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      Michael R. Long, N.Y. Conservative Party Stalwart, Dies at 82

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      His endorsement of George E. Pataki in 1994 helped elect the state’s only Republican governor in 50 years.Michael R. Long, the devout ideologue who for three decades headed New York State’s Conservative Party — which in 1994 provided the winning margin to elect the state’s only Republican governor in the last 50 years — died on Sunday at his home in Breezy Point, Queens. He was 82.The cause was kidney failure, his protégé and successor as the state party chairman, Gerard Kassar, said.Mr. Long was a fierce opponent of abortion rights, gay rights, same-sex marriages and higher taxes to pay for more spending by government, but he was generally respected and even liked by his political opponents as a man of principle who, by his consistency, had earned their trust.He was the longest-serving chairman of the state Conservative Party, from 1988 through early 2019, after heading the party’s organization in Brooklyn.He also served as an at-large city councilman from Brooklyn from 1981 to 1983, when the boroughwide position was abolished. He was the only Council member elected as a Conservative.In November 1994, George E. Pataki, a Republican state senator, toppled the liberal Democrat Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, who was seeking a fourth term, by drawing more than 300,000 votes on the Conservative Party’s ballot line.Its endorsement was a gamble: The party chose to paper over Mr. Pataki’s relatively permissive views on abortion and gay rights, but Mr. Pataki delivered on his vow to cut taxes and provided patronage appointments in state government to Conservatives, giving them greater influence over spending and other policies.“Without his support, I would never have been elected governor,” Mr. Pataki said Monday.Mr. Long stuck to his guns, a quality that even political opponents admired for its consistency.Marilynn K. Yee/The New York TimesMichael Robert Long was born on Feb. 1, 1940, in Brooklyn to Michael T. Long, who worked at different times for the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Stock Exchange, and Elmira (Nuetzel) Long, a supervisor for Blue Cross Blue Shield.He was raised in Queens, where he dropped out of Richmond Hill High School shortly before graduation in 1959 to join the Marines.“I just was that kind of a kid,” Mr. Long told The New York Times in 1999. “There were times when they were talking about throwing me out of school. And then I wound up on the honor roll.”“I was just contrary,” he added. “So I guess I’ve been contrary all my life.”He served in the Marines until 1961. In 1963, he married Eileen Dougherty. She survives him along with their sons, Michael, Matthew, James, Robert, Christopher, Francis and Edward; two daughters, Eileen Chelales and Maureen Hayes; 24 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.The Conservative Party in New York was founded in the 1960s by J. Daniel Mahoney and Kieran O’Doherty, Wall Street lawyers and brothers-in-law who sought to tilt the state’s Republicans to the right. In this they followed the pattern of the Liberal Party, which would leverage its endorsement of Democratic candidates — sometimes providing the margin of victory in close races — to nudge them to the left (and exact patronage once they were elected).Mr. Long, who ran a liquor store with his brother in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where he lived, was of a different breed of political leader: He was politically savvy, able to hold his own in any debate, but unlike many a standard politician, he was passionately committed to causes and unwilling to make transactional endorsements.In 1964, he volunteered to work in Barry Goldwater’s Republican presidential campaign and enrolled as a Conservative voter.The New York party achieved a stunning and unparalleled success in 1970 when James L. Buckley, William F. Buckley Jr.’s brother, was elected United States senator in a tight three-way race. He remains the only Conservative candidate who won a statewide race without the Republican nomination.In 1980, Conservative support helped Alfonse M. D’Amato defeat an incumbent senator, Jacob K. Javits — the last of the original Rockefeller Republicans — in the Republican primary, leading to Mr. Javits’s unseating that November.Mr. Long was elected Conservative Party leader in his Brooklyn Assembly district in 1968 and Kings County chairman four years later, serving until 1988. In 1974, he was chosen as state vice chairman.Despite his endorsement of Mr. Pataki in 1994, in 1997 he refused to endorse Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign for re-election as mayor of New York City because of the mayor’s liberal positions on social issues. Instead, he left the Conservative ballot line vacant and said he did not vote in the election. (In 1989, when Mr. Giuliani barely lost the mayoralty to David N. Dinkins, and in 1993, when Mr. Giuliani narrowly defeated Mr. Dinkins, the Conservative Party fielded its own candidates.)When the State Legislature passed the Marriage Equality Act in 2010, Mr. Long declared that no candidate who supported same-sex marriage would be allowed to run on the Conservative Party line.His political counterparts vigorously contested his ideological arguments, but generally respect his consistency in an era of expedient waffling and pandering.“There’s something almost refreshing about it, though I profoundly disagree with him,” Judith Hope, the former chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, said in 1999. “It’s rare to see what appears to be a principled stand from a party.”In 1990, the Conservative Party came perilously close to becoming what Mr. Long considered a typical political party.When the Conservative candidate for governor, Herbert London, campaigned as aggressively against the Republican nominee, Pierre A. Rinfret, as he did against the incumbent Democrat, Mr. Cuomo, Mr. London drew more than 800,000 votes, or 20 percent of the total, nearly outpolling Mr. Rinfret.“That was a little scary,” Mr. Long said at the time. Had Mr. London beaten Mr. Rinfret, the Conservatives would have dislodged the Republican Party from second place on the state ballot for four years and, Mr. Long asserted, “there would have been an infusion of people changing their registration, and you would have seen other players trying to take over the party.”“It would have become totally a political party and lost its vision,” he said.He added, “We’ve always understood that the Conservative Party is a philosophical movement, more than a political party.” More

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      John R. Froines, Chemist and Member of the Chicago Seven, Dies at 83

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      After his acquittal for inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he became a leading environmental toxicologist, shaping government standards on lead and diesel exhaust.John R. Froines, a quiet but politically stalwart chemist who stood trial alongside six other antiwar activists — known collectively as the Chicago Seven — on charges of conspiring to incite a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and who went on to become a pioneering advocate for environmental justice, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 83.His wife, Andrea Hricko, said the death, at a hospital, was caused by complications of Parkinson’s disease.A recently minted Yale Ph.D. on his way to teach chemistry at the University of Oregon, Dr. Froines found himself drawn into the swirl of antiwar activism building up to the Democratic convention, to be held in August 1968 at Chicago’s International Amphitheater.Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, two of the protest organizers, knew Dr. Froines through his work in Connecticut with the New Haven chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, and they invited him to join their inner circle.During the convention, tens of thousands of protesters marched in the streets and hundreds were arrested during violent clashes with the Chicago Police Department. But only eight were indicted under federal charges of crossing state lines to incite a riot; they included Mr. Hayden, Mr. Davis and Dr. Froines, who was also charged with building an incendiary device, accused of having shown three women how to make a stink bomb.Police clashing with protesters during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 28, 1968. Associated PressSeveral of those charged were already famous as radical activists and counterculture provocateurs. Bobby Seale had co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966; Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, co-founders of the Youth International Party, or the Yippies, were renowned for antics like dropping wads of cash onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange from the visitors gallery.The defendants were originally known as the Chicago Eight, but became the Chicago Seven when the judge in the case, Julius Hoffman — no relation to Abbie — had Mr. Seale legally severed from the group to be tried separately. (In an extraordinary move, the judge had earlier ordered Mr. Seale bound and gagged for several days in the courtroom after Mr. Seale’s repeated protests over his treatment by the court. He was later jailed for contempt.)Though the men stood in solidarity, Dr. Froines stuck out as particularly straight-laced and earnest, especially in contrast to the likes of Mr. Hoffman, who treated the trial with comic disdain, putting his feet on a table and referring to Judge Hoffman as his illegitimate father.“John was straight,” Lee Weiner, one of the defendants, said in a phone interview. “I’m not going to say we didn’t get along, because that’s not true. But I never had an impulse to say to John, ‘Let’s go smoke some dope.’”Despite what many saw as clear bias against the defendants by Judge Hoffman, in 1970 the jury acquitted Dr. Froines and Mr. Weiner of all charges. An appeals court later dismissed most of the charges against the others.Dr. Froines, left, in 1969 with Tom Hayden during their high-profile trial.David Fenton/Getty ImagesDr. Froines eventually returned to academia, then worked for several years in Washington for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Under his direction, the agency wrote the first regulatory guidelines for non-carcinogenic toxins like lead and cotton dust, setting the stage for dramatic increases in workplace and public health.He did much the same at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he moved in 1981. He directed numerous university research centers and sat on the state’s scientific review panel for air quality.And he engaged with communities hit hard by industrial pollution and smog, tailoring his research to their needs and even accompanying neighborhood groups to meet with government and corporate officials.“When you walk into a room with an internationally recognized expert on an issue, it makes a difference,” Angelo Logan, co-founder of one such organization, the California-based East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, said in a phone interview. “John’s work was driven, driven to make real differences in people’s lives.”Dr. Froines addressing a crowd at the University of Washington in 1970. After his acquittal in the Chicago Seven trial, he continued his antiwar activism. UPIJohn Radford Froines was born on June 13, 1939, in Oakland, Calif. His father, George, a shipyard worker, was murdered when John was 3, leaving his mother, Katherine (Livingston) Froines, a teacher, to raise him and his brother, Robert, by herself.After graduating from high school, he joined the Air National Guard, then earned an associate degree from Contra Costa Community College. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1962.It was at Yale, where he pursued a doctorate, that he first became involved in politics. He started as a moderate, chairing the university chapter of Students for Johnson during the 1964 presidential campaign.But, like many young people, he soured on the president after Johnson followed his landslide victory that fall with a massive expansion of the war in Vietnam. Mr. Froines joined the local branch of S.D.S., helping to organize poor white and Black residents in the city’s Hill neighborhood.He met his first wife, Ann (Rubio) Froines, through the organization. They later divorced. In addition to his wife, Ms. Hricko, he is survived by his daughter, Rebecca Froines Stanley, and his son, Jonathan.After his acquittal, Dr. Froines resigned from his position at the University of Oregon to continue his antiwar activism. He went back to New Haven to support the Black Panther Party during a series of trials against Mr. Seale and others, and in 1971 he helped organize the May Day antiwar protests in Washington, D.C.The next year, he returned to academia as a professor at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vt. He later worked for Vermont’s department of occupational health for two years before moving to Washington.Dr. Froines in 2015 at U.C.L.A., where he directed numerous university research centers and was a pioneering advocate for air quality regulations.UCLA Fielding School of Public HealthDr. Froines’s death leaves just two surviving members of the Chicago Eight, Mr. Seale and Mr. Weiner.The trial of the Chicago Seven became a touchstone of the era, one repeatedly mined for its historical significance. Two movies have been made about the case, most recently “The Trial of the Chicago Seven” (2020), written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, with Danny Flaherty playing Dr. Froines.It was a personal legacy that left Dr. Froines with mixed feelings. He remained as committed to social justice as he had been in his youth, he said, but he had left his activist days behind and was eager to be known better for his work regulating lead than for standing in court beside Abbie Hoffman.“No one is the same now as then,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. “We still need student protesters because many of the problems of the ’60s continue and new issues have emerged. But nobody’s a student activist at 50. You’d have to have your head examined.” More

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      Rob Stein, Who Changed How Politics Is Funded, Dies at 78

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      In the wake of Republican electoral victories in 2004, he convened major liberal donors to finance a network of political groups aligned with Democrats.Rob Stein, a Democratic strategist who helped reshape American politics by pioneering new ways for wealthy liberals to influence policy debates and elections, died on Monday at a hospice facility in Washington. He was 78.His son Gideon said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer.After a varied career in which he worked as a public interest lawyer and a top adviser to the Democratic Party and the Clinton administration and created nonprofit groups and a venture capital fund, Mr. Stein found his calling in the wake of the 2002 elections.The president’s party usually fares poorly in midterm elections, but Republicans captured the Senate, giving them control of both chambers of Congress and the presidency, as well as the majority of governorships and state legislative seats. This left Mr. Stein concerned that Republicans could be headed for long-term dominance if Democrats failed to understand and counter their rivals’ superior tactics and political machinery.He spent months obsessing over the advocacy groups and think tanks that collectively constituted the conservative movement. He routinely stayed awake past midnight studying tax filings to map the flow of cash to these groups.Mr. Stein crystallized his research into a PowerPoint presentation called “The Conservative Message Machine’s Money Matrix,” which was intended as a sort of Rosetta stone for understanding the conservative movement and its funding. He began showing it to Democratic political operatives and major donors around the country, developing a following among some of the most influential figures on the left.After President George W. Bush was re-elected and Republicans increased their majorities in Congress in 2004, Mr. Stein launched a coalition of major liberal donors, the Democracy Alliance, to offset the Republican advantages detailed in his presentation. Each member had to commit to donating at least $200,000 a year to groups recommended by the alliance — including outfits supporting progressive causes, like fighting climate change and protecting abortion rights, that generally aligned with the Democratic Party.Its founding members included some of the biggest donors on the left, among them the financier George Soros.The alliance’s donors have combined to give more than $2 billion to recommended groups, the organization said. Their donations have helped seed some of the most important institutions on the left, including America Votes, Media Matters and the Center for American Progress.It wasn’t long before Republicans were trying to organize donor coalitions of their own to mimic some of the strategy behind the Democracy Alliance.“It just changed the way people thought about their philanthropy,” said David Brock, the former conservative journalist who became a leading Democratic operative and who founded Media Matters.In the 2022 election cycle, Media Matters and a network of affiliated groups subsequently created by Mr. Brock are on pace to spend $100 million, Mr. Brock said. He added that none of that would have been possible without Mr. Stein and the Democracy Alliance.“It was revolutionary for our side, and over the last 20 years it was the sole reason why sustainable Democratic infrastructure got built,” he said.Mr. Stein, center, with Gov. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, a Democrat, and Kerry Healey, a former Republican lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, in 2018. Mr. Stein worked on building coalitions of donors and operatives across party lines.Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Concordia SummitRobert Jay Stein was born on Oct. 26, 1943, in Wheeling, W.Va. His father, Charles, owned a chain of lumberyards, and his mother, Janis (Harrison) Stein, was involved in local arts, social service and religious organizations.He graduated from the Linsly Military Institute (now the Linsly School) in Wheeling before attending Antioch College in Ohio, a hotbed of progressive politics and activism.The abrupt transition shaped Mr. Stein’s politics.“It opened my brain to both conservative values and liberal values, and I became respectful of both, even though over time I became more in the liberal camp,” Mr. Stein said in an interview last month.He went on to the George Washington University Law School in Washington, where he would make his home for the rest of his life.He worked as a public interest lawyer for 10 years, then helped create or run a series of nonprofit organizations focused on issues including nutrition, refugees, organizational management and voter participation.Ahead of the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Mr. Stein was recruited to develop a presentation about mobilizing voters. That led to positions as an adviser to the Democratic National Committee under Chairman Ronald H. Brown, and then as chief of staff to Mr. Brown when President Bill Clinton named him commerce secretary in 1993.Mr. Stein left the Commerce Department shortly before Mr. Brown’s death in a plane crash in 1996 to help start a venture capital fund focused on women-owned businesses. When he formed the Democracy Alliance, he infused it with principles typically associated with venture investing.In addition to his son Gideon, from his marriage to Mary Ann (Efroymson) Stein, which ended in divorce, Mr. Stein is survived by his wife, Ellen Miley Perry; their daughter, Kat Stein; two other children from his first marriage, Dorothy and Noah Stein; and five grandchildren.After the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision prompted a surge in political spending, much of it funded by undisclosed sources, Mr. Stein grew increasingly concerned that big money was deepening polarization and distrust in government.While he urged Democrats not to “unilaterally disarm,” he also began talking about ways to bridge partisan divides and reform politics. That became a larger part of Mr. Stein’s focus after Donald J. Trump’s election in 2016.He advised several groups on building coalitions of donors and operatives across the political spectrum to fight what he saw as a slide into authoritarianism exacerbated by Mr. Trump.Mr. Stein applied thinking and strategy from the Democracy Alliance to encourage “a new cross-partisan pro-democracy infrastructure,” said Sarah Longwell, a longtime Republican operative who has worked to loosen Mr. Trump’s grip on the party.“He was especially attentive to those of us on the right who had never had common cause with Democrats,” said Ms. Longwell, who helped create and run two organizations that oppose Mr. Trump and his allies: the Bulwark website and the political group Defending Democracy Together.She said Mr. Stein, whom she considers a mentor, was “a relentless cheerleader for the project of democracy.” More

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      L. McCrae Dowless Jr., 66, Dies; Operative at Heart of Election Scandal

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      Federal prosecutors charged him with absentee-ballot tampering in North Carolina, and the state ordered a historic rerun of a federal election.L. McCrae Dowless Jr., the North Carolina political operative who was at the center of a scandal involving absentee-ballot harvesting and tampering that led to the first rerun of a federal election in some 40 years, died on Sunday at his daughter’s home in Bladen County, N.C. He was 66.His daughter, Andrea Heverly, confirmed the death in a statement but did not provide a cause. He was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer last year.It was said that if there were 30,000 people in rural Bladen County, in the southeast corner of North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District, then Mr. Dowless knew 25,000. He grew up there, born on a peanut farm in a house without indoor plumbing. Aside from a short stint working construction in California, he never left.Starting in 2006, he turned that intimate knowledge into a get-out-the-vote operation that served both Democrats and Republicans, and that soon earned a reputation for unproven but potentially illegal tactics.Though there were significant concerns about Mr. Dowless’s work on a 2016 U.S. House race, in 2018 Mark Harris, the Republican nominee for the Ninth District, hired Mr. Dowless in his race against Dan McCready, a Democrat.Mr. Harris won the race that November by just 905 votes. He did especially well among absentee voters: Though only 19 percent of ballot requesters were registered Republicans, 61 percent of absentee voters picked Mr. Harris.Almost immediately, things unraveled. Witnesses came forward saying that Mr. Dowless had paid them to gather absentee-ballot request forms, or absentee ballots themselves, a felony under North Carolina law.Others attested to a wide-ranging operation in which Mr. Dowless directed them to fill in ballots, specifying the type of pen to use and how to mail them (never in large batches, always from post offices near the voters’ homes).The North Carolina Board of Elections ordered a redo. It was the first time that a federal election had been repeated because of allegations of fraud, according to voting experts. Mr. Harris decided not to run again, and in the 2019 redo Dan Bishop, another Republican, defeated Mr. McCready.Mr. Dowless was arrested in February 2019 on charges of ballot tampering and obstruction of justice related to the 2016 and 2018 primary races; four others faced charges. That July he was indicted on similar charges related to the 2018 general election, along with six others.The case faced multiple delays related to the Covid-19 pandemic and Mr. Dowless’s health. That did not prevent an unrelated fraud case from going forward. In June 2021, he pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud for failing to report his income from the Harris campaign while receiving Social Security disability benefits.Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr. was born on Jan. 3, 1956, near Lumberton, N.C., where Leslie Sr. worked on a 200-acre peanut farm. His mother, Monnie (Pait) Dowless, was a homemaker. He was the youngest of 11 children in the household, though the only child his parents had together.The family’s first home, tucked into the woods near the farm, had no indoor plumbing, and Mr. Dowless later recalled bathing in a 55-gallon oil drum. When he was 10 years old, his family moved to a modern home in nearby Bladenboro, where he ran from bathroom to bathroom, turning the taps on and off in amazement, he told Michael Graff and Nick Ochsner for their book “The Vote Collectors: The True Story of the Scammers, Politicians and Preachers Behind the Nation’s Greatest Electoral Fraud” (2021).Along with his daughter, Mr. Dowless is survived by his brother, Harry; his sisters Myrtice Johnson and Filena Carson; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Mr. Dowless Sr. ran a fertilizer store with his brother, and his son helped out after school and on weekends. And Leslie Jr. continued to work on farms, mostly growing peanuts, a prime crop in that corner of the state.By the late 1980s he was managing a used-car lot with a girlfriend, whom he hoped to marry once he had enough money saved. When one employee died unexpectedly, they took out life insurance on him, with the check illegally backdated.The scheme quickly fell apart, and Mr. Dowless and his girlfriend were charged with insurance fraud. But while she was sentenced to community service, he went to prison — a fact he chalked up to a crooked district attorney.When he got out after six months, he set his mind on revenge, and soon found it in politics, distributing campaign material against the prosecutor who had put him in jail. The prosecutor won the race, but Mr. Dowless was hooked.He dabbled in politics as a candidate as well. He won a seat on the Bladen County Soil and Water Conservation Board in 2012 and was re-elected in 2020.Immediately after his death, Lorrin Freeman, the Wake County district attorney, said that all charges against Mr. Dowless were now moot, but that the charges against the remaining defendants remained in place. More

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      Orrin Hatch, Longtime Senator Who Championed Right-Wing Causes, Dies at 88

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      A Utah Republican, he overcame poverty to become a powerful force in Washington, helping to build a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.Senator Orrin G. Hatch, the Utah Republican who crusaded for right-wing causes and outlasted six presidents in a seven-term Senate career that corresponded to the rise of the conservative movement in America, died on Saturday in Salt Lake City. He was 88.The Hatch Foundation confirmed his death in a statement. It did not specify a cause.Born into poverty in the Great Depression, one of nine children of a Pittsburgh metal worker, Mr. Hatch, who briefly aspired to the presidency and to a seat on the Supreme Court, had a grim Dickensian childhood. He went to school in bib overalls, lost siblings in infancy and in World War II, and grew up in a crowded, ramshackle house without indoor plumbing.In law school, he, his wife and children lived in a chicken coop that he and his father rebuilt behind his parents’ home.“We turned it into a tiny two-room bungalow, with a toilet and small stove, that we nicknamed ‘the cottage,’ a description that would have made even the most aggressive real estate agent cringe,” he said in a memoir, “Square Peg: Confessions of a Citizen Senator” (2002).But in the Senate, as in his early life, he was a fighter. Through shrewd political instincts and a fine-tuned sense of the national mood moving to the right, he became a powerful Washington political force, advising seven presidents, shaping some 12,000 pieces of legislation as a sponsor or co-sponsor, and helping to build and hold a conservative majority on the Supreme Court for years.In a 42-year tenure that began weeks before Jimmy Carter became president in 1977 and ended as his last term drew to a close in early 2019, Mr. Hatch was one of the Senate’s best-known leaders, as familiar to many Americans as anyone on Capitol Hill. He conferred at the White House with Presidents Carter, Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump, and voted to confirm nine justices of the Supreme Court.He was the longest-serving Republican and the sixth longest-serving senator in the history of the Senate, a singular achievement made all the more remarkable by the fact that, aside from a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, it was the only office he had ever sought. He was elected to the Senate in 1976 on his first try and re-elected six times by overwhelming margins. To make an orderly parting transition, he had announced nearly a year in advance that he would not seek an eighth term.From January 2015, when the G.O.P. took control of the Senate, until his retirement, Mr. Hatch had been its president pro tempore — making him by law third in the line of succession to the presidency, after the vice president and the speaker of the House. It was just a whiff of presidential power, as those ambitions had long ago sputtered out.By his final term, polls indicated that Utah voters believed it was time for Mr. Hatch to go. The Salt Lake Tribune facetiously named him “Utahn of the Year” in December 2017, and in an accompanying editorial had scathingly characterized his leading role in passage of the Trump tax cuts, which favored the rich, as an “utter lack of integrity.” The editorial reminded him of a 2012 promise not to run again in 2018.Mr. Hatch’s departure notice, a courteous and politically astute move, was appreciated by many party colleagues because it cleared a way for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee and a Mormon, to run for his seat.Mr. Romney was easily elected in 2018 and succeeded Mr. Hatch when he stepped down. Republicans saw Mr. Romney as a strong addition to the Senate; Democrats knew he was no friend of Mr. Trump, whom he had derided as a “fraud” and “phony” during the 2016 campaign.As the president pro tempore, Mr. Hatch was Mr. Trump’s designated successor during his Inaugural ceremonies — kept safe at an undisclosed location to ensure the government’s continuity, just in case. And in Mr. Trump’s first two years in office, he became one of the president’s most enthusiastic Senate loyalists, instrumental in achieving not only his tax cuts but the confirmation of his first two Supreme Court nominees, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. In 2018, Mr. Trump conferred the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, on Mr. Hatch.Throughout his Senate years, Mr. Hatch had been a gentlemanly, but relentless, conservative rock. He blocked labor law reforms and fair housing bills with filibusters, tying up Senate business for weeks. He voted against the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have enshrined gender equality as a bedrock civil right, and he proposed a Constitutional amendment to make abortion illegal.In a chamber of party loyalties, Mr. Hatch was also fiercely independent and often unpredictable. A lifelong Mormon who had performed missionary work in his youth, he held hard-right views on gun control, capital punishment, immigration and balanced budgets. He also opposed same-sex marriage, although he endorsed civil unions and laws barring discrimination against gay and transgender people in housing and employment.While he helped craft the court’s majority, he was hard to gauge on nominees. He voted for the conservatives Antonin Scalia (1986), Clarence Thomas (1991), John G. Roberts Jr. (chief justice, 2005), Samuel Alito (2006), Mr. Gorsuch (2017) and Mr. Kavanaugh (2018), and against the liberals Sonia Sotomayor (2009) and Elena Kagan (2010). But he also voted for Anthony Kennedy, a swing vote (1988) and for two liberals, Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1993) and Stephen Breyer (1994).When politically expedient, Mr. Hatch edged toward the center. In 1990, after labeling Democrats “the party of homosexuals,” the senator, amid talk that he might be interested in a Supreme Court seat himself, retracted the disparagement. “That was a dumb thing to say,” he acknowledged. “That’s their business and I’m not going to judge them by my standards of what I think is right.”Similarly, after his brief run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, he conceded the race to the eventual winner, George W. Bush, with centrist magnanimity. “I like the fact that he can reach across partisan lines,” Mr. Hatch said of Mr. Bush. “We can’t just take a narrow agenda and just narrowly be for a few people in this country. We’ve got to be for everybody.”For all his conservative credentials, Mr. Hatch had a longstanding and genuine friendship with Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the quintessential liberal Democrat. They spoke often and shared legislative accomplishments, including programs to assist AIDS patients, protect the disabled from discrimination and provide health insurance for the working poor. Mr. Hatch delivered a moving eulogy at Mr. Kennedy’s funeral in 2009.The New York Times in 1981 described Mr. Hatch as “an aggressive, ambitious man who, as much as anything, resembles a minister making his rounds.” He was, in fact, a bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Away from Capitol Hill, he led a quiet married life, the father of six children. He jogged, golfed and had an athlete’s trim look, even after his dark hair turned white.Senators, even Republicans, called him relatively humorless. His idea of a good joke, on himself, was a video that caught him trying to remove glasses he was not wearing during a contentious Senate hearing. It went viral online. A spokesman said he laughed at himself when he saw it, and created a fake Warby Parker page implying that invisible glasses were the new rage.Mr. Hatch had been an amateur boxer in his youth, with 11 bouts to his credit. He was also a pianist, a violinist and an organist, who wrote songs for pop groups and folk singers. In the early 1970s, he was the band manager for a Mormon-themed folk group, “Free Agency.” He also wrote books on politics and religion, and articles for periodicals and newspapers, including The Times.He was 42 years old, a tall, slim Salt Lake City lawyer, when he went to Washington in 1977 after defeating a three-term Democratic incumbent with the help of an endorsement — for “Warren Hatch” — from Ronald Reagan. The former California governor lost his bid for the Republican presidential nomination to President Gerald Ford, but would sweep into office with his conservative revolution in 1980, counting Mr. Hatch as an ally.As a Senate freshman, Mr. Hatch found mentors among its deepest conservatives — the Democrats James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Jim Allen of Alabama, and the Democrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. He did not, however, share their ardor for racial segregation.But he offered himself as a rising young protégé, and they taught him how to pass and block legislation, stage filibusters, build coalitions and horse-trade behind the scenes. In time, he became chairman of the Finance and Judiciary Committees, which wrote tax legislation and confirmed federal judges, and a power on committees that ruled the fate of health, education and labor bills.His actions were consistently conservative: opposing Mr. Carter’s social welfare programs, favoring Reagan and Bush tax and spending cuts and fighting Clinton health care ideas. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he helped draft the USA Patriot Act and supported Mr. Bush’s retributive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He also opposed Mr. Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and backed Mr. Trump’s immigration initiatives and his withdrawal from the Paris accords on climate change.Mr. Hatch was occasionally criticized for potential conflicts of interest. He publicly defended the Bank of Credit and Commerce International before it was closed in 1991 in a massive fraud case, and later acknowledged that he had solicited a $10 million loan from the bank for a business associate.During the opioid crisis in 2015, he introduced a bill to narrow the authority of government regulators to halt the marketing of drugs by predatory pharmaceutical companies. It later emerged that he had received $2.3 million in donations from the drug industry over 25 years.But there were no political repercussions. The senator was re-elected in 1982, 1988, 1994, 2000, 2006 and 2012, averaging nearly 65 percent of the vote. Orrin Grant Hatch was born in Homestead Park, Pa., near Pittsburgh, on March 22, 1934, the sixth of nine children of Jesse and Helen (Kamm) Hatch. His parents were Mormons who had moved from Utah in the 1920s to find work. After losing their home in the Depression, Jesse borrowed $100 to buy a plot of land in the hills above Pittsburgh and built a house of blackened lumber salvaged from a fire.Two of Orrin’s siblings died in infancy. He was deeply affected by the loss of his brother, Jesse, a World War II Army Air Force nose gunner who was killed when his B-24 was shot down in a 1945 bombing raid over Europe.At Baldwin High School, Orrin was captain of the basketball team and president of the student body. He took two years off for missionary work, proselytizing in Ohio, and graduated in 1955. He then moved to Utah and worked as a union lathe operator to pay his way through Brigham Young University.In 1957, he married Elaine Hansen. They had six children: Brent, Marcia, Scott, Kimberly, Alysa and Jess. After earning a bachelor’s degree in history at BYU in 1959, he studied law at the University of Pittsburgh on a full scholarship and received his juris doctor in 1962. He joined a Pittsburgh law firm, but in 1969 moved to Salt Lake City to open his own practice. He represented private clients in tax, contract and personal injury cases, and corporations fighting federal regulations.Coming from a family of Roosevelt Democrats, Mr. Hatch gradually became a conservative Republican. Upset by many events, including the Supreme Court’s ban on public-school prayers and its legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade, he concluded that America was headed in the wrong direction.“I was convinced that someone needed to stand against these trends,” he said in his memoir. “Someone needed to point out the deterioration of our moral fiber, the proliferation and increasing acceptance of drugs and crime, the expansion of the welfare state.”That someone was he. More

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      Victor Fazio, Longtime Democratic Leader in the House, Dies at 79

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      Known for his ability to work across the aisle, he represented the Sacramento area from 1979 to 1999 and rose to become chairman of the House Democratic caucus.Victor Fazio, a longtime Democratic member of Congress from California who served in House leadership for several years, died on March 16 at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 79.The cause was cancer, according to a statement from his former congressional office.Mr. Fazio represented the Sacramento area from 1979 to 1999. As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, he helped bring home funding for numerous projects, including a multimillion-dollar environmental institute at the University of California, Davis. He also lobbied for the funds to protect 3,700 acres of wetlands west of Sacramento as a refuge; dedicated by President Bill Clinton in 1997, it is known as the Vic Fazio Yolo Wildlife Area.Known for his low-key, bipartisan style, he often worked in partnership with the powerful California Republican representative Jerry Lewis, who died last year.Perhaps Mr. Fazio’s most difficult period was his tenure as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 1994 — the year that Republicans, led by Representative Newt Gingrich, took control of the House for the first time in 40 years.Still, because of Mr. Fazio’s ability to work across the aisle, his colleagues chose him the next year as chairman of the House Democratic caucus.Mr. Fazio stood behind the speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, as Mr. Gingrich’s fellow Republican representatives Bill Thomas (partly hidden) and Tom DeLay conferred, during a news conference on Capitol Hill in 1995.Karin Anderson for The New York TimesAfter he retired from Congress, he worked at a public relations firm in Washington led by Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman. He later joined the Washington office of the powerhouse law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and was regularly named to the annual list of top lobbyists by the political newspaper The Hill. He retired from Akin Gump in 2020.Victor Herbert Fazio Jr. was born in Winchester, Mass., on Oct. 11, 1942. His father was an insurance salesman, his mother a homemaker and dress shop manager.He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1965 before going to California on a Caro Foundation fellowship.In 1970, he co-founded California Journal magazine, now defunct, which covered state government and politics, and served in the California State Assembly before winning his House seat in 1978.His first marriage, to Joella Mason, ended in divorce. His second wife, Judy Neidhardt Kern, whom he married in 1983, died in 2015.In 2017, he married Kathy Sawyer. In addition to her, he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Dana Fazio Lawrie; two stepchildren, Kevin and Kristie Kern; and four granddaughters. A daughter, Anne Noel Fazio, died in 1995. More

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      Lynn Yeakel, Spurred Into Politics by Anita Hill, Dies at 80

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      She nearly unseated Senator Arlen Specter after his aggressive grilling of Ms. Hill during Clarence Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings.For a brief period in 1992, Lynn Yeakel carried the hope of many American women on her shoulders.While watching the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, she was among millions of people who were outraged by the way the Senate Judiciary Committee treated Anita Hill, a law professor who had accused Mr. Thomas of sexual harassment.The optics of the all-male, all-white committee grilling a Black woman and more or less dismissing her complaint about sexual harassment — not a widely acknowledged dynamic at the time — drove several women to run for office in what pundits called the “Year of the Woman.”Ms. Yeakel (pronounced YAY-kul), a Pennsylvania Democrat who had never run for office before, was among them.She took on Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, whose aggressive interrogation of Ms. Hill during the hearings, which riveted the nation, put him at the top of the list of men whom women voters most wanted to defeat.“If it hadn’t been for those hearings,” Ms. Yeakel told The New York Times in 1992, “it never would have occurred to me to run against Arlen Specter.”Ms. Yeakel lost her Senate race but saw 1992 as a turning point for women in seeking political power.Drexel University CollegeIn the end, she came up short. Still, she had caught the zeitgeist of a particular moment in history. As she told WHYY radio, in Philadelphia, she believed those hearings would be seen in retrospect as a turning point for women in seeking political power and standing up for their rights.Ms. Yeakel died on Jan. 13 at a medical center in Fort Myers, Fla. She was 80. The cause was complications of a blood cancer, said her husband, Paul Yeakel. They lived in Rosemont, Pa., and had a second home in Florida.Ms. Yeakel had been a longtime advocate for women’s rights and a fund-raiser for women’s charities but was largely unknown to the public when she challenged Mr. Specter, a former Philadelphia district attorney and two-term incumbent.Never having run for office, she barely registered in the polls. But during the Democratic primary, she ran a startling TV spot. It showed footage of Mr. Specter questioning Ms. Hill; Ms. Yeakel then stops the footage and asks the viewer, “Did this make you as angry as it made me?”She was the surprise winner of the five-way primary, earning 45 percent of the vote and becoming an overnight sensation. She initially led Mr. Specter in the polls by 15 percentage points.But Mr. Specter found his footing. He raised more than twice as much money as she did. He expressed some contrition for his treatment of Ms. Hill, saying he understood why her complaint against Justice Thomas “touched a raw nerve among so many women.”And he ran an aggressive campaign. He questioned Ms. Yeakel’s competence. He criticized her husband for belonging to a country club that had never had a Black member. And he criticized her father, a former member of Congress from Virginia, for his votes against civil rights.Ms. Yeakel noted that Mr. Specter was focusing on the men in her life, not on her, but he erased her lead. In the end, he beat her by three percentage points.Lynn Moore Hardy was born on July 9, 1941, in Portsmouth, Va. Her father, Porter Hardy Jr., a businessman, was a Democratic member of Congress from 1947 to 1968. Her mother, Lynn (Moore) Hardy, was a schoolteacher.Ms. Yeakel in 2019. Behind her is a photograph of Alice Paul, who helped secure passage of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote.Bob HortonLynn grew up in Virginia and went to Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph College) in Lynchburg, Va. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1963 with a major in French literature. Much later, in 2005, she earned a master’s degree in management from the American College of Financial Services in King of Prussia, Pa.Before she ran for the Senate, Ms. Yeakel was a co-founder and chief executive of Women’s Way, one of the first and largest fund-raising coalitions dedicated to the advancement of women and girls.After her Senate bid, she ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1994. President Bill Clinton appointed her that year to be the Mid-Atlantic regional director for the Department of Health and Human Services.Ms. Yeakel later joined Drexel University in Philadelphia as the director of its medical college’s Institute for Women’s Health and Leadership. There, she established the Women One Award and Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarships for medical students from underrepresented communities.Ms. Yeakel speaks at an event in 2019 celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Pennsylvania General Assembly’s vote to ratify the 19th Amendment.Daniel BurkeAt Drexel, she also established Vision 2020, now called Vision Forward. Its goal is to help women achieve social, economic and political equality with men.She married Paul M. Yeakel in 1965. In addition to her husband, she is survived by her daughter, Courtney; her son, Paul Jr.; and six grandchildren. More

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      Richard Blum, Political Donor and Husband of Senator Feinstein, Dies at 86

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      As a financier, he amassed a fortune that he spent on Democrats, helping to propel his wife from San Francisco mayor to a long career in the Senate.Richard C. Blum, a financier and major donor to Democrats — above all his wife, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California — died on Sunday at the family home in San Francisco. He was 86.The cause was cancer, according to a statement by Ms. Feinstein’s office.Ms. Feinstein missed votes in recent weeks as Mr. Blum’s health declined, imperiling the Democrats’ precarious Senate majority, which relies on a tiebreaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris.Mr. Blum exerted influence generally as a political patron and an adviser. It was only during his final months that he sought government office, informing President Biden early last year that he hoped to be made an ambassador.That move could have caused Ms. Feinstein to leave the Senate and travel overseas with Mr. Blum, and some Democrats saw it as a potential way for her to make a graceful exit from Congress at age 87. Members of her own Democratic caucus had been grumbling that her mental acuity had diminished and that she had become too accommodating to Republicans.Mr. Blum became Ms. Feinstein’s companion between the death of her second husband, Bertram Feinstein, in 1978, and her victory in a race for mayor of San Francisco in 1979 after two unsuccessful attempts. They married in 1980. In 1983, Mr. Blum helped Ms. Feinstein raise $400,000 to beat back a recall attempt.He remained her closest confidant and most reliable fund-raiser through her mayoralty, which ended in 1988. The couple then poured about $3 million of their own money into the 1990 California governor’s race, which Ms. Feinstein lost to Pete Wilson, a Republican. But, again with Mr. Blum’s financial help, she won election to the Senate in 1992.Ms. Feinstein is now the fifth-longest-serving United States senator, and if she stays in office for just under a year longer she will surpass Barbara A. Mikulski as the longest-tenured female senator in American history.Mr. Blum ran his own investment firm, Blum Capital Partners, and during his career as an investment banker and financial manager his clients included large institutions like Bank of America.With deep pockets, he became a major figure in Democratic politics, counting Jimmy Carter as a jogging partner and Mr. Biden as one of many beneficiaries of his largess. His net worth was estimated to exceed $1 billion.He also held nonprofit positions; at one point he was chairman of the University of California Board of Regents.With the Dalai Lama among his influential friends, Mr. Blum developed an interest in South Asia as the home of Buddhist philosophy, as a recipient of philanthropy and as a place for adventure: He once led an expedition up part of Mount Everest.In a statement of condolence, Mr. Biden called Mr. Blum “a successful businessman and proud son of California who dedicated much of his public life to fighting poverty around the globe” through the establishment of the American Himalayan Foundation, a nonprofit group that builds schools and hospitals in Tibet, and the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley, which focuses on innovative solutions to global poverty.Richard Charles Blum was born on July 31, 1935, in San Francisco to Louise Hirsch and Herbert Blum, a seller of robes and raincoats who died during Richard’s boyhood. Richard graduated from Berkeley with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration.He joined Sutro & Company, a San Francisco brokerage firm, at 23 and became a partner before he turned 30, by which time he was already a millionaire.In addition to Ms. Feinstein, Mr. Blum is survived by a brother, Robert; his daughters, Annette, Heidi and Eileen; his stepdaughter, Katherine; and seven grandchildren.During Ms. Feinstein’s 1990 race to be California’s governor, Mr. Blum described to The New York Times what he called “the triathlon of politics.”“No. 1,” he said, “we get to see on a regular basis everything she’s ever done and I’ve ever done distorted in the newspapers. No. 2, we get to share 17 years of our tax returns on an intimate basis with 30 million people. And three, I get to pay to watch all this happen.”Shawn Hubler More