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      This Case Should Never Have Made It to the Supreme Court

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      “The most important case for American democracy” in the nation’s history — that’s how the former appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig described Moore v. Harper, an extraordinary lawsuit that the Supreme Court considered in oral arguments Wednesday morning. Judge Luttig, a conservative and a widely respected legal thinker, is not one for overstatement. Yet most Americans aren’t paying attention to the case because it involves some confusing terminology and an arcane legal theory. It is essential that people understand just how dangerous this case is to the fundamental structure of American government, and that enough justices see the legal fallacies and protect our democracy.First, the back story on the case: In 2021, North Carolina lawmakers redrew their congressional maps. The state had 13 districts at the time, and its voters were more or less evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. But the Republicans who are in control of North Carolina’s legislature didn’t want fair maps; they wanted power. In one of the most egregious gerrymanders in the nation, they drew 10 seats intended to favor themselves.The North Carolina courts were not amused. A panel of three trial judges found that the 2021 maps were “intentionally and carefully designed to maximize Republican advantage” — so much so that Republicans could win legislative majorities even when Democrats won more votes statewide. The State Supreme Court struck down the maps, finding they violated the North Carolina Constitution’s guarantees of free elections, free speech, free assembly and equal protection.That should have been the end of it: A state court applying the state Constitution to strike down a state law. But North Carolina’s Republican lawmakers appealed, arguing that the U.S. Constitution does not give state courts authority to rule on their congressional maps — even though the legislature had passed a law authorizing the courts to review redistricting plans like these. Instead, the lawmakers are relying on an untested theory that asserts that state legislatures enjoy nearly unlimited power to set and change rules for federal elections.In 2000 the chief justice at the time, William H. Rehnquist, proposed the idea in his concurring opinion on Bush v. Gore, and the independent state legislature theory has been floating around the fringes of right-wing legal circles ever since.To be clear, this is a political power grab in the guise of a legal theory. Republicans are trying to see if they can turn state legislatures — 30 of which are controlled by Republicans — into omnipotent, unaccountable election bosses with the help of the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. The theory has no basis in law, history or precedent. The idea that state lawmakers exist free of any constraints imposed by their constitution and state courts makes a mockery of the separation of powers, which is foundational to the American system of government. By the North Carolina lawmakers’ logic, they possess infinite power to gerrymander districts and otherwise control federal elections. It is a Constitution-free zone where no one else in the state — not the governor, not the courts, not the voters through ballot initiatives — has any say.On Wednesday morning, Justice Elena Kagan rejected the theory out of hand, saying it “gets rid of the normal checks and balances on the way big governmental decisions are made in this country. And you might think that it gets rid of all those checks and balances at exactly the time when they are needed most.”In practice, the theory that the petitioners in the case are seeking to use would turn hundreds of state constitutional provisions into dead letters in federal elections. For instance, 48 states affirmatively guarantee a right to vote in their constitutions. (The federal Constitution still does not.) Most state constitutions guarantee free, fair, equal or open elections. Even the secret ballot — so fundamental to American democracy — is a creature of state constitutions. If the justices accept the most aggressive version of the independent state legislature theory that the petitioners want them to and even if they accept a weaker version, provisions like these could become invalid overnight, because the theory holds that state constitutions have no authority to impose any regulations on federal elections. (The Constitution and federal law remain supreme, so challenges to state legislative actions could still be brought in federal courts.)Some of the justices insist that they don’t — they can’t — pay attention to the real-world outcomes of their rulings. They’re just interpreting law. By that logic, this case should be rejected on its merits.First, the theory is based on bad legal interpretation. The Constitution uses the word “legislature” in describing who has the power to regulate federal elections. Because of this word, the theory’s supporters claim, state legislatures have nearly unlimited power in that realm. But as Judge Luttig has noted, the theory has “literally no support” in the Constitution. To the contrary, the framers who wrote the Constitution were concerned that state legislatures had too much power, not too little. The text they wrote makes many references to the powers of those legislatures and of Congress, but it never says or implies that they are immune to review by the judicial branch.Second, the theory is based on bad history. The best evidence its supporters offer is a two-century-old document that has long been known to be fraudulent. Written in 1818 by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, a founding father, it is purported to be a replica of the plan for government that he introduced three decades earlier at the Constitutional Convention. But what he submitted in 1818 was not the real deal. James Madison suspected this immediately, as have virtually all historians to examine it in the years since.When the theory’s supporters sought to claim that the practices of early state legislatures proved that their side should win, Justice Sonia Sotomayor responded, “Yes. If you rewrite history, it’s very easy to do.”Third, if the Supreme Court accepts this theory, it will create a logistical nightmare in states across the country. That’s because the theory applies only to federal elections, not state elections, in which state courts unquestionably have a role to play. As a result, there would be two sets of rules operating at the same time, one for federal elections and one for state elections. Chaos and confusion would reign.Most important, the Supreme Court has already implicitly rejected the theory many times over. In precedents stretching back decades, the court has made clear that state courts have the power to set limits on what lawmakers can do when it comes to federal elections. As recently as 2019, the court rejected a plea for it to stop the extreme partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina and other states. In doing so, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that this is exactly the role that state courts should play. “Provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply,” he wrote.At Wednesday’s argument, Justice Samuel Alito appeared to reject that premise. He accused elected state court judges, like those in North Carolina, of being political actors themselves. “There’s been a lot of talk about the impact of this decision on democracy,” said Justice Alito, who has given openly partisan speeches to outside groups and voted consistently in alignment with Republican policy priorities. “Do you think that it furthers democracy to transfer the political controversy about districting from the legislature to elected supreme courts where the candidates are permitted by state law to campaign on the issue of districting?”Another way to appreciate the absurdity of the theory is to consider who has come out for and against it. On one side, a large and bipartisan group of judges, government officials, former lawmakers, leading historians and constitutional scholars from across the political spectrum have rejected it. These include a co-founder of the right-wing legal group the Federalist Society, the chief justices of all 50 states, multiple Republican former governors and secretaries of state and civil rights organizations.On the other side, you will find a far smaller and less bipartisan cast of characters — among them, the Republican National Committee, a group of Republican state attorneys general and John Eastman, a former law professor last seen helping Donald Trump plan an illegal and unconstitutional coup to stay in office (an act that has exposed Mr. Eastman to a real risk of criminal prosecution).That so many justices would take the theory seriously is bad enough. Three of them — Justices Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas — appear to favor the independent state legislature theory, as they suggested in an opinion in an earlier stage of the case. Justice Brett Kavanaugh has also indicated his openness to it. It’s worse when the public trust in and approval of the court have fallen to historic lows, thanks largely to aggressively partisan recent opinions, as this board has argued.There’s an old saying that only close cases make it to the Supreme Court. If they weren’t close, they would have been resolved in the lower courts. But Moore v. Harper isn’t a remotely close case. A ruling for the North Carolina lawmakers would flood the federal courts with election litigation that normally plays out in the states, upending the balance of federalism that defines American government. That’s not a conservative result; it’s a dangerously radical one.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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      Losing Another Runoff, Georgia Republicans Weigh an Election Shake-Up

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      Some in the party said that additional changes to election rules were likely, after Senator Raphael Warnock’s victory put a new spotlight on a major 2021 voting law passed by the G.O.P.As Georgia Democrats won their third Senate runoff election in two years, the party proved it had crafted an effective strategy for triumphing in a decades-old system created to sustain segregationist power and for overcoming an array of efforts to making voting more difficult. Republicans, meanwhile, were quietly cursing the runoff system, or at least their strategy for winning under a state law they wrote after losing the last election.The various post-mortems over how Georgia’s runoff rules shaped the state’s Senate outcome on Tuesday put a spotlight on a major voting law passed by the Republican-led General Assembly last year. Some Republicans acknowledged that their efforts to limit in-person early voting days might have backfired, while others encouraged lawmakers to consider additional restrictions next year.With Georgia poised to remain a critical political battleground and with Republicans holding gerrymandered majorities in both chambers of its state legislature, some in the party said that additional election law changes were likely.Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who oversees the state’s voting procedures, said in an interview on Wednesday that there would be a debate next year over potential adjustments to Georgia’s runoff laws and procedures after Senator Raphael Warnock’s victory.Mr. Raffensperger said he would present three proposals to lawmakers. They include forcing large counties to open more early-voting locations to reduce hourslong lines like the ones that formed at many Metro Atlanta sites last week; lowering the threshold candidates must achieve to avoid a runoff to 45 percent from 50 percent; and instituting a ranked-choice instant-runoff system that would not require voters to come back to the polls again after the general election.Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said there would be a debate next year over potential changes to Georgia’s runoff laws and procedures. Audra Melton for The New York Times“The elected legislators need to have information so they can look at all the different options that they have and really see what they’re comfortable with,” Mr. Raffensperger said.Understand the Georgia Senate RunoffNew Battlegrounds: Senator Raphael Warnock’s win shows how Georgia and Arizona are poised to be the next kingmakers of presidential politics, Lisa Lerer writes.A Rising Democratic Star: Mr. Warnock, a son of Savannah public housing who rose to become Georgia’s first Black senator, is a pastor and politician who sees voting as a form of prayer.Trump’s Bad Day: The loss by Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate, capped one of the worst days for former President Donald J. Trump since he announced his 2024 bid.Republicans are not the only ones hoping to end Georgia’s requirement that a runoff take place if no candidate in a general election wins at least half of the vote. Democrats have long viewed the practice — a vestige of racist 1960s efforts to keep Black candidates or candidates backed by Black voters from taking office — as an additional hurdle for working-class people of color.Park Cannon, a Democratic state representative from Atlanta who was arrested last year after knocking on the closed door behind which Gov. Brian Kemp signed the state’s voting law, said that last Friday, she had driven for 30 minutes and then waited an hour to vote early in person.Runoffs, Ms. Cannon said, “are not to the benefit of working families.” She added, “It’s very difficult to, within four weeks of taking time off to vote, have to do that again.”Since the law was passed in 2021, Georgia Democrats have criticized the new barriers to voting that it set in place. During the runoff, Mr. Warnock, a Democrat, spared no opportunity to highlight the law and characterize it as the latest in a decades-long push to minimize the influence of Black voters and anyone who opposed Republican control.His stump speech featured a regular refrain reminding supporters that Georgia Republicans had sought to prohibit counties from opening for in-person early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, after the state’s Republican attorney general and Mr. Raffensperger concluded that doing so was in violation of state law. Mr. Warnock and Democrats sued, and a state judge agreed to allow for the Saturday voting.“People showed up in record numbers within the narrow confines of the time given to them by a state legislature that saw our electoral strength the last time and went after it with surgical precision,” Mr. Warnock said in his victory speech on Tuesday night in Atlanta. “The fact that voters worked so hard to overcome the hardship put in front of them does not eliminate the fact that hardship was put there in the first place.”Because of the new voting law, Tuesday’s runoff was held four weeks after the general election, rather than the nine-week runoff period under which Georgia’s high-profile Senate races in early 2021 unfolded. The nine-week runoff period that year had been ordered by a federal judge; runoff contests for state elections have always operated on a four-week timeline.Tuesday’s contest also included fewer days to vote and new restrictions on absentee ballots — and it ended with virtually the same result.The 3.5 million votes cast in Tuesday’s runoff amounted to 90 percent of the general-election turnout in the Senate race on Nov. 8. In 2021, when Mr. Warnock first won his seat, runoff turnout was 91 percent of the general-election turnout, which was higher because 2020 was a presidential year. The outpouring of voters in both years was orders of magnitude higher than in any prior Georgia runoff.A get-out-the-vote event on Tuesday near a polling site in Atlanta.Nicole Buchanan for The New York TimesThe booming turnout this year has led Georgia Republicans to insist that their voting law was not suppressive.“We had what I think was a nearly flawless execution of two huge elections in terms of turnout and in terms of accuracy and integrity,” said Butch Miller, a Republican leader in the Georgia State Senate who helped write the voting law and is leaving the chamber after losing the primary for lieutenant governor.Mr. Miller said he “didn’t care for” the way that some counties, including large Democratic-leaning ones in the Atlanta area, had opened for extra early voting days, a sentiment echoed by other Georgia Republicans after Mr. Warnock’s victory.The new law evidently had an effect on how Georgians voted. In the January 2021 runoffs, 24 percent of the vote came via absentee ballots that had been mailed to voters. On Tuesday, just 5 percent of the vote came through the mail, a result of restrictions on who could receive an absentee ballot and the shortening of the runoff period, which made it more difficult to request and receive a ballot within the allotted time period.The 2021 law also cut the amount of in-person early voting days to a minimum of five, but allowed Georgia’s counties to add more days before the state’s mandated early-voting week. The Warnock campaign pressed the state’s Democratic counties to open for early voting on the weekend after Thanksgiving, giving voters who were more likely to vote for the senator extra days to do so.But then Mr. Raffensperger sought to enforce a state law that forbids in-person early voting on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, leading to Mr. Warnock’s successful lawsuit.Jason Shepherd, a former chairman of the Cobb County Republican Party, said the push to stop Saturday voting “wasn’t worth the fight” and served to energize Democratic voters.“You can be completely right and it can send the wrong message, because it plays into the Democrats’ narrative about voter suppression,” Mr. Shepherd said on Wednesday.In the end, 28 of Georgia’s 159 counties opened for extra in-person early voting days. Of those, 17 ended up backing Mr. Warnock and 11 went for his Republican challenger, the former football star Herschel Walker.Compared with weekdays, when the entire state was open for in-person early voting, relatively few votes were cast on the extra voting days. Just over 167,000 votes in all were cast combined on the Saturday and Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, along with the Tuesday and Wednesday before the holiday, when just two counties opened for voting. By contrast, 285,000 to 352,000 votes were cast statewide on each day of weekday early voting.But voters who cast ballots during those extra in-person early voting days were likely to tilt heavily toward Mr. Warnock.The largest 14 counties to back Mr. Warnock — including seven in metropolitan Atlanta — all opened for extra early voting days. Just two of the 11 largest counties to back Mr. Walker opened for extra in-person early voting days.Maya King More

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      How Can Democrats Use Their Final Weeks in Power?

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      This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Wednesdays.The Democratic Party’s success in securing a 51st Senate seat in the Georgia runoff Tuesday is certainly consequential, but it did nothing to avert an imminent shift in the national political environment: On Jan. 3, Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives, and it will be two years at least — if not much longer, given historical trends — before Democrats again have the power to enact major legislation.This period between an election and the transition of power is known as a lame-duck session, and in recent years, it’s often when Congress has been most productive. How will Democrats make use of this one? Here are just some of the most pressing legislative priorities on the party’s agenda that could be accomplished without fear of a Republican filibuster in the Senate, or with the possibility of enough Republican votes to block such a move.Keeping the government — and the global financial system — runningCongress is staring down a Dec. 16 deadline to pass a budget for the 2023 fiscal year. If it doesn’t, the government could be forced to shut down, as it did in 2013 and twice in 2018, depriving hundreds of thousands of government workers of pay and disrupting public services.But an even more urgent threat, German Lopez of The Times recently wrote, is that Republicans will refuse to raise the limit on how much money the government can borrow, which Congress frequently must do to fund the budget it has approved. If the government hits the debt ceiling, which could happen early next year, it could eventually lose the ability to make debt payments and be forced, for the first time, to default, with potentially calamitous effects for the global economy.Once a pro forma administrative task, raising the debt ceiling became a matter of high-stakes brinkmanship during the Obama administration, as Republicans repeatedly leveraged the threat of default to push for spending cuts and regulatory rollbacks. In October, Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader hoping to become speaker, suggested that his party would deploy this strategy again to force “structural changes” to programs like Social Security and Medicare.Democrats have two options to avert financial crisis, Peter Orszag, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office, explains: Win over enough Senate Republicans to form a filibuster-proof majority to raise the debt ceiling, or raise it unilaterally through the reconciliation process, which would require only 50 votes.“Any Democrats averse to taking such a painful vote now should consider how much leverage their party will lose once Republicans control the House — and how much higher the risk of default will be then,” he writes in The Washington Post.The trade-off, however, is that raising the debt ceiling with only Democratic votes would take much longer — about two weeks — than if Republicans were on board. “This might crowd out Democrats’ ability to pass almost any other legislative priority while they still control both chambers,” notes Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post.Preventing a repeat of Jan. 6Given concerns about the integrity of the 2024 presidential election, another major Democratic priority is modernizing the Electoral Count Act, a 1887 law governing the Electoral College counting procedure. The law’s ambiguous language became the legal basis for Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, culminating in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.Reforming the law to prevent such schemes has bipartisan support: Nearly 40 senators, including 16 Republicans, have signed on to a bill introduced in the Senate over the summer, and the House passed its own bill in September.“Both the Senate and House bills are far better than what we have right now, and either one would go a long way to ensuring that the electoral-count law cannot be used as a tool for subverting the election in 2024 or beyond,” the Times editorial board wrote last month. “Congress needs to pass the overhaul now, when it has willing majorities in both houses and well before anyone casts a ballot in 2024.”Reforming the immigration systemNearly two years after President Biden proposed the most comprehensive immigration reform since the Reagan administration, Democrats have made very little headway on the issue. But this week, there were signs of a potential breakthrough when a bipartisan pair of senators reportedly drafted a framework for legislation that would create a pathway to citizenship for two million DACA recipients and improve the asylum system. In exchange, it also contains provisions for expediting the deportation of migrants who fail to qualify for asylum and continuing the use of Title 42, a Trump-era emergency public health order that restricts the right to claim asylum.Some immigration advocates have called on congressional Democrats to seize the opportunity. “House Republicans are not likely to allow any measures to improve immigration matters to reach a vote, preferring to have the political issue for the next elections rather than solutions,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice. “This year and the remaining weeks in this Congress present the best opportunity to enact legislation.”But obstacles to a bipartisan immigration deal are formidable. Republican senators “might decide that the G.O.P. won’t get any credit even if the effort succeeds — that credit might go to President Biden — and that it’s better to retain the permanent ‘border crisis’ as an issue,” writes Greg Sargeant of The Washington Post. On the Democratic side, he adds, “the continuation of Title 42, which has been a human rights disaster, and the beefed up removal process might make it a nonstarter among progressives in both chambers.”De-escalating the war on drugsAs overdoses soar and public opinion turns against the war on drugs, proponents of drug law reform say there may be an opening for Congress to save lives by passing bipartisan measures like the Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment Act, which would increase access to medication used to treat opioid addiction, and the Medicaid Re-Entry Act, which would reduce disruptions in medical care for people who have just been released from jail or prison.Another bill called the EQUAL Act, which would end the federal sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenses, already has more than 10 Republican co-sponsors, “so it can withstand a filibuster and seems ripe for some action this lame-duck session,” Udi Ofer, a professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, said last month.Staying ahead of the coronavirusThe Biden administration last month asked Congress for an additional $9 billion to fund its response to the coronavirus pandemic, which is still killing more than 280 Americans per day and remains a leading cause of death in the United States.Some of the $9 billion would go toward researching long Covid and ensuring continued access to vaccines and treatments, which have fallen out of reach for more and more uninsured Americans as federal money has dried up.About $5 billion would go toward creating a program in the mold of Operation Warp Speed, to develop next-generation therapeutics and vaccines, like nasal sprays that could block more infections and universal, variant-proof coronavirus shots.Many scientists believe that nasal vaccines could be crucial to reducing Covid’s disease burden, but the United States has lagged other countries in developing one because of underinvestment. Congressional Republicans have rebuffed requests for more pandemic funding, having accused the administration of mishandling previous allocations. They have also questioned the necessity of more aid, pointing to Biden’s declaration in September that “the pandemic is over.”Democrats now find themselves in the awkward position of trying to make the case for more funding without admitting error: “While COVID-19 is no longer the disruptive force it was when the president took office,” the White House wrote in a November letter to Congress, “we face the emergence of new subvariants in the United States and around the world that have the potential to cause a surge of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, particularly as we head into the winter months.”Protecting marriage equalityOne major legislative effort that is likely to advance is the Respect for Marriage Act, which would enshrine federal protections for same-sex and interracial marriage. The issue took on newfound importance this summer after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court “should reconsider” the 2015 precedent establishing the right of gay couples to marry.Some conservatives have dismissed the bill as a response to an imaginary threat and one that endangers religious liberties; many liberals argue the bill doesn’t go far enough, since it wouldn’t prevent states from refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Nonetheless, the measure attracted enough Republican support to pass in the Senate last week and is expected to win final approval in the House.To some, the success of a bill that was considered just a few months ago to be dead on arrival suggests there might be opportunities for more congressional breakthroughs, albeit within a very limited window. “As with the same-sex marriage bill, bipartisan legislation revising the 19th century Electoral Count Act wasn’t politically possible before the midterm elections and wouldn’t be once Trumpian Republicans are in charge of the House schedule in four weeks,” writes Jackie Calmes, a columnist for The Los Angeles Times. “Enjoy these few weeks of what passes for bipartisanship as Congress waddles to its end. You won’t be seeing much of that over the next two years.”Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.READ MORE“Can Republicans and Democrats Find a Way Forward on Immigration?” [The New York Times]“What should Democrats do in the lame-duck Congress?” [The Economist]“Same-Sex Marriage Bill Passes Senate After Bipartisan Breakthrough” [The New York Times]“Here’s how Congress can make the lame-duck session a mighty one”[The Washington Post] More

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      Warnock’s Narrow Victory Over Walker in Georgia

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      More from our inbox:Trump’s Very Bad DayThe Crypto IllusionEncourage BreastfeedingFood Buying That Reflects Our Values Nicole Craine for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Warnock Victory Hands Democrats 51st Seat in Senate” (front page, Dec. 7):Although I am relieved that Senator Raphael Warnock prevailed in the Georgia runoff, I am absolutely disgusted that this election was so close.We have lost our way as a country when we do not see that political leadership takes skill; knowledge of the law, the Constitution and history; the ability to negotiate and cooperate; and a worldview that is larger than your own.I would not be at all qualified to play professional football, and it was clear from the start that Herschel Walker did not have the knowledge or skill to be a U.S. senator.Dawn MenkenPortland, Ore.The writer is the author of “Facilitating a More Perfect Union: A Guide for Politicians and Leaders.”To the Editor:I have new respect for Herschel Walker: He gave a concession speech. He declared that he lost. He called on his supporters to respect their elected officials and to believe in America. He said he had no excuses for his loss because he put up a good fight. This probably reflects both who he is and his football heritage — you win but also lose games fair and square.He may have helped us back to the old pre-Trump norms. We may disagree with his views and abhor his scandals, but the most important thing is that he believes in democracy. Let’s hope Donald Trump watched that concession speech.When Mr. Walker said, “I want you to believe in America and continue to believe in the Constitution and believe in our elected officials most of all,” it could be the biggest takeaway of the election.James AdlerCambridge, Mass.To the Editor:Raphael Warnock was extremely lucky to win the Senate race in Georgia — lucky because he faced an opponent plagued by ignorance, myriad character flaws and an endorsement by Donald Trump. Almost certainly, a moderate Republican, Black or white, could have defeated Mr. Warnock, perhaps by a margin as large as the seven-plus percentage points that Brian Kemp scored over Stacey Abrams for the Georgia governorship just four weeks earlier.I am very happy about Mr. Warnock’s win, but it should not be interpreted as signaling a major shift in the political landscape of Georgia.Peter S. AllenProvidence, R.I.To the Editor:Every time the Republicans lose an election — most recently Tuesday in Georgia — the Times coverage predicts that the party will engage in “soul-searching,” suggesting that the G.O.P. has a desire to change course. Yet, again and again, the party persists in its pandering to far-right, anti-democratic forces of white nationalism and heteropatriarchy.The G.O.P. has made its soul abundantly clear. Perhaps some Republican voters have done their own soul-searching and decided to reject what their party has become.Pamela J. GriffithBrooklynTo the Editor:As a liberal Democrat I am very pleased with the results of the Georgia runoff and most of the rest of the 2022 U.S. Senate results in competitive races. How do we make sure that Donald Trump continues to influence the choice of Republican candidates for Senate in 2024?Michael G. RaitenBoynton Beach, Fla.Trump’s Very Bad Day Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Tuesday was a Trumpian negative hat trick: a defeat in the Senate runoff in Georgia, the conviction of the Trump Organization on tax fraud and other crimes, and a report of grand jury subpoenas from the special counsel to local officials in Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin.Of course the Republican Party has neglected to take any prior offramps to dump Donald Trump, most notably Jan. 6, so unfortunately the latest Trump failures will probably go by the wayside too. And the G.O.P. of yore — the party of Lincoln, T.R. and Ike — will continue to be the clown car it has become.Bill MutterperlBeverly Hills, Calif.The Crypto IllusionFederal authorities are trying to determine whether criminal charges should be filed against the founder of the crypto firm FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, and others over the company’s collapse.Winnie Au for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “‘It Just Angers Me.’ Crypto Crisis Drains Small Investors’ Savings” (front page, Dec. 6):Is it too early, or far too late, to suggest that “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” in relation to the FTX and BlockFi difficulties? Should this concern be extended to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general?There was a time when people earned the coins in their wallets from the sweat on their brow rather than from a computer program most people can’t understand that creates imaginary coins to be stored in wallets that seem easy to rob or lose. It is, however, sad to read of people who have lost so much in such a short time.As a teacher, I wasn’t that well paid, and so I saved as much as I could to buy a house and set myself up for retirement by sensible, boring approaches. But the gains to be made from Bitcoin are in its questionable uses or in realizing the increase in its value before it drops. For me it seems to have no actual value or use, and I doubt that I am the only one who thinks that.It’s time for me to forget the world of imaginary computer profits and go back to a boring life on my unicorn farm.Dennis FitzgeraldMelbourne, AustraliaEncourage Breastfeeding Vanessa Leroy for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “What It Really Takes to Breastfeed a Baby” (news article, Dec. 6):As a pediatrician who spends many hours with new mothers and their babies discussing the challenges and difficulties that come with breastfeeding, I felt that this article was not as positive as it should have been. It focused on following mothers who were having a hard time keeping up their breastfeeding.These days, any literature or news related to breastfeeding should only be encouraging new mothers to breastfeed, not scaring them away from doing it and making it sound so hard while working and raising other children.In my practice, I share my own personal experiences of breastfeeding my three children, each for a year, while working in a busy pediatrics office. My stories are useful and effective in making the breastfeeding experience achievable to the new moms I meet.We need to reverse the steady decline of breastfeeding mothers in this country.Naomi JackmanPort Washington, N.Y.Food Buying That Reflects Our Values Pavel PopovTo the Editor:Re “Help Black Farmers This Holiday Season,” by Tressie McMillan Cottom (column, Nov. 30):New York State’s food procurement laws are an extension of the disenfranchisement of Black farmers. Provisions require that municipalities contract with farmers who sell their produce at the “lowest” cost. This often comes at the expense of small, hyperlocal farmers and bars them from entering negotiations for public contracts — meaning that opportunities to support historically marginalized food producers are currently limited in New York.The Good Food New York bill would democratize local food purchasing decisions by allowing municipalities to galvanize around racial equity, animal welfare, environmental sustainability, nutrition, local economies and workers’ rights — and contract with producers that uphold these values.It is more critical than ever to rectify the wrongs of this country’s past and prepare for a future where the strength of our food systems and supply chains will be tested by the consequences of climate change. New York State legislators, we are counting on you to make the right decision for our food futures.Ribka GetachewTaylor PateNew YorkThe writers are, respectively, director and campaign manager of the NY Good Food Purchasing Program Campaign for Community Food Advocates. More

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      Supreme Court Hears Case That Could Transform Federal Elections

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      The justices are considering whether to adopt the “independent state legislature theory,” which would give state lawmakers nearly unchecked power over federal elections.WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on Wednesday about whether to adopt a legal theory that would radically reshape how federal elections are conducted. The theory would give state legislatures enormous and largely unchecked power to set all sorts of election rules, notably by drawing congressional maps warped by partisan gerrymandering.The Supreme Court has never endorsed the “independent state legislature” theory, but four of its conservative members have issued opinions that seemed to take it very seriously.The theory is based on a reading of the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which says: “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”Proponents of the strongest form of the theory say this means that no other organ of state government can alter a legislature’s actions on federal elections. They say that state supreme courts cannot require state laws to conform to state constitutions, that governors may not use their veto power to reject bills about federal elections, that election administrators may not issue regulations adjusting legislative enactments to take account of, say, a pandemic and that voters may not create independent redistricting commissions to address gerrymandering.Understand the U.S. Supreme Court’s New TermCard 1 of 6A race to the right. More

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      Warnock’s Victory Forges Democrats’ Path Through the New Battlegrounds

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      Forget about Florida and Ohio: Georgia and Arizona are poised to be the next kingmakers of presidential politics.Follow our latest updates on the Georgia Senate runoff.For decades, Florida and Ohio reigned supreme over presidential politics. The two states relished their role crowning presidents and spawning political clichés. Industrial Cleveland faced off against white-collar Cincinnati, the Midwestern snowbirds of the Villages against the Puerto Rican diaspora of the Orlando suburbs.But the Georgia runoff, the final note of the 2022 midterm elections, may have said goodbye to all that. The Marietta moms are in charge now.Senator Raphael Warnock’s win over Herschel Walker — his fifth victory in just over two years — proved that the Democratic surge in the Peach State two years ago was no Trump-era fluke, no one-off rebuke of an unpopular president. Georgia, with its storied civil rights history, booming Atlanta suburbs like Marietta and exploding ethnic diversity, is now officially contested ground, joining a narrow set of states that will select the next president.Mr. Warnock’s race was the final marker for a 2024 presidential road map that political strategists, officials and politicians in both parties say will run largely through six states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.The shrunken, shifted battlefield reflects a diversifying country remade by the polarizing politics of the Trump era. As white, working-class voters defected from Democrats, persuaded by Donald J. Trump’s populist cultural appeals and anti-elitist rhetoric, demographic changes opened up new presidential battlegrounds in the West and South.That is not good for Mr. Trump, who lost all six of those states to President Biden two years ago, as he begins to plot his third presidential bid. Other Republicans have found more success pulling together winning coalitions in states defined by their growth, new transplants, strong economies and a young and diverse population. But if the party wants to reclaim the White House in 2024, Republicans will have to improve their performance across the new terrain.“You’re going to have your soccer moms and Peloton dads. Those college-educated voters, specifically in the suburbs, are ones that Republicans have to learn how to win,” said Kristin Davison, a Republican strategist who worked on Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s win in Virginia, a once-red state that, until Mr. Youngkin’s victory, had turned a more suburban shade of blue. “It’s these growing, diverse communities combined with the college-educated voters.”“I secured my vote!” stickers at a polling place in Georgia.Nicole Buchanan for The New York TimesVoters at Morningside Presbyterian Church in Fulton County on Tuesday morning.Nicole Buchanan for The New York TimesIn most of the six states, midterm elections brought out deep shades of purple. In Arizona, Democrats won the governor’s mansion for the first time since 2006, but a race for attorney general remains too close to call. In Nevada, the party’s candidate won re-election to the Senate by less than one percentage point, while Republicans won the governor’s office. The reverse happened in Wisconsin.Mr. Warnock narrowly defeated Mr. Walker on Tuesday. But Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, handily toppled Stacey Abrams, a Democratic star, in his re-election bid last month.Only Pennsylvania and Michigan had clean Democratic sweeps in statewide offices.Republicans, meanwhile, swept Florida, with Gov. Ron DeSantis winning re-election in the state by easily the largest margin by a Republican candidate for governor in modern history. In Ohio, Representative Tim Ryan, widely considered to be one the Democratic Party’s strongest candidates, lost his bid for Senate by six percentage points.That new map isn’t entirely new, of course. Since 2008, Democrats have hoped that demographic changes and millions of dollars could help put the growing pockets of the South and West in play, allowing the party to stop chasing the votes of white, working-class voters across Ohio and Iowa.But the party has made inroads before, only to backslide later. When Barack Obama carried North Carolina in 2008, pundits and party officials heralded the arrival of the Democratic revival in the New South. President Obama lost the state four years later and Mr. Biden was defeated there by a little more than a percentage point.Democrats argue their victories in Georgia will be more resilient. Mr. Warnock’s coalition looked very similar to Mr. Biden’s — an alliance of voters of color, younger voters and college-educated suburbanites.For Republicans, the winning formula requires maintaining their sizable advantage among rural voters and working-class, white voters, without fully embracing the far-right stances and combative politics of Mr. Trump that could hurt their standing with more moderate swing voters. Mr. Kemp followed that path to an eight-percentage-point victory.But Mr. Walker was in no position to expand his voting base. He was recruited to run by Mr. Trump, despite allegations of domestic abuse, no political experience and few clear policy positions, and spent much of his campaign focused on his party’s most reliable voters.While votes were still being counted late Tuesday, Mr. Warnock appeared to improve on Mr. Biden’s margins in the suburban counties around Atlanta, including Gwinnett, Newton and Cobb County, home to Marietta.Herschel Walker and his team after a campaign stop in Dawsonville, Ga.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesGreeting supporters at a Dawsonville restaurant.Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesDemocrats recognized the rising influence of the Sun Belt in a high-profile way last week, when the Democratic National Committee advanced a plan to replace Iowa, a former battleground state that has grown more Republican recently, with South Carolina and add Nevada, Georgia and Michigan to the early-state calendar.“The Sun Belt delivered the Senate Democratic majority,” said Senator Jacky Rosen, a Democrat from Nevada who will face her first re-election campaign in 2024. “The party needs to invest in us and that’s what they’ve done by changing the calendar.”Already, investment in these new battlegrounds has been eye-popping. In Georgia, $1.4 billion has been spent by both parties on three Senate races and the one contest for governor since the beginning of 2020, according to a New York Times analysis.The flood of political activity has surprised even some of those who have long predicted that their states would grow more competitive.“We all thought Arizona would probably be a battleground state at some point like a decade or so down the road,” said Mike Noble, the chief of research with the polling firm OH Predictive Insights, which is based in Phoenix. “It’s mind-blowing that it came so quickly to be quite honest.”Political operatives in Ohio and Florida insist that their states could remain competitive if Democrats would invest in organizers and ads. But for presidential campaigns, the goal isn’t to flip states but to identify the easiest route to 270 electoral votes.David Pepper, a former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, acknowledged that the changed politics had created a national political dynamic that’s bad for Ohio but better for his party. “The fact that Ohio is less essential than it used to be is a good thing because it means there are other states that are now winnable that weren’t 10 years ago. Colorado and Virginia were Republican so you had to win Florida and Ohio,” he said, evoking the predecessor to the cable news interactive maps. “That’s why Tim Russert had them all over his white board.”Senator Raphael Warnock with the rapper Killer Mike at a campaign event on Monday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe Warnock campaign visited Georgia Tech on Monday.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesThe country wasn’t always so dependent on such a small group of deciders. In the 1980s, presidential candidates competed across an average of 29 states. That number fell to 19 during the 2000s, according to data compiled by FairVote, a nonpartisan advocacy group that works on election practices. In 2020, there were just eight states where the margin of victory for either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump was under 5 percent.The shrinking map leaves one clear loser: The bulk of American voters. About 50 million Americans live in the six states poised to get most of the attention, giving about 15 percent of the country’s nearly 332 million people an outsize role in determining the next president.For nearly 11 million Georgians, the political attention showered on their state during the midterm elections won’t be gone for long. More

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      Trump Is Unraveling Before Our Eyes, but Will It Matter?

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      In the weeks immediately surrounding the midterm elections, Donald Trump called for the “termination” of constitutional rule, openly embraced the conspiratorial QAnon movement, pledged support for the Jan. 6 rioters and hosted, over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, the white supremacist Nicholas Fuentes and Ye (once known as Kanye West), both of whom are prominent antisemites.Does every step Trump takes off the deep end make him a greater liability for the Republican Party, potentially leading to a second Biden term, the loss of the party’s precarious control of the House and an across-the-board weakening of Republican candidates up and down the ticket — from the U.S. Senate to local school boards?Will Trump’s wrecking ball bid for the presidency fracture his party? Will Trump’s extremism prompt the mainstream right — Mitch McConnell, Ron DeSantis, Glenn Youngkin, Nikki Haley and all the rest — to rise up in revolt? How are the worsening intraparty fissures likely to play out over the next two years?Most of the strategists and scholars to whom I posed these questions outlined scenarios in which a Trump candidacy is mainly helpful to the Democratic Party and its candidates. They often cited the hurdles confronting those seeking to nominate a more mainstream candidate.“The Republican Party faces a lose-lose proposition as long as Trump is politically active,” Martin Wattenberg, a political scientist at the University of California-Irvine, wrote by email in response to my inquiry.“If Trump succeeds in getting the nomination again, it would seem that his brand is so damaged among Independents and some Republicans that he will be unelectable,” Wattenberg continued. “And if Trump loses his nomination fight, it seems highly likely that he will charge that he is a victim of voter fraud and damage the legitimacy of the Republican nominee.”If that were not enough to satisfy Trump’s thirst for vengeance, Wattenberg suggested that “it is certainly conceivable that he would mount an independent candidacy and split some of the Republican vote. Continuing his fight as an independent would enable him to continue to raise big sums of money and attract the attention that he so intently craves. All in all, it could well be a disaster for the G.O.P.”While Trump has suffered setbacks on both the political and the legal front, no one I contacted suggested that he should be counted out in the 2024 nomination fight. Instead, just as was the case in 2016, the most favorable situation in 2024 for Trump would be a multicandidate field, as opposed to a single opponent who could consolidate those opposed to him.“It is hard to see President Trump getting more votes in 2024 than he did in the 2020 general election,” Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, said by email:Still, if he has 16 primary election opponents like he did in 2016, his name recognition and loyal base will give him real advantages in securing the nomination. He will get 30-40 percent of every vote, leaving the other 15 candidates to split the remaining 60-70 percent. Unless someone like DeSantis can clear the others out quickly, Trump will maintain an advantage.The split in the Republican Party, Lupia continued,has been brewing for several decades. The Tea Party is a focal point and a precursor to the current populist movement. The evolving split within the G.O.P. represents a divide between people who believe in government but want to run it according to conservative principles and an approach that increasingly questions the legitimacy of government itself.Lupia argued that “Despite that split, there is little or no chance that either faction will split off into a third party”:The rules of the American electoral system are stacked against third parties at nearly every turn. The fact that the U.S.A. elects nearly all members of Congress and state legislatures from single-member districts makes it difficult for third parties to win elections. To have viable third parties, you typically need legislators elected from multi-member districts (imagine that your Congressional district sent the top three vote getters to Congress instead of just one).While exploring various scenarios, Robert Erikson, a political scientist at Columbia, warned that there was a substantial chance that unanticipated and unpredictable developments would radically change the course of politics over the next two years and beyond:I think we should consider the likelihood of something very different. Suppose for instance it turns out that DeSantis cannot attract G.O.P. primary election voters and is just another bland Scott Walker. What then? The aftermath would be hard to imagine.Instead, Erikson wrote by email,We should steel ourselves for the possibility that the G.O.P. future turns out like nothing like we imagine today. The same is true regarding the Democrats’ presidential nominee if Biden does retire before 2024. That outcome might be something we could not imagine today. Trump critics have continually predicted that his latest outrage would be his downfall. Not even Jan. 6 caused a revolt within the G.O.P. G.O.P. leaders are too fearful of Trump’s baseBut, Erikson argued,If the fall comes, it could be swift and decisive. The template is the fate of Joe McCarthy. He seemed invincible, with the full support of elements of the American right. Then, following Joseph Welch’s condemnation in his “Have you no sense of decency?” speech, McCarthy was defeated, and swiftly. The circumstances of McCarthy’s downfall may seem hard to believe today. But this is what can happen to a bully when they do lose their power of intimidation.I asked Erikson and others how serious the current divisions within the Republican Party are.“The fissures in the Republican Party are larger than usual, but still comparable to those that regularly occur in American political parties,” he replied, but “compared to the realignment of the parties in the civil-rights era, the current conflict in the Republican Party is mild.”Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, sees some potential for destructive intraparty conflict:Republicans have a real dilemma, because they can’t win without the MAGA faction and are having a hard time winning with it. It comprises at least half the party so they have no choice but to try to keep it in the fold. I think they will succeed; opposition to Biden and the Democrats unites them for the time being at least.Would the defeat of Trump in the primaries by DeSantis, Youngkin or another candidate provoke a damaging schism in the general election?Jacobson replied by email:Depends on how Trump reacts if he is denied the nomination. If it comes about because of his legal difficulties or because he appears to be increasingly off the rails (e.g., demanding we ignore laws and the Constitution to put him back in the White House NOW), then the MAGA faction may look to a DeSantis (if not Youngkin) to take up their banner. If it is an all-out battle through the primaries, then whoever backs the losing side might be disinclined to show up in 2024.But, Jacobson cautioned, “Never underestimate the motivating force of negative partisanship; you really have to hate Democrats and want your party in power to show up and vote for someone with Herschel Walker’s character, but the vast majority of Georgia Republicans” did so.Trump, Jacobson wrote,is still very popular in the party at about 75 percent favorable in the recent Economist/YouGov and Quinnipiac polls. I think if the nomination took place now, he would certainly be the winner. But given his legal jeopardy and recent behavior that seems even more self-destructive than usual, on top of his damage to the Republican cause in 2022, I think Republican leaders and conservative pundits will be making every effort to keep him off the ticket to avoid losing again in 2024.A key question, according to Jacobson, is whether Trump’spursuit of self-preservation leads him to back away from the crazy tweets and wacko supporters or to embrace them even further. If the former, non-MAGA Republicans may treat him as they always have. If the latter, he will put them in a real bind. They’ve shown a capacity to put up with a lot over the years, but the combination of losing winnable elections and the constant humiliation of having to answer, or duck answering, for Trump’s latest folly may finally turn them openly against him. If he fights back as hard as he is capable of, the party will split.Robert Nickelsberg/Getty ImagesI posed the same question to all those I queried for today’s column:Is it possible to quantify the size of the extremist vote in the Republican primary electorate? By this, I mean not only active supporters of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, QAnon etc., but also the presumably larger constituency of those who sympathize with the aims of these groups — those with high levels of racial hostility that they want to see expressed in the political system, and those who are particularly fearful that they will be, or already have been, displaced from their position of status?Only Jacobson offered an answer:I took a quick look at some survey data I’ve been gathering over the past two years. One set of questions (27 surveys) ask if people approve of or support or have a favorable opinion of the people who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6. The results are quite consistent regardless of how the question is framed, with no trend over the two years: An average of 25 percent of Republicans have positive things to say about insurrectionists.Another question, asked 20 times by the Economist/YouGov poll in between August and December 2021: “How likely or unlikely do you think it is that Donald Trump will be reinstated as President before the end of 2021? An average of 22 percent of Republicans said it was very or somewhat likely that he would be reinstated. Finally, 20 percent of Republicans responding to an April 2022 Economist/YouGov poll said it was definitely true that “Top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.”My estimate is thus 20-25 percent of the Republican electorate can be considered extremists.The continued polarization of the two parties, especially at the extreme left and right, creates complex interactions within each party and between each party.Trump, according to David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, transformed the political environment in ways that have made it difficult, if not impossible, for other prominent Republicans to renounce some of the more extreme groups:The reason Republican politicians are often reluctant to explicitly separate themselves from the Proud Boys, QAnon, or other groups on the right-most fringe isn’t that those groups cast a lot of votes in either Republican primaries or general elections. It’s that denouncing those groups would make a candidate sound like a liberal, or at least like someone who buckles under pressure from liberals.Trump, Hopkins notes, “became a hero to Republican voters not just by adopting conservative policy positions, but also by refusing to make rhetorical concessions to Democrats, journalists, and other perennial conservative nemeses.”Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, contended in an email thatThe Republican Party is in the midst of an identity crisis. Traditional Republicans who push national defense, support for NATO and economic stability are fighting against insurgents who oppose these core tenets of the Republican brand. To these insurgents, isolationism and protectionism are the new mantra.In this struggle for the power to set the agenda in the House of Representatives, Westwood argued, the Republicans’ mediocre performance in the 2022 midterm elections empowered the party’s right wing:The great irony is that the defeat of the red wave gave more power to the extremes of the Republican Party. Had the red wave reshaped Congress, Republicans would have had a strong majority and could have governed with a more traditional policy platform, but because their margin of control is so narrow the new Speaker has no choice but to try to appease the Freedom Caucus and other extremes.Robert Y. Shapiro, a political scientist at Columbia, suggested that Republican Party leaders could make a concerted effort to block a Trump nomination, but it might take more fortitude than they have exhibited in the past. “This is one plausible resolution: first and foremost, if Republicans are thinking rationally and give highest priority to winning, they should see that Biden would defeat Trump in 2024 since he did so in 2020,” Shapiro wrote, “and since then Trump has been damaged by Jan. 6 and other investigations, and election deniers got trounced in 2022. DeSantis has been polling better than Trump against Biden and Youngkin probably would too.”One crucial but politically difficult step party leaders could take would be to unite behind — and endorse — a single candidate while pressuring the others to withdraw and, in Shapiro’s words, leave “only one such candidate opposing Trump in the primaries — otherwise multiple candidates would split the vote and Trump would be the party candidate, as happened in 2016.”Eric Groenendyk — a political scientist at the University of Memphis and a co-author of “Intraparty Polarization in American Politics” with Michael Sances and Kirill Zhirkov, political scientists at Temple University and the University of Virginia — wrote me by email:As party elites polarize, extreme partisans have reason to like it and identify more closely with their party, but not all partisans feel this way. Less extreme partisans have reason to like their party less. The part that is often overlooked is that these less extreme partisans also have reason to like the other party less, since that party is also moving away from them. If these less extreme partisans perceive both parties to be moving away from them at the same rate, they will still be closer to their own party, forcing the less extreme voters to adopt a ‘lesser of two evils’ justification for sticking with their party. And even if the other party is not moving away from the less extreme voters at the same rate, rehearsing negative thoughts about that party will also help them to rationalize sticking with their own party.This, in Groenendyk’s view,seems to be where many Republicans are stuck today. They are frustrated with the Trump wing of the party, but they can’t stomach voting for Democrats. The key point is that this shared hatred for Democrats is what’s holding their coalition together.Most of those I contacted downplayed the possibility that Trump would run as a third-party candidate if he were rejected as the Republican nominee, citing his aversion to losing and the logistical and financial difficulties of setting up a third party bid. Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, disagreed.I asked Hetherington: “If a DeSantis or Youngkin were to defeat Trump for the nomination, would either of them alienate Trump’s supporters, or could either one keep those voters in the tent?”Hetherington replied, “As long as Trump doesn’t run as a third-party candidate or actively tell his supporters to stay home, I suspect they’ll still vote Republican. What motivates them is their hatred of the Democrats.”But, Hetherington wrote, “There is every reason to think that Trump might actually do those things” — tell his loyalists to stay home on Election Day or run as a third-party candidate — “if he’s not the nominee”:If he has proven anything over the years, it is that Trump cares about Trump. In deciding to contest the 2020 vote, he asked “What do I have to lose?” He didn’t think at all about what the country had to lose. If he thinks he benefits from splitting the party — even if doing so just makes him feel better because he gets to settle an old score — then he’ll do it.Westwood noted that “it is not clear what power Trump will have to fight with if he doesn’t get the nomination in 2024, especially if he happens to be in a prison cell, which is increasingly likely.”In fact, however, conviction and imprisonment would not, under the Constitution, preclude a Trump candidacy and might in fact provide additional motivation, both for him and his most zealous supporters. Zijia Song, a reporter at Bloomberg, laid out the possible criminal charges Trump could face on Nov. 15 and then posed the question, “Could any of this disqualify him as a presidential candidate?”Her answer:Broadly speaking, no. Article II of the US Constitution, which lays out qualifications for the presidency, says nothing about criminal accusations or convictions. Trump opponents see two possible avenues to challenging his eligibility, however. One is a federal law barring the removal or destruction of government records: It says anyone convicted of the offense is disqualified from federal office. This could conceivably apply to Trump if — and this is a big if — he’s charged and convicted for taking classified documents from the White House. The other is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which says that nobody can hold a seat in Congress, or “any office, civil or military,” if they “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.”Which gets to the larger question that supersedes all the ins and outs of the maneuvering over the Republican presidential nomination and the future of the party.How, in a matter of less than a decade, could this once-proud country have evolved to the point at which there is a serious debate over choosing a presidential candidate who is a lifelong opportunist, a pathological and malignant narcissist, a sociopath, a serial liar, a philanderer, a tax cheat who does not pay his bills, a man who socializes with Holocaust deniers, who has pardoned his criminal allies, who encouraged a violent insurrection, who, behind a wall of bodyguards, is a coward, and who, without remorse, continuously undermines American democracy?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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      Raphael Warnock Makes Victory Speech After Georgia Election Runoff Win

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      ATLANTA — Senator Raphael Warnock, basking in cheers of “six more years” and the glory of a hard-fought re-election victory, evoked the civil rights movement late Tuesday night as he praised Georgians, whether they voted for him or not, for rising above the “folks trying to divide our country.”In a contest that pitted Mr. Warnock’s calls for the healing of racial inequities against Herschel Walker’s view that racism does not exist, the Democratic senator’s victory speech was unapologetic in its evocation of past wrongs in the Deep South, even as he held out the promise of reconciliation.“I am Georgia,” the senator said. “I am an example and an iteration of its history, of its peril and promise, of the brutality and the possibilities. But because this is America, because we always have a path to make our country greater against unspeakable odds, here we stand together.”He addressed those who point to the results of the race as proof that there was no voter suppression in Georgia. He said that just because people stood in blocks-long lines in the cold to cast their ballots did not mean voter suppression did not exist.“It simply means that you, the people, have decided that your voices will not be silenced,” he said.Responding to the impromptu comments of the audience around him, as if standing at the pulpit on a Sunday at his Atlanta church, his remarks often blended the personal with the political.“I want to say thank you to my mother, who is here tonight,” he told the crowd. “You’ll see her in a little while. But she grew up in the 1950s in Waycross, Ga., picking somebody else’s cotton and somebody else’s tobacco. But tonight she helped pick her youngest son to be a United States senator.” More