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      Justice Breyer Should Retire Right Now

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyJustice Breyer Should Retire Right NowIf he doesn’t, Democrats run the very real risk that they would be unable to replace him.Mr. Campos is a law professor who writes extensively about politics and the Constitution.March 15, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Simone NoronhaJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was widely, and deservedly, criticized for her refusal to retire from the Supreme Court at a time when a Democratic president could have chosen her replacement.Justice Stephen Breyer is making a similar and arguably even more egregious mistake.The evident indifference on the part of Democrats regarding the failure of Justice Breyer, 82, to announce his retirement is apparently a product of the assumption that he will do so at some point during the current Congress and that therefore whether he does so anytime soon is not particularly important.This is a grave mistake.Consider that because of the extremely thin nature of their Democratic Senate control, the shift of a single seat from the Democrats to the Republicans or even one vacancy in the 50 seats now controlled by the Democratic caucus would probably result in the swift reinstallation of Mitch McConnell as the majority leader.What are the odds that something like this — a senator’s death, disabling health crisis or departure from office for other reasons — will happen sometime in this Congress’s remaining 22 months?Alarmingly for Democrats, if history is any guide, the odds are quite high. Since the end of World War II, 27 of the 38 Congresses have featured a change in the party composition of the Senate during a session.The probability that such a shift may occur during this particular Congress may well be even higher than that. At the moment, no fewer than six Democratic senators over the age of 70 represent states where a Republican governor would be free to replace them with a Republican, should a vacancy occur.Five other Democratic senators represent states for which a vacancy would go unfilled for months, until a special election to fill the seat was held — which would hand the G.O.P. control of the Senate at least until that election and likely for the rest of the current Congress if a Republican wins that contest. (In the case of Wisconsin, such a vacancy might not be filled until 2023.)All things considered, the odds that Democrats will lose control of the Senate in the next 22 months are probably close to a coin flip.Under the circumstances, for Democrats to run the very real risk that they would be unable to replace Justice Breyer is unacceptable. Of course, the only person who is in a position to ensure that this does not happen is Justice Breyer himself.It is true that, under normal circumstances, a Supreme Court justice planning to retire generally waits until the end of a court term to do so. But these are not normal circumstances.Nothing illustrates the anti-democratic dysfunction of our political system more clearly than the current makeup of the Supreme Court. Two-thirds of the sitting justices were nominated by Republican presidents, even though Republican presidential candidates have lost the popular vote in seven of the nine elections, which determined who nominated these justices.And these justices were confirmed by a Senate that has become skewed so radically in favor of electing Republicans that the 50 senators who caucus with the Democrats represent about 41.5 million more Americans than the 50 Republican senators do.Under the circumstances, it would be a travesty if the Supreme Court seat occupied by Justice Breyer was not filled by a replacement chosen by Democrats.He should announce his retirement immediately, effective upon the confirmation of his successor. For him to continue to make the same gamble that Justice Ginsburg made and lost runs the risk of tainting his legacy as a justice and has the potential to be an anti-democratic disaster for the nation as a whole.Paul F. Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and writes about law and politics at Lawyers, Guns & Money.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Stimulus Bill as a Political Weapon? Democrats Are Counting on It.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Biden’s Stimulus PlanBiden’s AddressWhat to Know About the BillBenefits for Middle ClassChild Tax CreditAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyStimulus Bill as a Political Weapon? Democrats Are Counting on It.The $1.9 trillion package is a big bet by the party that it will restore a sense of normalcy by the 2022 elections and that voters will defy history and reward Democrats with more seats in Congress.Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, signed the stimulus bill this week while surrounded by Democratic members of Congress.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMarch 15, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETWASHINGTON — Triumphant over the signing of their far-reaching $1.9 trillion stimulus package, Democrats are now starting to angle for a major political payoff that would defy history: Picking up House and Senate seats in the 2022 midterm elections, even though the party in power usually loses in the midterms.Democratic leaders are making one of the biggest electoral bets in years — that the stimulus will be so transformational for Americans across party lines and demographic groups that Democrats will be able to wield it as a political weapon next year in elections against Republicans, who voted en masse against the package.Republicans need to gain only one seat in the Senate and just five in the House in 2022 to take back control, a likely result in a normal midterm election, but perhaps a trickier one if voters credit their rivals for a strong American rebound.Yet as Democrats prepare to start selling voters on the package, they remain haunted by what happened in 2010, the last time they were in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress and pursued an ambitious agenda: They lost 63 House seats, and the majority, and were unable to fulfill President Barack Obama’s goals on issues ranging from gun control to immigration.It has become an article of faith in the party that Mr. Obama’s presidency was diminished because his two signature accomplishments, the stimulus bill and the Affordable Care Act, were not expansive enough and their pitch to the public on the benefits of both measures was lacking. By this logic, Democrats began losing elections and the full control of the government, until now, because of their initial compromises with Republicans and insufficient salesmanship.“We didn’t adequately explain what we had done,” President Biden told House Democrats this month about the 2009 Recovery Act. “Barack was so modest, he didn’t want to take, as he said, a ‘victory lap.’”Now they are determined to exorcise those old ghosts by aggressively promoting a measure they believe meets the moment and has broader appeal than the $787 billion bill they trimmed and laced with tax cuts to win a handful of Republican votes in Mr. Obama’s first months in office.Republicans say the Democratic bet is a foolhardy one, both because of how little of the spending is directly related to the coronavirus pandemic and because of fleeting voter attention spans. But Democrats say they intend to run on the bill — and press Republicans over their opposition to it.“This is absolutely something I will campaign on next year,” said Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who may be the most vulnerable incumbent Senate Democrat in the country on the ballot in 2022. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, who heads the Democratic Senate campaign arm, said he would go on “offense” against Republicans who opposed the bill and sketched out their attack: “Every Republican said no in a time of need.”Party lawmakers point out that the measure Mr. Biden signed on Thursday is more popular than the 2009 bill, according to polling; contains more tangible benefits, like the $1,400 direct payments and unemployment benefits; and comes at a time when the pandemic and former President Donald Trump’s continued appetite for big spending have blunted Republican attacks.President Biden will travel the country next week to highlight the passage of the stimulus legislation.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times“People are going to feel it right away, to me that’s the biggest thing,” said Representative Conor Lamb, a Pennsylvania Democrat whose 2018 special election victory presaged the party’s revival. “Politics is confusing, it’s image-based, everyone calls everyone else a liar — but people are going to get the money in their bank accounts.”And, Representative Sara Jacobs of California said, Democrats have “learned the lessons from 2009, we made sure we went back to our districts this weekend to tell people how much help they were going to get from this bill.”Mr. Obama’s aides are quick to note that they did promote their stimulus and the health care law but ran into much more fervent, and unified, opposition on the right as the Tea Party blossomed and portrayed the measures as wasteful and ill-conceived.At the end of last week, with the House’s first extended recess looming at month’s end, Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed House Democrats to seize the moment.Ms. Pelosi’s office sent an email to colleagues, forwarded to The Times, brimming with talking points the speaker hopes they’ll use in town halls and news conferences. “During the upcoming district work period, members are encouraged to give visibility to how the American Rescue Plan meets the needs of their communities: putting vaccines in arms, money in pockets, workers back on the job and children back in the classroom safely,” it said.For their part, White House officials said they would deploy “the whole of government,” as one aide put it, to market the plan, send cabinet officers on the road and focus on different components of the bill each day to highlight its expanse.Democrats’ hopes for avoiding the losses typical in a president’s first midterm election will depend largely on whether Americans feel life is back to normal next year — and whether they credit the party in power for thwarting the disease, despair and dysfunction that characterized the end of Mr. Trump’s term.If voters are to believe the Democrats are delivering on an American rebound, of course, it’s essential the country is roaring back to prepandemic strength in a way it was not at the end of 2009, when unemployment reached 10 percent.“You could be looking at an extraordinary growth spurt in the third and fourth quarters, and that takes you into the year when candidates make their way,” said Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, where much of the bill was crafted.The politics of the legislation, in other words, will be clear enough by this time next year. “If all the sudden you got high inflation and things are hitting the fan, Republicans are going to run on it,” said Representative Filemon Vela, a Texas Democrat. “If things are going well they’re going to run on something else.”For now, Republicans are expressing little appetite to contest a measure that has the support of 70 percent of voters, according to a Pew survey released last week.Part of their challenge stems from Mr. Trump’s aggressive advocacy for $2,000 direct payments in the previous stimulus package late last year, a drumbeat he’s kept up in his political afterlife as he argues Republicans lost the two Georgia Senate runoffs because they did not embrace the proposal.It’s difficult for congressional Republicans to portray one of the main elements of the Democrats’ bill as socialism when the de facto leader of their party is an enthusiastic supporter of wealth redistribution. Moreover, right-wing media outlets have been more focused on culture war issues that are more animating to many conservatives than size-of-government questions.Asked if they would run against the bill next year, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, said, “There’s going to be a lot of things we run against.”Republicans in Congress hope to change the subject to a surge of migrants along the Southern border.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesAt the weekly news conference of House Republican leaders, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming spoke about the stimulus for 45 seconds before changing the subject to the rising number of migrants at the Southern border..css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-k59gj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;width:100%;}.css-1e2usoh{font-family:inherit;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;border-top:1px solid #ccc;padding:10px 0px 10px 0px;background-color:#fff;}.css-1jz6h6z{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;text-align:left;}.css-1t412wb{box-sizing:border-box;margin:8px 15px 0px 15px;cursor:pointer;}.css-hhzar2{-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform ease 0.5s;-webkit-transition:transform ease 0.5s;transition:transform ease 0.5s;}.css-t54hv4{-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-1r2j9qz{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-e1ipqs{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;padding:0px 30px 0px 0px;}.css-e1ipqs a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-e1ipqs a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1o76pdf{visibility:show;height:100%;padding-bottom:20px;}.css-1sw9s96{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1cz6wm{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;font-family:’nyt-franklin’,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;text-align:left;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1cz6wm{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1cz6wm:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1cz6wm{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}Frequently Asked Questions About the New Stimulus PackageThe stimulus payments would be $1,400 for most recipients. Those who are eligible would also receive an identical payment for each of their children. To qualify for the full $1,400, a single person would need an adjusted gross income of $75,000 or below. For heads of household, adjusted gross income would need to be $112,500 or below, and for married couples filing jointly that number would need to be $150,000 or below. To be eligible for a payment, a person must have a Social Security number. Read more. Buying insurance through the government program known as COBRA would temporarily become a lot cheaper. COBRA, for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, generally lets someone who loses a job buy coverage via the former employer. But it’s expensive: Under normal circumstances, a person may have to pay at least 102 percent of the cost of the premium. Under the relief bill, the government would pay the entire COBRA premium from April 1 through Sept. 30. A person who qualified for new, employer-based health insurance someplace else before Sept. 30 would lose eligibility for the no-cost coverage. And someone who left a job voluntarily would not be eligible, either. Read moreThis credit, which helps working families offset the cost of care for children under 13 and other dependents, would be significantly expanded for a single year. More people would be eligible, and many recipients would get a bigger break. The bill would also make the credit fully refundable, which means you could collect the money as a refund even if your tax bill was zero. “That will be helpful to people at the lower end” of the income scale, said Mark Luscombe, principal federal tax analyst at Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting. Read more.There would be a big one for people who already have debt. You wouldn’t have to pay income taxes on forgiven debt if you qualify for loan forgiveness or cancellation — for example, if you’ve been in an income-driven repayment plan for the requisite number of years, if your school defrauded you or if Congress or the president wipes away $10,000 of debt for large numbers of people. This would be the case for debt forgiven between Jan. 1, 2021, and the end of 2025. Read more.The bill would provide billions of dollars in rental and utility assistance to people who are struggling and in danger of being evicted from their homes. About $27 billion would go toward emergency rental assistance. The vast majority of it would replenish the so-called Coronavirus Relief Fund, created by the CARES Act and distributed through state, local and tribal governments, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. That’s on top of the $25 billion in assistance provided by the relief package passed in December. To receive financial assistance — which could be used for rent, utilities and other housing expenses — households would have to meet several conditions. Household income could not exceed 80 percent of the area median income, at least one household member must be at risk of homelessness or housing instability, and individuals would have to qualify for unemployment benefits or have experienced financial hardship (directly or indirectly) because of the pandemic. Assistance could be provided for up to 18 months, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Lower-income families that have been unemployed for three months or more would be given priority for assistance. Read more.And by the end of the week, Mr. McCarthy announced he and a group of House Republicans would travel to the border on Monday in a bid to highlight the problem there — and change the subject.After spending the campaign vowing to find common ground with Republicans and make Washington work again, Mr. Biden, in his first major act as president, prioritized speed and scale over bipartisanship.He and his top aides believe in legislative momentum, that success begets success and that they’ll be able to push through another pricey bill — this one to build roads, bridges and broadband — because of their early win on Covid-19 relief.“The fact that we could do it without Republicans forces them to the table,” said a senior White House official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the nitty-gritty of lawmaking.Yet to the G.O.P. lawmakers who have signaled a willingness to work with the new administration, Mr. Biden’s determination to push through the stimulus without G.O.P. votes will imperil the rest of his agenda.“What I would be worried about if I were them is what does this do to jeopardize bipartisan cooperation on other things you want to do — you can’t do everything by reconciliation,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, alluding to the parliamentary procedure by which the Senate can approve legislation by a simple majority. “I’ve heard some of our members say that, ‘If you’re going to waste all this money on unrelated matters, I’m really not interested in spending a bunch more money on infrastructure.’”To Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who was one of the Senate Republicans who went to the White House last month pitching a slimmed-down stimulus, it’s downright bizarre to hear Democrats claiming their 2010 difficulties stemmed from not going big.“I would argue it was too big, it was unfocused, it was wasted money,” Ms. Capito said.To Democrats, though, they are avoiding, not repeating, their past mistakes.“The public didn’t know about the Affordable Care Act and the administration was not exactly advertising,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters last week.Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, was just as blunt, singling out the Maine moderate who was wooed by Mr. Obama to ensure bipartisan support for the 2009 Recovery Act but whose appeals for a far-smaller compromise bill were ignored last month.“We made a big mistake in 2009 and ’10, Susan Collins was part of that mistake,” Mr. Schumer said on CNN. “We cut back on the stimulus dramatically and we stayed in recession for five years.”And, he could have noted, his party would not have full control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue for another decade.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Why Georgia is Bracing for More Political Hurricanes

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyA Political Hurricane Blew Through Georgia. Now It’s Bracing for More.The country’s most hotly contested state has calmed down after months of drama, court fights and national attention (even the death threats have slowed). But new storms are on the horizon.Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, who became a target of former President Donald J. Trump for defending the validity of the state’s election results.Credit…Audra Melton for The New York TimesMarch 13, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETATLANTA — The death threats finally appeared to be subsiding, Brad Raffensperger was happy to report.“I haven’t gotten one in a while,” said Mr. Raffensperger, Georgia’s embattled secretary of state, expressing hope that political passions might be cooling off in the state — though “cooling off” is relative in the country’s most heated battleground.Not since Florida’s presidential recount of 2000 has one state’s election cycle drawn so much national — even international — scrutiny. Polarizing figures, expensive campaigns and breathless plotlines have become a seemingly permanent feature of elections here. Analysts have identified Georgia as a major bellwether of the nation’s cultural, economic and demographic realignment, as well as a prime battlefield for showdowns over such fundamental civic matters as the right to vote.When exactly did this reliably Republican and relatively sleepy political sphere become such a vital center of contention and intrigue?Why does seemingly every politically interested observer in America have — à la Ray Charles — Georgia on their mind?The landmark event was President Biden’s becoming the first Democrat at the top of the ticket to carry Georgia since 1992, in what was the most closely decided state in last year’s presidential race. Former President Donald J. Trump appeared especially fixated on the state and made it the main focus of his efforts to reverse the results of the national election. Georgia then played host to double runoff contests in January that flipped control of the Senate to Democrats.The fervor and spotlight will endure: The state is a focal point for the nation’s persistent voting rights battle, as Republicans move swiftly to roll back ballot access in what opponents say is clear targeting of Black voters with echoes of Jim Crow-era disenfranchisement.In 2022, the Peach State’s race for governor is likely to include perhaps the Democratic Party’s leading champion of voting rights, Stacey Abrams, in a replay of the 2018 grudge match between her and Gov. Brian Kemp, the Republican incumbent. One of the two Democrats who won their races in January, Senator Raphael Warnock, will also have to turn around and defend his seat next year in a race that Republicans are already eyeing as they seek to reclaim the chamber. Several local and national Republicans — including Mr. Trump — have tried to recruit the former University of Georgia football legend Herschel Walker to run for the seat, which could lend another wrinkle to the state’s political story, as if it needed one.Adding to the chaos, Mr. Kemp has become the target of a vendetta by Mr. Trump, who has condemned him for not doing more to deliver (or poach) victory for him in Georgia in November. This has also made Georgia the unquestioned center of the internal disputes that have roiled the Republican Party since November. Mr. Trump has seemed intent on making the state a key stop on a revenge tour he has waged against Republicans he has deemed insufficiently loyal to him — Mr. Kemp and Mr. Raffensperger chief among them.“It just feels like a hurricane blew through here politically in the last few campaigns that just keeps carrying over,” said former Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Republican from the state.Stacey Abrams is seen as likely to run again for governor of Georgia in 2022, in a potential rematch of her 2018 race against Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican.Credit…Nicole Craine for The New York TimesSenator Jon Ossoff, who prevailed alongside Mr. Warnock in the runoffs, said that “there’s a tension and complexity to the total arc of Georgia’s history that manifests itself in this particular moment.” That tension, he added, “is continually being expressed in our politics.”Towering stakes in a shifting statePeople tend to speak of Georgia politics these days in the most dramatic of terms: A struggle is underway “for the soul of Georgia,” and the New South in general. Every week seems to bring a new “existential battle” over some defining issue. A “foundational tension” is playing out in the racial politics of a place considered both a cradle of the civil rights movement and a pillar of the old Confederacy.Some days, state officials said, the stakes feel too high, the energy too charged and the language too extreme.“In my opinion, that’s not healthy, and that’s not what America should be,” said Gabriel Sterling, another top election overseer who, like Mr. Raffensperger, gained a national profile as Mr. Trump challenged Mr. Biden’s victory in the state with false claims of rampant voter fraud. (Mr. Trump’s phone call to Mr. Raffensperger in December, pressuring him to “find” enough votes to overturn the results, was disclosed by The Washington Post and led Georgia prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into the former president.)“You’re not supposed to live and die by these elections,” Mr. Sterling said, noting that in a healthy democracy, the “normal” number of death threats directed at an official like him would be “zero.” He and Mr. Raffensperger were sitting in a tavern near the Georgia Capitol early this month, monitored by a security detail. They were unwinding after another day of pitched political battle in which the Republican-controlled legislature passed an election bill that would create a raft of new ballot restrictions.Republicans are now worried that their slipping grip on Georgia could make it a perennial swing state. Mr. Chambliss said that white suburban women, who have been the key component of the state’s Republican coalition, had defected en masse in recent years, more drastically around Atlanta than in other growing metropolitan areas around the country.Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff scored momentous victories for the Democratic Party when they won their runoff elections in January. Credit…Nicole Craine for The New York Times“The animosity toward Trump is real, and that’s a group that Republicans need to be courting in a heavy way,” Mr. Chambliss said. He added that such a goal would not be easy to achieve as long as Mr. Trump kept involving himself in the state’s politics.“A lot of us have been standing on mountaintops screaming that our margins in the suburbs have been collapsing,” said Brian Robinson, a Republican political consultant in Georgia. Much of the recent focus on those electoral shifts, he said, flowed from the tiny margin of votes separating Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump in the state. That segued to the saturation media coverage of the Senate runoffs, the Republican election challenges and, of course, Mr. Trump’s conduct after Nov. 3.“Everything became all about Georgia,” Mr. Robinson said. “I was getting interviewed by newspapers from Switzerland.”The transformation of Georgia’s politics is largely a story of rapidly changing demographics. Atlanta is among the fastest-growing cities in the country, its suburbs evolving from a white Republican hotbed to a more diverse and progressive population of college-educated “knowledge workers.” Metropolitan Atlanta has attracted a substantial influx of younger immigrants and transplants from more crowded and expensive cities in the Northeast and the West.Likewise, the racial makeup has shifted rapidly. “Our demography is reflective of where many states are, and where the nation is headed,” said Ms. Abrams, who added that the majority of Georgia’s population was expected to be nonwhite by the end of this decade. “Politically, Georgia reflects what happens when all of these things come together. It’s a difficult thing to navigate on a national scale, and Georgia is the living embodiment of this.”A Democratic-led push for voting rightsThe point of convergence for much of this ferment has been the protracted struggle over voting rights. Ms. Abrams, who founded the political advocacy and voter registration group Fair Fight Action, has received broad credit for helping capture the state’s electoral votes for Mr. Biden and the Senate seats for Democrats.She became a voting rights cause célèbre herself in 2018 after enduring a bitter defeat in a governor’s race marred by accusations of voter suppression against Mr. Kemp in his former capacity as Georgia’s secretary of state. Ms. Abrams has to this day refused to concede defeat; Mr. Kemp, who oversaw the purging of hundreds of thousands of Georgians from the state’s voter rolls during his tenure, denied any wrongdoing. He declined to comment for this article.Ms. Abrams said that Republicans could not match the political energy and the demographic momentum that have propelled Democrats in Georgia, other than to pursue laws that would make it harder for traditional Democratic constituencies, such as African-Americans, to vote.The legislation currently making its way through the Capitol includes strict limits on weekend voting, a measure that could significantly impede the traditional role of Black churches in fostering civic engagement. A bill that passed the Georgia Senate early this month would repeal “no-excuse” absentee voting and require more stringent voter identification measures. The state’s political patriarch, the 96-year-old former President Jimmy Carter, said this past week that he was “disheartened, saddened and angry” about the legislation.Mr. Ossoff, left, and Mr. Warnock on Capitol Hill this month. Mr. Warnock will have to run for re-election next year in a race that Republicans are targeting.Credit…J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press“We know that some version of this bill is likely to pass because Republicans face an existential crisis in Georgia,” Ms. Abrams said. By the same token, Democrats could face a crisis of their own if Republicans succeed at enacting more restrictive voting laws in Georgia and several other states with Republican-controlled legislatures.Mr. Ossoff, who at 34 is the youngest member of the Senate, said Georgia had become a textbook case of how political and generational realignment “can change power dynamics in a way that has massive national implications.”Mr. Ossoff’s life trajectory has offered him a firsthand view of these shifts. He grew up in a suburban Atlanta congressional district that was once represented in the House by Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker, and is now represented by Lucy McBath, an African-American Democrat.Mr. Ossoff began his career as an intern for the civil rights pioneer and Georgia congressman John Lewis, became the first Jewish senator from the Deep South and entered the chamber with first Black senator to represent Georgia, Mr. Warnock. He now sits at a Senate desk that was once occupied by the fierce civil rights opponent Richard Russell and the staunch segregationist Herman Talmadge. In accordance with Senate tradition, both long-dead senators carved their initials in the desk, though Mr. Ossoff said he had yet to do that himself.Republicans haltingly plan their next movesGeorgia Republicans say it would be shortsighted to think that legislation alone can stem the state’s recent tide of red to blue. Nor is it clear whether the most powerful motivating force in their party — Mr. Trump — has in fact motivated just as many voters to support Democrats in and around Atlanta.This dynamic has extended to Trump acolytes like Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the first-term Republican from the state’s northwest corner, whose far-right views, incendiary language and promotion of conspiracy theories have made her the biggest new attention magnet in Congress, for better or worse. “I have always subscribed to having a big tent,” Mr. Chambliss said. “By the same token, I don’t know where some of these people who wander into the tent ever come from.”Former Senator Kelly Loeffler, the Republican businesswoman whom Mr. Kemp appointed to replace the retiring Johnny Isakson in late 2019, announced plans last month to start a voter registration group of her own, geared toward disengaged conservatives. Ms. Loeffler, who lost to Mr. Warnock, envisions the organization, Greater Georgia, as a Republican counterbalance to Ms. Abrams’s efforts.Ms. Loeffler said she had committed a seven-figure sum of her own money to seed the effort. “When I stepped out of the Senate, I heard people say consistently that ‘someone needs to do something about Georgia,’” Ms. Loeffler said.Former Senator Kelly Loeffler said she had no timetable for deciding whether she would run again for the Senate in 2022.Credit…Dustin Chambers for The New York TimesMs. Loeffler did not say precisely what “needs to be done about Georgia” whether she meant only finding new ways to reach and register conservative voters or working to support Republican-driven laws that would discourage Democrats from voting. Ms. Abrams dismissed the effort as “a shallow attempt at mimicry” and “a vile attempt to limit access based on conspiracy theories.”Ms. Loeffler said she was merely “working to ensure that voters trust the process of voting.” She leaned heavily on phrases like “transparency,” “uniformity” and “election integrity,” which critics deride as false pretenses for Republican efforts to impose voter suppression measures. “There’s no question that many Georgians did not trust the process,” she said.Ms. Loeffler’s brief foray into elective politics began in January 2020, during Mr. Trump’s first Senate impeachment trial. She immediately began running for her November re-election, in a campaign that included Representative Doug Collins, a firebrand Republican and fierce defender of Mr. Trump who continually derided Ms. Loeffler as a “RINO” (Republican in name only) who was not adequately devoted to the former president. She then spent much of her brief Senate career trying to display her fealty to Mr. Trump — an effort that included a campaign ad literally portraying her as to the right of Attila the Hun.Ms. Loeffler, 50, said she had no timetable for deciding whether she would run against Mr. Warnock in what would be a rematch for her old seat. As for what other Republicans might run, speculation has produced (as it does) a colorful wish list, from Ms. Greene to Mr. Walker. David Perdue, the former Republican senator who was defeated by Mr. Ossoff, said last month that he would not run in 2022, and Mr. Trump has been trying to enlist Mr. Collins to take on Mr. Kemp in a Republican primary bid.Mr. Walker, the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner, signed his first professional football contract in the ’80s with Mr. Trump’s United States Football League team, the New Jersey Generals, and maintains a close friendship with his former boss. A native of Wrightsville, Ga., Mr. Walker is a Republican who has encouraged African-Americans to join the party, and he has not ruled himself out for 2022.He is also unquestionably beloved in his home state, and the feeling appears to be mutual, though Mr. Walker currently lives in Texas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      For Chuck Schumer, a Dream Job Comes With Tall Orders

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFor Chuck Schumer, a Dream Job Comes With Tall OrdersAfter ascending to the top Senate job during the assault on the Capitol, Mr. Schumer faces a different kind of challenge: steering President Biden’s agenda with no margin for error.“I do my job well, and everything works out,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMarch 9, 2021Updated 9:24 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The moment Chuck Schumer achieved his longtime dream of becoming Senate majority leader, he was in a secure room hiding from a violent pro-Trump mob that was rampaging through the Capitol.As rioters prowled the halls hunting for top lawmakers — Mr. Schumer, Democrat of New York, later heard that one had been looking for his desk, saying, “Where’s the big Jew?” — he was being evacuated with other leaders to a safe room at an undisclosed location.It was then that news outlets confirmed that Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, had won the final Georgia Senate race that would give the party the majority, handing Mr. Schumer the top job. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, turned to the man who had engineered his defeat and offered a brief concession and congratulations.With that, Charles Ellis Schumer, 70, the Brooklyn-raised son of an exterminator and a homemaker, became the first New Yorker ever to lead the United States Senate.“Jan. 6 was the best of times,” Mr. Schumer said in a recent interview in his office, where he cracked open a Diet Coke. “And it was the worst of times.”His dream job has come with huge challenges and a practically nonexistent margin for error. Mr. Schumer rose to power on the strength of his skills as a party messenger and relentless campaign strategist, not his talent as a legislative tactician.Now it falls to him to maneuver President Biden’s ambitious agenda through a polarized, 50-50 Senate without one vote to spare, navigating between the progressive and moderate factions in his party in the face of a Republican opposition that is more determined than ever.Mr. Schumer passed his first test over the weekend, squeezing Mr. Biden’s sweeping $1.9 trillion stimulus measure through the Senate along party lines — an effort that nearly fell apart as Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia and a crucial moderate, balked at the 11th hour. Mr. Schumer negotiated a concession, and the bill passed, paving the way for emergency aid and the most far-reaching antipoverty effort in a generation.“I’ve never seen anyone work as skillfully, as ably, as patiently, with determination to deliver such a consequential piece of legislation,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Schumer.The effort forced the Senate leader to straddle his party’s centrist and progressive wings, a trick he will have to master if he hopes to keep the president’s agenda on track and Democrats in control of the chamber, as well as fending off a possible 2022 primary challenge from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the high-profile progressive from the Bronx.Asked what he would do about her, Mr. Schumer shrugged and said he talked to Ms. Ocasio-Cortez “all the time.”“What I’ve done throughout my career,” he added. “I do my job well, and everything works out.”‘I Love My Members!’“I know every one of my colleagues’ numbers by heart,” Mr. Schumer said recently, waving his signature flip phone in the air.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIf Mr. Schumer’s victory was overshadowed by the violence of Jan. 6 and the chaos that followed, it has not slowed his pace or scaled back his plans.After the stimulus measure, the next items on his agenda are all ambitious and difficult, beginning with a sweeping infrastructure and jobs proposal aimed at addressing climate change, economic inequality and racial justice.The bills would be huge victories for Democrats, showing that they can deliver the progressive policies they have promised. But Mr. Schumer faces formidable hurdles in keeping together his ideologically diverse caucus, which includes conservative Democrats and a self-described democratic socialist. He also will have to outmaneuver Mr. McConnell, who likes to call himself the “grim reaper” because of a long history of using his mastery of Senate strategy to obstruct Democratic initiatives.Mr. Schumer, who is more of a happy warrior, has traditionally been less focused on the intricacies of the Senate floor. But at a moment when unity is critical to his party’s success, he has attributes that Democrats may need more: strong relationships with his colleagues and a knack for reading their political moods, along with a flair for communication.“I know every one of my colleagues’ numbers by heart,” he said in the interview, waving his signature flip phone in the air. “I love my members. I truly love them!”(Asked at a news conference on Saturday whether that included Mr. Manchin, who single-handedly delayed the stimulus measure for about 10 hours by haggling over jobless aid, Mr. Schumer grinned and said enthusiastically, “Yes!”)Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a conservative Democrat, slowed passage of the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill at the 11th hour last week.Credit…Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesMr. Schumer can be sentimental (President Donald J. Trump mocked him as “Cryin’ Chuck” after he wept during a news conference objecting to the travel ban). Since 1994, he has carried with him a letter a Union soldier, Sullivan Ballou, wrote to his wife before he was killed in the Civil War to remind himself of the “best of America.”The first Jewish person to hold the top Senate job, Mr. Schumer peppers his speech with Yiddish expressions and phrases like “holy moly.” He once cried so hard at the movie “Free Willy” that his daughters left the theater out of embarrassment.He can also be a bit of a ham. His staff has imposed some rules for him when appearing in public: “No singing. No dancing. No hats.”“I love to sing. I love to dance,” he says, “and I’m lousy at both.”The effusive personality has helped him develop personal bonds with lawmakers of every ideological stripe. Mr. Schumer has 11 Democrats on his leadership team that meets each Monday, including the Senate’s most conservative, Mr. Manchin, and its two most left-learning members, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent.Most of them refer to him as a friend.“Anybody and everybody can work with Chuck,” said Mr. Manchin, who because of the tight Senate margin is a crucial swing vote on everything that crosses Mr. Schumer’s desk.Mr. McConnell’s willingness to employ hardball tactics might give him the “negotiating advantage in many circumstances,” said Ms. Warren, whom Mr. Schumer wooed to run for the Senate in 2012 over a meal at Hunan Dynasty, his favorite Chinese restaurant a few blocks from the Capitol.“But when the Democrats stand together behind Chuck,” Ms. Warren said, “Chuck has shown that he can deliver.”Less clear is how effective he can be at courting the moderate Republicans he will most likely need to push through key priorities in the Senate, where 60 votes are required to advance most major bills. His relationship with Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who may be the single most important swing vote, grew particularly toxic after Mr. Schumer attacked her during her latest re-election race.Mr. Schumer’s political action committee ran ads accusing Ms. Collins’s husband of enriching himself through the opioid crisis and charging that she had “pocketed” money from drug companies.“His tactics were unworthy of a Senate race,” Ms. Collins said, calling the ads “deceptive” and “shameful.”She said Mr. Schumer’s only goal was to “jam the Republicans and force partisan, highly political votes on nearly every major issue.”“So far,” she said of the majority leader, “the signs are not promising.”A Political EvolutionRepresentative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and Mr. Schumer speaking to constituents about funeral costs for Covid-19 victims in Queens last month. Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/ReutersMr. Schumer was not always regarded as a liberal partisan, but his path to the top Senate job has involved considerable reinvention. When he campaigned for the Senate in 1998, he described himself as an “angry centrist” who was “tough on crime.”His critics have long portrayed him as too cozy with Wall Street, and a review of his Senate record by The New York Times in 2008 showed that he repeatedly took steps to protect industry players from government oversight and tougher rules.But as his party has moved to the left, Mr. Schumer has aligned himself more closely with its progressive wing. In addition to backing a clean-energy jobs initiative that is part of the infrastructure plan, he has been among the leading voices calling on Mr. Biden to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt.“The world changes, and you have to change with it,” Mr. Schumer said. “Income inequality is much worse. Climate change is much more dangerous.”His ability to work both wings of his party was on display on Friday, when Mr. Schumer spent hours in painstaking negotiations with Mr. Manchin, who wanted to scale back unemployment payments, a core liberal priority in the stimulus bill. As action stalled, Republicans gleefully laid the chaos at the new majority leader’s feet.“Chuck Schumer has officially lost control,” Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said in a one-line statement.But in the end — after a marathon series of calls with Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, Mr. Manchin and others — Mr. Schumer had a deal, and he held Democrats together in beating back Republican attempts to erode support for the bill with politically tricky votes.“Not a single member defected on any significant vote,” Mr. Schumer said.Destined for PoliticsMr. Schumer in New York in 1987.Credit…Robert Kalfus/New York Post, via Getty ImagesThose who know Mr. Schumer say he has been preparing for his current job for nearly his entire life.His first foray into politics came in 1968, during a low moment in his freshman year at Harvard, after the basketball coach dashed his hopes of playing for the team.A distraught Mr. Schumer wrote to his mother, saying he wanted to come home and go to Brooklyn College. But then he was invited to join the Harvard Young Democrats, whose backing for Eugene McCarthy was part of an antiwar movement that swept the nation and ultimately prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson not to seek another term.“There’s a Yiddish word — beshert — God’s hand,” Mr. Schumer said. “I said to myself, ‘Holy moly! A ragtag group of students and other assorted nobodies toppled the most powerful man in the world? This is what I want to dedicate my life to.’”So at 23, he ran for a seat in the New York State Legislature, making him the second-youngest person after Theodore Roosevelt to do so. He won, and has never lost a race in the nearly half-century since, rising to the House of Representatives in 1981 and eventually to the Senate in 1999.A Relentless RecruiterMr. Schumer spent about four months persuading Senator Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia, to run for office. His victory handed Mr. Schumer the majority.Credit…Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesOne task that Mr. Schumer especially loves, and to which he owes his current post, is his relentless work recruiting winning Democratic candidates. It is a major reason that, in a year when his party lost 13 seats in the House, it was able to recapture the Senate, albeit by the thinnest of margins.Ms. Warren recalled Mr. Schumer “hammering” her in 2011 until she agreed to run. He has had dozens of similar meetings over the years.As John Hickenlooper, the former Colorado governor, pursued the Democratic presidential nomination last year, Mr. Schumer was pestering him from the sidelines to consider a Senate run. He waited until a few days after Mr. Hickenlooper had left the presidential race, summoned the Coloradan and his wife for a meeting that lasted five hours and made his case. Mr. Hickenlooper ran and won, picking up a crucial Senate seat for Democrats.Mr. Schumer has had his share of disappointments, too. He wanted badly for Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia House minority leader, to challenge the Republican Kelly Loeffler for her Senate seat, but Ms. Abrams had her sights set on another office and instead urged him to choose the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a progressive Black pastor.It took about four months of cajoling by Mr. Schumer, but Mr. Warnock eventually agreed. His victory in a runoff in January was one of the final two pickups that handed Senate control to the Democrats.Ms. Abrams recalled steeling herself as she called Mr. Schumer to let him know she would not run.“Having worked with people with big personalities, there was a range of responses it could have been, and his was instinctive kindness,” she said. “Which is why, when I get a call from Chuck Schumer, I take it.”Emily Cochrane More

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      Roy Blunt of Missouri, No. 4 Senate Republican, Plans to Retire

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRoy Blunt of Missouri, No. 4 Senate Republican, Plans to RetireMr. Blunt, a fixture of Republican leadership in Congress who had been known for his ability to work with both parties, said he would not seek re-election in 2022.Republicans are confident they can hold Senator Roy Blunt’s seat in a state that has swung hard to the right over the last decade.Credit…Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesMarch 8, 2021Updated 6:34 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Roy Blunt of Missouri, the No. 4 Senate Republican, announced on Monday that he would not seek re-election in 2022, the latest in a string of party veterans who have opted to exit Congress as the G.O.P. remakes itself in the mold of former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Blunt, a fixture of the Republican establishment, had told reporters in January that he was planning to run for a third term and had taken steps to avoid alienating the former president. But with his surprise announcement on Monday, he joined a growing group of institutionalists who have chosen to leave rather than potentially subject themselves to party primaries that promise to be contests of which candidate can tie himself more closely to Mr. Trump.“After 14 general election victories — three to county office, seven to the United States House of Representatives and four statewide elections — I won’t be a candidate for re-election to the United States Senate next year,” Mr. Blunt, 71, said in a two-minute video posted on social media.Speaking later to reporters in Springfield, Mo., Mr. Blunt predicted he would have won Mr. Trump’s endorsement and prevailed if he had run again, but said he did not want to commit to another eight years of campaigning and service in Congress.“I felt good about getting elected, but what I felt less good about was whether I wanted to go from 26 years in the Congress to 32 years in the Congress and maybe eliminate the other things I might get a chance to do,” he said.Republicans are confident they can hold his seat in a state that has swung hard to the right over the last decade. Still, Mr. Blunt’s departure adds to a brain drain already underway among Senate Republicans.A bipartisan deal maker and stalwart of Washington social circles known for well-tailored suits and disarming charm, he is the rare figure who has served in high-ranking posts in both House and Senate leadership. Mr. Blunt was also in charge of planning President Biden’s inauguration in January, a delicate task that required him to navigate explosive political crosscurrents and the threat of violence after the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol.His decision not to seek another term follows similar ones by Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, one of Republicans’ leading policy minds and a seeker of bipartisan compromises; Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, a deal-making former chairman of the Appropriations Committee; and Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, a top party voice on free-market economics. Republicans are still closely watching Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, 87, their longest-serving member, to see if he will seek another term.In their place has emerged a crop of Trump acolytes who have mirrored the former president’s combative style, shunned compromise with Democrats and so far been more willing to buck Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the long-serving top Republican leader with whom Mr. Blunt closely allied himself.“There are two kinds of politicians in Washington — those who want to make a point, and those who want to make a difference. Senator Blunt always worked to make a difference,” said Antonia Ferrier, a former longtime Republican aide who worked for Mr. Blunt in the House and later for Mr. McConnell. “There is no question that his departure, on top of those like Senators Alexander and Shelby, leaves a hole of those who know how to forge bipartisan legislative deals.”In a fawning statement, Mr. McConnell called Mr. Blunt a “policy heavyweight” who had helped bring home legislative victories for Republicans and the Senate as a whole. Among Mr. Blunt’s proudest were billions of dollars in new funding he helped secure as an appropriator for medical research, including for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and mental health. He was also a savvy political tactician who was talked about both as a possible successor to Mr. McConnell and as a sought-after negotiating partner for Democrats.Those qualities, once prized in government, have slowly become political liabilities among Republican primary voters whose loyalty to Mr. Trump and distrust of official Washington have reshaped the party. Mr. Blunt had not formally drawn a primary challenger, but his close alliance with Mr. McConnell, who has openly sought to purge Mr. Trump from the party, and his status as a consummate Washington insider put him at risk.Eric Greitens, a Republican who resigned as Missouri’s governor in a cloud of scandal in 2018, said last week that he was “evaluating” whether to challenge Mr. Blunt in a primary. Mr. Greitens, a decorated member of the Navy SEALs, has sought to position himself as an heir to Mr. Trump and accused Mr. Blunt of inadequately backing him.“It’s not enough to have an ‘R’ behind their name. We have to have people who are willing to take on the establishment to actually fight against the swamp,” Mr. Greitens told a St. Louis radio station.Mr. Blunt had only occasionally criticized Mr. Trump during his four years in office, careful not to anger the former president who helped him secure a narrow victory in 2016.The Capitol riot proved a more difficult path to walk. Afterward, Mr. Blunt broke with most of Missouri’s Republican delegation and voted to confirm Mr. Biden’s election victory after the attack. He called Mr. Trump’s actions “clearly reckless” and said Jan. 6 had been “a sad and terrible day in the history of the country.” But he vocally opposed Mr. Trump’s impeachment.Mr. Blunt had no cross words for either Mr. Trump or Mr. Greitens on Monday, but he warned against the ascendant brand of politics in his party focused not on solving problems for people but on drawing lines in the sand and picking fights.“The country in the last decade or so has sort of fallen off the edge of too many politicians saying, ‘If you’ll vote for me, I’ll never compromise on anything,’” he told reporters in Springfield. “That is a philosophy that particularly does not work in a democracy.”Among other Republicans considering running for the seat are Jay Ashcroft, the Missouri secretary of state; Eric Schmitt, the attorney general; Jean Evans, a former state party leader; Mike Kehoe, the lieutenant governor; Representatives Jason Smith and Ann Wagner; and Carl Edwards, a former NASCAR driver.With Republicans’ newfound dominance in Missouri, statewide contests have increasingly been decided in G.O.P. primaries. But John Hancock, a former state party chairman, warned that there was always a risk that so many ambitious young Republicans vying for the nomination could lead to a “divisive primary” backfiring.“There are benefits and detriments to having a deep bench,” he said.Democrats, who have lost nearly every race for statewide office over the last decade, have no clear front-runner at the moment.Scott Sifton, a veteran of the Missouri statehouse, has already jumped into the race and put together a full campaign team. Democrats in the state have suggested one of its two Democratic members of Congress, Cori Bush of St. Louis and Emanuel Cleaver II of Kansas City, could also run. And Quinton Lucas, the mayor of Kansas City, expressed interest on Monday.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Democrats Want a Stronger Edge in the Senate. Ohio Could Be Crucial.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDemocrats Want a Stronger Edge in the Senate. Ohio Could Be Crucial.The retirement of a moderate Republican senator and conservative infighting have raised Democratic ambitions in the state, a longtime political bellwether that is increasingly tilting red.Ohio served as a political bellwether and swing-state proving ground for years, but has recently been dominated by Republicans.Credit…Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesMarch 6, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCOLUMBUS, Ohio — For Democrats of late, winning in Ohio has been a bit like Lucy and the football.First, Hillary Clinton made a late push there in 2016, returning to the state on the weekend before the election with no less a local celebrity than LeBron James, even though she had stayed away for much of the fall. Then, in the 2018 governor’s race, Democrats were optimistic about Richard Cordray, the wonky former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And in November, it was President Biden who made an 11th-hour stop in Ohio, even though his campaign was also skeptical about its chances there.Each candidate lost, and for the two presidential hopefuls, it was not even close.But Ohio Democrats are getting their hopes up again, aiming to capitalize on Senator Rob Portman’s surprise announcement last month that he was retiring and on Republican infighting after more than a decade of G.O.P. dominance at the state level.“I think people will look for something different,” Senator Sherrod Brown, the only remaining Democrat in statewide office, said of his party’s chances to pick up the Portman seat in 2022. “There’s a whole lot of people whose lives have gotten worse in the last five to 10 years.”If Democrats are to increase their Senate seats significantly beyond the 50 they now hold, with the party relying on Vice President Kamala Harris as a tiebreaker in the event of a 50-50 deadlock, states like Ohio are essential. They owe their narrow advantage to the fast-growing South and West, having picked up Republican-held seats in three states — Georgia, Arizona and Colorado — that Mr. Biden also carried in November.Yet the president’s recent challenges with some of his appointments and coronavirus relief legislation make the limitations of such fragile Senate control vividly clear: To claim something larger than what’s effectively a Joe Manchin majority, in which appointments and the shape of legislation can be determined by a single red-state senator, Democrats will have to go on the offensive next year in a part of the country that has proved far more fickle for them: the industrial Midwest.Mr. Biden’s hopes for working with a more expansive majority will hinge on whether his party can capture a cluster of Republican-held seats across the Big Ten region: in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa. Former President Barack Obama won all of those states both times he ran, but they have become more forbidding for Democrats, or at least more competitive, as working-class white voters have become more reliable Republicans since the rise of former President Donald J. Trump.“If we’re going to have a real majority for Biden, we’ve got to figure out how we can get up to 52 to 53 seats, and that means Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin,” said Doug Thornell, a Democratic strategist. (Iowa, which has been as difficult for Democrats as Ohio in recent years, may be competitive as a Senate battleground, but only if its longtime Senator Charles E. Grassley, 87, retires.)Senator Rob Portman of Ohio announced he would not seek re-election in 2022, creating an open seat during the midterm elections.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesBeyond the question of the Senate majority, how these states behave in 2022 could carry profound implications. If they revert to a more Democratic orientation in the aftermath of the Trump era, it would suggest that the rightward shift of working-class white voters in recent years was driven by affection for one outsize figure. If Republicans win across the region, though, it may portend a more enduring realignment and raise sobering questions for Democrats about the Senate and presidential maps.And few states, in the Midwest or beyond, have the symbolic resonance of Ohio, which for decades served as a political bellwether and swing-state proving ground. Now, however, even the most optimistic Ohio Democrats acknowledge that they reside in a Republican-leaning state and must take lessons on how to compete from their ideological counterparts in other precincts of red-state America.“We should look at how Democrats won in Montana and Kansas,” said Mayor Nan Whaley of Dayton, who is planning a run for governor next year. “That’s a new place for us to look because we’ve always been a battleground, but national messages don’t fit right into Ohio.”One of the most consequential questions for Ohio Democrats is out of their hands: What direction will Republicans take in the Biden era? “Where they land is going to be a big deal,” Ms. Whaley said.Had Mr. Portman run for re-election, this would have been a far less weighty question in Ohio. He and Gov. Mike DeWine, another establishment-aligned and well-known incumbent, would have campaigned on their own political brands, never confronting Mr. Trump but also never embracing him, either.Now, though, the open Senate seat is thrusting the loyalty-obsessed former president to the forefront of his party’s nascent primary, as the announced candidates compete to see who can hug Mr. Trump tightest.Josh Mandel, a former state treasurer who twice ran against Mr. Brown before withdrawing from the 2018 race and disappearing from public view, has resurfaced as an ardent MAGA man. In interviews and tweets since entering the race to succeed Mr. Portman, he has claimed that Mr. Trump’s second impeachment prompted him to run — never mind his previous two bids — and vowed to advance Mr. Trump’s “America First Agenda.”Perhaps more striking, though, is the maneuvering by Jane Timken, a wealthy executive who was elevated to the chair of the Ohio Republican Party in 2017 in part because Mr. Trump took the extraordinary step as president-elect to make calls to party activists on her behalf.Mr. Portman, hinting where his eventual preferences may lie, has praised Ms. Timken, saying that “over the last couple of years, she has somehow managed through her communications and her organizing to keep all wings of the party moving in the same direction.”Jane Timken, right, a wealthy executive who was elevated to the chair of the Ohio Republican Party in 2017, is expected to begin a campaign for the Senate seat.Credit…Aaron Doster/Associated PressYet Ms. Timken’s conduct since the start of this year illustrates the high-wire act Mr. Trump may force Republicans to execute in next year’s election.The weekend after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Ms. Timken, then still the state party chair, sent an email to Republicans urging them to “remember that whether it comes to our country or our party, our shared progress and prosperity is never about one person, one candidate or one government official.”A few weeks later, addressing a question about the decision by Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio to vote to impeach Mr. Trump, Ms. Timken said she was not sure she would have made the same choice but added that he had “a rational reason” for his vote. She called him “an effective legislator.”Ms. Timken changed her tune, however, just hours before quitting her state party post last month as she prepared to enter the Senate race.“Anthony Gonzalez made the wrong decision on impeachment and I disagree with his vote,” she said. “This sham impeachment is illegal and unconstitutional.”And then, just this week, Ms. Timken, under pressure to show her fealty to Mr. Trump, issued a statement demanding that Mr. Gonzalez resign from his seat. Her campaign, seeing private polling that showed an overwhelming majority of Ohio Republicans wanted to oust Mr. Gonzalez, realized it needed to put the issue to bed, according to one adviser.Tim Ryan, a Democrat who represents a district in northeastern Ohio in Congress, is considering a run for Senate in the stateCredit…Eric Thayer for The New York TimesA number of Ohio Republicans were struck by the speed of her shift, including one who may also enter the Senate race: Representative Steve Stivers, the former chair of the House G.O.P. campaign arm.“Wait till you quit before you attack somebody,” Mr. Stivers said of Ms. Timken’s broadside on Mr. Gonzalez.While he has yet to announce his intentions, Mr. Stivers, who has said he would prefer Mr. Trump to enjoy a quiet retirement à la George W. Bush, believes the competition to cozy up to the former president could leave an opening in the primary.“My lane is looking pretty empty,” he said. “I should be able to go about 180 miles per hour in it.”Though it’s uncertain how strong Mr. Trump’s political standing will be next year, particularly if he were to be indicted in one of the criminal investigations he faces, many veterans of Ohio politics believe the only path to the Republican Senate nomination is through the former president.“Jane would be honored to have the president’s endorsement,” said Corry Bliss, who ran Mr. Portman’s 2016 campaign and is advising Ms. Timken. He made sure to note that she had been Mr. Trump’s “handpicked chair.”To a number of Ohio Republicans, the importance of their eventual nominee pales in comparison to what they believe is the fundamental political math of a state that absorbs the Rust Belt and Appalachia. “Our suburban losses are dwarfed by their losses among working-class whites,” said Nick Everhart, a Columbus-based G.O.P. strategist.Ohio Democrats don’t deny that they are underdogs — or that to win, they may need the Republican Party to remain fractured.They point to the scandal-plagued Statehouse, where the House speaker is under federal indictment on corruption charges, as well as tensions between Trumpian legislators and the mild-mannered Mr. DeWine. Then there’s Mr. Trump and the widening gap between how he’s viewed by Republican activists and the broader electorate.“I don’t know if I’d call it a prerequisite for us to win, but their chaos is our opportunity,” said Liz Walters, the newly elected Ohio Democratic state chair.But Ohio Democrats may have their own drama.Emilia Strong Sykes, the state House minority leader, said progressive groups had encouraged her to run for the Senate seat.Credit…Paul Vernon/Associated PressWhile Representative Tim Ryan, a veteran Youngstown-area lawmaker, has been clear about his intent to run for Mr. Portman’s seat, he may face a primary that would highlight some of the tensions in the Democratic coalition.Lamenting how Mr. Trump had tapped into the “angst, anger and frustration” of onetime Ohio Democrats, longtime Representative Marcy Kaptur said that Mr. Ryan, who like her represents one of the lowest-income, predominantly white districts in the country, would “be able to reach people” the party has lost.A handful of other Democrats are considering entering the Senate race. They include Amy Acton, the former director of the state health department; Emilia Strong Sykes, the state House minority leader; and Kevin Boyce, a local official in Columbus who previously served in the state House. Ms. Sykes said the party’s turnout efforts in Ohio’s cities had been “awful” and called for a new approach.“Recreating Sherrod Brown — that doesn’t work because Sherrod Brown is Sherrod Brown,” she said, a barely veiled reference to Mr. Ryan’s attempt to pitch himself as a white populist. “We’re going to have to find a candidate who’s exciting and can appeal to women and people of color.”Ms. Sykes, who is Black, said she had been encouraged to run for the Senate by a handful of progressive advocacy groups and was assessing the landscape.She spoke for a number of Ohio Democrats when she said that Mr. Portman’s surprise retirement had prompted an otherwise depressed party to again place hope over history.“Had he not done that, it would’ve been a lost cause,” she said of the senator’s exit. “But now there’s new energy and we have to at least try.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Joseph D. Duffey, 88, Dies; Apostle of Liberalism and Humanities

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJoseph D. Duffey, 88, Dies; Apostle of Liberalism and HumanitiesHis 1970 Senate race in Connecticut energized antiwar progressives. He later served two presidents and headed universities in Massachusetts and Washington.Joseph D. Duffey in 1969, when he was chairman of the liberal advocacy group Americans for Democratic Action. He ran for the Senate the next year. Credit…Denver Post, via Getty ImagesMarch 3, 2021, 4:51 p.m. ETJoseph D. Duffey, a coal miner’s son and ordained minister whose antiwar campaign for the United States Senate from Connecticut in 1970 galvanized a generation of campus liberals, and who later served as a cultural arbiter in the Carter and Clinton administrations and presided over two major universities, died on Feb. 25 at his home in Washington. He was 88.His death was confirmed by his son, Michael.A self-described “hillbilly and a Baptist” from West Virginia, Dr. Duffey had organized Freedom Rides for civil rights in the South and protests against the Vietnam War before seeking the Senate seat from Connecticut. He lost, but his insurgent candidacy jolted the Democratic Party organization and catapulted him into appointive jobs, thanks to two other “hillbilly Baptists” who happened to become presidents of the United States.Jimmy Carter named him assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs in early 1977, and later that year Dr. Duffey was named chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a post he held until 1982, into the Reagan years.In 1993, Mr. Clinton recruited him to be director of the United States Information Agency, which promotes American policy abroad. He was its last director as an independent agency; it was absorbed into the State Department in 1999.Dr. Duffey was chancellor of the University of Massachusetts from 1982 to 1991 and chancellor of American University in Washington from 1991 to 1993.He entered the political fray after succeeding John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist, as chairman of the liberal advocacy group Americans for Democratic Action. In 1970 he was going up against John M. Bailey’s Connecticut Democratic machine.Mr. Bailey supported Alphonsus J. Donahue, a wealthy Stamford businessman, to fill the seat that had been held since 1958 by Senator Thomas J. Dodd, a fellow Democrat who had been censured in the Senate for diverting campaign funds for personal use and repudiated by party leaders when he sought re-election to a third term. (His son Christopher Dodd was later elected to the Senate from the state.)Attracting an array of boldface-name supporters, including the actor Paul Newman, who had a home in Westport, Conn., Dr. Duffey upset Mr. Donahue and a state legislator to win the nomination.Dr. Duffey, with the actor Paul Newman, spoke to Connecticut delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Mr. Duffey was spearheading his state’s campaign for Eugene McCarthy, the liberal, antiwar senator who was seeking the party’s presidential nomination.Credit…Associated PressMounted two years after the failed progressive presidential candidacy of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy in 1968, Dr. Duffey’s campaign energized campus progressives, including a young Bill Clinton, then a student at Yale Law School. They embraced Dr. Duffey as an honest broker who might bridge the gap between disaffected liberal Democrats and blue-collar voters who had switched to the Republican Party and helped put Richard M. Nixon in the White House in 1968.“At a time when young people were so desperately hungry for honesty and conviction, he met that moment with grace and eloquence,’’ Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and a former law school classmate of Mr. Clinton’s, said of Dr. Duffey this week.But Dr. Duffey’s campaign was dealt a setback when Mr. Dodd entered the general election race that fall as an independent. Mr. Dodd wound up splitting the Democratic vote, allowing the Republican nominee, Lowell P. Weicker, to slip into office with less than 42 percent. (Mr. Dodd died less than seven months later.)“In the fall of 1970, I missed about half of my law school classes trying to help get Joe Duffey elected to the Senate,” Mr. Clinton said in a statement. “There were so many of us who were drawn to his deep commitment to peace, economic fairness, and civil rights. Joe lost the election, but he left us all proud, wiser in the ways of politics, and richer in lifelong friends, including Joe himself.”A bumper sticker from Dr. Duffey’s 1970 Senate campaign. Emilio Q. Daddario, a former Connecticut congressman, was the Democratic nominee for governor. Both men lost. Joseph Daniel Duffey was born on July 1, 1932 in Huntington, W. Va., in the western foothills of the Appalachians. His father, Joseph Ivanhoe Duffey, lost a leg in a mining accident and became a barber. His mother, Ruth (Wilson) Duffey, a telegraph operator, died when Joe was 13.Raised in the Baptist church and later ordained as a Congregational minister, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Marshall University in Huntington in 1954; a bachelor of divinity degree from Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts (now the Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School) in 1957; a master’s from Yale Divinity School in 1963; and a doctorate from what is now the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut in 1969.In 1952, Dr. Duffey married Patricia Fortney, whom he had met at a Baptist youth convention; they divorced in 1973. A year later, he married Anne Wexler, who ran his 1970 campaign, became an aide to President Carter and then a prominent Washington political operative and lobbyist; she died in 2009.In addition to his son Michael, from his first marriage, he is survived by his partner, Marian Burros, a former food writer for The New York Times; two stepsons, Daniel and David Wexler; two sisters, Ida Ruth Plymale and Patrica Duffey Keesee; and four grandchildren.Dr. Duffey brought his progressive sensibilities to his job as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Mr. Carter. He defined the job to The Times in 1977 as awarding federal grants to support “disciplines whose function and purpose are self‐discovery and the exploration of the human experience.” And he acknowledged that he had encountered flak for focusing on what he called “neglected areas of research,” like the study of women and minority groups in America and the history of the Middle East.His background as chief administrative officer for the American Association of University Professors from 1974 to 1976 helped pave the way for his appointments to the chancellorships of the University of Massachusetts and American University.As a product of the antiwar movement, Dr. Duffey cautioned against romanticizing the era, recalling it as a time of deep national division.But at a reunion of some of his 1970 campaign volunteers in 1993, after Mr. Clinton had risen to the White House, he reminded them that while it had taken Mr. Clinton’s election to reunite them, they should hold fast to their liberal principles and continue to work for what could bring them together again.“Looking at you, I’m sure there’s another president here,” Dr. Duffey said. “And I’m sure we’ll all be together again when she is inaugurated.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Ron Johnson Says He Still Has Many Unanswered Questions

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutTracking the ArrestsVisual TimelineInside the SiegeThe Lost HoursThe Oath KeepersAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRon Johnson Says He Still Has Many Unanswered QuestionsThe Republican senator from Wisconsin is known for regularly promoting fringe theories favored by the right, most recently questioning the fact that pro-Trump rioters attacked the Capitol.Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, has not decided if he will seek re-election in 2022.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesMarch 1, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETSenator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has been on the forefront of elevating fringe theories about President Biden’s son Hunter, the coronavirus and the results of the 2020 election.In recent weeks he has come under renewed scrutiny for claiming in a series of radio interviews in his home state that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was not an “armed insurrection” and for using his time during a Senate hearing to read a first-person account that posited “provocateurs” and “fake Trump supporters” were behind the attack.Mr. Johnson has a reputation for being among the most accessible, high-profile Republicans in Washington, regularly defending his views to the mainstream news media — something many of his G.O.P. colleagues do not do.He spoke with The New York Times on Thursday about his theories of who was responsible for the attack on the Capitol and what he would like to see included in the congressional investigation of it. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed.You were on the radio recently talking about how it wasn’t an armed insurrection. I was curious what the origin of that perspective was for you.When I think armed, I think firearms. And yeah, we don’t know. I have no idea. That’s one of the questions I’ve got is, how many firearms were seen, were confiscated? How many shots were fired? I believe the only ones that were fired were from law enforcement. And I’ve said I’ll defend law enforcement for taking action. I don’t understand what the uproar is. But apparently, there’s uproar somewhere. Somebody takes offense to it.And I would say, if it’s properly termed an “armed insurrection,” it was a pretty ragtag one. And again, I don’t dispute the destruction, or destructive capability of things like flagpoles and bats and that type of thing, but again, words have meaning.Well, what’s your feeling about who made up the group that stormed the Capitol?I don’t know, and I’m asking the question. I’m making no assumptions.There are just so many unanswered questions, which seems to be kind of the basic situation in so many things I’m trying to get to the bottom of. But here we are almost two months later, and there are just basic pieces of information that are missing here.In the Senate hearing the other day, you read the piece from The Federalist that suggested there were sort of provocateurs and “fake Trump supporters” that had designs on generating trouble from the crowd. And I wondered, do you share that analysis?I think it’s important, if we’re going to really get the whole truth, to understand exactly what happened, we need to look at different vantage points, different perspectives.I read that article, I think, as soon as it was published, which was shortly after Jan. 6. And I was intrigued by it. Because here was an individual that, again, I didn’t know him at the time. I actually spoke to him yesterday for the first time. But I didn’t know who he was. It just looks like he had a pretty good background. This is an instructor, focusing on this type of psychological type of warfare and that type of thing. So he seemed to be a knowledgeable observer.And I was just fascinated by the fact that he wrote down his thoughts, about 14, 15 pages, without looking at any news. So it’s kind of an unblemished accounting. And that’s really kind of the eyewitness accounts you want to examine. I’m not saying you accept everything. You don’t necessarily accept his conclusions. I think you kind of have to take at face value what he said he saw.Do you believe that, as the Federalist author Michael Waller wrote, that there were fake Trump protesters in the crowd?That’s what he said he thought he saw. I think later in the article, he didn’t see any who he would have thought were fake Trump protesters, he didn’t see them engage in any violence. I think he writes that in his article. Yeah. I’m letting his testimony stand on its own. I wasn’t there.Again, I’m drawing no conclusions whatsoever. Again, a lot of press reports are assuming, imputing all kinds of conclusions. They’re saying I’m saying things that I’m not saying at all. All I’m saying at this point in time is we need to ask a lot of questions.I wonder why you think there is merit to giving an audience to Mr. Waller’s assertions that there were either provocateurs or fake Trump supporters in the crowd, given the lack of evidence.I’m not questioning his veracity. I believe he’s probably telling the truth. That’s what he saw. I’m not agreeing with any conclusions. I’m not sure he’s really making too many conclusions, other than he concluded he saw four individual types of groups that stood out from the crowd.It might be a flawed part of the evidence, but why exclude it? Just because it doesn’t necessarily tie into whatever narrative somebody else wants to tell about the day? I’m not interested in the narratives, I’m interested in the truth.There’s been a lot of talk among some of your Republican colleagues in Congress about antifa or Black Lives Matter being involved in instigating what happened. Do you share that belief?It doesn’t really seem like that was the issue. It appears, again, this is all early, I haven’t drawn any conclusions, but it appears if there was any preplanning by groups, it was white supremacist groups, like the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers, that type of thing. That’s what it appears..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1pd7fgo{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1pd7fgo{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1pd7fgo:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1pd7fgo{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}From Riot to ImpeachmentThe riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.I’ve seen videos of other people claiming to be antifa in their hotel rooms. I don’t know if any of that’s been verified. But no, again, I am drawing no conclusions at all. But right now, it appears that there were provocateurs or agitators. It would appear it would probably be from the white supremacist groups that have already been named. But I haven’t talked to the F.B.I.You were on with Maria Bartiromo and talked about being against violent extremists from the left or the right. And it sounds like you’ve sort of landed on the position that these were right-wing groups that were involved in organizing what happened on Jan. 6. Is that right?It seems like those white supremacist groups seem to be responsible for this. I really condemn it. I mean, I’m not happy with it.I’ve attended a lot of Trump rallies. You talk to a lot of people. You see the mood in those crowds. And it is festive. It is joyful. You’re loving America. And it’s definitely pro-law enforcement and anti-breaking the law. Which is, again, why I certainly do not suspect, even a large pro-Trump crowd, I did not expect any violence from them.You said you want what you say to be accurate. And you read Mr. Waller’s piece, but without necessarily doing any due diligence to see whether what he was saying checked out.What do you mean, checked out? It’s his eyewitness account. What else is there to check out about it? I read what his credentials were, where he was teaching, at Fort Bragg. I mean, you can see in the article what his credentials are. He seemed to be pretty solid.A couple days later The Washington Post wrote an article that was very close to kind of describing things as Mr. Waller did, too. So that added further credence, from my standpoint, that what he saw, other people kind of saw and noticed and drew similar types of conclusions. Again, it’s just one piece of information that needs to be looked at, needs to be considered, needs to be tested, needs to be verified, compared against other things.Again, I’m not afraid of information. I’m amazed at how many people are. And how quick people are to put the conspiracy theory label on something, or call it disinformation.You’ve said tens of millions of Americans didn’t trust the election results. I wonder, how much do you think that’s because Republican leaders, from President Trump on down, told them not to trust the election results?I think that there’s a range of reasons why. But I’d say the main reason is that they saw their TV screens, observers not being able to observe. They see in states where all these other counties can turn in millions of votes, but in a few large counties in swing states, they just can’t get the vote totals in by 10 o’clock at night, for some reason. It just raises a level of suspicion.Well, in Wisconsin that’s because —It’s unfortunate the mainstream media’s revealed themselves to be so unbelievably biased that people on the other side of the aisle, the other side of the political spectrum, simply don’t trust them anymore. That’s part of the issue, too.One last thing. Where are you on running for re-election next year?Haven’t decided. Don’t need to decide for a while.Do you have a timeline for that?Yeah. But I’m not necessarily going to reveal it to you.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More