s 13th consecutive month to break a global heat record and more than a third of Americans are facing dangerous levels of heat. But climate change is unlikely to be a major theme at the Republican convention, which runs through Thursday. It was not mentioned in any of the main speeches on Monday, which instead focused on inflation and the economy.(The closest thing to a mention of global warming Monday night came from Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who derided what she called the “Green New Scam,” saying it was destroying small business.)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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term

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      Now is the summer of Republican content.The G.O.P. is confident and unified. Donald Trump has held a consistent and widening lead over President Biden in all the battleground states. Never Trumpers have been exiled, purged or converted. The Supreme Court has eased many of Trump’s legal travails while his felony convictions in New York seem to have inflicted only minimal political damage — if they didn’t actually help him.Best of all for Republicans, a diminished Joe Biden seems determined to stay in the race, leading a dispirited and divided party that thinks of its presumptive nominee as one might think of a colonoscopy: an unpleasant reminder of age. Even if Biden can be cajoled into quitting, his likeliest replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, whose 37 percent approval rating is just around that of her boss. Do Democrats really think they can run on her non-handling of the border crisis, her reputation for managerial incompetence or her verbal gaffes?In short, Republicans have good reason to think they’ll be back in the White House next January. Only then will the regrets set in.Three in particular: First, Trump won’t slay the left; instead, he will re-energize and radicalize it. Second, Trump will be a down-ballot loser, leading to divided and paralyzed government. Third, Trump’s second-term personnel won’t be like the ones in his first. Instead, he will appoint his Trumpiest people and pursue his Trumpiest instincts. The results won’t be ones old-school Republicans want or expect.Begin with the left.Talk to most conservatives and even a few liberals, and they’ll tell you that Peak Woke — that is, the worst excesses of far-left activism and cancel culture — happened around 2020. In fact, Peak Woke, from the campus witch hunts to “abolish the police” and the “mostly peaceful” protests in cities like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis that followed George Floyd’s murder, really coincided with the entirety of Trump’s presidency, then abated after Biden’s election.That’s no accident. What used to be called political correctness has been with us for a long time. But it grew to a fever pitch under Trump, most of all because he was precisely the kind of bigoted vulgarian and aspiring strongman that liberals always feared might come to power, and which they felt duty bound to “resist.” With his every tweet, Trump’s presidency felt like a diesel engine blowing black soot in the face of the country. That’s also surely how Trump wanted it, since it delighted his base, goaded his critics and left everyone else in a kind of blind stupor.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Election Results in Europe Suggest Another Reason Biden Has to Go

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      There’s a dollop of good news for Democrats from the British and French elections, but it’s bad news for President Biden.The basic lesson is that liberals can win elections but perhaps not as incumbents. The election results abroad strike me as one more reason for Biden to perform the ultimate act of statesmanship and withdraw from the presidential race.The U.K. elections on July 4 resulted in a landslide for the Labour Party, ending the Conservative Party’s 14 years in power. Keir Starmer, the new Labour prime minister, achieved this result in part by moving to the center and even criticizing the Conservatives for being too lax on immigration. He projected quiet competence, promising in his first speech as Britain’s leader to end “the era of noisy performance.”But mostly, British voters supported Labour simply because they’re sick of Conservatives mucking up the government. The two main reasons voters backed Labour, according to one poll, were “to get the Tories out” and “the country needs a change.” A mere 5 percent said they backed Labour candidates because they “agree with their policies.”British voters were unhappy with Conservatives for some of the same reasons many Americans are unhappy with Biden. Prices are too high. Inequality is too great. Immigration seems unchecked. Officeholders are perceived as out of touch and beholden to elites. This sourness toward incumbents is seen throughout the industrialized world, from Canada to the Netherlands and Japan.Frustration with incumbents was also a theme in the French election, where President Emmanuel Macron made a bet similar to the one that Biden is making — that voters would come to their senses and support him over his rivals. Macron basically lost that bet, although the final result wasn’t as catastrophic as it might have been.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s Independent Streak Marked Supreme Court Term

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      The junior member of the court’s six-justice conservative supermajority often questioned its approach and wrote important dissents joined by liberal justices.Justice Amy Coney Barrett, 52, is the youngest member of the Supreme Court and the junior member of its conservative supermajority. Last week, she completed what was only her third full term.Yet she has already emerged as a distinctive force on the court, issuing opinions that her admirers say are characterized by intellectual seriousness, independence, caution and a welcome measure of common sense.In the term that ended last week, she delivered a series of concurring opinions questioning and honing the majority’s methods and conclusions.She wrote notable dissents, joined by liberal justices, from decisions limiting the tools prosecutors can use in cases against members of the Jan. 6 mob and blocking a Biden administration plan to combat air pollution. And she voted with the court’s three-member liberal wing in March, saying the majority had ruled too broadly in restoring former President Donald J. Trump to the Colorado ballot.The bottom line: Justice Barrett was the Republican appointee most likely to vote for a liberal result in the last term.That does not make her a liberal, said Irv Gornstein, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Supreme Court Institute.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Dear Elites (of Both Parties), the People Will Take It From Here, Thanks

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      I first learned about the opioid crisis three presidential elections ago, in the fall of 2011. I was the domestic policy director for Mitt Romney’s campaign and questions began trickling in from the New Hampshire team: What’s our plan?By then, opioids had been fueling the deadliest drug epidemic in American history for years. I am ashamed to say I did not know what they were. Opioids, as in opium? I looked it up online. Pills of some kind. Tell them it’s a priority, and President Obama isn’t working. That year saw nearly 23,000 deaths from opioid overdoses nationwide.I was no outlier. America’s political class was in the final stages of self-righteous detachment from the economic and social conditions of the nation it ruled. The infamous bitter clinger and “47 percent” comments by Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney captured the atmosphere well: delivered at private fund-raisers in San Francisco in 2008 and Boca Raton in 2012, evincing disdain for the voters who lived in between. The opioid crisis gained more attention in the years after the election, particularly in 2015, with Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on deaths of despair.Of course, 2015’s most notable political development was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign launch and subsequent steamrolling of 16 Republican primary opponents committed to party orthodoxy. In the 2016 general election he narrowly defeated the former first lady, senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who didn’t need her own views of Americans leaked: In public remarks, she gleefully classified half of the voters who supported Mr. Trump as “deplorables,” as her audience laughed and applauded. That year saw more than 42,000 deaths from opioid overdoses.In a democratic republic such as the United States, where the people elect leaders to govern on their behalf, the ballot box is the primary check on an unresponsive, incompetent or corrupt ruling class — or, as Democrats may be learning, a ruling class that insists on a candidate who voters no longer believe can lead. If those in power come to believe they are the only logical options, the people can always prove them wrong. For a frustrated populace, an anti-establishment outsider’s ability to wreak havoc is a feature rather than a bug. The elevation of such a candidate to high office should provoke immediate soul-searching and radical reform among the highly credentialed leaders across government, law, media, business, academia and so on — collectively, the elites.The response to Mr. Trump’s success, unfortunately, has been the opposite. Seeing him elected once, faced with the reality that he may well win again, most elites have doubled down. We have not failed, the thinking goes; we have been failed, by the American people. In some tellings, grievance-filled Americans simply do not appreciate their prosperity. In others they are incapable of informed judgments, leaving them susceptible to demagoguery and foreign manipulation. Or perhaps they are just too racist to care — never mind that polling consistently suggests that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are women and minorities, or that polling shows he is attracting far greater Black and Hispanic support than prior Republican leaders.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Curtis, a Moderate House Republican, Wins Utah’s Senate Primary

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      Representative John Curtis, a centrist Republican, won his party’s primary for U.S. Senate in Utah on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, beating a more conservative candidate endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Curtis, who has held a House seat in eastern Utah since 2017, has portrayed himself as a moderate workhorse in the image of the senator whose seat he is vying to fill: Mitt Romney, a former presidential candidate who said he was retiring to make way for a “new generation of leaders.”Mr. Curtis, 64, is perhaps not the fresh-faced successor Mr. Romney, 77, had imagined. But Mr. Curtis, a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and a leader of Republican efforts to address climate change in Congress, is a clear heir apparent to Mr. Romney’s centrist style of politics.Unlike Mr. Romney, Mr. Curtis is not a vocal critic of Mr. Trump. Mr. Romney, who voted twice to remove Mr. Trump from office during the former president’s two impeachment trials in the Senate, had pleaded with his fellow Republicans to unite behind an alternative to the former president for 2024.While Mr. Curtis declined to support Mr. Trump in the 2016 election, he largely backed his agenda once he was elected to Congress. But he refused to support Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. In the midst of this year’s Senate primary race, and seeking to polish his conservative bona fides, Mr. Curtis defended the former president’s vow to prosecute his political enemies if elected president.“I think it’s just human nature to feel the way that President Trump has expressed himself,” Mr. Curtis said during a debate ahead of the primary.Still, he faced attacks from his main primary opponent, Trent Staggs, the mayor of Riverton, Utah, for not being sufficiently supportive of the former president. Mr. Trump had endorsed Mr. Staggs, describing him in a video last weekend as “a little bit of a long shot” but “MAGA all the way.” For months, polls showed Mr. Curtis leading the race by a wide margin.Mr. Curtis began his political career as a Democrat. He unsuccessfully ran for the Utah State Senate in 2000, and then served for a year as the chair of the Democratic Party in Utah County. He ran for mayor of Provo as a Republican in 2009, and served in that position until 2017.That year, when Representative Jason Chaffetz, the influential chair of the House Oversight Committee, abruptly retired from his House seat in eastern Utah, Mr. Curtis jumped into the race, winning the Republican primary with 40 percent of the vote and defeating his Democratic opponent in the special election in a landslide. Mr. Curtis has since cruised to re-election to three full terms in the House. More

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      One Week That Revealed the Struggles of the Anti-Abortion Movement

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      The movement looks for a path forward: “Is the goal the absolute abolition of abortion in our nation?”The Southern Baptist Convention voted to condemn in vitro fertilization at its annual meeting in Indianapolis this week, over the objections of some members.Conservative lawyers pushing to sharply restrict medication abortion lost a major case at the Supreme Court, after pursuing a strategy that many of their allies thought was an overreach.Former president Donald J. Trump told Republicans in a closed-door meeting to stop talking about abortion bans limiting the procedure at certain numbers of weeks. In one chaotic week, the anti-abortion movement showed how major players are pulling in various directions and struggling to find a clear path forward two years after their victory of overturning Roe v. Wade.The divisions start at the most fundamental level of whether to even keep pushing to end abortion or to move on to other areas of reproductive health, like fertility treatments. A movement that once marched nearly in lock step finds itself mired in infighting and unable to settle on a basic agenda.In some cases, hard-liners are seizing the reins, rejecting the incremental strategy that made their movement successful in overturning Roe. Other abortion opponents are backing away, sensing the political volatility of the moment.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Is the Fight Against Big Oil Headed to the Supreme Court?

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      The Supreme Court may soon decide the fate of dozens of cases brought by cities and states that seek to hold fossil fuel companies accountable.Over the past several years, dozens of cities and states have sued big oil companies, seeking to hold the producers of fossil fuels accountable for their role in causing climate change. All of the cases follow more or less the same script: they claim that oil companies like Exxon and Chevron deceived the public by concealing their understanding of the devastating effects of global warming, and seek to make those companies pay for the billions of dollars in damages now being caused by rising seas and extreme weather. So far, none of those cases has gone to trial. But this week, a closely watched case out of Hawaii took what could be a pivotal step toward the Supreme Court and have a cascading effect on the legal fight to hold fossil fuel companies accountable.The case was brought by the city of Honolulu against Sunoco and other big oil companies in 2020. Last year, the Hawaii state supreme court ruled the case could go to trial. But a coalition of energy firms, including ExxonMobil and Chevron, appealed that decision, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the case from moving forward. On Monday, the Supreme Court asked the Biden administration’s solicitor general for its opinion on the appeals. That may sound like a technicality. But to legal experts, it’s a sign that the case has the attention of the justices. The Supreme Court reviews many appeals each year, but only seeks input from the solicitor general in cases it is actively considering taking up. 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More