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      Brazil’s Bolsonaro Blocked From Office for Election-Fraud Claims

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      Brazil’s electoral court banned former President Jair Bolsonaro from seeking office until 2030 for spreading false claims about the nation’s voting system.Brazilian election officials on Friday blocked former President Jair Bolsonaro from seeking public office until 2030, removing a top contender from the next presidential contest and dealing a significant blow to the country’s far-right movement.Brazil’s electoral court ruled that Mr. Bolsonaro had violated Brazil’s election laws when, less than three months ahead of last year’s vote, he called diplomats to the presidential palace and made baseless claims that the nation’s voting systems were likely to be rigged against him.Five of the court’s seven judges voted that Mr. Bolsonaro had abused his power as president when he convened the meeting with diplomats and broadcast it on state television.“This response will confirm our faith in the democracy,” said Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice who leads the electoral court, as he cast his vote against Mr. Bolsonaro.The decision is a sharp and swift rebuke of Mr. Bolsonaro and his effort to undermine Brazil’s elections. Just six months ago, Mr. Bolsonaro was president of one of the world’s largest democracies. Now his career as a politician is in jeopardy.Under the ruling, Mr. Bolsonaro, 68, will next be able to run for president in 2030, when he is 75. The next presidential election is scheduled for 2026.Mr. Bolsonaro said Friday that he was not surprised by the 5-to-2 decision because the court had always been against him. “Come on. We know that since I took office they said I was going to carry out a coup,” he told reporters (though he, too, had hinted at that possibility). “This is not democracy.”His lawyers had argued that his speech to diplomats was an “act of government” aimed at raising legitimate concerns about election security.Mr. Bolsonaro appeared to accept his fate, saying Friday that he would focus on campaigning for other right-wing candidates.Yet he is still expected to appeal the ruling to Brazil’s Supreme Court, though that body acted aggressively to rein in his power during his presidency. He has harshly attacked the high court for years, calling some justices “terrorists” and accusing them of trying to sway the vote against him.Judge Alexandre de Moraes, center, a member of Brazil’s Supreme Court, used the court to curb Mr. Bolsonaro’s power during his administration.Dado Galdieri for The New York TimesEven if an appeal is successful, Mr. Bolsonaro would face another 15 cases in the electoral court, including accusations that he improperly used public funds to influence the vote and that his campaign ran a coordinated misinformation campaign. Any of those cases could also block him from seeking the presidency.He is also linked to several criminal investigations, involving whether he provoked his supporters to storm Brazil’s halls of power on Jan. 8 and whether he was involved in a scheme to falsify his vaccine records. (Mr. Bolsonaro has declined the Covid-19 vaccine.) A conviction in any criminal case would also render him ineligible for office, in addition to carrying possible prison time.Mr. Bolsonaro was a shock to Brazil’s politics when he was elected president in 2018. A former Army captain and fringe far-right congressman, he rode a populist wave to the presidency on an anti-corruption campaign.His lone term was marked by controversy from the start, including a sharp rise in deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, a hands-off approach to the pandemic that left nearly 700,000 dead in Brazil and harsh attacks against the press, the judiciary and the left.Mr. Bolsonaro in 2017, when he was a member of congress.Lalo de Almeida for The New York TimesBut it was his repeated broadsides against Brazil’s voting systems that alarmed many Brazilians, as well as the international community, stoking worries that he might try to hold on to power if he lost last October’s election.Mr. Bolsonaro did lose by a slim margin and at first refused to concede. Under pressure from allies and rivals, he eventually agreed to a transition to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.Yet, after listening to Mr. Bolsonaro’s false claims for years, many Bolsonaro supporters remained convinced that Mr. Lula, a leftist, had stolen the election. On Jan. 8, a week after Mr. Lula took office, thousands of people stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices, hoping to induce the military to take over the government and restore Mr. Bolsonaro as president.Mr. Bolsonaro said on Friday that the riot was not an attempted coup, but instead “little old women and little old men, with Brazilian flags on their back and Bibles under their arms.”Since then, more evidence has emerged that at least some members of Mr. Bolsonaro’s inner circle were entertaining ideas of a coup. Brazil’s federal police found separate drafts of plans for Mr. Bolsonaro to hold on to power at the home of Mr. Bolsonaro’s justice minister and on the phone of his former assistant.Mr. Bolsonaro’s attacks on the voting system and the Jan. 8 riot in Brazil bore a striking resemblance to former president Donald J. Trump’s denials that he lost the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.The aftermath of the riot at the Brazilian government complex in Brasília in January.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesYet the result for the two former presidents has so far been different. While Mr. Bolsonaro has already been excluded from the next presidential race, Mr. Trump remains the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Mr. Trump could also still run for president even if he is convicted of any of the various criminal charges he faces.The ruling against Mr. Bolsonaro upends politics in Latin America’s largest nation. For years, he has pulled Brazil’s conservative movement further to the right with harsh rhetoric against rivals, skepticism of science, a love of guns and an embrace of the culture wars.He received 49.1 percent of the vote in the 2022 election, just 2.1 million votes behind Mr. Lula, in the nation’s closest presidential contest since it returned to democracy in 1985, following a military dictatorship.Yet conservative leaders in Brazil, with an eye toward Mr. Bolsonaro’s legal challenges, have started to move on, touting Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas, the right-wing governor of Brazil’s largest state, São Paulo, as the new standard-bearer of the right and a 2026 challenger to Mr. Lula.“He is a much more palatable candidate because he doesn’t have Bolsonaro’s liabilities and because he is making a move to the center,” said Marta Arretche, a political science professor at the University of São Paulo.The Brazilian press and pollsters have speculated that Mr. Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle, or two of his sons would run for president. Mr. Bolsonaro said recently that he told Ms. Bolsonaro she doesn’t have the necessary experience, “but she is an excellent campaigner.”Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas, the right-wing governor of São Paulo state, is emerging as a new standard-bearer of the Brazilian right.Adriano Machado/ReutersFriday’s decision is also further proof that Mr. Moraes, the head of the electoral court, has become one of Brazil’s most powerful men.During Mr. Bolsonaro’s administration, Mr. Moraes acted as the most effective check on the president’s power, leading investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies, jailing some of his supporters for what he viewed as threats against Brazil’s institutions and ordering tech companies to remove the accounts of many other right-wing voices.Those tactics raised concerns that he was abusing his power, and Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters have called Mr. Moraes an authoritarian. On the left, he has been praised as the savior of Brazil’s democracy.Mr. Bolsonaro’s case before the electoral court stemmed from a 47-minute meeting on July 18 in which he called dozens of foreign diplomats to the presidential residence to present what he promised was evidence of fraud in past Brazilian elections.He made unfounded claims that Brazil’s voting machines changed ballots for him to other candidates in a previous election and that a 2018 hack of the electoral court’s computer network showed the vote could be rigged. But security experts have said the hackers could never gain access to the voting machines or change votes.The speech was broadcast on the Brazilian government’s television network and its social media channels. Some tech companies later took the video down because it spread election misinformation.As for Mr. Bolsonaro’s future plans? He told the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo that during the three months he spent in Florida this year after his election loss, he was offered a job as a “poster boy” for American businesses wanting to reach Brazilians.“I went to a hamburger joint and it filled with people,” he said. “But I don’t want to abandon my country.”Ana Ionova More

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      The Supreme Court Just Helped Save American Democracy From Trumpism

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      To understand both the Trump-led Republican effort to overturn the 2020 election and the lingering Republican bitterness surrounding that contest, it’s important to remember that the G.O.P.’s attack on American democracy had two aspects: a conspiracy theory and a coup theory. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court dealt a blow to both. In a case called Moore v. Harper, the court rejected the “independent state legislature” doctrine, reaffirmed the soundness of the 2020 election and secured the integrity of elections to come.First, a bit of background. The effort to steal the 2020 election depended on two key arguments. The first, the conspiracy theory, was that the election was fundamentally flawed; the second, the coup theory, was that the Constitution provided a remedy that would enable Donald Trump to remain in office.The disparate elements of the conspiracy theory varied from truly wild claims about voting machines being manipulated and Italian satellites somehow altering the outcome to more respectable arguments that pandemic-induced changes in voting procedures were both unconstitutional and disproportionately benefited Democrats. For example, in one of the most important cases filed during the 2020 election season, the Pennsylvania Republican Party argued that changes in voting procedures mandated by the State Supreme Court violated the Constitution by overriding the will of the Pennsylvania legislature.The Pennsylvania G.O.P. argued for a version of the independent state legislature doctrine, a theory that the Constitution grants state legislatures — and state legislatures alone — broad, independent powers to regulate elections for president and for Congress. The basis for this argument is found in both Article I and Article II of the Constitution. The relevant provision of Article I states, “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” And Article II’s electors clause says, “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the state may be entitled in the Congress.”The question was whether those two clauses essentially insulated the state legislatures from accountability to other state branches of government, including from judicial review by state courts.The Supreme Court refused to hear the Pennsylvania G.O.P.’s petition, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissenting. But the issue was bound to come back to the court, and in Moore v. Harper it did.The case turned on a complicated North Carolina redistricting dispute. After the 2020 census, the Republican-dominated state legislature drew up a new district map. The Democratic-controlled North Carolina Supreme Court rejected the map as an unlawful partisan gerrymander under state law, and the legislature appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the State Supreme Court had no authority to override the legislature. The Supreme Court accepted the review.After SCOTUS took the case, last November’s midterm elections handed control of the North Carolina Supreme Court to Republicans, and the new, Republican-dominated court reversed itself. It held that partisan gerrymanders weren’t “justiciable” under state law, but it did not reinstate the legislature’s original map. This new North Carolina decision raised the question of whether the court would decide Harper on the merits or if it would dismiss the appeal as moot, given that it was based on a state ruling that had already been overturned.In a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court not only declined to dismiss the case; it also flatly rejected the independent state legislature doctrine. Chief Justice John Roberts — writing for a majority that included Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson — was unequivocal. “The elections clause,” Chief Justice Roberts declared, “does not insulate state legislatures from the ordinary exercise of state judicial review.”Or, to put it another way, the relevant provisions of the federal Constitution did not grant state legislatures independent powers that exempt them from the normal operations of state constitutional law. Chief Justice Roberts cited previous Supreme Court authority rejecting the idea that the federal Constitution endows “the legislature of the state with power to enact laws in any manner other than that in which the Constitution of the state has provided that laws shall be enacted.”The implications are profound. In regard to 2020, the Supreme Court’s decision strips away the foundation of G.O.P. arguments that the election was legally problematic because of state court interventions. Such interventions did not inherently violate the federal Constitution, and the state legislatures did not have extraordinary constitutional autonomy to independently set election rules.In regard to 2024 and beyond, the Supreme Court’s decision eliminates the ability of a rogue legislature to set new electoral rules immune from judicial review. State legislatures will still be accountable for following both federal and state constitutional law. In other words, the conventional checks and balances of American law will still apply.Trump’s coup attempt was a national trauma, but if there’s a silver lining to be found in that dark cloud, it’s that the political and judicial branches of American government have responded to the crisis. Late last year, Congress passed significant reforms to the Electoral Count Act that were designed to clarify the ambiguities in the original act and to reaffirm Congress’s and the vice president’s limited roles in counting state electoral votes.And on Tuesday, a supermajority of the Supreme Court, including both Democratic and Republican appointees, reaffirmed the American constitutional order. State legislatures are not an electoral law unto themselves, and while Moore v. Harper does not guarantee that elections will be flawless, it does protect the vital role of courts in the American system. The 2020 election was sound. The 2024 election is now safer. The Supreme Court has done its part to defend American democracy from the MAGA movement’s constitutional corruption.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Mexico’s Supreme Court Rejects AMLO-Backed Election Changes

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      The ruling from the country’s top court came as President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ramps up his attacks on the judicial system.Mexico’s highest court on Thursday struck down a key piece of a sweeping electoral bill backed by the president that would have undermined the agency that oversees the country’s vote, and that helped shift the nation away from single-party rule.The ruling by the Supreme Court is a major blow to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has argued that the plan would make elections more efficient, save millions of dollars and allow Mexicans living abroad to vote online.The election measures were passed early this year by Congress, which is controlled by the president’s party, and would have applied to next year’s presidential race. Though Mr. López Obrador is barred from seeking re-election, his party’s chosen candidate will most likely be a heavy favorite.The bill would have slashed the National Electoral Institute’s work force, reduced its autonomy and curbed its power to punish politicians for violating election laws. Civil liberty groups said the measures would have hobbled a key pillar of Mexican democracy.“What it sought was to transform the entire electoral system,” said Ernesto Guerra, a political analyst based in Mexico City. “It was a 180-degree turn to the rules of the democratic game.”However relieved some Mexicans were by the ruling, some also worried that Mr. López Obrador might try to turn the legal setback to his advantage and rally his base around the idea that the judiciary is corrupt. During a morning address Thursday in which he anticipated the ruling, he lit into the court.“It is an invasion, an intrusion,” Mr. López Obrador said.He said he would present an initiative “in due time” to have members of the judiciary elected just like the president or senators. “It should be the people who elect them,” he said. “They should not represent an elite.”The court last month had invalidated another part of the bill that, among other things, involved changes to publicity rules in electoral campaigns.Mexicans casting ballots in Ciudad Juárez in 2018.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesIn throwing out the remaining part of the bill by a vote of nine to two, justices pointed to violations by lawmakers of legislative procedure, saying that the changes had been rushed through in only four hours and that members of Congress had not been given reasonable time to know what they were voting on.“As a whole, they are so serious that they violate the constitutional principles of Mexican democracy,” Justice Luis María Aguilar said during the court’s discussion. “Not respecting the rules of legislative procedure is constitutional disloyalty.”José Ramón Cossío, a lawyer who is a former member of the court, said that Mr. López Obrador and his allies had pushed the changes known as “Plan B” forward “in such an arrogant, violent, rude way that they lost.”Experts described the court’s decision as a major setback for the administration of Mr. López Obrador, who has made overhauling the electoral system a major priority. The government had defended the changes as a needed step to “reduce the bureaucratic costs” of elections and to ensure that “no more frauds occur” in Mexico.“The rule of law has never been threatened with the approval of the reforms,” the president’s legal adviser wrote in a statement in March. “It is false that the fundamental rights of the citizens are at risk.”With Plan B struck down, next year’s elections will be governed by the same rules under which Mr. López Obrador and his party, Morena, came to power, Mr. Guerra said.“This gives me peace of mind,” he said. “We see the burial of this reform emanating from and for the political power.”The Supreme Court building in Mexico City. Marco Ugarte/Associated Press But fears remain that the ruling may be weaponized against the judicial system, which already has come under attack by the president for rejecting a number of his administration’s initiatives, including one that would have transferred the newly created National Guard from civilian to military control. The court ruled that this was unconstitutional.“This defeat was intentionally sought to properly assume the role of victim and erect the perfect enemy,” said Juan Jesús Garza Onofre, an expert in constitutional law and ethics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “Narratively, this defeat becomes more of a victory.”The risk, analysts warn, is long-term damage to the judiciary. “Justice as we know it, with all its shortcomings, could experience a setback,” Mr. Garza Onofre said.The president, he added, would be prudent “to cool heated tempers.”“We know that is not going to happen,” he said. More

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      Judge in Trump Documents Case Sets Tentative Trial Date as Soon as August

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      The judge, Aileen M. Cannon, set an aggressive schedule for moving the case forward, though the proceedings are likely to be delayed by pretrial clashes.The federal judge presiding over the prosecution of former President Donald J. Trump in the classified documents case set an aggressive schedule on Tuesday, ordering a trial to begin as soon as Aug. 14.While the timeline set by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, is likely to be delayed by extensive pretrial litigation — including over how to handle classified material — its brisk pace suggests that she is seeking to avoid any criticism for dragging her feet or for slow-walking the proceeding. In each of four other criminal trials she has overseen that were identified in a New York Times review, she has initially set a relatively quick trial date and later pushed it back.The early moves by Judge Cannon, a relatively inexperienced jurist who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2020, are being particularly closely watched. She disrupted the documents investigation last year with several rulings favorable to the former president before a conservative appeals court overturned her, saying that she never had legitimate legal authority to intervene. Brandon L. Van Grack, a former federal prosecutor who has worked on complex criminal matters involving national security, said the trial date was “unlikely to hold” considering that the process of turning over classified evidence to the defense in discovery had not yet begun. Still, he said, Judge Cannon appeared to be showing that she intended to do what she could to push the case to trial quickly.“It signals that the court is at least trying to do everything it can to move the case along and that it’s important that the case proceed quickly,” Mr. Van Grack said. “Even though it’s unlikely to hold, it’s at least a positive signal — positive in the sense that all parties and the public should want this case to proceed as quickly as possible.”But it is not clear that the defense wants the case to proceed quickly. Mr. Trump’s strategy in legal matters has long been to delay them, and the federal case against him is unlikely to be an exception. If a trial drags past the 2024 election and Mr. Trump wins the race, he could, in theory, try to pardon himself — or he could direct his attorney general to drop the charges and wipe out the case.In public remarks after the indictment against Mr. Trump and one of his aides, Walt Nauta, was filed two weeks ago in Federal District Court in Miami, the special counsel, Jack Smith, who oversaw the investigation, said he wanted a speedy trial.The schedule that Judge Cannon set forth in her order on Tuesday clearly does that, requesting that all pretrial motions be filed by July 24.She also ruled that the trial — and all the hearings in the case — will be held at her home courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., a small town in the northern portion of the Southern District of Florida. Mr. Trump’s arraignment was held in the federal courthouse in Miami.Pretrial proceedings in the case are highly unlikely to be done by August. Legal experts have identified a series of complicated matters that Judge Cannon, the defense and the prosecution will have to work through before the matter is ready to go in front of a jury.For one thing, following Judge Cannon’s orders, Mr. Trump’s lawyers started the process of obtaining the security clearances needed to deal with the significant classified evidence issues in the case only last week. The background check process to obtain the clearances can take months.Mr. Trump’s legal team is also still in flux. Mr. Nauta’s lawyer, Stanley Woodward Jr., is still interviewing Florida-based lawyers to assist him with the case. He expects to have someone in place when Mr. Nauta is arraigned next week.Beyond the array of legal tactics that Mr. Trump’s lawyers may use to attack the validity of the charges against him, the parties in the case will also have to engage in significant closed-door litigation over how to handle the classified evidence at the heart of the government’s prosecution. Mr. Trump has been accused of illegally holding on to 31 individual national defense documents, many of which were marked as top secret.Much of the secret litigation will take place under the aegis of the Classified Information Procedures Act. If the government does not agree with any of Judge Cannon’s rulings involving the act, it can pause pretrial proceedings and appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta. (The defense would have to wait until after any conviction to appeal an evidentiary issue under the act.)Mr. Trump’s lawyers are expected to file a battery of pretrial motions, including one claiming that he is being selectively prosecuted while other public officials investigated for mishandling classified material — chief among them, Hillary Clinton — did not face charges.The former president’s legal team may also file motions accusing prosecutors of various types of misconduct or seeking to suppress audio notes by one of his lawyers, which the government obtained before the indictment and was filed by piercing the traditional protections of attorney-client privilege.Depending on how seriously Judge Cannon considers the claims made in those filings, she could order additional briefs, attestations and hearings, further slowing down the process.The preliminary court calendar underscores how Mr. Trump’s decision to press ahead with his political campaign, now a key part of his defense, could affect the broader presidential primary race. The first Republican debate is scheduled for Aug. 23 in Milwaukee. Mr. Trump has not said whether he is attending and has signaled he might skip the first two debates.The second debate is scheduled for September, and there is expected to be one each month through the end of the year. Depending on the court calendar, Mr. Trump’s political plans could again coincide with court dates.What’s more, this is not Mr. Trump’s only court proceeding. His trial in a Manhattan state court, on charges stemming from hush money payments to a porn actress during the 2016 presidential campaign, is set to begin in March. A second defamation trial, brought by a New York writer who claimed Mr. Trump raped her decades ago, is set to begin in January.The former president is also facing the prospect of at least one more indictment. Prosecutors in Fulton County, Ga., may bring charges in connection with his efforts to stay in office. Mr. Smith, the special counsel, is also still investigating issues related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election. More

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      In Trump Prosecution, Special Counsel Seeks to Avoid Distracting Fights

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      Jack Smith has taken an iron-fist-in-a-kid-glove approach, sidestepping secondary issues that could divert attention from the weight of the evidence he has assembled in his case against the former president.Jonathan Goodman, the magistrate judge assigned to handle Donald J. Trump’s arraignment, did something of a double take during the proceeding on Tuesday, when the Justice Department offered the former president a bond deal that was not merely lenient but imposed virtually no restrictions on him at all.Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the prosecution for the department, opted not to request conditions routinely imposed on other defendants seeking to be released from custody, like cash bail, limits on domestic travel or turning in his passport.But Judge Goodman, tasked with hashing out a bond agreement during a one-day cameo appearance on the case, was not entirely on board. He suggested that Mr. Trump be compelled to “avoid all contact with co-defendants, victims and witnesses except through counsel.” Mr. Smith’s deputy, David Harbach, joined Mr. Trump’s lawyers in opposing that idea — but the judge imposed a version of it anyway.The first courtroom skirmish in United States v. Donald J. Trump underscored the legal perils the former president faces and his determination to make the indictment a centerpiece of a 2024 presidential campaign fueled by grievance and retribution.It also provided telling insights into the fist-inside-a-kid-glove approach that Mr. Smith and his team employed: an aggressive fast-track approach to prosecution coupled with a conspicuously respectful posture toward the defendant.Mr. Smith’s decision not to demand any conditions at the arraignment, people familiar with the situation said, reflected a belief that prosecutors should avoid impairing Mr. Trump’s ability to campaign. He is also seeking to dodge potentially distracting elements to a case focused on concrete evidence about the former president’s handling of classified documents and efforts to obstruct government efforts to reclaim them.His approach also seems to be a nod to the political sensitivities created by years of Republican protests — and misinformation — about prior investigations into Mr. Trump by the Justice Department and the F.B.I.“The prosecution of a former president and the current political rival of President Biden is obviously hugely politically fraught and comes against the background of prior Justice Department actions against Trump marked by error and excess,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor and former assistant attorney general.“Trump and his allies will do everything they can to demonize the prosecution as unfair,” he added. “It makes perfect sense that Smith, who has the law clearly on his side, would do everything he can to avoid raising the temperature on the matter further.”There are other indications that Mr. Smith, who sat a few feet behind Mr. Harbach in the courtroom on Tuesday, intently following the back-and-forth with the judge, seems intent on avoiding unnecessary confrontation.Conspicuously absent from the indictment was a potential charge that had been listed in the affidavit the Justice Department filed to obtain a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago last summer: Section 2071 of the federal criminal code, which prohibits the concealment and mishandling of sensitive government documents.It was the only crime on the sheet that might have directly affected Mr. Trump’s 2024 presidential bid, requiring that anyone convicted of it “shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”Jack Smith, the special counsel, opted not to request conditions routinely imposed on other defendants seeking to be released from custody.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMany legal scholars believe that the provision is unconstitutional and would have ultimately been struck down if it were imposed on Mr. Trump. But Mr. Smith’s team sidestepped the issue altogether, leaving it out of their 37-count indictment on a section of the Espionage Act that imposes a prison term but no restrictions on holding office.“I think it’s a very savvy move not bringing that charge,” said John P. Fishwick Jr., who was the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia from 2015 to 2017. “It makes this much less about politics — this is about the evidence, not about blocking him from office.”The special counsel has already gone where no prosecutor has before, indicting a former president on charges that he illegally retained national security documents and schemed with his personal aide to obstruct investigators. And he has not been shy about ensuring that some of the most vivid evidence (including photographs of boxes stacked in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago and of top-secret documents spilled onto the floor of a storage room) be made public.But Mr. Smith’s team has also taken pains to spare the former president unnecessary embarrassment or inconvenience, as evidenced by their deferential attitude at the arraignment toward Mr. Trump and his co-defendant, Walt Nauta.The U.S. Marshals Service, a branch of the Justice Department responsible for law enforcement at federal courts, adopted a similar tack. They booked Mr. Trump quickly and quietly in an office in the courthouse, registering his fingerprints electronically but eschewing a mug shot “because there are plenty of pictures of him” to choose from, according to a federal law enforcement official who briefed reporters afterward.Mr. Smith’s decision to avoid the placement of strict preconditions on Mr. Trump’s release appears to be part of a larger strategy of avoiding secondary fights that could complicate efforts to obtain a conviction, according to current and former Justice Department officials.By not pressing to limit contact between Mr. Trump and potential witnesses who are also his aides and other employees or advisers and lawyers, the prosecutors were seeking to minimize the potential for any violations of those strictures that might disrupt their efforts to keep the trial focused on the core charges involving national security secrets and obstruction.“I imagine this is why they did not insist on travel restrictions or even a gag order,” said Barbara L. McQuade, who was the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017.There is also a sense among some close to the case that much of the evidence needed to convict the defendants — in the form of text messages, photographs, camera footage, sworn testimony and the detailed notes of M. Evan Corcoran, a Trump lawyer — is already in place, making a confrontation over witnesses a costly distraction with limited benefits.“No-contact orders, like the one the judge insisted on, are routine — even in cases where you don’t have a defendant, like Trump, who has tried to influence witnesses,” said Mary McCord, a former top official in the Justice Department’s national security division. “But in this case, Jack Smith has a lot of what he needs already, so he seems to be avoiding a fight that could slow the whole the process down.”Mr. Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche had a different reason for objecting to the tougher terms: It was “unworkable” for the court to place preconditions on his client’s casual interactions with potential witnesses on his payroll or in his Secret Service protective detail, he told the court.But some critics, including Andrew Weissmann, who was the lead prosecutor in Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, see all this as a double standard that unfairly shields Mr. Trump from the conditions placed on others accused of serious offenses.Judge Goodman — a former newspaper reporter with a wry, conversational courtroom style — did not object to the department’s desire to limit the restrictions on Mr. Trump, other than he appear for his court hearings and commit no crimes. But he seemed puzzled why Mr. Smith’s team would not, as a bare minimum, insist that a defendant who has been accused repeatedly of pressuring witnesses be given no constraints at all.“Despite the parties’ recommendations to me, I am also going to be imposing some additional special conditions,” the judge said. “Former President Trump will avoid all contact with witnesses and victims except through counsel” — once prosecutors assembled a list of witnesses.Mr. Harbach said his team would comply, then joked that the “elephant in the room” was that no such list existed yet. More

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      The Trump Case and the Bathroom Files

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      More from our inbox:Affirmative Action in College Admissions: Race or Class?The Slow Runner via Department of JusticeTo the Editor:Re “U.S. Justice System Put on Trial as Trump Denounces the Rule of Law” (news analysis, front page, June 11):Contrary to this analysis of the documents case against former President Donald Trump, what is being tested is not the credibility of the justice system. Mr. Trump’s completely predictable efforts to undermine confidence in the legal process are pure bluster.What is actually at stake is the credibility of the political system. At any other time in United States history, a candidate for president charged with serious federal crimes that led to profound questions about his judgment and commitment to protecting the nation’s secrets would be decisively rejected by the voters.Instead, early indications are that Mr. Trump’s base remains staunchly loyal to him. American democracy is imperiled if a significant segment of the voting public cannot see through dangerous, self-serving posturing.In Abraham Lincoln’s first great speech, the Lyceum Address in 1838, he predicted that an aspiring tyrant would someday seek power, and he warned, “It will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”Nearly 190 years later, Lincoln’s wisdom is truer than ever.Steven S. BerizziNorwalk, Conn.To the Editor:Re “Trump Put U.S. at Risk, Indictment Says” (front page, June 10):As the mother of a U.S. Marine reservist, I am sickened beyond belief to read that U.S. government top-secret information was stored in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.Our son and tens of thousands of other servicemen and women put their lives on the line in service and sacrifice to this country. To think that a man who was elected president could be so malevolent as to break the law for his own selfish reasons is incomprehensible.Kathryn KleekampSandwich, Mass.To the Editor:It is at once not surprising and mind-boggling to read the indictment of Donald Trump for his mishandling of classified documents (“The Trump Classified Document Indictment, Annotated,” June 10).It is not surprising because his alleged misconduct is consistent with his arrogant quip years ago that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. And it is mind-boggling because so many Republicans — no doubt celebrating in private — continue to publicly support Mr. Trump in order to not alienate his base.There are certain moments that are, or should be, above politics. This is one of them. This is a time for somber reflection and a commitment to, and respect for, the rule of law.Larry S. SandbergNew YorkTo the Editor:Re “The Greater Trump’s Opposition, the Greater His Support as a Martyr,” by Damon Linker (Opinion guest essay, June 10):I consider myself a liberal, but I am not feeling “giddy,” as Mr. Linker puts it, over the former president’s indictment. I am not gloating or smacking my lips but feeling sad, because the Republican Party has let it come to this low point.I’m sad because Republicans have let themselves be guided by political polls rather than common sense and a regard for ethics and patriotism. They have followed Donald Trump down this dismal road, which has sullied the office of the presidency, and there seems to be no end in sight.Chase WebbPortland, Ore.To the Editor:Re “Trump Appointee Was Randomly Assigned to Case, Clerk Says” (news article, June 11):The supposedly random assignment of Judge Aileen Cannon to the Trump criminal case will be another test of the frequent pronouncements by members of the federal judiciary, including several Supreme Court justices, that politics never crosses the courtroom threshold.Will Judge Cannon have learned nothing from the surprisingly strident appeals court slap-down of her troubling and seemingly politically based previous rulings, or will she proceed as the fair and impartial judge she swore to be?It is not only the public’s perception of the judiciary but also the future direction of the country that may hang in the balance.Stephen F. GladstoneShaker Heights, OhioThe writer is a lawyer.Affirmative Action in College Admissions: Race or Class? Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “I’m in High School. I Hope Affirmative Action Is Rejected and Replaced With Something Stronger,” by Sophia Lam (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, June 5):The facts are clear: The vast majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action. Amplifying the voices of the Asian American minority that oppose affirmative action without this essential context privileges their position at the expense of the 69 percent of Asian Americans who believe that affirmative action offers communities of color better access to higher education.Regardless of the Supreme Court’s ruling, we will continue to stand in solidarity with communities of color and fight for policies that increase equal access to educational opportunities for all, particularly the underrepresented children of our multiracial society.Michelle BoykinsNiyati ShahWashingtonMs. Boykins is the senior director of strategic communications at Asian Americans Advancing Justice-AAJC. Ms. Shah is its director of litigation.To the Editor:Sophia Lam is entirely right. What is most puzzling about college admissions is that no colleges, including the most prestigious, are focused on diversity in such a socioeconomic-based way. “Underprivileged” includes many immigrants, people of color and all Americans from working-class backgrounds.If a socioeconomic standard were applied, clearly African Americans and other students of color would benefit, but it would not be solely for their skin color.Soft or hard quotas make Americans (and the Supreme Court for more than 40 years) uncomfortable. Why doesn’t Harvard, Princeton or Yale take this common-sense step?Howard FishmanHaddon Township, N.J.The Slow Runner Desiree Rios for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “For This Runner, There Is No Shame in Bringing Up the Rear” (front page, June 3):I enjoyed reading about Martinus Evans, the founder of Slow AF Run Club. I am now 71 and have been running since 1980 and used to be near the front in races. But now I’ve slowed to be near the back of the pack.I too have been taunted by people in the crowds during the New York City Marathon about going too slow. His encouragement to all runners is excellent.I too tell every slow runner in my club (New Hyde Park/Mineola Runners) to just get out there. I will stay with any runner, even if they have to walk. I’ve competed in marathons, half-marathons and triathlons and believe that no runner is too slow.Some people in clubs have become elitist and don’t want to be bothered with slower runners. Shame on them. Once they were very slow too. How soon they forget.This article is very important to show that there is support for all types and shapes of runners. Running is life-changing and lifesaving.Jeffrey SalgoQueens More

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      in Elections

      The Supreme Court Has Earned a Little Contempt

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      Although the Supreme Court has been deciding cases at a glacial pace this term — and that with an almost comically small docket of only 59 merits cases — the justices have found other ways to keep busy. They have been spinning their ethical lapses (Justice Clarence Thomas), blowing off congressional oversight (Chief Justice John Roberts), giving interviews whining about public criticism (Justice Samuel Alito) and presenting awards to one another (Justice Elena Kagan to Mr. Roberts).In the cases it has decided, the Supreme Court has gutted an important provision of the Clean Water Act and made it easier for private litigants to mount constitutional challenges to an administrative agency’s structure or existence. Opinions still to come threaten to strike down everything from affirmative action in education to student debt relief to the Indian Child Welfare Act.Court observers might be tempted to describe all this as a relatively recent development, a function of the court’s 6-to-3 Republican-appointed supermajority. The University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman has called this the “YOLO court” (for “you only live once”), because of the majority’s apparent sense of liberation in pursuing long-held conservative goals. Mark Lemley of Stanford placed the beginning of the “imperial Supreme Court” in 2020.Mr. Lemley is right to decry the self-aggrandizing nature of the court. But his dating is somewhat off. Judicial self-aggrandizement has been in the works for a lot longer: It has been a hallmark of the John Roberts years.Over roughly the past 15 years, the justices have seized for themselves more and more of the national governing agenda, overriding other decision makers with startling frequency. And they have done so in language that drips with contempt for other governing institutions and in a way that elevates the judicial role above all others.The result has been a judicial power grab.Judges have long portrayed themselves as neutral, apolitical conduits of the law, in contrast to the sordid political branches. This portrayal serves to obscure the institution of the judiciary and to foreground the abstract, disembodied concept of the law. In turn, it serves to empower judges, who present themselves not as one type of political actor but rather as the voice of the majestic principles of the law.But Mr. Roberts’s judiciary has increasingly taken subtext and made it text. Here are three thematic examples out of many.Campaign Finance LawStarting with Citizens United in 2010, the Republican-appointed majority on the court has consistently struck down provisions limiting the influence of money in politics, including provisions that it previously upheld. In a 2014 case, Mr. Roberts wrote that campaign finance regulations that pursue objectives other than eradicating quid pro quo corruption or its appearance “impermissibly inject the government into the debate over who should govern. And those who govern should be the last people to help decide who should govern.”In this brief passage, Mr. Roberts implicitly distances his own institution from “the government” of which it is obviously a part, implies that the court stands outside the processes of governance, and suggests that there is something self-dealing and borderline corrupt about campaign finance laws passed by elected legislatures.In these same cases, the justices have described nonjudicial political speech in terms that make it sound kind of … icky. It involves “sound bites, talking points and scripted messages that dominate the 24-hour news cycle,” in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words. This sort of speech deserves protection for the same reasons that “flag burning, funeral protests and Nazi parades” do, in Mr. Roberts’s.Yet there has been one glaring exception to the majority’s hostility to campaign finance regulations: In the context of state judicial elections, they have upheld restrictions that they would be highly unlikely to tolerate in the context of nonjudicial elections. Tellingly, these cases describe judges in a manner that starkly contrasts with how they have described nonjudicial officeholders.As Mr. Kennedy put it in a 2009 case about when campaign spending required a state judge to recuse himself, “Precedent and stare decisis and the text and purpose of the law and the Constitution, logic and scholarship and experience and common sense, and fairness and disinterest and neutrality are among the factors at work” when judges consider cases — a far cry from the “sound bites, talking points and scripted messages” of nonjudicial political speech.And in a 2015 case upholding a Florida law that forbade candidates for judicial office from personally soliciting campaign contributions, Mr. Roberts, anachronistically appealing to the authority of Magna Carta, wrote that judges “cannot supplicate campaign donors without diminishing public confidence in judicial integrity” and concluded that “judges are not politicians, even when they come to the bench by way of the ballot.”Mr. Roberts’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, judges are political actors, and striking down federal election laws is an aggressive act of governance by the judiciary. And the justices’ language in these cases, holding up judges as noble instruments of the law and denigrating other officeholders as power-grubbing and superficial, serves to reinforce and justify the notion that they are uniquely qualified to govern us.Congressional OversightOn one day in 2020, the court decided two cases dealing with very similar subpoenas for information about President Donald Trump’s financial and business dealings. One set of subpoenas came from congressional committees; the other came from a New York State grand jury.Mr. Roberts wrote both opinions. In the case dealing with congressional subpoenas, he worried that Congress may aim to “harass the president or render him ‘complaisan[t] to the humors of the legislature.’” Accordingly, the subpoenas must be superintended by the courts, lest the legislature “‘exert an imperious controul’ over the executive branch and aggrandize itself at the president’s expense, just as the framers feared.” (The internal quotations there are from the Federalist Papers to provide a patina of antiquity.) He thus announced a multipart balancing test that applies only when Congress seeks the personal papers of the president.While that decision made the president a supercitizen vis-à-vis congressional subpoenas, the other opinion emphasized that he is just a regular citizen when it comes to judicial subpoenas. Unlike Congress, apparently, a grand jury requires “all information that might possibly bear on its investigation.” Whereas Mr. Roberts worried about Congress harassing the president, “we generally ‘assume[] that state courts and prosecutors will observe constitutional limitations.’”Not only do these opinions stymie congressional oversight — the papers were not handed over to the committees until nearly two years into the Biden administration — they also do so using language that elevates judicial institutions while denigrating legislative ones.Federal RegulationCongress is not alone; administrative agencies also bear the brunt of the justices’ disdain. In a series of recent cases that, for example, struck down the E.P.A.’s clean power plan for addressing climate change, the Republican-appointed justices have invented the so-called major questions doctrine. If they consider an issue major — and they have not told us what makes a question major beyond “vast economic and political significance” or “earnest and profound debate across the country” — then they will not allow an agency to regulate in that manner unless Congress has clearly stated that it may.To use an analogy: If a majority of justices determine that eating an ice cream cone is a major question, then it is not enough that Congress has empowered the agency to “eat any dessert it chooses.” It must legislate that the agency can “eat any dessert it chooses, including ice cream cones.” But Congress has no way of knowing whether eating an ice cream cone is major until it sees what a majority of justices have to say about it.In justifying this doctrine, the justices have raised the specter of out-of-control bureaucrats intruding on the liberty of citizens, undermining legal stability, serving only special interests and invading the domain of the states.You might think that this doctrine is meant to protect congressional power, except that it dictates to Congress how it must legislate, despite the fact that Congress has no way of knowing in advance what issues will be considered major. Moreover, as the legal scholar Beau Baumann has noted, Justice Neil Gorsuch and his colleagues have justified the doctrine on the grounds that Congress is too eager to delegate to agencies in order to avoid political responsibility, so the courts must keep Congress in line. In other words, the justices are paternalistically claiming to protect Congress from itself.***In all of these areas and in plenty more, the justices have seized for themselves an active role in governance. But perhaps even more consequentially, in doing so, they have repeatedly described other political institutions in overwhelmingly derogatory terms while either describing the judiciary in flattering terms or not describing it at all — denying its status as an institution and positioning it as simply a conduit of disembodied law.This is the ideological foundation for the Roberts-era judicial power grab.It is also worth noting that this ideological project is bipartisan. Republican-appointed justices dominate the court and have for many decades, but their Democratic-appointed colleagues — while dissenting in many individual opinions — evince no desire to contest the underlying disdain for other institutions or elevation of their own. When Mr. Roberts recently refused to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, nothing stopped Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan or Ketanji Brown Jackson from volunteering to testify, but they did not. Nothing is stopping them from publicly calling for a binding ethics code or from questioning not just the correctness but also the legitimacy of their institution’s assertiveness, but they have not.Recognizing the justices’ ideological project also points to the beginning of the solution. We ought to begin talking about the justices the way we talk about other political actors — recognizing that their first name is not Justice and that they, like other politicians, should be identified by their party.We should stop talking about another branch’s potential defiance of a judicial opinion as an attack on “the rule of law” and instead understand it as an attack on rule by judges, one that may (or may not) be a justified response to some act of judicial governance. And those other branches should be more willing — as they have at other moments in American history — to use the tools at their disposal, including cutting the judiciary’s funding, to put the courts in their place.In recent years, the judiciary has shown little but contempt for other governing institutions. It has earned a little contempt in return.Josh Chafetz (@joshchafetz) is a law professor at Georgetown and the author of “Congress’s Constitution.” This essay is adapted from a forthcoming article in The St. Louis University Law Journal.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      in Elections

      How to Police Gerrymanders? Some Judges Say the Courts Can’t.

      by

      A North Carolina court, following the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled that courts don’t have the ability to determine if a political map is legal, giving legislators a free pass.WASHINGTON — Courts decide vexing legal matters and interpret opaque constitutional language all the time, from defining pornography and judging whether a search or seizure is unreasonable to determining how speedy a speedy trial must be.And then there is the issue that some judges increasingly say is beyond their abilities to adjudicate. It was on display again last week, in North Carolina.The North Carolina Supreme Court said that it could find no way to determine when even egregious gerrymanders — in this case, lopsided partisan maps of the state’s General Assembly and its 14 congressional districts — cross the line between skewed but legal and unconstitutionally rigged. In addition, the justices said, any court-ordered standard “would embroil the judiciary in every local election in every county, city and district across the state.”The effect was to give the Republican-led legislature carte blanche to draw new maps for 2024 elections that lock in G.O.P. political dominance, even though the state’s electorate is split almost evenly between the two major parties.Under its current court-ordered map, North Carolina now elects seven Democrats and seven Republicans to the U.S. House. Maps drawn by the Republican legislature could mean 10 Republicans to four Democrats, or possibly 11 to three. Without judicial review, the only remedy is to vote the dominant party out using maps drawn to keep them in power.The 5-to-2 decision, which fell along party lines in a court led by Republicans, pointedly threw out a ruling by a Democrat-led court only a few months earlier that said such lines could — and should — be drawn. In that respect, the North Carolina ruling reinforced what seems to be a hardening partisan divide between jurists who believe unfair political maps should be policed and ones who do not.The U.S. Supreme Court also split along partisan lines in 2019 when it ruled 5 to 4, after decades of dithering, that it could not devise a legal standard to regulate partisan gerrymandering, though it suggested that state courts could.It is hard to separate party allegiance from jurists’ positions, said Paul M. Smith, the senior vice president of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan advocacy group that litigates voting rights issues.“One explanation would be that the courts decide cases about elections based on who will be helped,” he said. “On some days, I’m cynical enough to believe that.” Whether that consciously figures in court decisions, though, is less easy to say, he added.Nate Persily, a Stanford Law School professor and expert on election law and democracy, said that any standard for judging partisan gerrymanders has to be above reproach.“The response is always going to be that you’re picking winners and losers,” he said. “Unless we come up with some sort of clear mathematical test, I respect the argument that judges’ political preferences might creep into the process.” Passing judgment on a legislature’s constitutional authority to set political boundaries can be a fraught exercise. In 1962, one U.S. Supreme Court justice, Charles Evans Whittaker, who had heard the historic redistricting case Baker v. Carr, suffered a nervous breakdown during the court’s deliberations and skipped the final vote.But some say that just because it is hard to create fair district lines does not mean it cannot be done.“I think that’s intellectually dishonest and intellectually lazy,” Rebecca Szetela, a political independent and a member of the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, said in an interview. “We had a commission made up of 13 randomly selected voters of varying educational backgrounds, and somehow we were able to come up with fair standards.”The Michigan commissioners drew their first set of maps after the 2020 election, following orders not to give any party a “disproportionate advantage.” They relied on several statistical metrics to meet that standard. But overall, they decided that an acceptable range for the statewide ratio of votes to seats won would fall within five percentage points of their calculation of the state’s political preferences: 52 percent Democratic, 48 percent Republican.In practice, Ms Szetela said, the maps hewed closely to the calculated partisan divide. Still, some experts say that it is impossible to construct a standard that will be reliably fair. Daniel H. Lowenstein, an election-law expert at UCLA School of Law, said that would-be regulators of partisan gerrymanders by and large know little of how politics really works. He said that he picked up such an education during the 1970s while working in the California Secretary of State office, and later while running the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission.“There’s nothing in the Constitution that says elections have to be fair,” he said, “and that’s a good thing, because different people all have different concepts of what it means to be fair.”Peter H. Schuck, professor emeritus of law at Yale wrote a detailed analysis on the topic, “The Thickest Thicket,” in 1987. “I just don’t see any objective criteria that would be authoritative in assessing whether a gerrymander ought to be upheld or not,” he said. A few other state courts have set standards for partisan gerrymandering and applied them. Pennsylvania was the first state to strike down partisan gerrymanders in 2018, and the Alaska Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision last month stating that gerrymandered State Senate seats violated the State Constitution’s equal protection clause.Many voting rights advocates say the same computer-driven advances that enable today’s extreme gerrymanders also make it possible to easily spot them.In particular, software programs can now generate thousands and even millions of maps of hypothetical political districts, each with small variations in their borders. Using statistical measures, those maps can be compared to a map being contested to gauge their partisan slant.In actual court cases, the technique has shown that some gerrymandered maps produce more lopsided partisan outcomes than 99 percent and more of the hypothetical ones.Measures of partisanship have improved, as social scientists employed data analytics to tease out the partisan impact of map changes. One yardstick, called the efficiency gap, gauges how much the votes of one party are wasted when its voters are disproportionately packed into one district or carved up among several. Another, partisan bias, measures the effectiveness of a gerrymandered map by calculating how many seats the same map would give each party in a hypothetical election where voters were split 50-50. There are many others, and each has its shortcomings. For example, voters sort themselves geographically, with a lopsided share of Democrats packed in cities and Republicans in rural areas, for reasons that have nothing to do with partisan skulduggery. And some metrics are useful only in particular situations, such as in states where party support is closely divided.In a 2017 hearing in a Wisconsin partisan gerrymander case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called such metrics “sociological gobbledygook.” But if so, much of American jurisprudence carries the same label, said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard University law professor who has been a leading advocate of standards to judge partisan gerrymanders.“In any voting rights case, people have to calculate racial polarization, which is a far more complex calculation than the efficiency gap,” he said. “You have to calculate the compactness of districts. You have to estimate voting patterns for minority voters and white voters.”“Tests involving some matter of degree are just ubiquitous in constitutional law,” he added, and nothing makes a partisan gerrymander case any different.Mr. Stephanopoulos and others also say that drawing a line between permissible and illegal political maps is not all that difficult. Courts make similar judgments in lawsuits claiming racial bias in redistricting, he noted. After the one-person, one-vote ruling in 1964, judges quickly set a limit — 10 percent — on how much political districts could deviate from the new requirement to have substantially equal populations.Some gerrymandering yardsticks have already been suggested. For example, a political map might be assumed constitutional unless measures of partisanship uniformly argued against it. At that point, the body that drew the map would have to demonstrate another compelling reason for the way boundaries were drawn.Critics like Professor Lowenstein argue that any dividing line between unfair and fair maps will have an unwanted consequence: Every subsequent map may be drawn to extract as much partisan gain as possible, yet fall just short of the legal standard for rejection.“The ultimate question,” Professor Schuck said, “is how crude a fit should a court be willing to accept?”Then again, he pointed out, the U.S. Supreme Court and the North Carolina Supreme Court have answered that question: Future political maps, they have ruled, can be as crude as their makers want them to be.“Declining to apply a rule is still going to validate or invalidate what politicians have done,” he said. “There’s no total innocence, no virginity, as it were.” More