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

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

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      Something’s Got to Give

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      It’s been 52 years since Congress passed, and the country ratified, a constitutional amendment — the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18 in the wake of the Vietnam War and the broader disruption of the 1960s. (The 27th Amendment, ratified in 1992, was passed in 1789.) It’s been 64 years since Congress added states to the union — Alaska and Hawaii, in 1959. And it’s been 94 years since Congress capped the size of the House of Representatives at 435 members.You might be tempted to treat these facts as trivia. But the truth is that they say something profound about American politics. For more than 50 years, the United States has been frozen in a kind of structural and constitutional stasis. Despite deep changes in our society — among them major population growth and at least two generational waves — we have made no formal changes to our national charter, nor have we added states or rearranged the federal system or altered the rules of political competition.One reason this matters, as Kate Shaw and Julie C. Suk observe in a recent essay for Times Opinion, is that “several generations of Americans have lost the habit and muscle memory of seeking formal constitutional change.” Unaccustomed to the concept and convinced that it is functionally impossible, Americans have abandoned the very notion that we can change our Constitution. Instead, we place the onus for change on the Supreme Court and hope for the best. Out with popular sovereignty, in with judicial supremacy.There is another reason this matters. Our stagnant political system has produced a stagnant political landscape. Neither party has been able to obtain a lasting advantage over the other, nor is either party poised to do so. The margins of victory and defeat in national elections are slim. The Republican majority that gave President George W. Bush a second term in the White House — and inspired, however briefly, visions of a permanent Republican majority — came to just 50.7 percent of the overall vote. President Barack Obama won his second term by around four percentage points, and President Biden won by a similar margin in 2020. Donald Trump, as we know, didn’t win a majority of voters in 2016.Control of Congress is evenly matched as well. Majorities are made with narrow margins in a handful of contested races, where victory can rest more on the shape of the district map — and the extent of the gerrymandering, assuming it holds — than on any kind of political persuasion. That’s the House. In the Senate, control has lurched back and forth on the basis of a few competitive seats in a few competitive states. And the next presidential election, thanks to the Electoral College, will be a game of inches in a small batch of closely matched states rather than a true national election.Past eras of political dynamism often came from some change in the overall political order. Throughout the 19th century, for example, the addition of states either transformed the terrain on which Americans fought partisan politics or opened avenues for long-term success for either one of the two major parties. States could be used to solidify partisan control in Washington — the reason we have two Dakotas instead of one — or used to extend and enlarge an existing coalition.Progressive-era constitutional transformations — the direct election of senators, women’s suffrage and Prohibition — reverberated through partisan politics, and the flood of Black Americans from Southern fields to Northern cities put an indelible stamp on the behavior of Democrats and Republicans.We lack for political disruption on that scale. There are no constitutional amendments on the table that might alter the terms of partisan combat in this country. There’s no chance — anytime soon — that we’ll end the Electoral College or radically expand the size of the House, moves that could change the national political calculus for both parties. There are no prospects, at this point, for new states, whether D.C., Puerto Rico or any of the other territories where Americans live and work without real representation in Congress.There’s nothing either constitutional or structural on the horizon of American politics that might unsettle or shake the political system itself out of its stagnation. Nothing that could push the public in new directions or force the parties themselves to build new kinds of coalitions. Nothing, in short, that could help Americans untangle the pathologies of our current political order.The fact of the matter is that there are forces that are trying to break the stasis of American politics. There’s the Supreme Court, which has used its iron grip on constitutional meaning to accumulate power in its chambers, to the detriment of other institutions of American governance. There’s the Republican Party, which has used the countermajoritarian features of our system to build redoubts of power, insulated from the voters themselves. And there is an authoritarian movement, led and animated by Trump, that wants to renounce constitutional government in favor of an authoritarian patronage regime, with his family at its center.Each of these forces is trying to game the current system, to build a new order from the pieces as they exist. But there’s nothing that says we can’t write new rules. And there’s nothing that says that we have to play this particular game.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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      David Trone Enters Maryland Senate Race

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      Representative David Trone, who is in his third term, is expected to pour tens of millions of dollars of his personal fortune into what is likely to be a hotly contested primary.Representative David Trone, Democrat of Maryland, said he was set to launch a campaign for the Senate on Thursday, joining a race into which he is expected to pour tens of millions of dollars from his personal fortune in an effort to capitalize on a rare opportunity to seek an open seat in the deep-blue state.Just days after Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, who has held his seat since 2007, announced he would not seek re-election, Mr. Trone, 67, a third-term congressman from Potomac, said he had assembled a campaign team and cut an advertisement that emphasizes his roots growing up on a Pennsylvania farm and building a fortune after founding a lucrative alcohol retail business, Total Wine & More.In an interview, Mr. Trone, who is in his third term in Congress, said he expected to be an underdog in what is likely to be a hotly contested Democratic primary. The race could also draw Angela Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive who is seen as a rising star in the state, and Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee who has established a national following, having served as the lead impeachment manager prosecuting former President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Will Jawando, a member of the Montgomery County Council, has already announced he is running for the seat.“I’ll be the underdog in the race. I’m always an underdog. I’m a disrupter,” Mr. Trone said. “We take no money from PACs. I take no money from lobbyists, no money from corporations. And when you don’t take anybody else’s money, and you’re willing to put some of your own resources into the campaign, people realize you’re in it because you care.”Those close to Mr. Trone said he was willing to spend tens of millions of dollars on the race, as he has in previous campaigns for the House.In the House, Mr. Trone co-founded the Bipartisan Addiction and Mental Health Task Force, and he said he would focus on similar issues if elected to the Senate. He emphasized the need to address the opioid crisis, mental health issues and criminal justice reform.Mr. Trone said he believed Maryland Democrats would choose a progressive candidate over any centrists who might enter the race, and that he believed his platform would appeal to liberal voters.“We’re all on the same team,” Mr. Trone said of the other Democrats who are likely to run. “We despise the most narcissistic president, probably the worst president ever, Donald Trump.”Mr. Cardin said in an interview that he did not intend to endorse a successor.“We have a great group of Democrats in Maryland,” he said. “I know some are interested. I’m very confident that we will be able to to elect a Democrat to fill the seat.”Whoever wins the Democratic primary is likely to carry the seat. The state’s most popular Republican, former Governor Larry Hogan, has said he is not interested in running.Maryland’s filing deadline is Feb. 9, 2024. The primary election is May 14, 2024. More

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      Repulsed by Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump? Tough.

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      The presidential race sure does seem like it’ll wind up coming down to Biden vs. Trump — and a whole lot of people would rather have an alternative.Here’s an important early message: Even if you aren’t thrilled by the Republican and Democratic options come Election Day, don’t vote for anybody else.We’re talking here about the attraction of third parties. So tempting. So disaster-inducing.The lure is obvious. Donald Trump’s terrible and Joe Biden’s boring. Much more satisfying to go to the polls and announce you’re too far above the status quo to vote for either.The way so many people did in 2016, when Trump won the presidency thanks to the Electoral College votes of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Which Hillary Clinton would probably have carried if the folks who were appalled by Trump had voted for her instead of the Libertarian or Green Party candidates.OK, ticked-off swing staters, how did that work for you in the long run?This brings us to No Labels, a new group that’s warning it might launch a third-party candidacy if it isn’t happy with the two major party nominees.“We care about this country more than the demands of any political party,” No Labels announces on its website. Its founding chairman, Joe Lieberman, told interviewers that his group believes the American people “are so dissatisfied with the choice of Presidents Trump or Biden that they want a third alternative.”Yeah. But let’s stop here to recall that Lieberman is a former U.S. senator, Democrat of Connecticut. Who ran for vice president with Al Gore on the Democratic ticket in 2000, hurt Gore’s chances with a terrible performance in a debate with Dick Cheney, then made a totally disastrous attempt to run for president himself four years later.Hard to think of him as a guy with big answers. And about that business of voters wanting a third choice: A lot of them do, until it turns out that option throws the race to the worse of the top two.Remember all the chaos in the 2000 Florida vote count? The entire presidential election hinged on the result. In the end, Ralph Nader, the Green Party nominee, got more than 97,000 votes there. In a state that George W. Bush eventually won by 537.Now Nader had a phenomenal career as a champion of consumer protection and the environment. But this was a terrible finale. His candidacy gave Floridians who felt that Gore was not very exciting a chance to declare their disaffection. It gave them a chance to feel superior. It gave the country a new President Bush. And a war in Iraq.I talked with Nader about his role much later, and he basically said the outcome was Gore’s fault for being a bad candidate. This conversation took place when the country was bearing down on the 2016 election, and Nader vowed not to vote for either Trump or Clinton. “They’re not alike,” he acknowledged, but added, “they’re both terrible.”Think that was the last time I ever consulted Ralph Nader.The third-party thingy also comes up in legislative races. Remember the 2018 Senate contest in Arizona? No? OK, that’s fair. The Democratic candidate was Kyrsten Sinema, who seemed to be in danger of losing because the Green Party was on the ballot, capable of siphoning off a chunk of her supporters. Even though Sinema had a good environmental record! Well, a few days before the election the Green candidate — have I mentioned her name was Angela Green? — urged her supporters to vote for Sinema. Who did squeak out a win.As senator, Sinema became an, um, unreliable Democratic vote. Who you might call either principled or egocentrically uncooperative. In any case, it didn’t look like she’d have much chance of being renominated. So now she’s very likely to run as … an independent.Another senator who frequently drives Democratic leaders crazy is Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who hasn’t announced his own plans. But he’s started to flirt with a presidential run. On a No Labels ticket? “I don’t rule myself in and I don’t rule myself out,” he helpfully told an interviewer.Sigh.Politicians are perfectly well aware of what effect a third option can have on elections. Back in 2020, a group of Montanans who’d signed petitions to put the Green Party on the ballot discovered that the Republicans had spent $100,000 to support the signature-gathering effort — undoubtedly in hopes that the Green candidate would take votes away from former Democratic governor Steve Bullock when he ran for the Senate. The irate voters went to court and a judge finally ruled that they could remove their names.Didn’t help Bullock win, but it does leave another message about the way too many options can be used to screw up an election. Really, people, when it comes time to go to the polls, the smartest thing you can do is accept the depressing compromises that can come with a two-party democracy. Then straighten your back and fight for change anyhow.Don’t forget to vote! But feel free to go home after and have three or four drinks.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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      Jay Inslee Sees Greener Pastures Ahead

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      After nearly 30 years in elected office, Washington’s governor plans to shift his focus to climate solutions and clean energy, underscoring the need for “a sense of optimism and confidence.”Jay Inslee has been in elected office so long that he served in Congress during the tail end of the George H.W. Bush administration.On Monday Mr. Inslee, 72, announced that he would not seek a fourth term as Washington State’s governor, ending a nearly 30-year career in elected office. He went to Congress as a centrist Democrat and evolved into a fierce critic of the Iraq war and later of President Donald J. Trump. He will leave the State Capitol after the 2024 elections as one of America’s leading climate hawks.Mr. Inslee ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination by arguing that the country would have to radically reshape its relationship with fossil fuels and promote renewable energy. While Mr. Inslee’s candidacy never caught fire, his goals later became the blueprint for the climate spending in the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Biden signed into law last year.When I interviewed Mr. Inslee in 2017, he said the only other job he would want was to be the quarterback of his hometown Seattle Seahawks. When I reminded him of this as we spoke Monday afternoon, he replied, “Now I want to be the next goalie for the Seattle Kraken,” the city’s hockey team. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Why did you make this decision now?There comes a time to pass the torch, and to everything there is a season, and for a variety of reasons, I decided it was the right season. But I’ve got another year and a half to put the pedal to the metal. My dad was a track coach, and he always said run through the tape, so I’ll be running through the tape. Have you spoken with President Biden about your decision?I have not, but he has a few other things on his mind, so I’m happy that he’s up and running in his race. I’m glad he’s in his race.How would you grade him on climate policy?I’ve never liked grades because I always thought it was a bit presumptuous, but I can just tell you I was so delighted at him pulling a rabbit out of the hat to get the Inflation Reduction Act through. Its prospects were so dim. And for him to get that $360 billion in clean energy investment is so pivotal for us to have even a fighting chance to deal with climate.I just came from an unveiling of the world’s largest commercial hydrogen fuel cell plane that represents a potential for sustainable aviation. Last week, I signed a permit for a solar farm in Yakima County. These are the things that his accomplishment is going to accelerate, and I could not be more excited about that. So, you know, there’s always things on siting and permitting that are contentious.You mentioned the siting and permitting. I take it you’re referring to his approving the Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. I imagine you don’t agree with his decisions on that front.I don’t, but he won the presidency, and I did not. So we should point that out.What’s your level of interest in serving in his administration at some point?It isn’t something I’ve thought about. I really am so focused on the next 20 months. I think he’s done a real crackerjack job as president. I’m glad he’s running. I feel good about him winning the next election. I just haven’t thought about what happens after this term of office, except it’s going to be involved in something that will push the climate agenda and the clean energy economic development. I’ll find some way to be productive in that realm.It sounds like you’d listen if the president were to call and talk to you about something.Of course I would listen, but it’s just not something that’s on my agenda to consider at the moment.We talked a lot when you were running for president about the urgency of the climate moment. Do you think the country and the planet are beyond a state of no return?One of the most important things we need to do at this moment is to establish a sense of optimism and confidence in what you might call a can-do attitude when it comes to the development of clean energy. It is necessary to keep people from the despair, which leads to inactivity and passivity. And the antidote for despair is action. It is also just healthy for us from a mental health standpoint.The rate of change is so dramatic that it legitimately should give us optimism in our ability to transform this economy much faster than we believe. In 2007, I said we’re going to be driving electric cars. People thought I was smoking the cheap stuff. Well, now we’re buying them so fast that production can’t even keep up.Obviously, we are going to be suffering some changes that to some degree are baked into the climatic system. But we don’t need to focus on despair, we need to focus on action and a can-do spirit. More

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      Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, Climate Champion, Won’t Seek Re-Election

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      Mr. Inslee, 72, a former presidential candidate and a leading Democratic proponent of policies to slow climate change, said he would not seek a fourth term.Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State, the nation’s longest-serving current governor and one of the Democratic Party’s leading climate defenders, will not seek a fourth term in office next year, he announced on Monday.“Serving the people as governor of Washington State has been my greatest honor,” he said. “During a decade of dynamic change, we’ve made Washington a beacon for progress for the nation. I’m ready to pass the torch.”Mr. Inslee, 72, who before becoming governor was elected to Congress eight times, ran for his party’s 2020 presidential nomination on a platform of sharply reducing the country’s reliance on fossil fuels. He dropped out of the race in August 2019 when it became clear he would not meet the Democratic National Committee’s threshold to appear in presidential debates.During President Donald J. Trump’s years in office, Mr. Inslee placed himself on the vanguard of the Democratic opposition to Mr. Trump’s policies. Mr. Inslee and the Washington State attorney general, Bob Ferguson, filed a series of lawsuits against Mr. Trump’s administration, challenging policies on its ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries, its separation of migrant children from their parents and its unwinding of climate regulations.Mr. Ferguson, who has long had eyes on succeeding Mr. Inslee, is now considered one of the front-runners in an open-seat race to replace him at the helm of a solidly Democratic state. Though in 2012 Mr. Inslee won his first election for governor by just three percentage points, by 2020 he carried the state by more than 13 points. More

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      Senator Ben Cardin Won’t Seek Re-election in Maryland

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      His retirement is likely to draw a number of Democrats and Republicans to compete for the seat.Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, a long-serving Democrat, announced his retirement on Monday, clearing the way for highly competitive primaries to replace him in 2024, especially among Democrats in a deep-blue state.Maryland’s liberal-leaning voters have not sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate since 1980, and the eight-member congressional delegation includes just one member of the G.O.P.“I have run my last election and will not be on the ballot in 2024, but there is still much work to be done,” Mr. Cardin, 79, said in a statement. “During the next two years, I will continue to travel around the state, listening to Marylanders and responding to their needs.”High-profile Maryland Democrats who could be in the mix to replace Mr. Cardin include Representatives Jamie Raskin and David Trone, and Angela Alsobrooks, the executive of Prince George’s County.On the Republican side, there is already speculation about whether Larry Hogan, a popular former governor who in March said he would not run for president, will make a bid.In an interview, Mr. Cardin declined to endorse a successor, but he said he was confident Democrats would hold the seat. His election to the Senate in 2006 made him the third straight representative from Maryland’s Third Congressional District to join the chamber. The House seat is now held by John Sarbanes, a son of Paul Sarbanes, the senator who preceded Mr. Cardin.Mr. Cardin was named last month by Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, to serve on the Judiciary Committee as a temporary replacement for Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who is on leave recovering from shingles, but Republicans have blocked the move. Without her vote, Democrats have been unable to advance stalled judicial nominations.In a video announcing his retirement that he recorded with his wife, Myrna Cardin, Mr. Cardin touched on highlights of a career that includes enacting the Magnitsky sanctions, international penalties aimed at violators of human rights, and environmental protections for Chesapeake Bay.Much of his motivation through his 58 years in elected office, Mr. Cardin said in the video, “comes back to tzedakah, part of our tradition as Jews to help those that are less fortunate.”Mr. Cardin, who was speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates before being elected to Congress, said in the interview on Monday that he hopes to focus his final two years in the Senate on helping small businesses. More

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      This Is Why Politicians Like to Change the Subject

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. You know I’m no fan of Kevin McCarthy’s. But the House speaker did succeed in getting a bill through Congress with a debt-ceiling increase, and now the Biden administration needs 60 votes in the Senate — meaning 51 Democrats and independents plus 9 Republicans — to get the limit increase to the president’s desk for a signature.So, shouldn’t Joe, you know, negotiate?Gail Collins: Bret, with your strong feelings about fiscal responsibility, you of all people should be offended by McCarthy’s ploy. The debt ceiling needs to be raised in order to avoid an unprecedented, messy, horrible moment when the country’s credit goes bad and economic collapse spreads around the globe.Everybody knows that has to be done. But McCarthy now wants to use it as a hostage — attaching his wish list of spending cuts (weaken the I.R.S.!) and prosecuting the G.O.P. war on environmentalism.Bret: I don’t think anyone wants Uncle Sam to default on his debts — except, well, the nuttier Republicans who hold the balance of power in the House. McCarthy had to pass a bill that could garner their support. That’s just political reality, and we can’t wish it away.Gail: President Biden’s right, though. We have to go ahead and do the thing we have to do. It’s the government equivalent of paying the mortgage. Then we can fight about regular spending, like a family debating whether to get a second car.Bret: Biden’s budget request was the largest in history — $6.8 trillion — which is far more than the $3.7 trillion President Barack Obama asked for just 10 years ago. Is that the right thing to do? We’ve got a federal debt that surpasses $30 trillion. Democrats show little interest in fiscal restraint, but they have maximum appetite for tax increases they know all Republicans will oppose. So of course the G.O.P. is going to play hardball. It’s not much different from the mid-1980s, when Biden, as a senator, linked his own support for an increase in the debt ceiling with a freeze on federal spending.But here’s a question, Gail: Let’s say you got your way and Republicans magically agreed to a “clean” raising of the debt ceiling. What sort of spending cuts would you endorse?Gail: Bret, as you know, my top priority for fixing government finances is to get the rich to pay their fair share of Social Security taxes.Bret: Don’t usually think of a tax increase as a spending cut, but go on.Gail: Right now, the Social Security tax cap is so low that anybody who’s made a million dollars or more this year has already maxed out. You and I are getting taxed right now, but Elon Musk isn’t.Bret: Give the guy a break: He’s been busy blowing up rockets, launchpads, Twitter, the S.E.C., not to mention his reputation ….Gail: On the spending-cut side, while I concede we’ll inevitably spend a ton on defense, there are plenty of obvious saving targets. For instance, military bases that exist only because some powerful House or Senate member is defending them.Bret: If it were up to me, I’d do away with nearly all agriculture subsidies, starting with biofuels, which are environmentally destructive and contribute to global food scarcity by diverting corn and sugar and soybean fields for fuel production. I’d get rid of the Department of Education, which was not Jimmy Carter’s best idea and which has presided over 43 years of persistent and worsening educational failure in this country. I’d eliminate the National Flood Insurance Program; we are encouraging people to build irresponsibly in the face of climate change.Gail: Want to jump in and agree about the flood insurance. But go on …Bret: I’d stop subsidizing rich people who want to buy Teslas. Electric vehicles can compete in the market on their own merits. I’d terminate the Space Force; the Air Force was doing just fine before Donald Trump decided to add another layer of Pentagon bureaucracy. I’d claw back unspent Covid funds. The pandemic is over; we’ve spent enough. I’d … I’m really getting into this, aren’t I?Gail: I’m with you on Covid funds and the Space Force. But we do need to encourage the production and sale of electric vehicles. If we have to spend money to push back on global warming, so be it.Bret: Switching gears, Gail, our colleague Tom Friedman wrote a powerful column last week making the case that Biden needs to think hard about the wisdom of keeping Kamala Harris on the ticket. I gather you think that ship has already sailed?Gail: Tom is a great columnist and great friend — he once took me on a tour of Israel and the West Bank that was one of the most enlightening weeks of my life.Bret: Oy vey!Gail: And a year or two ago, I would definitely have agreed with him about Harris. But I’ve come around to believing that she’s grown in the job despite being saddled with a lousy agenda early on. (Kamala, would you please go solve the Mexican border situation?) Lately she’s been the administration’s fierce advocate for abortion rights.Practical bottom line — you have here a Black woman who’s been, at minimum, a perfectly adequate vice president. I just can’t see any way Biden could toss her off the ticket. Even if there’s a good chance at his age that he’ll die in office. Which is, of course, not a train of thought he wants to take us on.Your opinion?Bret: Remember all those independents who might have voted for John McCain in 2008 save for Sarah Palin? Well, Kamala Harris is gonna be another deal breaker for some of those same independents.Gail: One of the happier factoids of the world today is that a huge proportion of it has forgotten who Sarah Palin even is. What’s worse than being both terrible and forgettable?But go on about Kamala …Bret: Her approval rating is the lowest for any vice president in the last 30 years at this point in the administration — and that includes Mike Pence and Dick Cheney. It’s an open secret in Washington that she runs the most dysfunctional office of any major office holder. Nobody thought she’d “solve” the Mexican border situation, but it would have been nice if she showed a basic command of facts. Because of Biden’s age, the chances of her taking the top job are substantial, and many voters will judge the Biden-Harris ticket on how confident they feel about Harris. How would I feel about President Harris dealing with a nuclear crisis in Korea or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or another global financial crisis? Not good.Democrats need to get over their fear of offending her. There are plenty of qualified replacements.Gail: We used to be in agreement here, but I do think she’s grown in the job. And when it comes to being terrified about somebody dealing with a nuclear crisis — how would you feel about, say, Ron DeSantis? Or of course Donald Trump?Bret: You’re sort of making my point. If you think, as Tom and I do, that she’s a major political liability for Biden, it’s that much more of an incentive to get a stronger running mate. Surely the U.N. secretary general can be cajoled into early retirement so Harris can get an office with a nice view of the East River?Gail: You just brought me back to an old fantasy about finding a job for Biden so great it would tempt him to leave office after one term. Guess secretary general wouldn’t do it. But I do keep wishing he’d announced last week that he wasn’t running again. He has plenty of major accomplishments to point to, and the nation would have a good long time to watch and appraise the many promising Democratic candidates to replace him. Including his vice president.Bret: Frank Bruni was really on the money on this subject: There really is no better job than the presidency. The perks, the pomp and the power are all irresistible, particularly to guys like Biden who have been chasing the office their whole adult lives and now finally have it. We were fools to imagine he might be tempted not to run again — even though he’s tempting fate, and second terms rarely exceed the quality of first terms.Gail: OK, Bret — that’s enough politics for today. Always count on you to finish with something more profound.Bret: One of the delights of our conversation, Gail, is being able to point our readers toward some of the very best work of our colleagues. This week, they really shouldn’t miss Mike Baker’s beautifully written, heartbreaking story about Craig Coyner, a brilliant public defender who served as mayor of Bend, Ore., in the 1980s — only to die there earlier this year as a homeless man, broken by mental illness.We all need stories that uplift us. But we also need those that remind us of the adage that “there but for the grace of God go I.” May Coyner’s memory be for a blessing.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