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    How Biden’s Immigration Fight Threatens His Biggest Foreign Policy Win

    The debate over immigration in the United States is spilling over into other parts of President Biden’s agenda, particularly the war in Ukraine.The soaring number of people crossing into the United States from Mexico has been a political vulnerability for President Biden for the past three years, chipping away at his approval rating and opening him up to political attacks.But now, the crisis is threatening to upend America’s support for the war in Ukraine, throwing the centerpiece of Mr. Biden’s foreign policy into jeopardy.After a meeting with Mr. Biden at the White House on Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson insisted that the Republican-led House would not pass legislation to send aid to Ukraine unless Democrats agreed to sweeping new restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border.And even if the two sides do come to some sort of agreement, many Republicans, especially in the House, would be loath to give an election-year win to Mr. Biden on an issue that has given them a powerful line of criticism toward the White House. The issue is also at the center of the candidacy of Mr. Biden’s likely opponent this fall, former President Donald J. Trump.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Scott Stringer Explores Run Against Eric Adams for N.Y.C. Mayor

    Mr. Stringer, whose 2021 mayoralty bid was derailed by a sexual misconduct allegation, is gearing up to try again to beat Eric Adams.Scott M. Stringer, the former New York City comptroller and 2021 mayoral candidate, said on Thursday that he would form an exploratory committee and begin raising funds for a possible primary challenge against Mayor Eric Adams next year.The move caught much of the city’s Democratic establishment by surprise and signaled the start of a combative new phase of Mr. Adams’s mayoralty, as Mr. Stringer became the first Democrat to move toward directly contesting the mayor’s re-election.Any primary challenge promises to be exceedingly difficult. No challenger has defeated an incumbent New York City mayor in a primary since David Dinkins beat Edward I. Koch in 1989.But few of his predecessors have been held in such low regard in polls as Mr. Adams, who is confronting the city’s budget woes, an escalating migrant crisis and an F.B.I. investigation into his campaign. Other challengers may soon follow.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Dean Phillips Drops DEI From Campaign Website After Bill Ackman Donation

    The campaign website for Representative Dean Phillips, the Minnesota Democrat mounting a long-shot primary challenge to President Biden, has a policy platform that signals liberal bona fides tempered by a Midwestern businessman’s practicality. It includes headers like “Climate Action,” “Women’s Health and Economic Security” and “Immigration Reform.”Sometime on Tuesday, one header was changed. Gone was “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” In its place: “Equity and Restorative Justice.”The text beneath the header — including acknowledgments of racial disparities and vague promises to ensure equal opportunity — was untouched. But the tweak was nonetheless significant. Even more so was its timing: On Saturday, Mr. Phillips had received the endorsement of William A. Ackman, the billionaire investor who in recent months has become an outspoken critic of so-called D.E.I. programs in higher education.Mr. Ackman did not merely endorse Mr. Phillips; in a lengthy post on X on Saturday, where Mr. Ackman has a considerable following, he said that he had already given the maximum $3,300 donation allowed to Mr. Phillips’s campaign, and he announced that on Tuesday, after the federal holiday for Martin Luther King’s Birthday, he planned to wire $1 million to We Deserve Better, a super PAC formed late last year that is supporting Mr. Phillips’s candidacy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    For Biden, Another Trump Nomination Presents Opportunity, and Great Risk

    Some Democrats consider the former president the Republican they would have the best chance against this fall, but also the one they most fear the consequences of losing to.To be clear, no one in President Biden’s White House would ever root for Donald J. Trump. To a person, they consider him an existential threat to the nation. But as they watched Mr. Trump open the contest for the Republican presidential nomination with a romp through Iowa, they also saw something else: a pathway to a second term.Mr. Biden’s best chance of winning re-election in the fall, in their view, is a rematch against Mr. Trump. The former president is so toxic, so polarizing that his presence on the November ballot, as Mr. Biden’s advisers see it, would be the most powerful incentive possible to lure disaffected Democrats and independents back into the camp of the poll-challenged president.And so, some Democrats felt a little torn this week as the Republican race got underway. None of them would cry if Mr. Trump were taken down by someone like former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, who has one shot in New Hampshire next week to make it a race. Whatever Ms. Haley’s flaws, and Democrats see many, they do not believe she would pose the same danger to democracy that Mr. Trump does.But if she won the Republican nomination, she might pose a bigger danger to Mr. Biden.The paradox recalls 2016, when many Democrats were not unhappy when Mr. Trump won the Republican nomination, on the theory that the country would never elect a bumptious reality-television star who specialized in racist appeals and insult politics. Burned once, they are not so certain this time, but Democrats are banking on the hope that the country would not take back a defeated president who inspired a violent mob to help him keep power and has been charged with more felonies than Al Capone.“I was not one of those Democrats who thought Trump would be easier to beat in 2016,” said Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s communications director in the election she lost to Mr. Trump. “Some Democrats root for Trump. I think it is better for the country” for him “to be defeated in the Republican Party and not continue to gain strength.” If Mr. Trump did lose, she added, she believed Biden could defeat Ms. Haley or Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.But it might not be as easy. Ms. Haley would be vulnerable to Democratic attacks for enabling Mr. Trump as his ambassador to the United Nations, and even as a Republican candidate for president who largely declined to attack the former president and would not rule out voting for him if he won the nomination.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Trump’s Landslide Victory in Iowa

    More from our inbox:Young Voters: Vote!U.S. Strikes in YemenThe Genocide Charges Against IsraelDonald J. Trump at a caucus site in Clive, Iowa, on Monday evening. His victory was called by The Associated Press only 31 minutes after the caucuses had begun.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump Wins Iowa in Key First Step Toward Rematch” (front page, Jan. 16):If you weren’t scared before Monday night’s Iowa caucuses, you should be terrified now. The disgraced, twice-impeached, quadruple-indicted former president came within one vote of winning all 99 of Iowa’s counties, and received 51 percent of the vote.Ron DeSantis came in a distant second with 21 percent of the vote, and Nikki Haley was a distant third with just 19 percent of the vote.The bid for the Republican nomination for president is all but over, leaving America with a terrible choice between the autocratic and awful former president, and the obviously too old and frail current president.Unless Ms. Haley can win convincingly in New Hampshire, and match Donald Trump in South Carolina, the former president will be the nominee.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Trump Wins Iowa, and Iceland’s Volcanic Eruption

    The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about five minutes.Former President Donald J. Trump’s sweep of the Iowa caucuses was broad and deep.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn Today’s Episode:5 Takeaways From Trump’s Runaway Victory in the Iowa Caucuses, by Lisa Lerer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan SwanWhat to Know as Trump Faces Another Defamation Trial by E. Jean Carroll, by Benjamin Weiser and Maggie Haberman, with Maria CramerSenate to Vote on Potential Freeze to Israel Aid as Democrats Question Conduct of War, by Karoun DemirjianU.S. Defense Secretary Is Released From the Hospital After 2 Weeks, by Eric SchmittIceland Faces ‘New Chapter’ of Seismic Activity as Lava Menaces Town, by Egill Bjarnason and Emma Bubola75th Emmy Awards Ceremony: ‘Succession’ Wins Emmy for Best Drama and ‘The Bear’ Best Comedy, by John KoblinJessica Metzger and More

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    The U.S. Lacks What Every Democracy Needs

    The history of voting in the United States shows the high costs of living with an old Constitution, unevenly enforced by a reluctant Supreme Court.Unlike the constitutions of many other advanced democracies, the U.S. Constitution contains no affirmative right to vote. We have nothing like Section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, providing that “every citizen of Canada has the right to vote in an election of members of the House of Commons or of a legislative assembly and to be qualified for membership therein,” or like Article 38 of the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, which provides that when it comes to election of the Bundestag, “any person who has attained the age of 18 shall be entitled to vote.”As we enter yet another fraught election season, it’s easy to miss that many of the problems we have with voting and elections in the United States can be traced to this fundamental constitutional defect. Our problems are only going to get worse until we get constitutional change.The framers were skeptical of universal voting. The original U.S. Constitution provided for voting only for the House of Representatives, not for the Senate or the presidency, leaving voter qualifications for House elections to the states. Later amendments framed voting protections in the negative: If there’s going to be an election, a state may not discriminate on the basis of race (15th Amendment), gender (19th Amendment) or status as an 18-to-20-year old (26th Amendment).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Pritzker Is Among Democrats Making Case for Biden in Iowa

    All the political action in Iowa may be among Republicans, but President Biden’s campaign sought on Monday to get a piece of the action, sending three top surrogates to Des Moines to promote his agenda and trash his potential opponents.Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota and Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Hollywood megadonor and a campaign co-chairman, all made their case for re-electing Mr. Biden before a dozen TV cameras and a gaggle of journalists in a conference room at the Iowa Events Center.Mr. Pritzker said there was no difference between former President Donald J. Trump and his G.O.P. rivals, Ms. Smith warned that Republicans would ban abortion nationwide if they won back the White House and Mr. Katzenberg did a victory lap on the campaign’s latest fund-raising announcement.“Tonight’s contest is simply a contest of whether you like MAGA in its original packaging or in high heels or with lifts in their boots,” Mr. Pritzker said, jabbing at Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who quipped during a debate about wearing heels, and at Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has been suspected of wearing lifts in his shoes.Beyond cracks about the Republican candidates’ footwear, the Biden surrogates did not share much new information about the re-election campaign or the president’s thinking. Mr. Pritzker fended off questions about immigration policy and the Supreme Court case concerning Mr. Trump’s eligibility to be on the ballot, while Mr. Katzenberg declined to engage in a debate over whether the Biden campaign is too focused on coastal supporters.Instead, they sought to convey their argument that the future of the nation would be at risk if Mr. Trump were re-elected.“The campaign is running an operation like our democracy depends on it,” Mr. Katzenberg said. “Because in some respect it does.” More