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      Labor’s Disenchantment in Ohio Puts Even Democratic Veterans at Risk

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      TOLEDO, Ohio — Representative Marcy Kaptur, the blue-collar daughter of this blue-collar city, is on the cusp of a milestone: If elected in November to her 21st term, she will become the longest-serving female member of Congress, breaking Barbara Mikulski’s combined House and Senate record.But for Ms. Kaptur, 75, a famously pro-union, old-school appropriator, the political ground has washed away beneath her feet. A new Republican-drawn district has robbed her of reliable Democratic votes on the outskirts of Cleveland. The national Democratic Party has saddled her with an agenda of phasing out internal combustion engines and the fossil fuels that power them that sits poorly in the region that put the first Jeeps into mass production.And Donald J. Trump rattled the underpinnings of Democratic appeal to labor, with his trade protectionism, thundering denunciations of China and professed belief in job creation at all cost.As Republican voters go to the polls on Tuesday to select Ms. Kaptur’s opponent for the fall election, some of her oldest, firmest allies in the union world are having their doubts — about Ms. Kaptur’s future, and more broadly, the future of the Democratic Party in the industrial heartland.“Listen, Marcy is a friend,” said Shaun Enright, executive secretary and business manager of the 17,000-strong Northwest Ohio Building Trades Council. “But I have to go to membership, whatever the election cycle is, and say, ‘This is the most important election of your life. You have to vote.’ And I’m tired of doing it. Members are tired of hearing it.”Ms. Kaptur’s longevity was supposed to underscore a truism that union families knew their friends and would not abandon them. Democratic senators like Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia have banked on it. Representative Tim Ryan is testing it with his run for an Ohio Senate seat that so far has revolved around blue-collar appeals.Mr. Trump would have won Ms. Kaptur’s newly drawn district by three percentage points, but in the parts that overlapped the old map, Ms. Kaptur outperformed Joseph R. Biden Jr. by six percentage points, giving some hope — at least numerically — that her name recognition, long record and general popularity could still deliver that 41st year in Congress.“My service has now afforded me the ability to make a difference,” she said in an interview, boasting of her seat on the powerful Appropriations Committee and her chairmanship of the subcommittee that doles out energy and water funding.Ms. Kaptur with President Biden last year. The national Democrats’ policy goals, especially on energy, are harder to sell in her district.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut her struggle to reach that historical mark attests to what Republicans and some union leaders here have been saying since the rise of Trumpism: Labor politics have changed forever. There are fewer union voters, and the ones who remain are less Democratic, said Jeff Broxmeyer, a political scientist at the University of Toledo. Since 1990, the percentage of Ohio workers represented by unions has slipped from 23.2 percent to 13 percent.“The organizational capacity of the Democratic Party in northwest Ohio is the organizational capacity of organized labor, and organized labor is much diminished,” he said. “Now we’re at the endgame.”The State of Jobs in the United StatesJob openings and the number of workers voluntarily leaving their positions in the United States remained near record levels in March.March Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 431,000 jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent ​​in the third month of 2022.Job Market and Stocks: This year’s decline in stock prices follows a historical pattern: Hot labor markets and stocks often don’t mix well.New Career Paths: For some, the Covid-19 crisis presented an opportunity to change course. Here is how these six people pivoted professionally.Return to the Office: Many companies are loosening Covid safety rules, leaving people to navigate social distancing on their own. Some workers are concerned.The state legislature lopped off the tail of Ms. Kaptur’s oddly drawn district along Lake Erie — nicknamed the Snake on the Lake — then extended it west through rural Ohio to the Indiana border. That, Professor Broxmeyer said, signaled that Republicans “are coming for the last Democrat.”It was not that long ago, 2012, that Barack Obama won Ohio’s union families, 61 percent to Mitt Romney’s 37 percent. But Mr. Trump took 54 percent of those same voters in 2016, then 55 percent in 2020. While on the coasts, prognosticators fret over the former president’s continued hold on the Republican Party, in northwest Ohio, the party’s embrace of Trump-era protectionism, immigration exclusion and anti-environmentalism is cheered heartily.“A lot of those union workers, they’re not happy with their unions right now,” said Craig Riedel, a state representative running in the Republican primary to challenge Ms. Kaptur. “They realize that a lot of those union bosses, they’re part of the Democratic machine, and oftentimes, they’re looking at a political outlook of their unions that is in disalignment with their own.”Union leaders agree that it is becoming much more difficult to paper over disagreements between local Democrats and their national party when Trump-aligned Republican candidates are using the same anti-China, anti-trade rhetoric that Ohio Democrats use. Erika White, president of the Communications Workers of America local in northwest Ohio, said Mr. Trump had given voice to the anger of white workers, even if he did not deliver on his promises.Ms. White, who is Black, said she spends much of her time listening to the frustrations of the white men who make up about half of her union.“I personally cannot stand the guy, but you think of his persona,” she said of Mr. Trump. “Where people are, I don’t know if they’re afraid of accountability or where we’re headed, but instead of personal responsibility, they say, ‘I’d rather blame you for all my problems, and then not only am I going to blame you, I’m going to be mean and aggressive with it.’”Erika White, president of a union local, said Mr. Trump had given voice to the anger of white workers, even if he did not deliver on his promises.Cydni Elledge for The New York TimesMs. Kaptur sees it too, and sees Mr. Trump’s appeal, despite his failure to deliver tangible benefits.“Our party, for the most part, is very coastally oriented,” she said, adding, “Our part of the country just doesn’t have much voice, and so partly what he reflects is that vacuum of people feeling left out, and I can understand that.”In Toledo, a burning issue is a natural gas and crude oil pipeline called Line Five that runs on the floor of the Great Lakes from Canada to Ohio, supplying a refinery here that employs 1,200 union workers.The Democratic administration of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan has labeled it a “ticking time bomb” that needs to be shut down, and allies in the environmental movement say workers need to face reality: As the auto industry shifts to electric vehicles, oil pipelines and refineries will no longer be needed.But what national Democrats see as a planetary imperative, union leaders like Mr. Enright see as an immediate mortal threat, and they fully expect the politicians they back to fight for their jobs. That means keeping Line Five open and the shift to electric vehicles in the lowest possible gear.“Democrats say they’re the ones working on behalf of people’s pocketbooks, but how do I tell my members that’s the guy working to help your pocketbook when that’s the guy who is shutting down the pipeline to your refinery?” Mr. Enright asked.An issue like Line Five is easy for the Republicans in the race. It unites unions and business, without alienating any other constituency.Theresa Gavarone, a state senator, is a leading Republican in the campaign to run against Ms. Kaptur in the fall.Cydni Elledge for The New York Times“I mean, it’s 1,200 direct jobs, and thousands of indirect jobs, which include union workers in good paying jobs, and Marcy Kaptur has been silent,” said State Senator Theresa Gavarone, a leading Republican in the race, as she shook hands at Archbold High School in the rural west of the newly drawn district.Ms. Gavarone has used the Line Five issue to make allies in the building trades unions, and used those allies to separate herself from Mr. Riedel, who is openly anti-union.Ms. Kaptur responded defensively, but she also showed the crosscurrents she faces. As chairwoman of the Energy and Water Appropriations subcommittee, she said she had done what she could to protect and move to strengthen the pipeline. But she also leads the Great Lakes Caucus in the House, and protecting the largest body of freshwater on Earth, she said, also has to be a priority.That Mr. Trump never seemed bothered by such conflicts frustrates her, and she does not seem clear on how to overcome his appeal in a region drained by globalization and left behind, first by free trade, then by the changing priorities of environmental protection and an information and technology economy.But she is perfectly clear about her constituents’ point of view.“He was able to prick the despair that results from economic opportunity being jerked out from under you like a rug, and he was able to do it even though he didn’t do anything for them,” Ms. Kaptur fumed. “These are people who’ve worked hard all their lives, and then an earthquake happened. That’s not their fault, and largely Washington never saw it.” More

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      Democrats Lose Control of N.Y. Election Maps, as Top Court Rejects Appeal

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      The Court of Appeals said Democrats violated the State Constitution and ignored the will of the voters. The judges ordered a court-appointed expert to draw replacements.New York’s highest court ruled on Wednesday that Democratic leaders had violated the State Constitution when they took it upon themselves to draw new congressional and State Senate districts, and ordered that a court-appointed special master draft replacement lines for this year’s critical midterm elections.In a sweeping 32-page ruling, a divided New York State Court of Appeals chided Democrats for ignoring a constitutional amendment adopted by voters in 2014 to curb political influence in the redistricting process. The amendment also created a new outside commission to guide the process.The judges additionally found that the congressional districts designed by Democrats violated an explicit state ban on partisan gerrymandering, undercutting the party’s national campaign to brand itself as the champion of voting rights.Writing for the four-judge majority, Chief Judge Janet DiFiore said that Democratic lawmakers created congressional and State Senate maps in a way that was “procedurally unconstitutional,” and that the congressional map in particular was “drawn with impermissible partisan purpose.”The ruling, which is not subject to appeal, was expected to delay the June 28 party primaries for the congressional and State Senate districts until August, to allow time for new maps to be drawn and for candidates to collect petitions to qualify for the ballot.The verdict delivered a stinging defeat to Democrats in Albany and in Washington and cast this year’s election cycle into deep uncertainty.Party leaders had been hopeful that the Court of Appeals, with all seven judges appointed by Democratic governors, would overturn earlier decisions by a Republican judge in Steuben County and a bipartisan appeals court in Rochester.Instead, the high court issued an even more damning verdict that denied the Democrat-dominated State Legislature a chance to redraw the maps itself. That task, the judges said, should be handled by a politically neutral special master, who would be overseen by a trial court.National Democrats had been counting on the New York congressional maps adopted in February to deliver as many as three new seats this fall and offset redistricting gains by Republicans across the country. Now, with Democratic gains likely to be erased or minimized in New York, Republicans are on track to make modest gains nationally, easing their path to retaking control of the House of Representatives this fall.Democrats were likewise expecting the State Senate maps they adopted in February to help safeguard the party’s supermajority in Albany.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.Deepening Divides: As political mapmakers create lopsided new district lines, the already polarized parties are being pulled even farther apart.Wednesday’s decision was a milestone in New York jurisprudence, the first time since the 1960s that the Court of Appeals has struck down district lines approved by lawmakers in their once-in-a-decade redistricting process.But the ruling is part of a growing trend across the nation in which state courts have taken up more active stances against partisan gerrymandering as federal courts have been removed from these battles by the Supreme Court.This year alone, state courts in Ohio, North Carolina, Kansas and Maryland have scrapped plans put in place by lawmakers because they ran afoul of state constitutional language outlawing partisan mapmaking, like that adopted by New York voters in 2014. The courts are widely expected to scrutinize new lines in Florida that overwhelmingly favor Republicans, as well.“States can be the laboratories of redistricting reforms,” said Samuel Wang, the director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. “And this just goes to show that if a state court is willing to look carefully to its constitution and laws, it will find principals that can restrict the most extreme partisan acts.”Unlike New York, though, some of those courts have indicated they will allow 2022 elections to take place on tainted maps, potentially putting Democrats at a greater disadvantage nationally.The judges in New York were silent on whether to reschedule primary elections for other contested seats — including for governor, lieutenant governor and the State Assembly — leaving it to a trial court judge, Patrick F. McAllister, and the State Board of Elections to work out the details with “all due haste.” The board said Wednesday evening that it did “not foresee” moving those contests.But the judges appeared to bless the idea of separating them, pointing out that New York has a history of holding bifurcated primaries. They were more explicit in rejecting Democrats’ plea to allow this year’s elections to proceed on tainted lines and fix them later.“We reject this invitation to subject the people of this state to an election conducted pursuant to an unconstitutional reapportionment,” Judge DiFiore wrote in the majority opinion.Justice McAllister has already appointed Jonathan Cervas, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, as special master to draw the congressional and State Senate lines by late May.Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said Wednesday afternoon that she was reviewing the decision. Michael Murphy, a spokesman for Senate Democrats, said they still “believe in the constitutionality” of their maps and plan to argue their case to the special master.Republicans and several nonpartisan public interest groups lauded the decision.“The will of the people prevailed over the Corrupt Albany Machine in a tremendous victory for democracy, fair elections & the Constitution!” Representative Nicole Malliotakis, a New York City Republican, wrote on Twitter.Ms. Malliotakis’s Staten Island-based district was among several that the Democrats’ congressional map would have made more challenging for Republicans, in her case by adding liberal voters from Park Slope in Brooklyn. The map also created new Democratic pickup opportunities on the eastern end of Long Island and in Central New York, and shored up Democrat-held swing seats in the Hudson Valley, by cramming conservative voters into just a handful of districts.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Democrats Ask if They Should Hit Back Harder Against the G.O.P.

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      Many of the party’s voters are hungry for their candidates to go on offense against Republican cultural attacks, even if it puts them on less comfortable political terrain.If Democrats could bottle Mallory McMorrow, the Michigan state senator who gave a widely viewed speech condemning Republicans’ push to limit discussions about gender and sexuality in schools, they would do it.McMorrow’s big moment, which we wrote about on Monday, made her an instant political celebrity on the left. Her Twitter following has rocketed past 220,000. Democrats raising money for state legislative races have already found her to be a fund-raising powerhouse.McMorrow’s five minutes of fury was so effective, Democrats said, in part because it was so rare.It tapped into a frustration many Democrats feel about their party leaders’ hesitation to engage in these cultural firestorms, said Wendy Davis, a former Texas lawmaker whose filibuster of an abortion bill in 2013 made her a national political figure.‘What we’re fighting for’“There comes a point when you simply need to stand up and fight back,” Davis said.“The strategy of not meeting the right wing where they are can only take you so far,” she added. “I think people have been really hungry to see Democrats pushing back and pushing back strongly, like Mallory did.”Other Democrats are urging candidates to defend their beliefs more aggressively, rather than ignoring or deflecting Republicans’ cultural attacks by changing the subject to pocketbook issues.“Democrats are afraid to talk about why we’re fighting about what we’re fighting for,” said Tré Easton, a progressive strategist. “It was exactly the kind of values-focused rebuttal that I want every Democrat to sound like.”Finding the messageAnother lesson of McMorrow’s speech, said Rebecca Katz, a senior adviser to Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, a Democratic Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, is that voters are searching for authenticity and passion rather than lock-step ideological agreement.“Voters want candidates who talk like actual people instead of slick, poll-tested performers,” Katz said. “They like candidates who are unfiltered, not calculated and scripted. And even if they don’t always agree with you, if a candidate is direct and honest, voters tend to respect that.”Fetterman, who is leading polls ahead of the May 17 primary, is a progressive aligned with the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. His main opponent is Representative Conor Lamb, a centrist from a suburban district outside Pittsburgh. Fetterman has worked to reassure Democratic Party leaders in and outside the state that he is not too far left to win a seat that is crucial to their hopes of retaining their Senate majority.But the fault lines within the party are about how to communicate with the public just as much as they are about traditional arguments between progressives and moderates.Party strategists in Washington, led by centrist lawmakers facing tough re-election bids, have settled on a heavily poll-tested midterm message that emphasizes the major legislation Democrats have passed in Congress: the $1.9 trillion economic relief package known as the American Rescue Plan and the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law.It’s an approach that leaves some Democrats wanting a little more Mallory McMorrow.“I agree that we should be making sure every single day to tell the American people what we’re doing to benefit them and their families,” Davis said, measuring her words carefully. “But we also need to fight fire with fire.”What to readNew York’s highest court ruled that Democratic leaders had violated the State Constitution when drawing new congressional and State Senate districts, ordering a court-appointed expert to draw replacements for this year’s critical midterm elections.Democratic lawmakers released a report alleging that in 2020, top Trump administration officials had awarded a $700 million pandemic relief loan to a struggling trucking company over the objections of Defense Department officials.The White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner is returning in person on Saturday after a two-year pandemic absence. It has some in Washington calculating the risks involved. President Biden will be there. Anthony Fauci is skipping it.pulseSeventy-three percent of college-educated women have an unfavorable opinion of Trump, while 59 percent have a very unfavorable view of him.Sergio Flores/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt’s the gender gap, stupidIt might be the most important rift in American politics: the gender gap between the two major parties. And it’s growing larger.New public opinion research by the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank in Washington, explores just how far apart Democrats and Republicans now are on a bevy of issues, including their contrasting approaches to sex and sexuality and their spiritual practices.Driving the split, in large part, is the steady migration of college-educated women to the Democratic Party. In 1998, the study’s authors note, only 12 percent of Democrats were women with a college degree. That figure is now 28 percent — making them a dominant bloc in the party. For comparison, men without college degrees now make up 22 percent of the Republican Party, up from 17 percent in 1998.That gender gap is a quiet driver of political polarization, said Daniel Cox, the director and founder of A.E.I.’s Survey Center on American Life.He was struck by the stark differences of opinion between women with college degrees and men without them on two issues in particular: climate change and abortion.Sixty-five percent of college-educated women favor protecting the environment over faster economic growth, A.E.I. found, versus only 45 percent of men without college degrees. Seventy-two percent of college-educated women say abortion ought to be legal in most cases, while just 43 percent of men without a college education agree.The gender gap was growing well before Donald Trump, Cox said. But his election “supercharged” the political activism of millennial women in particular, he said.It was primarily college-educated women who rallied on the National Mall in 2017 to express their opposition to Trump, a Republican president swept into office by — as he put it — “the poorly educated.”College-educated women rallied to Joe Biden during the 2020 election, repelled by Trump’s brash and aggressive political style.Those feelings have only intensified. Seventy-three percent of college-educated women have an unfavorable opinion of Trump, A.E.I. found, while 59 percent have a very unfavorable view of him. By contrast, 48 percent of men without college degrees view Trump unfavorably.— BlakeIs there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      French Lessons for the Biden Administration

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      You probably breathed a deep sigh of relief when you heard that Emmanuel Macron trounced Marine Le Pen by a 17-point margin in Sunday’s French presidential election. A Le Pen victory would have been a boon to Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Steve Bannon and a disaster for NATO, Europe and France.The center held, thank God — because Macron governed from the center. He was hated by the far left and the far right and never entirely pleased those closer to the center. But he also became the first president to be re-elected in France in 20 years.There’s a lesson in that for the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress, especially when it comes to immigration.It has become an article of progressive faith in recent years that efforts to control immigration are presumptively racist.A border wall is “a monument to white supremacy,” according to a piece published in Bloomberg. The “remain in Mexico” policy is “racist, cruel and inhumane,” according to the Justice Action Center. An essay published by the Brookings Institution calls U.S. immigration policy “a classic, unappreciated example of structural racism.”It wasn’t long ago that Bernie Sanders was an avowed restrictionist on the view that immigration depresses working-class wages. Did that position make him a racist? The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, where I once worked, used to make the case for open borders with Mexico. Were we left-wing progressives? People of good will should be able to take different and nuanced views on immigration — and change their minds about it — without being tagged as morally deficient.But that’s no longer how it works in progressive circles. The results are policy choices that are bad for the country and worse for Democrats and are an unbidden gift to the far right.The issue is now acute with the Biden administration simultaneously seeking to end the Trump administration’s “remain in Mexico” policy in a case before the Supreme Court while accepting a recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to let the use of Title 42, which allowed border authorities to expel illegal immigrants as a public health measure, expire on May 23.There’s not much doubt as to what will happen if the administration gets its way: An already straining southern border will burst. In fiscal year 2020 there were 646,822 “enforcement actions” at the border. In 2021 the number was a little shy of two million. Without the authority of Title 42, under which 62 percent of expulsions took place in 2021, the number of migrants being released in the United States will increase drastically. You don’t have to be opposed to immigration as a general matter to have serious doubts about the administration’s course.Is there a practical and available legal alternative to regulating immigration through Title 42 enforcement? Where is the logic of ending Title 42 even as the administration seeks to extend mask mandates because the pandemic is far from over? Given housing shortages, how much capacity is there to absorb the next wave of migrants? Even if an overwhelming majority of migrants are merely seeking a better life, what system is there to find those with less honorable intentions?More to the point: What does the administration’s utter failure at effective control of the border say about its commitment to enforcing the rule of law?To raise such questions should be an invitation to propose balanced and practical immigration legislation and try to win over moderate Republicans. Instead it tends to invite cheap accusations of racism, along with policy paralysis in the White House. As Politico reported last week, some think the administration’s secret policy is to call for an end to Title 42 to satisfy progressives while crossing fingers that the courts continue it — which a federal judge did on Monday, at least temporarily.Leading from behind Trump-appointed judges is probably not what Americans elected Joe Biden to do.Which brings us back to the example of France. When Jean-Marie Le Pen made his first presidential bid on an anti-immigration platform in 1974, he took 0.75 percent of the ballot in the first round — fewer than 200,000 votes. When his daughter Marine ran on a similar platform this year, she took 41.5 percent in the second round, or more than 13 million. The Le Pens are thoroughgoing bigots.But decades of pretending that only bigots had worries about immigration only made their brand of politics stronger.As president, Macron tacked right on immigration — not to weaken France’s historic position as an open society, friendly to newcomers, but rather to save it. He has cracked down on some asylum seekers, demanded that immigrants learn French and get jobs and taken a hard line against Islamic separatism. But he’s also tried to make France a more welcoming place for legal immigration. The left thinks of him as Le Pen lite, the right as a feckless impostor. Maybe he’s both. Then again, he also saved France for the free world.Democrats could stand to brush up on their French.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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      New York Democrats Make Last-Ditch Bid to Save New Congressional Maps

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      The state’s highest court heard arguments on Tuesday on whether to uphold earlier rulings that voided maps drawn by Democrats as illegal gerrymanders.New York Democrats made a last-ditch appeal to the state’s highest court on Tuesday to overturn a pair of lower-court rulings and salvage newly drawn congressional districts that overwhelmingly favor their party.In oral arguments before the New York State Court of Appeals, lawyers for the governor and top legislative leaders said that Republicans challenging the lines had fallen short of proving that the state’s new congressional map violated a state ban on gerrymandering.But the arguments turned tense at times, especially as several members of the seven-judge panel scrutinized the constitutionality of the mapmaking process itself.Voters created a new redistricting commission in 2014 to help wean politics from the mapmaking process, at the same time that they outlawed gerrymandering. But after the commission’s efforts broke down this winter, the Democratic-led Legislature quickly shunted aside the commission’s proposals in favor of more politically favorable maps.“Isn’t that evidence of a purpose to gerrymander?” Judge Michael Garcia asked lawyers for the Democrats.The court’s decision, expected as soon as Wednesday, could have far-reaching implications for New York and the rest of the country.A bare-knuckle political fight over representation and power lies beneath the complex legal arguments. National Democrats are relying on New York to help offset Republican redistricting gains in other states. Without it, their path to maintaining the House of Representatives in Washington could become considerably more difficult.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.The congressional map, approved by Democratic supermajorities in February, threatens to cut the state’s eight-member Republican House delegation in half and creates three new Democratic friendly seats on Long Island, Staten Island and in central New York. The map, which favors Democrats 22 to four, shores up several swing districts that Democrats hold now with more left-leaning voters.But an Appeals Court ruling could also determine the future of the 2014 reforms to the redistricting process, which takes place once a decade. If the court upholds the maps and the process behind them, its ruling could effectively neuter the redistricting commission after just one cycle of activity and would set a high bar to prove maps are partisan gerrymanders.“It’s a total disregard for the Constitution and what the voters chose in 2014 as a process to try to improve the way the lines were drawn,” Laura Ladd Bierman, executive director of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of New York State, said of the Legislature’s actions. “That’s what just makes me so frustrated: They just seem to have no regard for what the public wanted.”Ms. Bierman’s group has submitted an amicus brief in the case siding with Republicans to argue that the courts should strike down the maps and draw new ones using a special master.The Court of Appeals judges, all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors, appeared to be wrestling with how to balance the interests of the voters, the longstanding right of the Legislature to set district lines and more pragmatic questions about how and when this year’s critical midterm elections should proceed.The court has traditionally shown deference to state lawmakers to set boundaries that they feel are appropriate. But the questions this time were particularly thorny because the case — Harkenrider v. Hochul — is the first time that the courts have tested the 2014 constitutional changes.The challengers, New York voters backed by national Republicans, have argued that the mapmaking power should have gone directly to the courts, not the Legislature, when the commission collapsed this winter. Instead, they contend, Democrats hijacked the process and drew lines expertly devised to knock out Republicans.The commission violated the law, the Republican lawyer, Misha Tseytlin, said, “but then the Legislature attempted to take a step that it had no legal authority to take.”Democrats rejected both claims. They maintain that the commission was an advisory body whose maps required lawmakers’ approval to become law. And they defended their congressional map as a good-faith effort to balance competing requirements to preserve the cores of existing districts and communities of interest — which includes racial and ethnic groups — while achieving maximum compactness and adjusting for population shifts that generally benefit Democrats.“Maybe the petitioners would have drawn the map a little differently, maybe someone from a think tank or the editorial board of a newspaper would have drawn these maps differently, or somebody on Twitter,” said Craig R. Bucki, a lawyer for State Assembly Democrats. “But the fact is they are not the Legislature, and they are not elected by the people, and that’s why all these maps should be upheld.”How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Side by Side With (Bernie) Sanders

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      THE FIGHTING SOULOn the Road With Bernie SandersBy Ari Rabin-HavtSo much has happened to shape American politics since Bernie Sanders ended his second presidential campaign — the pandemic, Donald Trump’s election denial, the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, the war in Ukraine — it’s easy to overlook the Vermont senator’s place in political history.To a remarkable degree for a failed presidential candidate, Sanders has had an enduring impact on the Democratic Party. In the wake of his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Democrats have tacked sharply to the left on issues like college debt, health care and social welfare. Even in defeat, Sanders remains a progressive hero, with a new perch for influencing policy as the Senate Budget Committee chairman.For all that, Sanders is not well known on the granular level — his management style, tastes and quirks — in a way that is common for national politicians. Into that vacuum comes Ari Rabin-Havt’s engaging memoir of the 2020 Sanders campaign, “The Fighting Soul: On the Road With Bernie Sanders.”Rabin-Havt, a former deputy campaign manager, offers an insider’s view of the gruff, no-frills, democratic socialist — a politician who “hated the political part of political campaigns” like fund-raising and hobnobbing. He was so clueless about party pooh-bahs that he did not recognize the Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, a major Democratic donor.Rabin-Havt was with the senator when he had a campaign-trail heart attack in October 2019. Feisty even in an ambulance, Sanders quizzed E.M.T.s about their jobs and benefits. Asked to rate his pain on a 1-to-10 scale, he snapped with an expletive: “That is a (nonsense) question. I have no idea.”The heart attack was a watershed that looked like the end of the campaign. Then 78, Sanders already faced questions about whether he was too old to be president, and was losing ground to Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.Surprisingly, the health scare helped revive Sanders’s fortunes. While he was still in the hospital, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called to offer her coveted endorsement, which brought fresh momentum and was central to a “Bernie Is Back” campaign.He dominated early voting rounds as Biden floundered. After Biden’s South Carolina primary triumph, other Democratic contenders dropped out, leaving Sanders the last rival standing. Then, after quitting, Sanders became a reliable team player, working hard to elect the Democratic nominee.Rabin-Havt says his book’s principal goal is not to dwell on why the senator lost. Still, that question lingers over the narrative. Rabin-Havt’s explanation, common among Sanders loyalists, is that the party establishment, aided by the mainstream media, rallied behind Biden to keep Sanders from winning the nomination. “The Democratic Party is a disorganized institution,” he writes, “but it would organize against Bernie Sanders in a way they had not against any other candidate — Democratic or Republican.”He rejects suggestions from some Democrats — including former President Obama, in a 2018 meeting with Sanders here recounted in fresh detail — that he would have had a better shot if he’d reached beyond his base or moderated his message. But if he had followed that advice, Rabin-Havt writes, Sanders would have become a different politician and lost core backers. There’s the rub: The uncompromising consistency that thrilled supporters and put Sanders within reach of the nomination was an obstacle to building a broader coalition to win it.The book ends with a glimpse of how the iconoclastic outsider now appreciates the satisfactions of being a Senate insider. Sanders had a big hand in shaping President Biden’s first major accomplishment — a pandemic-relief bill brimming with progressive policies.“We got something done here, didn’t we?” he told Rabin-Havt after the bill passed. “This is fun.” More

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      Merrick Garland Finds His Footing as Attorney General

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      During a recent swing through the South, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland chatted up participants in a police program in Georgia aimed at redirecting youth who had sold bottled water on interstate highways into less dangerous work. He announced funding to address policing problems like the use of excessive force. He talked about mental health support, an issue he has thought about since he saw firsthand how officers who responded to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing struggled to process the horror.For all of the attention on the Justice Department’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack, the trip was focused on the everyday work of being the attorney general, fighting crime and serving as a steward of law enforcement. Over two days in Georgia and Louisiana, Mr. Garland, in interviews with The New York Times on his plane and later in Baton Rouge, would say only that the assault on the Capitol “completely wiped out” any doubts he had about taking the post.“I felt that this was exactly why I had agreed to be attorney general in the first place,” he said. “Jan. 6 is a date that showed what happens if the rule of law breaks down.”By most accounts, becoming attorney general was a tough adjustment for a former appeals judge who had last worked at the Justice Department in the late 1990s. But more than a year into his tenure, colleagues say that a cautious leader has found some footing, more a prosecutor now than a deliberator.In interviews, a dozen administration officials and federal prosecutors, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions, said Mr. Garland, 69, initially ran his office like a judge’s chambers, peppering even Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta with the kind of granular questions that clerks might expect while writing his opinions.But the slow pace that characterized Mr. Garland’s early months has somewhat quickened. Decisions that took weeks at the outset can now take a day. And with more top officials confirmed, he can be less directly involved in the department’s day-to-day work.Mr. Garland has said that the department must remain independent from improper influence if it is to deliver on its top priorities: to uphold the rule of law, keep the nation safe and protect civil rights.Mr. Garland and his chief of staff, Matt Klapper, in Atlanta. Career employees at the Justice Department say they no longer feel the political pressure they did during the Trump administration.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesHe has notched victories. Many career employees say they no longer feel pressure to satisfy blatantly political demands, as they did under the previous administration. The department created a unit dedicated to fighting domestic terrorism and charged important cybercrime cases. Prosecutors won high-profile convictions in the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black jogger, and George Floyd, a Black motorist.But in a significant setback, prosecutors failed to win convictions against four men accused of plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. The Bureau of Prisons remains plagued by violence, sexual abuse and corruption. And Democrats still castigate Mr. Garland for not moving more aggressively to indict former President Donald J. Trump for trying to undo his election loss. Republican critics accuse him of using the department to improperly wade into culture wars, including fights over school curriculums and the pandemic response.A Challenging First YearSeated on a sofa in the U.S. attorney’s office in Baton Rouge, Mr. Garland detailed the chaos he encountered when he took the reins in March 2021. Colleagues said that if the typical transition between parties is like relay racers passing a baton, this was a runner searching for a stick dropped on the track.Trump administration officials who expected to spend their final weeks preparing briefing binders for the incoming administration instead parried false cries of voter fraud and absorbed the horror of the Capitol attack. Mr. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat shortened the transition process. The Biden team would not be up to speed on every issue that awaited them.The first order of business was the nine-week-old Jan. 6 investigation, which entailed a nationwide manhunt and hundreds of criminal cases.Mr. Garland and his top officials, Ms. Monaco and Ms. Gupta, issued policy memos, filed lawsuits and secured indictments related to federal executions, hate crimes, domestic extremism and voter suppression, among other concerns.Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general, speaking with Mr. Garland in Baton Rouge. Mr. Garland initially ran the Justice Department in a deliberative style, but the pace has quickened.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesMs. Gupta scrutinized corporate mergers and initiated reviews of police departments in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky. Ms. Monaco’s office, which oversees the Jan. 6 inquiry, eased tensions between prosecutors and officials on the case. She closed the federal prison in Manhattan to address subpar conditions, and is pushing for more Bureau of Prisons reforms.Soft-spoken and slight, Mr. Garland has an understated manner that makes him easy to underestimate, associates said. But they insisted that his questions were always probing, and that he seemed to remember every answer.Some aides said he was slow to shift the department away from postures that had hardened during the Trump era. He took four months to reaffirm a longstanding policy that strictly limits the president’s contact with the department and to curb the seizure of reporters’ records. The department sued Georgia three months after the state passed a restrictive voting law, frustrating the White House.Prosecutors were told over a year ago to expect a new memo allowing them to forgo harsh mandatory minimum sentences, such as those for nonviolent drug dealers who had sold crack rather than cocaine. They are still waiting.In a move that some aides believe reflected the unusually high level of detail he needed to feel prepared, Mr. Garland often dispatched Ms. Monaco to attend White House meetings in his place. This year, he has attended nearly all of them.Ms. Monaco’s office overcame hiccups, too. It did not play its traditional management role under its predecessor, and she had to ease information bottlenecks. Exceedingly wary about cybercrime, she used a pseudonymous email address. That precaution, normally taken by attorneys general, gave those outside her staff the impression that she was difficult to reach.“I’m delegating more,” Mr. Garland said in the interview. “It’s easier to deal with crises every day, and new decisions, if you’re not still working on the old ones.” With Covid risks easing, he has held more meetings of the kind he attended in Georgia and Louisiana, and has met in person more frequently with his leadership team.Mr. Garland meeting with local law enforcement officers at the Justice Department’s office in Atlanta. Mr. Garland has held more in-person meetings as Covid risks have eased.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesHe will not say when he intends to step down, but administration officials believe that he would willingly serve beyond the midterm election.Protecting the Rule of LawFor most of a 90-minute flight to Atlanta on a 12-seat government plane, Mr. Garland sat near the front, editing speeches, conferring with his chief of staff and juggling updates from Washington. In a quiet moment in the interview, he spoke with seeming relish about his prior life as a prosecutor. He recalled uncovering a State Department record that proved a witness had lied, and shining a flashlight behind a document to show a judge and jury that a defendant had doctored it with correction fluid.As a special assistant to Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti in 1979, Mr. Garland helped codify reforms that stemmed from President Nixon’s abuses of power. After a stint in private practice, he became a top department official under Attorney General Janet Reno. He supervised the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing, that era’s most serious domestic terrorism attack, before joining the federal appeals court in Washington.Mr. Garland, then an associate deputy attorney general, speaking to the news media in 1995 about the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.Rick Bowmer/Associated PressMr. Biden asked Mr. Garland to lead the department the day before Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed Congress. At home on Jan. 6 writing his acceptance speech, Mr. Garland watched the attack unfold on television.“Failure to make clear by words and deed that our law is not the instrument of partisan purpose” would imperil the country, Mr. Garland said the next day, when his nomination was announced.The Trump InvestigationsCard 1 of 6Numerous inquiries. More

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      The Tennessee Law Making School Board Culture Wars Even Worse

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      FRANKLIN, Tenn. — “What happens when a child sounds out the word ‘lesbian’ and turns to their teacher and asks, ‘What is a lesbian?’”Trisha Lucente, the mom of a local kindergartner, has come before the Williamson County school board to voice her distress over the district’s continued use of Epic, a digital library app containing more than 40,000 children’s books and videos. Ms. Lucente and like-minded parents have complained about several titles that they consider inappropriate. Anything touching on race, gender or sexuality can set off alarms in conservative circles here. (A book on sea horses came under fire recently. The fact that male sea horses get pregnant was seen as promoting the idea of gender fluidity.)In response, the school system temporarily shut down access to the library to conduct a review — prompting an outcry from supporters of the app — then reinstated it while allowing parents to opt out their kids.Ms. Lucente finds the compromise unacceptable. What happens when a child who has been opted out overhears the lesbian question, she demands. “What position does that put our teachers in? What are they supposed to say to that?” The Epic situation, she contends, is just another example of how the board and administration are dividing the community and “failing our children and our teachers.”Ms. Lucente is not the only one with strong feelings on the matter. Multiple parents and teachers at the meeting rise to praise Epic. One teenager, a junior at Franklin High School, asserts that “censorship is stupid” and scolds adults who would “shield” students from learning about racism, antisemitism and other uncomfortable aspects of history and humanity.Welcome to Williamson County, a hot spot in the ongoing culture war engulfing America’s public schools. An affluent, highly educated, politically conservative enclave just south of Nashville, Williamson has seen its share of school-related drama over the years. In 2015, for instance, conservatives here were fired up about a seventh-grade social studies unit that some viewed as Islamic indoctrination.The trauma of the Covid pandemic has driven tensions to a new level. Last August, the district drew national attention after a mob of parents, protesting the board’s vote to impose a temporary mask mandate, turned feral. One pro-mask dad was swarmed, cursed at and threatened as he made his way from the meeting back to his car. “You can leave freely, but we will find you!” a protester raged in a video that went viral.The district has since sought to curtail the hostilities. The 25 residents who signed up to speak at this month’s meeting were allowed precisely one minute each, with a timer keeping everyone on track. Officials warned at the outset that disruptive speakers would have their remarks terminated and that those who felt unsafe could have a sheriff’s deputy escort them to their vehicles.Williamson County is obviously not the only community dealing with such frictions. School boards across the nation are being dragged onto the front lines of partisan battles. Vaccination requirements, diversity and inclusion efforts, books that make certain people feel icky — these issues and more have prompted ugly, overheated confrontations, some of them violent. Outside groups are fanning the flames, as are cynical politicians looking to juice their careers. (See: DeSantis, Ron, governor of Florida.) The day-to-day concerns of running a school district (boring stuff like budgeting and approving contracts for vendors) are increasingly being overshadowed by partisan agendas.Many people would look at the spiraling circus and think: This is bad. Low-level, nonpartisan school boards are not where these radioactive political issues should be hashed out. Someone should find a way to reduce the heat on these public servants.Instead, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature went the other way: passing a law last fall that allows for partisan school board elections, setting up a system that not only codifies the existing toxicity but also promises to exacerbate it. So much for putting students first.The overwhelming majority of school board races around the country are nonpartisan. This was the case in Tennessee until Republican lawmakers, during an emergency session called to deal with Covid-related issues, rammed through legislation permitting county parties to hold primary elections to select school board nominees, who can then list their party affiliations on the general election ballots. It was a controversial move, and the opposition included state Democrats, droves of educators and school board officials and even some Republicans.The law’s supporters insist that partisan contests will give voters a clearer sense of school board candidates and their values and, more broadly, that they will increase involvement and public interest in what are typically low-profile races.Critics of the new system counter that the law will change the fundamental nature of the position — and not in a good way. Among their biggest fears: To win their party’s primaries, candidates will need to focus more on hot-button issues that appeal to base voters, leading to more and fiercer culture clashes. Campaigns will require more money and more partisan brawling, discouraging many people from running. Those who skip the primaries and run in general elections as independents will be at a disadvantage. (America’s two-party system is not kind to independent candidates at any political level.) And as time goes on, the pool of people who choose to run will be composed less of civic-minded parents than of partisan warriors and careerist politicians.Not all of the county parties opted to hold school board primaries this cycle, and many voters are likely not yet aware of the change. But even at this early stage, there are signs that the new law’s supporters and its detractors are both right.Pretty much everyone plugged into this drama acknowledges that the newly partisan contests have increased interest and participation in school board races.Jim Garrett is the chair of the Davidson County Republican Party, which is holding primaries for its candidates running for the Metropolitan Nashville school board. Nashville is among Tennessee’s bluer regions, where Democrats have an electoral edge. Even so, with the new system, he says, more Republicans are running, and they are raising more money. “It looks like the cost of a campaign is going to be about double what it used to be,” he estimates.The local G.O.P. is also investing more in these races. For the first time, Davidson Republicans are arranging training sessions for school board candidates. These races weren’t a focus in previous elections, says Mr. Garrett. “They are a focus now.”There hasn’t yet been special training on the Democratic side. But the county party is happy to connect candidates to campaign vendors and other resources, says its chairwoman, Tara Houston. The party has also tasked a special committee to come up with a platform outlining its basic values on public education, which Democratic school board hopefuls will be expected to support.In Williamson County, where having a D next to one’s name is a scarlet letter of sorts, most of the primary action has been on the Republican side. In multiple districts, more conventional conservatives are facing off against contenders from the party’s Trumpier wing. Outside groups have lined up behind their champions, providing financial and other support. The most prominent of these is Williamson Families, a political action committee dedicated to protecting the county’s “conservative roots” and “Judeo-Christian values.” The PAC is led by Robin Steenman, who also heads the local branch of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit based in Florida that champions parental rights and “liberty-minded” leaders nationwide. Williamson Families has endorsed a slate of superconservatives — after weeding out the RINOs, of course.Multiple parents and teachers in Williamson complain that, as predicted, some of the campaigns and contenders seem focused less on concrete education issues than on culture-war talking points. One middle-school teacher vents to me that some candidates are bragging about their love of Donald Trump and decrying the decline of traditional families and the godlessness of today’s youth.Meagan Gillis, whose two young daughters attend county schools, says the whole situation has turned to “chaos.” She points to a social media post by a conservative candidate promoting the child furries myth: the wacky online claim that teachers are being forced to cater to students who identify as cats, to the point of putting litter boxes in classrooms and meowing at the children. “I’m like, are you kidding me?” Ms. Gillis marvels. Things are getting so absurd, she says, that her family is seriously considering moving out of the area.Similar concerns and complaints can be heard from other corners of the state. Virginia Babb has loved her time on the Knox County school board and was planning to run for re-election — until the shift to partisan races. Now she will step down at the end of her term rather than get sucked into the slime. She initially ran for the board as “a very involved parent” without strong partisan leanings, she tells me, noting: “I don’t like either party. They are too much controlled by their extremes.”So down the partisan rabbit hole Tennessee school boards are being nudged — with other states possibly to follow. Missouri, Arizona, Florida and South Carolina are among the states where lawmakers toyed less successfully with similar legislation this year. Some bills made it farther than others, and the idea is likely to keep popping up. The conservative American Enterprise Institute favors listing school board candidates’ party affiliations on ballots. A collection of conservative leaders has been exploring other ways to bring school board races more into line with other types of elections, according to Politico.All of which would indeed most likely earn school board campaigns more attention and resources and make candidates easier to ideologically sort. But at what cost to America’s children?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