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      Democrats and Republicans Won’t Stop Committing Political Malpractice

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      In the spring of a new president’s second year in office, political junkies know all too well what to expect from the midterm elections.A president (of whatever party), elected largely thanks to public distaste for his opponent, came in with his party in control of Congress and intent on not wasting an opportunity for transformative policy change. For all his talk of building new coalitions, he focused on the priorities of his party’s core activists, and by now it’s pretty clear that most voters don’t love what they see. The only way his party will avoid losing at least one house of Congress is if the other party somehow makes itself even more obnoxious. The question for November is whom the public will like less.Something like this has been the pattern of our politics for three decades now — long enough that we rarely stop to wonder much at just how strange it is or how we might change it. Neither party does much to expand its appeal or its coalition. Both double down on the voters they can count on, hoping they add up to a slim, temporary majority. If that doesn’t work, they just do it again.For political parties, whose very purpose is to build the broadest possible coalitions, such behavior is malpractice. So why has it persisted for so long? Why is public disaffection not pushing politicians to change their strategies or their agendas and seek durable majorities?The very fact that voters are unhappy with both parties makes it hard for either one to take a hint from its electoral failures. Even more than polarization, it is the closeness of elections that has degraded the capacity of our democracy to respond to voter pressure. In an era of persistent, polarized deadlock, both parties are effectively minorities — but each continues to think it is on the verge of winning big.To see why, it’s worth first noticing how unusual such persistent deadlock is. As the political scientist Morris Fiorina showed in his 2017 book, “Unstable Majorities,” our two-party system has usually produced durable partisan patterns of governance. Realignments have occasionally transformed a longstanding minority into the dominant party of a new era, but long stretches in which power has shifted back and forth have been rare. The only previous one was from 1874 to 1894. Ours has already been longer.Consider the previous hundred years or so. Republicans won seven of the nine presidential elections from 1896 to 1928 and controlled both houses of Congress for most of that stretch. Then from 1932 through 1950, Democrats won five presidential elections in a row and controlled Congress for all but two years. After that came more than four decades of durably divided government: Republicans won seven of 10 presidential elections from the 1950s through the 1980s — including a 24-year stretch with only one, single-term, Democratic presidency. But in that time, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for 40 straight years and the Senate for 34 of those years. You might say that was an age of two overlapping majorities, in contrast to our age of two polarized minorities.But since 1992, elections for president and Congress have been consistently up for grabs. Two presidents have been elected while losing the popular vote, which happened only twice in the previous two centuries. Control of Congress has swung back and forth more rapidly than in any previous era.The effects of this flux have been perverse. You might think that two minority parties would each feel pressure to expand its coalition and become a majority, but actually both have behaved as if they were the rightful majorities already. Each finds ways to dismiss the other’s wins as narrow flukes and treat its own as massive triumphs.This is sustainable only because elections are so close. Politicians learn big lessons from big losses or big wins, so neither of our parties has learned much in a long time, and neither can quite grasp that it just isn’t very popular and could easily lose the next election.This dynamic has many causes — from the advent of party primaries to the evolution of the media and much in between. Polarization doesn’t have to mean deadlock, but a long-term pattern of growing negative polarization, in which each party sees the other as the country’s biggest problem, creates incentives for the parties to seek narrower but ideologically purer wins rather than build broader if less ideologically coherent coalitions.Yet the pattern isn’t inevitable, and it’s crucial to see that the very closeness of elections blinds politicians to potential ways of breaking out of it. As the political scientist Frances Lee has shown, the minority party in Congress now always thinks it’s one election away from power and so sees no reason to change its appeal or to bargain to address the country’s longer-term needs. Younger politicians who have known only this period assume there is no other way — that short-termism is unavoidable and governing means frantically expending rather than patiently amassing political capital.This also intensifies party cohesion. As the political scientist Daniel DiSalvo has argued, internal factions let parties evolve toward new voters and vice versa, but our era has seen fewer and weaker factions. Narrow elections invite strict unity, so the parties now hunt heretics rather than seek converts. Witness, for instance, the Arizona Republican and Democratic Parties censuring Gov. Doug Ducey and Senator Kyrsten Sinema for undermining party unity. Both parties act as if they have too many voters, rather than too few.Breaking this pattern would have to start by acknowledging a truism: Bigger majorities are possible if politicians seek broader support. That sounds obvious, yet it has eluded our leaders for a generation because it requires seeing beyond our age of deadlock.That doesn’t mean reaching for the center in a shallow ideological sense, let alone hoping swing voters catch up with the priorities of party activists. It requires not so much offering different answers to the questions that have long shaped our political divisions but taking up some new questions better rooted in the public’s contemporary concerns — about new sources of financial insecurity and high living costs, threats to parenthood and childhood, dangers of concentrated corporate power, sources of cultural dislocation, perils of internet governance and other challenges that scramble familiar partisan dogmas. Such questions can be answered in right-leaning or left-leaning ways, but they first need to be asked.Some Republicans have long pointed to the need to move beyond the terms of Reaganism, and some even hoped that Donald Trump’s ascent might enable such a move. But Mr. Trump’s vile cult of personality only reinforced the trench-warfare dynamics. He mostly offered a model of how to squander opportunity: He won independents by six percentage points in 2016 and then lost them by 13 in 2020. That Republicans are even contemplating nominating him again shows they are not attuned to the need to break out of the age of deadlock.Some Democrats can see the problem, too. In an important recent paper for the Progressive Policy Institute, two veterans of the Clinton White House, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, raised the alarm about the narrowness of their party’s appeal. “Unless they want to spend their careers in a minority party,” they argued, Democrats “must acknowledge the need to win swing states — and the political implications of this necessity.” But such arguments can barely be heard over the din of party activists who aggressively alienate potential swing voters with heedless cultural radicalism.Each party is therefore left pursuing a losing strategy and saved from disaster only by the fact that the other party is doing the same. The first to realize that this is not working will face a real opportunity. The party that grasps that it has been losing for a generation will have a chance to make itself the next big winner in our politics.Yuval Levin is a contributing Opinion writer and is the editor of National Affairs and the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.”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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Biden’s Center-Leaning Budget Bends to Political Reality

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      With his party facing potentially gale-force headwinds in the midterm elections, President Biden released a budget on Monday that tacks toward the political center, bowing to the realities facing endangered Democrats by bolstering defense and law enforcement spending and tackling inflation and deficit reduction in service of what he called a “bipartisan unity agenda.”Under the plan, the left wing’s hopes for a peace dividend at the end of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be scotched in favor of a new Great Powers military budget that would bring the Defense Department’s allocation to $773 billion, an increase of nearly 10 percent over the level for fiscal 2021. Rather than cuts, Mr. Biden pledges to bolster the nation’s nuclear weapons program, including all three legs of the nuclear “triad”: bombers, land-based intercontinental missiles and submarines.“We are at the beginning of a decisive decade that will determine the future strategic competition with China, the trajectory of the climate crisis, and whether the rules governing technology, trade and international economics enshrine or violate our democratic values,” the budget states, justifying large increases to project U.S. military and diplomatic strength globally.Far from defunding the police and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, two popular slogans on the left, the budget robustly funds both. Customs and Border Protection would receive $15.3 billion, ICE $8.1 billion, including $309 million for border security technology — a well-funded effort to stop illegal migration. The nation’s two primary immigration law enforcement agencies would see increases of around 13 percent.The budget even includes $19 million for border fencing and other infrastructure.Federal law enforcement would receive $17.4 billion, a jump of nearly 11 percent, or $1.7 billion over 2021 levels. And the president, acknowledging widespread concerns that are driving Republican attacks against Democrats, vows to tackle the rise in violent crime.The proposals track with some of the main attack lines Republicans are using against Democrats in the run-up to the November contests, as they portray Mr. Biden and his allies in Congress as weak on security, soft on crime and profligate with federal spending to the point of damaging the economy.Liberal Democrats would see some of their priorities addressed, including “through substantial funding for climate programs and “environmental justice” initiatives, as well as changes to incarceration policy. But many on the left will be disappointed. In lieu of broad student debt forgiveness, an executive order that many Democrats have been pressing for since Mr. Biden’s inauguration, the Education Department’s student lending services would receive a huge increase, 43 percent, to $2.7 billion.Swing-district Democrats who have been pressing Mr. Biden to address widespread concerns about rising prices would be able to point to a number of programs to combat inflation, the biggest issue weighing down their prospects. The president promises large-scale efforts to unclot supply-chain bottlenecks that are raising costs and large-scale deficit reduction that could cool the economy. More

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      Maryland Judge Throws Out Democrats’ Congressional Redistricting Map

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      The ruling, in which the judge said Democrats had drawn an “extreme gerrymander,” was the first time this redistricting cycle that the party’s legislators had a congressional map defeated in court.A Maryland judge ruled on Friday that Democrats in the state had drawn an “extreme gerrymander” and threw out the state’s new congressional map, the first time this redistricting cycle that a Democratic-controlled legislature’s map has been rejected in court.The ruling by Senior Judge Lynne A. Battaglia of the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County found that the map drawn by Democrats had “constitutional failings” and ignored requirements of focusing on “compactness” and keeping similar communities together.“All of the testimony in this case supports the notions that the voice of Republican voters was diluted and their right to vote and be heard with the efficacy of a Democratic voter was diminished,” Judge Battaglia wrote in her opinion.The congressional map drawn by Democrats would have most likely guaranteed them at least seven of Maryland’s eight House seats, or 87 percent of the state’s seats. President Biden carried the state with 65 percent of the vote in 2020.Judge Battaglia ordered the General Assembly to redraw the map by March 30, an extraordinarily tight deadline for a complicated process that often takes weeks, and she set a hearing for the new map for April 1. This year, the Maryland Court of Appeals moved the state’s primary election from June 28 to July 19 because of pending legal challenges to the new map.Democrats across the country have taken a much more aggressive tack this redistricting cycle than they have in the past, seeking to counteract what they have long denounced as extreme Republican gerrymanders from the 2010 cycle. Republicans’ map-drawing gains that year helped the party maintain power in the House of Representatives despite a Democratic victory at the presidential level in 2012. Democratic state legislatures in New York, Illinois and Oregon drew new maps this year that would have given them a significant advantage over Republicans — and congressional delegations at odds with the overall partisan tilt of each state. 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.Rather than looking to aggressively add new seats this cycle, Republicans, for the most part, have sought to shore up their previous advantages in gerrymandered maps in states like Texas and Georgia, removing competition and packing Democrats together in deeply blue districts.Maryland was one of the few states during the last redistricting cycle where Democrats enacted an aggressive gerrymander, pushing to add a Democratic seat to the state’s delegation, which consisted of six Democrats and two Republicans at the time. The eventual map added a batch of new Democratic voters to the Sixth District, leading to the defeat of Representative Roscoe Bartlett, a 20-year Republican incumbent. Former Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat and former presidential candidate, has since acknowledged in a court deposition that the goal of the last redistricting process was to draw a map that was “more likely to elect more Democrats rather than less.”Judge Battaglia’s decision comes as state courts have emerged as a central battleground for parties and voters to challenge maps by calling them partisan gerrymanders, after a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that partisan gerrymandering could not be challenged at the federal level. This year, state courts in Ohio and North Carolina have tossed out maps drawn by legislators as unconstitutional gerrymanders. Judge Battaglia, who was appointed by former Gov. Parris N. Glendening, a Democrat, is a former U.S. attorney in Maryland. She also served as chief of staff to former Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland. Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican whose veto of the map was overridden by the Democratic-controlled legislature, praised the decision and called on the General Assembly to pass a map drawn by an independent commission he created. “This ruling is a monumental victory for every Marylander who cares about protecting our democracy, bringing fairness to our elections, and putting the people back in charge,” Mr. Hogan said in a statement. The office of Brian Frosh, the attorney general of Maryland and a Democrat, said that it was reviewing the decision and that it had not yet decided whether to appeal it.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Nebraska Congressman Convicted in Campaign Finance Case

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      Representative Jeff Fortenberry was accused of lying to F.B.I. agents investigating illegal foreign donations.LOS ANGELES — A Nebraska congressman was convicted Thursday on charges that he lied to federal authorities about having received an illegal campaign contribution from a foreign citizen.Representative Jeff Fortenberry was convicted in federal court in Los Angeles on one count of falsifying and concealing material facts and two counts of making false statements. Each carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, according to the United States Department of Justice. A sentencing hearing was set for June 28.“The lies in this case threatened the integrity of the American electoral system and were designed to prevent investigators from learning the true source of campaign funds,” said Tracy L. Wilkison, one of the prosecutors.Mr. Fortenberry’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But outside the courthouse, Mr. Fortenberry said that the process had been unfair and that he would appeal immediately, according to The Associated Press.In October, when he was charged, the congressman vowed to fight the accusations and maintained his innocence.“Five and a half years ago, a person from overseas illegally moved money to my campaign,” Mr. Fortenberry said in a video he posted online at the time. “I didn’t know anything about this.”He was convicted after a weeklong trial.Mr. Fortenberry, a Republican who has been in Congress for almost two decades, received a $30,000 donation to his re-election campaign at a fund-raiser in 2016, according to the federal indictment in the case. Foreign citizens are prohibited from donating to U.S. election campaigns.Rather than report the contribution in an amended filing with the Federal Election Commission or return the money, as federal law dictates, prosecutors said Mr. Fortenberry kept it and told investigators in 2019 that he had been unaware of any contributions made by foreign citizens.The charges did not stem from the donation itself, which came from Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese Nigerian billionaire who was accused of conspiring to make illegal campaign contributions to American politicians in exchange for access to them.The charges came after prosecutors said Mr. Fortenberry denied knowing that the donation, which had been funneled through an intermediary, were from Mr. Chagoury — even after the congressman told a cooperating witness, a fund-raiser referred to in court filings as Individual H, that the donation “probably did come from Gilbert Chagoury.”Federal investigators first interviewed Mr. Fortenberry in 2019 as part of an investigation into Mr. Chagoury, who admitted to giving $180,000 to four candidates from June 2012 to March 2016. Mr. Fortenberry was one of those four.Mr. Chagoury ultimately reached a deal with the U.S. government and paid a $1.8 million fine.In court documents, prosecutors said Mr. Chagoury had been told to donate to “politicians from less-populous states because the contribution would be more noticeable to the politician and thereby would promote increased donor access.”Katie Benner contributed reporting. More

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      U.S. House Candidate Ends Run After Uproar Over Behavior at Sleepover

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      Abby Broyles of Oklahoma said on Thursday that she had checked into rehab “to focus on myself and my happiness” weeks after apologizing for drinking and swearing at children.A Democratic candidate for Congress in Oklahoma has ended her campaign one month after she apologized for verbally abusing children attending a sleepover at a friend’s home.The candidate, Abby Broyles, a former investigative television reporter who ran an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2020, said she was ending her bid to represent Oklahoma’s Fifth Congressional District “to focus on myself and my happiness,” according to a Medium post published on Thursday.In the essay, Ms. Broyles, 32, described how she “hit rock bottom” after the sleepover incident last month.She described being in an emergency room on March 2, less than two weeks after the apology.“I drank heavily in my hotel room, more than 1,300 miles away in an effort to hide and took sleeping pills, anguishing in pain reading about myself on social media and in tabloid articles,” she wrote.Ms. Broyles also said she had “struggled with mental health issues including self-worth, severe anxiety and insomnia for about 20 years.”Ms. Broyles, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday, has said that she has no memory of what happened during the Feb. 11 sleepover where she had mixed alcohol and sleep medication. About eight girls ages 12 and 13 attended the sleepover, where they watched the movie “Titanic,” according to NonDoc Media, a journalism nonprofit in Oklahoma.When first contacted by NonDoc Media for comment, Ms. Broyles seemed to deny that she was at the party. After a TikTok video showed otherwise, she gave an interview to KFOR-TV, an Oklahoma City station where she once worked.In the interview, Ms. Broyles said that she had “blacked out” after drinking wine and taking a sleeping medication. She said that her friend, who was hosting the sleepover, had given her medicine that she had never taken before.After the sleepover episode made national headlines, Ms. Broyles said she had received death threats and had been harassed by online trolls. She also wrote that she had “lost support” from Democratic leaders. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which Ms. Broyles said “announced it was distancing itself” from her after the episode, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment on Thursday.“The news cycle was the longest nine days of my life,” she continued. “I didn’t even feel safe staying in my own home due to the threats I received.”Alone in a hotel room this month, Ms. Broyles became overwhelmed with self-doubt, she said in the post. “Surrounded by empty wine and liquor bottles, I stared at the dark circles under my eyes in the bathroom mirror, and this time, I didn’t just tell myself I’m ‘not good enough,’” she wrote. “This time I told myself I was done.”“I don’t remember what all I drank before I sent a couple suicidal texts to close friends and sent a tweet out that said, ‘You guys win. I’ll just kill myself,’” she continued. “I blacked out and woke up on a gurney.”Ms. Broyles was seeking her party’s nomination in June to run against Representative Stephanie Bice, the Republican incumbent serving her first term. In 2020, Ms. Broyles ran to unseat Senator James Inhofe, a Republican.Toward the end of her statement, Ms. Broyles said that she had checked into a rehabilitation center recently.She said she was sharing her story “because I should’ve gotten help sooner, and if you’re suffering, please know, there is help. Unfortunately, I had to hit rock bottom to realize it.”If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. More

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      Victor Fazio, Longtime Democratic Leader in the House, Dies at 79

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      Known for his ability to work across the aisle, he represented the Sacramento area from 1979 to 1999 and rose to become chairman of the House Democratic caucus.Victor Fazio, a longtime Democratic member of Congress from California who served in House leadership for several years, died on March 16 at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 79.The cause was cancer, according to a statement from his former congressional office.Mr. Fazio represented the Sacramento area from 1979 to 1999. As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, he helped bring home funding for numerous projects, including a multimillion-dollar environmental institute at the University of California, Davis. He also lobbied for the funds to protect 3,700 acres of wetlands west of Sacramento as a refuge; dedicated by President Bill Clinton in 1997, it is known as the Vic Fazio Yolo Wildlife Area.Known for his low-key, bipartisan style, he often worked in partnership with the powerful California Republican representative Jerry Lewis, who died last year.Perhaps Mr. Fazio’s most difficult period was his tenure as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 1994 — the year that Republicans, led by Representative Newt Gingrich, took control of the House for the first time in 40 years.Still, because of Mr. Fazio’s ability to work across the aisle, his colleagues chose him the next year as chairman of the House Democratic caucus.Mr. Fazio stood behind the speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, as Mr. Gingrich’s fellow Republican representatives Bill Thomas (partly hidden) and Tom DeLay conferred, during a news conference on Capitol Hill in 1995.Karin Anderson for The New York TimesAfter he retired from Congress, he worked at a public relations firm in Washington led by Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman. He later joined the Washington office of the powerhouse law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and was regularly named to the annual list of top lobbyists by the political newspaper The Hill. He retired from Akin Gump in 2020.Victor Herbert Fazio Jr. was born in Winchester, Mass., on Oct. 11, 1942. His father was an insurance salesman, his mother a homemaker and dress shop manager.He earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., in 1965 before going to California on a Caro Foundation fellowship.In 1970, he co-founded California Journal magazine, now defunct, which covered state government and politics, and served in the California State Assembly before winning his House seat in 1978.His first marriage, to Joella Mason, ended in divorce. His second wife, Judy Neidhardt Kern, whom he married in 1983, died in 2015.In 2017, he married Kathy Sawyer. In addition to her, he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Dana Fazio Lawrie; two stepchildren, Kevin and Kristie Kern; and four granddaughters. A daughter, Anne Noel Fazio, died in 1995. More

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      It’s Never a Good Time for the Hunter Biden Story

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      Gail Collins: Bret, here’s one question I don’t think I ever asked you before: What do you think of daylight saving time?Bret Stephens: About the same way I feel about Volodymyr Zelensky. The light of the West.Gail: Your ability to have everything remind you of foreign affairs is awesome.I was sorta impressed the other day when the Senate voted unanimously to make daylight saving time permanent, year-round. What’s the last thing they agreed about that easily?Bret: Invading Afghanistan?Gail: I think switching back and forth is stupid. But many sleep scientists seem to think standard time — winter time — is healthier. So I’ll go with them, just to be difficult.Bret: This is a major difference between liberals and conservatives. Modern-day liberals are often quite happy to defer to the wisdom of experts, at least when it comes to subjects like public health or economics. Whereas those of us who are conservative tend to be — skeptical. We prefer the wisdom of crowds, or markets, to the wisdom of the purportedly wise. It goes back to William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous line that he’d rather “be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.”Gail: Do you happen to know what William F. Buckley Jr.’s position on daylight saving time was?Bret: Given that daylight savings was initially signed into law by Woodrow Wilson, I’d have to assume Buckley would have been against it.Gail: And you know, if the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory did take control, polls suggest we’d very likely be right in line for Medicare for all and universal early childhood education.Bret: Isn’t that because people love liberal policy ideas until you show them the price tag?On a gloomier subject, Joe Biden has now called Vladimir Putin a “war criminal,” a “murderous dictator” and a “pure thug.” Hard to disagree with the characterizations, but is it prudent?Gail: Well, in the grand scheme of things I’d say Biden could have been more … restrained.Bret: I’m happy he said it. It reminds me of Ronald Reagan calling the Soviet Union the “evil empire,” which liberals once considered provocative but had the benefit of being absolutely true.Gail: Ukraine’s troops seem to be doing way better than people expected, and even if average Russian citizens aren’t allowed to know about that, they can’t help noticing that their economy is cratering.So what happens next? I’m just terrified Putin will feel cornered and drop a nuclear bomb or do something else that’s planet-destructive. Am I being paranoid?Bret: The scary thing is that you’re being completely rational.Gail: Truly scary if I’m being rational on foreign affairs.Bret: If Russian forces are capable of firing on a nuclear power station, they’re capable of worse. And Russia’s battlefield incompetence, along with its mounting losses, is probably tempting Putin to use chemical weapons or even a tactical nuclear weapon to win a war his generals can’t.Gail: Yep, that’s my nightmare.Bret: On the other hand, it’s in Putin’s interest to make us think he’s capable of anything: It’s his version of Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of international relations, in which a leader cultivates the appearance of being capable of anything in order to terrify his adversary into backing down. The best thing Biden can do is continue to provide our Ukrainian friends with all the means we can offer so they can defend themselves by themselves, without us getting into combat directly. I understand why Biden is reluctant to impose a no-fly zone, but I don’t get why he won’t supply the Ukrainian air force with fighter jets or any other equipment they ask for.Gail: Meanwhile, on the domestic front, have you been keeping an eye on the primary elections? There’s a big Republican fight coming up this spring in Georgia, where Donald Trump and his folks are trying to nominate Herschel Walker for a Senate race. Despite allegations of violent behavior toward his ex-wife and his recent demand to know why there are still apes if evolution works the way scientists say it does. And then there’s a primary this summer in Wyoming, where Liz Cheney is fighting to keep her House seat ….Bret: People often forget that Cheney actually supported Trump in the 2016 election, only to become a convinced anti-Trumper after she saw the guy in action. Her main challenger in this race, Harriet Hageman, went in the opposite direction: from fervent Never Trumper in 2016 to a fervent Trumper today. Cheney has a big campaign war chest and she could still pull off a win, at least if Wyoming Democrats switch parties to vote for her in the primary.Gail: Well, if Wyoming Republicans can reward Cheney for her independence, I promise to stop complaining that a state with a population of less than 600,000 has the same number of Senators as California, which has nearly 40 million.Bret: I feel just the same way about Vermont and Texas. But about Cheney’s chances, I wouldn’t bet on them. A party with a cult-of-personality problem is like a person with a substance abuse problem, meaning they’re going to ride the addiction to rock bottom.By the way: Did you read The Times’s account of the government’s investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax and foreign-business affairs? The news here has less to do with Hunter himself and more with the fact that those emails recovered from the discarded laptop were his, despite the best efforts by Twitter and other social media and news media companies to bury or not look closely enough at that fact on the eve of the 2020 election.Gail: I’m so glad our colleagues are still doing strong reporting on this story — Hunter Biden’s scummy business dealings shouldn’t be swept under the rug any more than anyone else’s.Bret: Not to mention those paintings he tried to sell for up to $500,000 a canvas in nontransparent sales. Nothing at all fishy there.Gail: That said, I have to admit I’ve never found Hunter’s behavior criminal — just very, very depressing. Fragile son in a family buffeted by tragedy, grows up to have a drug problem and makes a lot of money by working for companies that presumably like to have a famous American politician’s relative to trot around.Bret: The D.O.J.’s investigation will tell.Gail: Some of Hunter’s behavior was obviously unseemly in the extreme. Any new evidence needs to be carefully examined to see if Hunter’s behavior ever went past that into actual criminality — did he claim, for instance, that he could deliver favors from the government because he was Joe Biden’s son?So far I haven’t seen it, but whenever Hunter’s name comes up, I do find myself holding my breath.Bret: The book to read on this subject is “The Bidens,” by Politico’s Ben Schreckinger. It’s no right-wing hit job, which makes its description of Hunter’s business dealings that much more damning. But what really bothered me was the not-so-subtle media effort to bury the email story right before the election as some kind of “Russian disinformation” campaign. If someone had discovered that, say, Ivanka Trump had left a laptop at a repair shop stuffed with emails about 10 percent being held “for the big guy”— to use a reference that appears to be to Joe Biden, which comes from one of the emails found on Hunter’s computer — would the story have been treated with kid gloves?Gail: Well, Ivanka is a much tidier person. Your mentioning her does remind me that it’s never been clear to me exactly how much, if any, of the campaign donations Trump’s been piling up are going to his kids’ activities.Not trying to downplay the Hunter story, but in the grand scheme of things I still think his misdeeds are going to wind up as a sidebar on the Biden saga. Feel free to remind me I said that if half the family winds up indicted.Bret: I honestly hope not. The world needs another White House corruption scandal like I need a hole in my head, to borrow a line from one of the better songs of the 1990s.Gail: On another subject entirely — have you noticed that earmarks are back?Bret: Don Young dies but pork is forever. I don’t think pork is such a bad thing in the grand scheme of things. It brings projects to constituents who need them and makes politics a whole lot more fun to cover. What do you think?Gail: Makes me sorta sad remembering John McCain’s long, long battle to get rid of them. The biggest problem, as I remember, wasn’t lawmakers trying to get some special bridge overpass for their district; it was lawmakers trying to get a contract for some big, unnecessary project that would go to one of their donors.Now we’re stunned that the Senate can come together on daylight saving time. Guess things are just darker now than in the olden days.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: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Ohio Supreme Court Intensifies a Redistricting Map Standoff

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      Years ago, voters created a commission to make political maps fairer. Now the State Supreme Court is blocking maps drawn by the Republican-led commission, saying nothing has changed.A bipartisan majority of Ohio Supreme Court justices has ratcheted up an extraordinary legal standoff over the state’s political boundaries, rejecting — for the third time in barely two months — new maps of state legislative districts that heavily favor the Republican Party.The decision appears likely to force the state to postpone its primary elections, scheduled to take place on May 3, until new maps of both state legislative seats and districts for the United States House of Representatives pass constitutional muster.The court’s ruling late Wednesday was a blunt rebuff of the Ohio Redistricting Commission, a Republican-dominated body that voters established in 2015 explicitly to make political maps fairer, but that now stands accused of trying to fatten already lopsided G.O.P. majorities in the state’s legislature and the U.S. House.Ohio has become the heart of a nationwide battle over political boundaries that has assumed life-or-death proportions for both Republicans and Democrats, one in which courts like Ohio’s have played an increasingly crucial role.With redistricting complete in all but five states, Democrats have erased much of a huge partisan advantage that Republicans had amassed on the House of Representatives map by dominating the last round of redistricting in 2011. Democrats have also rolled back some of the Republican gerrymanders that have allowed the party to dominate state legislatures.The minority justices in the 4-to-3 ruling in Ohio, all Republicans, said in a bitter dissent that the decision “decrees electoral chaos” by upending election plans and fomenting a constitutional crisis. But the four majority justices, led by Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, said it was the Redistricting Commission that was creating chaos by repeatedly drawing maps that violated the State Constitution’s mandate for political fairness.Constitutional scholars and Ohio political experts have said the Redistricting Commission had been betting that the high court would be forced to approve its maps so that it would not shoulder blame for disrupting statewide elections. The court has already complained of foot-dragging by the commission, threatening last month to hold its members in contempt for failing to produce a new state legislative map on time.“There’s this attitude that ‘if we can’t get our way with the court, we’re going to try to run out the clock on them,’” Paul De Marco, a Cincinnati lawyer who specializes in appeals cases, said of the Redistricting Commission, which is made up of five Republicans, including Gov. Mike DeWine, and two Democrats.With the ruling this week, the court effectively called the commission’s bluff.“This court is not a rubber stamp,” Justice Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, wrote in a concurring opinion. “By interpreting and enforcing the requirements of the Ohio Constitution, we do not create chaos or a constitutional crisis — we work to promote the trust of Ohio’s voters in the redistricting of Ohio’s legislative districts.”The stalemate is playing out in a state whose 15 House seats — the seventh-largest congressional delegation in the nation — represent the second-largest trove of congressional districts whose boundaries remain to be drawn for this year’s midterm elections. (Florida, with 28 House seats, is the largest.) The delegation’s partisan makeup could determine control of an almost evenly divided House of Representatives.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 Ohio Supreme Court is also in a standoff with the Redistricting Commission over the state’s congressional map, having already rejected one version in January as too partisan. It is considering a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the commission’s newly redrawn map of Ohio congressional districts, which would create solidly Republican seats in 10 of the 15 districts. The map would leave Democrats with three safe seats and two competitive seats where the party would hold slight edges.The fight over the maps could well move to federal court, where Republicans have asked that a three-judge panel be created to consider instituting the Redistricting Commission’s rejected maps so that elections can proceed. Chief Judge Algenon L. Marbley of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio declined to act on Monday, noting that the State Supreme Court was considering the maps.But Judge Marbley, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, indicated that he would step in if there were “serious doubts that state processes will produce a state map in time for the primary election.”In North Carolina, Pennsylvania and some other states, state supreme courts have played decisive roles in redistricting this year, casting aside gerrymanders in favor of fairer maps often drawn by nonpartisan experts. The Ohio court is at an impasse because the State Constitution allows the court to reject maps it deems unconstitutional, but gives it no clear authority to make maps more fair, much less to adopt ones that the commission did not draw. Maureen O’Connor, the chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court and a Republican, said the state’s G.O.P.-dominated Redistricting Commission was creating chaos by repeatedly drawing maps that violated the Ohio Constitution’s mandate for political fairness. Earl Gibson III/Getty ImagesIt wasn’t supposed to be this way.Ohioans thought they had abolished hyperpartisan political maps for good seven years ago, when they resoundingly approved a constitutional amendment that took mapmaking authority away from politicians in the legislature and gave it to the new commission. That referendum ended a long struggle between voting rights advocates and political leaders of both parties, who had resisted any change in the mapmaking process.The two sides struck a compromise that gave politicians control of the Redistricting Commission, filling its seven seats with elected officials and their appointees, generally favoring the party in power. In return, voting rights groups were granted one of their wishes: a constitutional mandate that the commission draw maps that “correspond closely to the statewide preferences of the voters of Ohio,” based on the previous decade’s elections.Seven in 10 voters approved the 2015 amendment. Three years later, another amendment effectively extended the deal to congressional maps.“This issue is proof that when you work together in a bipartisan manner, you can accomplish great things,” Matt Huffman, a Republican state representative from Lima who campaigned for the 2015 amendment, said after it passed.Today Mr. Huffman is the president of the State Senate and sits on the Redistricting Commission. But he now says that the constitutional requirement that maps reflect voters’ preferences was only “aspirational” — a view the Supreme Court rejected in January.Jen Miller, the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, said that “we mobilized more than 12,000 Ohioans to advocate for fair maps through emails, phone calls and even submitting their own maps.”She added: “What’s disappointing, and shocking for most of us, is that it’s business as usual. Nothing has changed.”How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More