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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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      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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      Democrats and the 2022 Midterms: ‘It’s Going to Be a Terrible Cycle’

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      Strategists and pollsters are increasingly talking about limiting the party’s expected losses in November rather than how to gain new seats.The collective mood of Democratic insiders has darkened appreciably in recent weeks.Pollsters and prognosticators are forecasting increasingly dire results for their party in the November midterm elections. Inflation, the No. 1 issue on the minds of voters, is accelerating. And despite a booming job market, the president’s average approval rating hasn’t budged since January, when it settled into the low 40s.“Are you calling to ask me about our impending doom?” one Democratic strategist quipped at the outset of a recent phone call.“The vibes just feel very off,” said Tré Easton, a progressive consultant.Others use words like “horrible” and “debacle” to describe a political environment that has gone from bad to worse over the last three months. Many fault the White House for steering President Biden too far to the left as he sought to pass social spending legislation stuffed with progressive priorities. Some see the president as a wounded figure who has failed to establish himself as the unequivocal leader of his fractious party.“It’s going to be a terrible cycle for Democrats,” said Doug Sosnik, a former political adviser to Bill Clinton. Democrats have only a matter of weeks, he said, to try to alter the contours of a race that will largely be determined by factors beyond their control.One sign of the alarm rippling through the party: Some Democratic politicians have begun creating distance between themselves and the president. Senate candidates are stampeding to break with the administration’s immigration policies, for instance. Other moves are more subtle, such as those of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who quietly removed the president’s name from news releases about federally funded infrastructure projects.“What you’re seeing is people feeling like it’s time to head for the lifeboats rather than trying to steer the ship,” said Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary who worked under Barack Obama.A sense of fatalism is setting in among many, with discussions centering increasingly on how to limit the party’s expected losses rather than how to gain new seats. In Arizona, for example, some Democrats are losing confidence that they will be able to flip the State House, a major target for national party strategists this year.“We have to be cognizant and realistic about where and how we can win,” said Chad Campbell, a former state lawmaker and Democratic consultant in Phoenix. He added that it was more important for Democrats to position themselves for 2024.“Most of this is baked,” said Dmitri Mehlhorn, the confidant of a number of Democratic megadonors, referring to the historical pattern of the president’s party losing seats in the midterms.Not everyone is so pessimistic. But for those charged with solving the Democrats’ midterms conundrum, the question, increasingly, is: How many seats can they save? Control of the Senate is deadlocked at 50-50, and Democrats are clinging to a five-seat majority in the House. Few Democratic strategists expect to keep the House, but many remain hopeful about the Senate, where there’s far more room for candidates to burnish their own independent brands.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.When Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank, recently reviewed past midterms for a presentation to Democratic strategists and Hill Democrats, he found that the party in power typically lost around 10 percentage points during off-cycle elections.That suggested two main takeaways, he said. First, the Democratic Party’s current struggles are utterly ordinary by historical standards. And second, even candidates in safely blue political areas need to brace themselves for difficult campaigns.“If you’re a district that is Biden plus 12 or less” — meaning the president won the House district in question by that many percentage points in 2020 — “you need to run like you’re losing,” Kessler said.Wealthy donors in Silicon Valley are turning their attention to offices they have traditionally ignored: attorneys general, governors and secretaries of state in parts of the country that could prove decisive to the outcome of the presidential election in 2024.In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania, Republican candidates aligned with Donald Trump have disputed the 2020 election results, promoting dubious “audits” and conspiracy theories about voting machines. The widespread fear among donors is that, if those Trump allies are elected, they will find illegitimate ways to ensure his return to power in 2024.With Democrats’ prospects in Washington looking dim, Mehlhorn is advising donors to look for opportunities to forestall and disrupt full Republican control in those states.“Frankly,” he said, “the most important thing is to preserve the ability to have elections in the future.”‘You don’t have to outswim the shark’Democrats are still weighing, too, how much to emphasize their accomplishments versus how much to sharpen their points of contrast with Republicans.The White House has positioned President Biden as fighting to lower costs for Americans, holding events outside of Washington with vulnerable incumbents such as Representative Cindy Axne of Iowa. On these trips to tout his legislative program, he has invited lawmakers into the conference room on Air Force One to hear their concerns and help him hone his speeches to better reflect local input.But the president has expressed frustration at times that his administration isn’t getting enough credit for taming the coronavirus pandemic, resuscitating the economy and passing funding for infrastructure.“We have done one hell of a job, but the fact is that because things have moved so rapidly, so profoundly, it’s hard for people,” to appreciate Biden said on Thursday at a fund-raising event for the Democratic National Committee in Portland, Oregon, before rattling off a list of favorable statistics about the economy.One challenge for a White House that was slow to recognize the public’s growing anger over rising consumer prices is how to balance such boasts while also empathizing with voters’ anxieties about their personal finances.Inflation, a top voter concern, is reflected in higher gas prices.Gabby Jones for The New York Times“The difference about heading into 2022 is that we have tangible projects that have been accomplished because Democrats were able to get that done,” said Martha McKenna, a Democratic consultant who previously worked for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.McKenna said it was important to convey a double-barreled contrast message: that while Democrats are trying to solve working families’ most pressing problems, Republicans are focusing on distractions — be it feuding over Trump’s false claims of a stolen election or attempting to ban school textbooks.Democrats have made gleeful use of an 11-point plan pushed by Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who chairs the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm. Scott’s plan, which has irritated many of his fellow Republican senators, calls for subjecting all Americans to income taxes and proposes tinkering with government entitlement programs, such as Social Security and Medicare.Around Tax Day, for instance, the Democratic National Committee purchased Google text ads pointing late-filing Americans toward an ungenerous interpretation of Scott’s plan, which Democrats insists represents the Republican Party’s true policy agenda.But more drastic measures might be needed if Democrats are going to turn the fall elections into a choice between the two parties rather than a referendum on Biden, others argue.Gibbs is urging his fellow Democrats to pick a few issues that are important to voters, such as lowering prices for prescription drugs or insulin, and launch a disciplined, party-wide effort to blame Republicans for standing in the way.“It’s got to be a more coordinated fight than a presidential tweet,” Gibbs said.There’s an analogy some Democrats are drawn to that speaks to their need to shift the race into a head-to-head contest.In the first season of the HBO show “Billions,” a fictional hedge fund chief named Bobby Axelrod is confronting the threat of federal prosecution over his illegal trading practices. He decides his best bet is to distract the government by leaking damaging information about an easier target: a rival financier.As they draw up the plan, Axelrod’s shadowy fixer, a man known only as Hall, tells him: “Remember, you don’t have to outswim the shark. You just have to outswim the guy you’re scuba diving with.”What to readKatie Glueck examines how Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida’s fight with Disney signals an escalation of the Republican Party’s brawl with the business community.At an administrative law hearing in Atlanta on Friday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia spouted debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election but denied that her support for the Jan. 6 protests made her an “insurrectionist,” Jonathan Weisman and Neil Vigdor report.Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House’s top Republican, spent much of Friday containing the political fallout after The New York Times revealed his private criticism of Trump after Jan. 6, Annie Karni reports.ViewfinderSarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesA weather-beaten receiving lineOn Politics regularly features work by Times photographers. Here’s what Sarahbeth Maney told us about capturing the image above on Tuesday:On our way to New Hampshire, we had a bit of a bumpy ride. When we stepped outside, we were met with gusty winds so strong that I struggled to keep my balance.I shielded myself behind some print and TV reporters as we waited for President Biden to exit from Air Force One. I crouched low and noticed an interesting pattern in the way local officials stood in a line, all with a similar pose of locked hands.Everyone was ready to rush into a warm place, but the president appears unfazed by the weather.Thanks for reading. We’ll see you Monday.— Blake (Leah is on vacation)Is 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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      N.Y. House Districts Illegally Favor Democrats, Appeals Court Rules

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      A divided five-judge panel found that Democrats engaged in gerrymandering in creating new district maps. The case is expected to head to New York’s highest court.A New York appeals court ruled on Thursday that new congressional districts drawn by Democrats violated the state’s ban on partisan gerrymandering, partially upholding a lower-court ruling that would block the state from using the lines in this year’s critical midterm elections.A divided five-judge panel in Rochester said Democratic legislative leaders had drawn the new House map “to discourage competition and favor Democrats,” knowingly ignoring the will of voters who recently approved a constitutional amendment outlawing the practice.“We are satisfied that petitioners established beyond a reasonable doubt that the Legislature acted with partisan intent,” a three-judge majority wrote in its opinion. Two judges dissented.Gov. Kathy Hochul and top legislative leaders are expected to immediately appeal the decision to the state’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals. The judges there, all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors, have indicated they could render a final verdict as soon as next week.The outcome in New York will have significant implications in the broader fight for control of the House of Representatives. National Democratic leaders are counting on the maps their party drew in New York to help offset gains by Republicans.Without them, Democrats are at risk of emerging from this year’s redistricting cycle having been bested by Republicans for the second consecutive decade. Republican gains were on track to grow further after Florida lawmakers this week approved a map drawn by Gov. Ron DeSantis that would create four new Republican-friendly seats.The ruling was the second consecutive setback for New York’s Democratic mapmakers, and this time it came in an appellate court that was viewed as generally friendly to the party.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.“Like other state courts around the country, New York courts aren’t finding the question of whether a map is a partisan gerrymander a particularly hard one to decide,” said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It’s very hard to defend a map like New York’s, and ultimately if it quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.”Still, Mr. Li added, Thursday’s decision was only the second of three acts in New York’s redistricting legal drama.On Thursday, the judges from the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court ordered the Democrat-led Legislature to promptly redraft the map by April 30 or leave the task to a court-appointed neutral expert. The judges were largely silent on another key question at stake: whether some of the primaries scheduled for June should be postponed until August to accommodate new districts.The congressional lines in question, adopted by Democratic supermajorities in the Legislature in February, would give Democrats a clear advantage in 22 of the state’s 26 congressional districts by shifting voters favorable to their party into redrawn seats on Long Island and Staten Island and in Central New York, and packing Republicans in a smaller number of districts. Republicans currently hold eight districts on a map that was drawn by a court-appointed special master in 2012.State leaders did emerge with some good news from the latest ruling. The panel rejected more sweeping parts of the decision by the lower-court judge, Patrick F. McAllister of Steuben County, that held that lawmakers lacked the authority to draw any maps at all after New York’s newly created redistricting commission failed to agree on a plan for the state.As a result, the appeals court ruling reinstated State Senate and Assembly maps that Justice McAllister had thrown out.Mike Murphy, a spokesman for Senate Democrats, said they were “pleased” that the appeals court had validated the Legislature’s right to draw the maps this year, and predicted the higher court would reinstate the congressional maps as well.“We always knew this case would end at the Court of Appeals and look forward to being heard on our appeal to uphold the congressional map as well,” he said.John Faso, a spokesman for the Republican-backed voters challenging the maps, said that they would file their own appeal to try to strike the state legislative maps. But he called Thursday’s decision a “great victory.”The broader legal dispute turns on two interlocking questions: whether the mapmaking process properly adhered to procedures laid out in a 2014 amendment to the State Constitution, and whether the maps themselves violated an accompanying ban on drawing districts for partisan gain.The procedural changes made in 2014 were designed to remove the line-drawing process from the hands of politicians by creating an outside commission to solicit public input and forge a bipartisan proposal for House, State Senate and Assembly districts. If the commission had reached agreement, the Legislature’s role would have been to ratify the maps.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Sarah Morgenthau’s Tricky House Race in Rhode Island

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      Running for office in a state where you haven’t lived is a delicate art.When Sarah Morgenthau entered the race for the open congressional seat in Rhode Island, she had to answer an age-old question in American politics: Are you really from here?She isn’t the only one.Mehmet Oz, a leading Republican candidate for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat, grew up in Wilmington, Del., and has lived for many years in New Jersey. A mere two years before running, Oz invited People magazine for a photo shoot inside his 9,000-square-foot mansion overlooking the Manhattan skyline. He has since claimed his in-laws’ house in the Philadelphia suburbs as his residence, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.Other out-of-state candidates — like David McCormick, Oz’s chief Republican rival in Pennsylvania, as well as Herschel Walker in Georgia — have faced similar scrutiny this year.Morgenthau, a lawyer who left a top Commerce Department job to run for office as a Democrat, does have ties to Rhode Island. Although she grew up in Boston and New York, she notes in a video announcing her candidacy that she married her husband in the backyard of the Morgenthau family’s summer home in Saunderstown, a village north of Narragansett. “While work has pulled us elsewhere, Rhode Island is the place that has remained constant in all of our lives,” she says.On paper, Morgenthau is an impressive candidate.She has an impressive résumé: degrees from Barnard College and Columbia Law School, and stints at senior levels in the Peace Corps, the Department of Homeland Security and at Nardello & Company, a private security and investigations firm.And an impressive family: Her mother, Ruth, was a scholar of international politics and an adviser to President Jimmy Carter. In 1988, Ruth Morgenthau ran for office in Rhode Island as a Democrat, losing to Representative Claudine Schneider, a Republican.Sarah Morgenthau’s uncle was Robert Morgenthau, the famed longtime district attorney for Manhattan. Her grandfather Henry Morgenthau Jr. was President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the Treasury. Henry Morgenthau Sr., her great-grandfather, documented the Armenian genocide as the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I.That family connection led Sarah Morgenthau to push the Biden administration to recognize the Armenian genocide, an initiative that won her a laudatory write-up by Politico in April 2021.“She was national co-chair of Lawyers for Biden, a prolific fund-raiser and a volunteer on national security policy groups for the campaign,” Politico reported. “She served as a surrogate who was frequently quoted in national publications about the trajectory of the race or the temperature of donors.”None of it might matter if Morgenthau can’t answer that question — Are you really from here? — to the satisfaction of Rhode Island voters.A tight-knit political cultureMorgenthau has much to prove in the months before the Democratic primary election on Sept. 13.She’ll have to overcome the local favorite in the race, Seth Magaziner, who is the state’s general treasurer. He has already secured the backing of several major unions, and has so far outraised the rest of the field. More than 95 percent of Morgenthau’s campaign donations have come from out of state, The Boston Globe has noted, versus 27 percent of Magaziner’s.Rhode Island’s political culture is famously insular and suspicious of perceived outsiders — so much so that Brett Smiley, a candidate for mayor of Providence who has lived in Rhode Island for 16 years, began his campaign kickoff speech last month by nodding to the fact that he grew up in Chicago. “Like more and more people, I chose Providence,” Smiley said. “I have lived and worked elsewhere and know that what we have here is special.”It’s common in the state to see bumper stickers that say, “I Never Leave Rhode Island.” The fight song of the University of Rhode Island begins, “We’re Rhode Island born and we’re Rhode Island bred, and when we die we’ll be Rhode Island dead!”“People are very rooted in their communities,” said Rich Luchette, a longtime aide to Representative David Cicilline, who represents the state’s other congressional district. “There’s a resistance to change of any kind.”Little wonder, then, that Morgenthau has faced incessant questions about her Rhode Island credentials from the local news media.When The Providence Journal asked candidates in the race to answer a series of trivia questions about Rhode Island, Morgenthau gave an answer that was nearly identical to a Wikipedia entry — and the newspaper called her out for it.Then came a brutal encounter early this month with a local television anchor, Kim Kalunian, who asked if Morgenthau had ever lived in the state for an entire year or enrolled her children in school there.“I have been paying property taxes in the Second District for 40 years,” Morgenthau replied, though she conceded that the answer to both questions was no.A clip of the exchange rocketed around Rhode Island’s tightly knit Democratic political class, which is nervously watching the race to succeed Representative Jim Langevin, who is retiring. While Langevin won re-election relatively easily in 2020, some Democrats fear that in a weak year for their party, a candidate lacking local ties could help hand the seat to Republicans.“Being out of state isn’t necessarily fatal,” said Joe Caiazzo, a Democratic consultant who ran Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the state in 2016. “I think the way it’s being handled is fatal, because it highlights the lack of local connectivity, which is so important in Rhode Island.”Morgenthau is well aware of the skepticism. In an interview, she emphasized her “extensive experience in Washington” and described herself as someone who “will go through a brick wall if I need to get things done.”She also spoke about a “commitment to public service that has been instilled in me since I was a young girl at the kitchen table,” a theme she has highlighted while campaigning.“When people meet me,” she said, “they’re going to see someone who’s a problem solver, who has Rhode Island’s back.”Hillary Clinton with Yankees players on the South Lawn of the White House shortly before declaring her candidacy for Senate in New York.Paul Hosefros/The New York TimesEmpire state of mindThere is a successful playbook for running as a carpetbagger — and it was drawn up by none other than Hillary Clinton.In 2000, Clinton took a gamble by running for Senate in New York despite never having held elective office, growing up in Illinois and living for many years in Arkansas while her husband was governor. She had some major advantages: universal name recognition as first lady, an overwhelmingly Democratic electorate and a lackluster opponent in Rick Lazio, the Republican candidate.But Clinton had never lived in New York, and she knew her lack of roots in the state would be a problem. Her solution, the brainchild of the pollster Mark Penn, was a “listening tour” of New York’s 62 counties during the summer of 1999, as she weighed an official run.On several occasions, with the help of local Democratic Party officials, Clinton even stayed overnight in the homes of complete strangers, where she was known to pitch in on household chores.The listening tour did not always go well. During a visit to an electronics plant outside Binghamton, protesters held signs that said “Hillary Go Home” and “Hillary: Go Back to Arkansas, You Carpetbagger.” Clinton, reportedly a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, was also pilloried for doffing a Yankees cap when the team came to the White House to celebrate its World Series win.Lazio tried hard to capitalize on the issue; an account of his campaign rollout in Time magazine said that he “flashed his New York pedigree almost as often as his teeth.”Clinton’s rejoinder was to emphasize her familiarity with subjects important to New Yorkers, and to outwork Lazio. “I may be new to the neighborhood,” she said during her announcement speech, “but I’m not new to your concerns.”She also hired a team of experienced New York operatives, led by Howard Wolfson and Bill de Blasio, to help her navigate Manhattan’s vicious tabloid press.But it was the upstate listening tour, much mocked at the time, that ultimately allowed her to shrug off the accusations of carpetbagging.“We purposely designed the events to be small groups, to listen to what people were worried about,” recalled Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s campaign manager. “She said very little and took a lot of notes.”The events were so devoid of drama that eventually, they lulled the press to sleep, Solis Doyle said.“By the end,” she said, “they were bored to tears.”What to readRepublican Party leaders privately condemned Donald Trump after Jan. 6 and vowed to drive him from politics, Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns reveal in an exclusive excerpt from their forthcoming book. But their opposition faded quickly.Florida stands poised to revoke Disney World’s longtime designation as a special tax district, as Republicans moved swiftly to punish the company for its opposition to a new education law that opponents call “Don’t Say Gay.”It’s Republicans, not Democrats, who are talking about the supposed failings of American democracy on the campaign trail, Reid Epstein and Jonathan Weisman write.David Fahrenthold and Keri Blakinger take a look inside Crime Stoppers of Houston, a traditionally nonprofit institution that has become a mouthpiece for conservative talking points on crime.— 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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      Will Alaskans Welcome Sarah Palin’s Political Comeback?

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      Charles Homans, a New York Times reporter who lived in Alaska during Palin’s ascent, reflects on the state’s astonishing political transformation.Greetings from your host Blake Hounshell. Leah Askarinam is off today. We’re joined tonight by our colleague Charles Homans, who writes about Sarah Palin and Alaska’s changing politics.A decade ago, I caught a ride in a pickup truck on the outskirts of Nome, Alaska, with Bob Hafner, a burly, tattooed gold dredger.I was working on an article about the boom in reality TV shows celebrating rugged blue-collar jobs, which seemed to be in production in every corner of America’s most rugged state. As Hafner’s truck bounced along the rutted coast road, I asked what he made of it.He laughed, a little ruefully. “I’m probably partly responsible for it,” he said. “Me and my diving partner, we did that Sarah Palin show.”“Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” produced by Mark Burnett, had recently run for nine episodes on TLC. Palin was filmed communing with enough commercial fishermen, loggers and bush pilots that the odds of randomly encountering one of them on the road in Nome were probably pretty good.Later I watched the Nome episode, and sure enough: There was Hafner standing alongside Palin as she admired a gold nugget the size of a fingernail that he and Palin’s brother, Chuck, had sucked up from the seafloor. “That’s neat!” the former governor said.There was a note of desperation in this strenuous on-screen Alaska-ing, and in Palin’s voice-over declaration during the opening montage that “I love this state like I love my family.”Four years after the 2008 presidential election and three years after her resignation as governor, the waterfront tourist shops in Valdez hawked “Bailin’ Palin” T-shirts. Only 36 percent of Alaskans viewed her positively, and 61 percent viewed her negatively.Ivan Moore, a pollster in Anchorage, recalls that when he asked people who viewed her negatively why they felt that way, “the most common response, streaks ahead of the rest, was: ‘She quit. She’s a quitter.’”Return from the wildernessThe governor’s relationship with her state changed forever with her resignation, which seemed to represent the exchange of Sarah Palin’s Alaska for “Sarah Palin’s Alaska”: a place for a personal brand.Aside from backing an ultimately unsuccessful challenger to Senator Lisa Murkowski in 2010 (and the same candidate four years later, in the race for the state’s other Senate seat), she was mostly a nonparticipant in Alaska’s affairs. Her political ambitions seemed entirely national, though even these appeared to flag quickly.Her 2012 presidential campaign ended before it began. Her political action committee still took in millions of dollars, but spent a tiny fraction of the money on candidates or independent expenditures. Her most prominent return to the arena, in 2016, was a stemwinder in service of a politician who would all but supplant her role within the Republican Party. In recent years, she had been in the news most often on account of her libel lawsuit against The New York Times. A jury rejected her claims in February.So it was a surprise when Palin emerged from a decade in the cable-talking-head wilderness to hint at and, on April 1, announce her candidacy for Alaska’s lone House seat, which had opened up with Don Young’s death in March.It was more surprising still to see Palin give a lengthy interview to Nathaniel Herz of The Anchorage Daily News, in which she excoriated the “establishment machine” that would oppose her.“They have a loud voice,” she told Herz. “They hold purse strings. They have the media’s ear. But they do not necessarily reflect the will of the people.”An Arctic political machineRepublican candidates today frequently denounce a greatly weakened party “establishment,” but the line is more jarring coming from Palin, who in 2006 did fight and beat one of the country’s most entrenched and clubby state-level Republican establishments.It is a story that has long since grown threadbare from Palin’s own retelling, but if you lived in Alaska, as I did, at the time of Palin’s primary election victory over the incumbent and Alaskan institution Frank Murkowski, it was a genuinely astonishing moment of political transformation.Alaska in 2006 still possessed something resembling a political machine, which cannily husbanded the state’s all-important relationships with the oil and gas industry and the federal government.Alaskans did not always love the stalwarts of this mostly Republican machine, but they understood that deposing them would potentially cost the state a great deal, so they kept electing them. Probably only someone like Palin, with her messianic conviction, had a shot at toppling it.The F.B.I. helped, too, of course, mounting a yearslong investigation of more than half a dozen lawmakers suspected of having taken bribes from the VECO Corporation, an oil-field contractor, that happened to come to a head shortly after Palin’s primary triumph.Today, Alaskan Republican politics don’t much resemble the hierarchy that Palin tilted against 16 years ago. They look, for better or worse, a lot more like Republican politics everywhere else.Sarah Palin in New York this winter.Jefferson Siegel for The New York TimesA 48-candidate ballotMany influential G.O.P. figures in Alaska remain cool to Palin, but over more prosaic matters, like her relative lack of involvement locally over her years as a national celebrity.“Most serious Republican figures in Alaska, their question is, ‘Where have you been?’” said Suzanne Downing, a former speechwriter for Palin’s lieutenant and successor as governor, Sean Parnell. Downing, who now edits the right-leaning Must Read Alaska blog, added, “She hasn’t lifted a finger for Alaska since she left office.”Palin’s campaign did not respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment. In an interview with The Associated Press this week, Palin objected to the suggestion that she had left the state behind.“I’m sorry if that narrative is out there, because it’s inaccurate,” she told The A.P., offering by way of bona fides the fact that she had recently been “shoveling moose poop” in her father’s yard.Early this month, Downing commissioned a poll of the comically large field for the June primary — the ballot for which, with its 48 candidates, looks like a page from a phone book. She concedes to having been shocked when Palin came out in the lead at 31 percent: five percentage points ahead of her nearest rival, Al Gross, an independent who has in past races been endorsed by the state Democratic Party.And yet when the pollster asked about respondents’ favorable or unfavorable views of Palin, the numbers — 37 percent to 51 percent — were not much changed from when Ivan Moore asked the same question a decade ago. In fact, Moore told me that Palin’s numbers had not moved appreciably in intermittent polls over the intervening years.This is unusual: For ordinary politicians, favorability and unfavorability tend to soften as time passes and headlines fade. It’s possible — Moore thinks this — that the longer half-life of Palin’s numbers reflects the depth of the betrayal Alaskans still feel about her resignation.But her most recent national polling — admittedly nine years old — shows an almost identical breakdown of favorable and unfavorable responses. Which raises another possibility: that Palin’s political celebrity is so all-devouring and all-polarizing that even Alaskans, with their very particular history with Palin, can’t see past it.Can a much-changed state still surprise?Downing brought up another possible explanation. Alaska, she reminded me, is extraordinarily transient: 12.8 percent of the population turns over in an average year, more than in any other state. Many of the Alaskans taking the measure of Palin today were not Alaskans when she was in office.They are, in other words, less familiar with Sarah Palin’s Alaska than with “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” One was a place of heady transformation. The other was a veneer of local particularity, stretched over the same national politics that seemed to offer few potential surprises, only deepening entrenchment.“I don’t know,” Downing said, “if she can get a single voter that she doesn’t already own.”What to readThe Florida Senate passed a congressional map proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, which would give Republicans an even greater advantage in the state.Herschel Walker, a Republican contender for Senate in Georgia, is a risky candidate for the G.O.P. to run, but he has nevertheless surged to the top of the field, our colleague Maya King reports.Barack Obama, who has waded more and more into the public fray over misinformation and disinformation, is expected to give a speech on the subject at Stanford University on Thursday.briefing bookDisney World’s Main Street, U.S.A., under construction in 1970.Associated PressHow Disney got its own state-within-a-stateWhen Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida urged lawmakers this week to consider ending Disney’s special administrative status, he wasn’t just escalating his cultural standoff with his state’s largest employer.He was also pulling on a string that threatened to unravel an arrangement the state made with Disney in 1967 that granted the company extraordinary power over a 39-square-mile patch of former swampland in Central Florida — an unusual experiment in local governance that has few American counterparts.Disney runs everything from the fire department and emergency services to electricity, gas, water and wastewater, subject to the supervision of a five-member board dominated by the company. It decides what is built, and how, and has the power to raise bonds and assess taxes. The charter for the special municipality, the Reedy Creek Improvement District, even allows Disney to build and operate an airport or a power plant using “nuclear fission” if it so chooses.“It’s almost like a sovereign state inside another state,” said Aaron Goldberg, the author of a book on the origins of Disney World, the company’s Florida resort. Others have called it a “Vatican with mouse ears.”At the time of the district’s creation, the brothers Walt and Roy Disney were searching for the ideal site for the successor resort to Disneyland, their California theme park. It had to be somewhere warm and near major highways — but not too near the ocean, because the company didn’t want to compete with the beach. With the help of Paul Helliwell, a lawyer and longtime intelligence operative, they secretly acquired portions of Orange and Osceola Counties. Announcing the project, Disney spoke of his ambition to build a “city of tomorrow.”To fulfill that vision, Disney demanded sovereignty over its own land and, to make a long story short, Florida said yes.Disney’s futuristic city never happened. Portions became Epcot Center, and the special district has under 50 residents. And over half a century later, DeSantis is re-evaluating the state’s bargain as he contemplates some grand ambitions of his own.“Disney has gotten away with special deals from the state of Florida for way too long,” the governor said in an email to his supporters on Wednesday. “It took a look under the hood to see what Disney has become to truly understand their inappropriate influence.”But taking apart Disney’s magical Florida kingdom might prove complicated. For one thing, The Miami Herald noted on Wednesday that residents of Orange and Osceola Counties might be on the hook for a hefty tax bill should DeSantis get what he wants.As Goldberg put it, “How do you dissolve a government that’s been there for 50 years?”— 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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      Florida Senate Passes Congressional Map Giving G.O.P. a Big Edge

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      The map, proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, would most likely add four Republican districts while eliminating three held by Democrats.Florida Republicans are poised to adopt one of the nation’s most aggressive congressional maps, pressing forward with a proposal from Gov. Ron DeSantis that would most likely add four congressional districts for the party while eliminating three held by Democrats.The map, which the Florida Senate approved by a party-line vote of 24 to 15 on Wednesday during a special session of the Legislature, was put forward by Mr. DeSantis after he vetoed a version approved in March by state legislators that would have added two Republican seats and subtracted one from the Democrats.The new proposal would create 20 seats that favor Republicans and just eight that tilt toward Democrats, meaning that the G.O.P. would be likely to hold 71 percent of the seats. Former President Donald J. Trump carried Florida in 2020 with 51.2 percent of the vote.The Florida map would erase some of the gains Democrats have made in this year’s national redistricting process. The 2022 map had been poised to be balanced between the two major parties for the first time in generations, with a nearly equal number of House districts that are expected to lean Democratic and Republican for the first time in more than 50 years.The map would also serve as a high-profile, if possibly temporary, victory for Mr. DeSantis, who has emerged as one of the Republican Party’s leading figures and has not ruled out challenging Mr. Trump for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. The Florida House is expected to pass the map on Thursday, and Mr. DeSantis is certain to sign it.“I think they are good maps that will be able to be upheld,” said Joe Gruters, a Florida state senator who is the chairman of the state Republican Party.If it is adopted into law, the Florida map would face legal challenges from Democrats, who clashed with Republicans on Tuesday over whether the proposal violated the state’s Constitution and the Voting Rights Act’s prohibition on racial gerrymandering.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.“It does appear to be politically motivated, and it does not take seriously the hard-working Black people in the state,” said Rosalind Osgood, a state senator from Broward County in South Florida.Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main mapmaking organization, said that the proposed map complied with the state Constitution “while remaining faithful to the U.S. Constitution and the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.”Some Democrats predicted that the DeSantis map would ultimately not pass legal muster — though any successful challenge would probably not arrive in time for the November elections. In addition to the Florida dispute, Democrats are locked in a court battle over a political gerrymander of their own in New York, where a judge last month invalidated Democratic-drawn maps.The Florida map would end the congressional career of Representative Al Lawson, a Black Democrat from Jacksonville, by carving up a district that stretches across North Florida to combine Black neighborhoods in Jacksonville and Tallahassee.It would also eliminate an Orlando district held by Representative Val Demings, a Democrat, and pack Black voters from two districts in Tampa and St. Petersburg into one, creating a second district certain to be won by a Republican. Ms. Demings is vacating her seat to challenge Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican.If the new map becomes law, Representative Val Demings’s congressional district in Orlando would be eliminated. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesMr. Lawson’s district has been held by a Black Democrat since 1993, when former Representative Corrine Brown first took office.Mr. DeSantis’s map-drawer, Alex Kelly, said at a Florida Senate committee hearing on Tuesday that he could not draw a compact majority-Black district based in Jacksonville.“I determined that was not possible to check all those boxes,” he said.But Democrats argued that the map represented an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.“Governor DeSantis is bullying the Legislature into drawing Republicans an illegitimate and illegal partisan advantage in the congressional map, and he’s doing it at the expense of Black voters in Florida,” Kelly Burton, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in an interview. “This blatant gerrymander will not go unchallenged.”Democrats’ objections to the DeSantis map focused in part on a state constitutional amendment enacted by Florida voters in 2010 that set new standards for the redistricting process by requiring compact districts that did not favor one political party. A state court ordered Florida’s entire congressional map to be redrawn before the 2016 elections.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Only the Feds Can Disqualify Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      The events of Jan. 6, 2021, are casting a long shadow over the midterm elections. Voters in North Carolina are seeking to bar Representative Madison Cawthorn from running for re-election to his House seat, and those in Georgia are trying to do the same to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.These voters have filed complaints with state elections officials arguing that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies members of Congress who engage in insurrection from appearing on the congressional ballot. (Challenges to other elected officials have also begun involving other candidates.)But these challenges face an intractable problem: Only the federal government — not the states — can disqualify insurrectionists from congressional ballots. States cannot unilaterally create procedures, unless authorized by federal statute, to keep accused insurrectionists off the congressional ballot.If these members of Congress engaged in insurrection, then the U.S. House of Representatives may exclude them, or federal prosecutors may charge them with the federal crime of insurrection. But in light of an important 1869 judicial decision, the cases against Mr. Cawthorn and Ms. Greene — which are currently mired in both state and federal proceedings — cannot remove the candidates from the congressional ballot.The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War. Section 3 disqualified many former Confederates from holding certain public offices if they had taken an oath to support the U.S. Constitution but subsequently, as Section 3 declares, “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Since 1868, the federal judiciary has had few occasions to interpret Section 3. As a result, the courts are largely in uncharted territory. Nevertheless, there is some important on-point precedent.An 1869 case concerning Hugh W. Sheffey is instructive for the Jan. 6 litigation and how courts might see things today. Mr. Sheffey took an oath to support the Constitution but later served as a member of the Confederate Virginia legislature, thereby actively supporting the Confederacy.After the war, he served as a state court judge. As Judge Sheffey, he presided over the trial and conviction of Caesar Griffin for shooting with an intent to kill. Later, Mr. Griffin challenged his conviction in federal court. He argued that Section 3 should have disqualified Mr. Sheffey from serving as judge. Griffin’s case, as it is known, was heard on appeal by the federal circuit court in Virginia. Salmon P. Chase, the chief justice of the United States and an appointee of President Abraham Lincoln, presided over the appeal. Chief Justice Chase ruled against Mr. Griffin, finding that Section 3 did not disqualify Judge Sheffey, despite the fact that he had taken an oath to support the U.S. Constitution and that it was “admitted,” as the case stated, that he later committed a Section 3 disqualifying offense.Chief Justice Chase reasoned “that legislation by Congress is necessary to give effect to” Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — and that “only” Congress can enact that legislation. Chief Justice Chase added that the exclusion of disqualified office holders “can only be provided for by Congress.” Congress must create the procedure that would determine if a defendant violated Section 3. Section 5 of the 14th Amendment emphasizes this principle: Congress, it states, “shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”In short, Griffin’s case teaches that in legal terms, Section 3 is not self-executing — that is, Congress must establish, or at least authorize, the process that affords accused insurrectionists an opportunity to contest the allegations brought against them.Mr. Cawthorn and Ms. Greene deny that they engaged in insurrection and oppose any assertion that they violated the law, which would include Section 3 disqualifying offenses. Moreover, in the Cawthorn and Greene cases, the plaintiffs have not pointed to any federal legislation authorizing the states to police Section 3 by disqualifying accused insurrectionists from the congressional ballot. Without federal authorization, state elections boards and even state courts could very well be powerless to make determinations about congressional candidates and Section 3.There may be another way, based on an existing statute, to disqualify a candidate from congressional ballots: the Insurrection Act of 1862. This legislation, which predated the 14th Amendment, mirrors one of the disqualifying offenses established in Section 3.The modern Insurrection Act is virtually unchanged from the statute Lincoln signed in 1862. If the Justice Department indicts and succeeds in convicting Mr. Cawthorn, Ms. Greene or others of insurrection under that act, then on that basis, state elections boards and state courts may remove these candidates from the congressional ballot.Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesBut so far, the Justice Department has not charged any congressional candidates with inciting or engaging in an insurrection or with any other disqualifying offenses. Most of the Jan. 6 federal charges have been based on things like property crimes or for obstructing official proceedings or assaulting officers rather than insurrection.If the Justice Department does not secure a conviction of a Section 3 disqualifying offense before the state ballot is printed (the primary in North Carolina is scheduled for May 17 and the one in Georgia for May 24), then, generally, state boards of election and even state courts will be powerless to remove otherwise eligible congressional candidates from the ballot.Recently, some scholars and advocates have contested Chief Justice Chase’s opinion in Griffin’s case as precluding the state challenges against Mr. Cawthorn and Ms. Greene. In their view, even in the absence of a federal statute, state election officials who conclude that a person engaged in insurrection may proceed to remove that candidate from the congressional ballot. There is no Supreme Court precedent that squarely forecloses that position. Moreover, Chief Justice Chase’s decision was not rendered by the United States Supreme Court, and so it is not controlling precedent. On Monday, a federal court in Georgia allowed the state court disqualification proceeding to go forward against Representative Greene. The federal judge did so without citing or distinguishing Griffin’s case.Still, we think the chief justice’s opinion is persuasive; we expect state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, will likely follow this historically entrenched position. Chief Justice Chase’s approach is the simplest path. If the courts find that Section 3 is not self-executing, there is no need for state election officials to decide far more politically charged questions about whether Mr. Cawthorn and Ms. Greene — and potentially, looking ahead to 2024, Donald Trump — engaged in insurrection.Congress has not authorized the states to enforce Section 3 by striking congressional candidates from the ballot. Thus, state courts and elections boards lack jurisdiction to exclude alleged insurrectionists from the congressional ballot. In such circumstances, state governments must let the people decide who will represent them in Congress.Josh Blackman is a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. S.B. Tillman is an associate professor at the Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology. They recently wrote a law review article about the application of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to President Trump.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