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      Texas Governor Greg Abbott Announces Military Base Camp in Eagle Pass

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      The base for up to 2,300 soldiers will establish a significant state law enforcement infrastructure in an area where Texas is contesting the federal government’s sole authority.Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said on Friday that the state would begin building a forward operating base in the border city of Eagle Pass for up to 2,300 soldiers, creating the most significant military infrastructure yet to support the state’s efforts to limit the number of people crossing illegally from Mexico.While Texas has been deploying National Guard troops and state police officers up and down the state’s border since 2021, the move to create an 80-acre base camp cements a large law enforcement infrastructure in the region and signals Texas’ commitment to a security role that previously belonged almost exclusively to the federal government.“This will increase the ability for a larger number of Texas military department personnel in Eagle Pass to operate more effectively and more efficiently,” Mr. Abbott said in his announcement, as he was flanked by a row of armed National Guard members. The camp, Mr. Abbott added, “will amass a large army in a very strategic area.”Mr. Abbott did not say on Friday how much money the state was spending to build the base, but added that the financial impact would be “minimal” in view of the state’s existing expenditures to house those deployed on the border.The camp, which will include a 700-seat dining facility, a gym, a laundry and medical services, will save on hotel costs for the existing deployment. And it will presumably make way for additional states that are sending troops to help patrol the border as part of a widening rift between Republican governors and the federal government over border enforcement.Mr. Abbott has been testing the legal limits of what states can do to enforce immigration law. Several of his Republican cohorts, including the governors of Florida and Georgia, have sent their own National Guard troops to help patrol the border in Texas, where record numbers of migrants have been crossing without authorization in recent years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme Court to Decide Whether Trump Is Eligible for Colorado Ballot

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      The Colorado Supreme Court ruled last month that the former president could not appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot because he had engaged in insurrection.The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether former President Donald J. Trump is eligible for Colorado’s Republican primary ballot, thrusting the justices into a pivotal role that could alter the course of this year’s presidential election.The sweep of the court’s ruling is likely to be broad. It will probably resolve not only whether Mr. Trump may appear on the Colorado primary ballot after the state’s top court declared that he had engaged in insurrection in his efforts to subvert the 2020 election, but it will most likely also determine his eligibility to run in the general election and to hold office at all.Not since Bush v. Gore, the 2000 decision that handed the presidency to George W. Bush, has the Supreme Court taken such a central role in an election for the nation’s highest office.The case will be argued on Feb. 8, and the court will probably decide it quickly. The Colorado Republican Party had urged the justices to rule by March 5, when many states, including Colorado, hold primaries.The number of challenges to Mr. Trump’s eligibility across the country can only have added pressure on the court to hear the Colorado case, as they underscored the need for a nationwide resolution of the question.The case is one of several involving or affecting Mr. Trump on the court’s docket or on the horizon. An appeals court will hear arguments on Tuesday on whether he has absolute immunity from prosecution, and the losing side is all but certain to appeal. And the court has already said that it will rule on the scope of a central charge in the federal election-interference case in a decision expected by June.Mr. Trump asked the Supreme Court to intervene after Colorado’s top court disqualified him from the ballot last month. That decision is on hold while the justices consider the matter.Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state, pressed the Supreme Court to act fast.“Coloradans, and the American people, deserve clarity on whether someone who engaged in insurrection may run for the country’s highest office,” she said in a statement.Mr. Trump acknowledged the court’s decision to hear the case at a rally Friday in Sioux Center, Iowa, saying he hoped the justices would fairly interpret the law. “All I want is fair; I fought really hard to get three very, very good people in,” he said, referring to his appointees. He added, “And I just hope that they’re going to be fair because, you know, the other side plays the ref.”The case turns on the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, which bars those who had taken an oath “to support the Constitution of the United States” from holding office if they then “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”Congress can remove the prohibition, the provision says, but only by a two-thirds vote in each chamber.Though Section 3 addressed the aftermath of the Civil War, it was written in general terms and, most scholars say, continues to have force. More

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      Republicans Are Finding Out That ‘Pro-Life’ Means a Lot of Things to a Lot of People

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      Electoral results since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision should tell a lot of people in the Republican Party something they absolutely do not want to hear: Even rank-and-file G.O.P. voters are not as pro-life as we might have thought when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land.That trend was confirmed last month in Ohio — the latest sign that the Republican Party needs to figure out a new way of addressing abortion.Many conservatives may call themselves pro-life, but in practice, that may be a more aspirational statement than an accurate reflection of hard policy views. Perhaps by figuring out what it now means to be pro-life — and recognizing that pro-life policy is easiest to sell only when it amounts to a ban on abortions later in pregnancy — Republicans can come up with a new approach to the politics of the issue.Before Roe was overturned, the term “pro-life” covered a lot of ground — which was useful over decades in galvanizing a broad coalition willing to use abortion as a political cudgel. As Republicans are finding out today, “pro-life” means many things to many people.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Supreme Court Delays Efforts to Redraw Louisiana Voting Map

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      The Louisiana dispute is one of several voting rights cases churning through the courts that challenge a state’s congressional map.The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a lower-court ruling that delays an effort to redraw Louisiana’s congressional map, prolonging a bitter clash over the representation of Black voters in the state.The order temporarily leaves in place a Republican-drawn map that a federal judge had said diluted the power of Black voters while an appeal moves through the lower courts.Civil rights groups had sought emergency relief from the Supreme Court after a federal appeals court abruptly canceled a scheduled hearing aimed at drafting a new map for Louisiana. That map was to include two districts in which Black voters represent a large enough share of the population to have the opportunity to select a candidate. The appeals court said that the state legislature should have more time to redraw its own map before a lower court stepped in.The Supreme Court’s order was unsigned, which is typical when the justices rule on emergency applications, and there were no public dissents.Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a brief concurring opinion, emphasized that Louisiana should resolve the dispute in time for the 2024 election.In asking the Supreme Court to intervene, the plaintiffs had argued that delays in the case could complicate efforts to instate a new map by the next election, leaving the state with a version that lumps Black voters from different parts of the state into one voting district, diluting their power.By the time the Supreme Court issued its order on Thursday, a hearing date had passed. Another has been set for February.The consolidated cases, Galmon v. Ardoin and Robinson v. Ardoin, are part of a larger fight over redistricting. State lawmakers in the South have contested orders to refashion congressional maps and establish additional districts to bolster Black representation. The outcomes could help tilt control of the House, where Republicans hold a razor-thin majority.Weeks earlier, the court refused a similar request by Alabama, which had asked the justices to reinstate a map with only one majority-Black district. A lower court had found that Republican lawmakers blatantly disregarded its order to create a second majority-Black district or something “close to it.”At issue in Louisiana is a voting map passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature in the winter of 2022. The map carved the state into six districts, with only one majority-Black district, which joined Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the state’s two largest cities. About a third of the population in the state is Black.The case has reached the Supreme Court before.A coalition that included the N.A.A.C.P. Louisiana State Conference, the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice and Louisiana voters sued state officials and said the map unfairly weakened the power of Black voters.A district court, siding with the plaintiffs, temporarily blocked Louisiana from using its map in any upcoming elections. A new map, it said, should include an additional district where Black voters could choose a representative. The court gave the Legislature until June 20, 2022, to sign off on a redrawn map.Louisiana immediately appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, and a three-judge panel unanimously denied the request. The state then asked the Supreme Court to intervene.The Supreme Court paused the case until it ruled in the Alabama case, Allen v. Milligan, which concerned similar questions. That essentially allowed the Republican-drawn map in Louisiana to go into effect during the 2022 election.The court lifted the pause in June after a majority of the justices, in a surprise decision, found Alabama’s map had unfairly undercut the power of Black voters. The justices said the appeals court should review the case before the 2024 elections. More

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      Border Crisis Comes to Blue Cities After Migrants Are Bused North

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      The strain of migrants in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities has taxed resources, divided Democrats and put pressure on President Biden to act.When Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas began sending migrants and asylum seekers from the southwestern frontier to New York, Washington and Chicago, he vowed to bring the border to the Democratic cities he said were naïvely dismissing its costs.A year later, the migrant waves he helped set in motion have put northern “sanctuary” cities increasingly on edge, their budgets stretched, their communities strained. And a border crisis that has animated Republican politics for years is now dividing the Democratic Party. Humanitarian impulses are crashing into desperate resource constraints and once-loyal Democratic allies have reluctantly joined Republicans to train their fire on President Biden.Eric Adams, the mayor of the nation’s largest city, declared this week that without a federal bailout and clampdown at the border, swelling migration “will destroy New York City.” The nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles, has promised to sue Mr. Abbott. And the liberal mayor of the third-largest city, Chicago, began pleading last month for the White House to step in.“Let me state this clearly: The city of Chicago cannot go on welcoming new arrivals safely and capably without significant support and immigration policy changes,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said.Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts, a liberal Democrat, has declared a state of emergency, activated the National Guard and started petitioning the White House for help.The migrants on state-funded buses from Texas are a fraction of the total number arriving in northern cities. Texas brags that its “Operation Lone Star” has sent more than 13,100 migrants to New York City since August 2022, but the overall strain there stems from the total, more than 110,000. Some of those migrants have family in New York, while others are attracted to the city’s history of welcoming immigrants.Still, the rising clamor is creating a rare convergence between the two parties, which for years have fought in seemingly parallel political universes. Democrats focused on issues like abortion, the preservation of democracy and expansion of health care, while Republicans warned of a migrant “invasion” and railed against “woke” liberal ideology, socialism and expanding L.G.B.T.Q. rights. Endless Republican news conferences at the border and threats to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, were dismissed as political bluster.Now, suddenly, some Democrats are sounding remarkably like Republicans.“Upstate New Yorkers shouldn’t be forced to bear responsibility for decades of failed immigration policy, dysfunction and stupidity out of Washington, Albany and places like New York City,” said Josh Riley, the Democratic candidate seeking to unseat Representative Marc Molinaro, a Hudson Valley Republican. Mr. Riley added that it was time for Mr. Biden to “to step up and help out.”For Republicans, the response to Mr. Abbott’s gambit has gone beyond what they could have hoped for — a spreading of the pain, as millions of migrants stream across the southern border, fleeing violence and poverty, drawn to what they see as a more welcoming administration in Washington and plentiful work.Representative Ronny Jackson, a conservative Republican from Texas, praised the bus caravans as “bold” and “thinking outside the box.” Even more moderate Republican voices have praised the move. “The reality is, Abbott was shining a light on existing issues that nobody was talking about,” said Will Hurd, a moderate Republican and former House member from a Texas border district now running for president as a fierce critic of Donald J. Trump. “Blue governors and mayors are having to deal with what Republican governors have had to deal with for three years now.”Democrats seem paralyzed by a surge of urban migration that has defied easy answers — and increasingly threatens their political aspirations, from crucial tossup congressional races in the suburbs of New York City to the race for the White House.Democrats in the cities continue to castigate their Republican opponents for using migrants as political weapons, with little regard for their health or safety. Last month, a 3-year-old child traveling to Chicago on a Texas-funded bus became ill, was put on an ambulance and later died at a hospital. The party’s candidates are quick to point out that Republicans deserve a large share of blame for blocking previous attempts to enact a bipartisan immigration overhaul in Washington.But many Democrats realize complaints only go so far as they enter an election year, when immigration, border security and appeals to nativism from Mr. Trump and his imitators will roil the electorate far from the Mexican border.“The potency of the issue has not abated, and Democrats who think that it has are fooling themselves,” said Howard Wolfson, a top Democratic strategist who steers hundreds of millions of dollars in political spending as Michael R. Bloomberg’s adviser.“This is not just going to be a local New York City or Chicago or Boston issue,” he added. “This is going to be top of mind for voters all over the country next year, and my strong advice to the White House is they need to get off the sidelines and take action to address this.”In Chicago, migrants have jammed police stations and O’Hare Airport.Sebastian Hidalgo for The New York TimesThe numbers are becoming impossible to ignore. New York City is sheltering 59,000 migrants each night and projects that caring for them could eat up $12 billion in the next few years, threatening the viability of other city services.Chicago has taken in 13,500 migrants, and spent at least $250 million. Migrants have jammed police stations and O’Hare Airport, and prompted fierce recriminations from Black residents on the South Side who see disparities between investment in their communities and the money spent on migrant care.In Washington, the city has taken in 10,500 migrants since the first bus arrived outside the home of Vice President Kamala Harris.And in Massachusetts, the arrival of thousands of migrant families has driven the state’s shelter population up by 80 percent in the last year.“When is enough enough?” asked Representative Henry Cuellar, a conservative Democrat who represents a border district around Laredo, Texas. “You’ve got to be able to control your borders and be able to handle the number of people that come in. You just can’t open up the faucet and let everybody in.”Mr. Cuellar said that even before Mr. Biden’s inauguration, he warned Biden transition officials that a crisis was looming with the receding Covid-19 emergency and the end to draconian border rules imposed by the Trump administration. He recalled meeting Mayor Adams at a reception this year and listening to his complaints.“I didn’t tell him who I was,” Mr. Cuellar said. “I was just smiling and thinking to myself, ‘You guys only get a drop of what we get here at the border.’”Asylum seekers, many from Venezuela, at a Catholic Charities respite center in Laredo, Texas.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesAs the appeals grow louder, the White House has slowly ramped up its response.The Federal Emergency Management Agency in June allocated huge “shelter and service” grants to cities and states unused to such attention — $105 million to New York City, $10.6 million for Chicago, $19 million to Illinois, more than $5 million to Washington. Those numbers, however, hardly meet the need: Chicago and Illinois alone have allocated about $200 million on migrant care in the city this year.After Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York traveled to Washington last month, Biden administration officials said they would ask Congress to allocate more money to reimburse cities and states and pledged to help asylum seekers fill out paperwork to obtain work permits more quickly. They also blamed Congress for refusing to take up a comprehensive immigration plan Mr. Biden first proposed in 2021.Tom Perez, director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, has begun convening weekly phone calls with Mr. Adams and Ms. Hochul, and he spoke with Governor Healey on Thursday.White House officials said they were rushing work permits to migrants who cross the border using a new app issued by Customs and Border Protection and said the administration had spent $1 billion to ease the crisis. An additional $600 million request is awaiting congressional action.But the officials said ultimately Congress must act to broaden immigration legislation.Angelo Fernández Hernández, a White House spokesman, dismissed Mr. Abbott’s “cruel political stunts” and chided “Republicans in Congress who not only refuse to pass comprehensive immigration reform but are also not providing” the Department of Homeland Security with the resources it needs.He said the Biden administration was “using the tools it has available to secure the border and build a safe, orderly and humane immigration system while leading the largest expansion of lawful pathways for immigration in decades.”But the White House has quietly said no to more aggressive unilateral actions, such as using executive powers to accelerate work permitting. And Mr. Biden himself appears to want nothing to do with the issue publicly, forgoing the kind of high-profile leadership local officials have been clamoring for.“When some of these governors and blue cities like New York started calling out, I thought the Biden administration would get its head out of the sand, but not a lot has changed,” said Mr. Jackson, the Republican congressman from Texas. “I just think they don’t know what to do at this point. They’ve created a crisis they can’t manage.”Some Democrats fear that their standard-bearer for 2024 may be misreading the potency of a volatile issue heading into an election year.Tom Suozzi, a Democratic former congressman from Long Island mulling a comeback attempt next year, urged Mr. Biden to take a page from one of his predecessors, Bill Clinton. Mr. Suozzi said the president should propose to Republicans a moderate package of reforms that balances border security with “the very real human suffering that exists.”“If the Republicans come to the table with the president and the Democrats, America has a path forward,” Mr. Suozzi said. “If the Republicans reject the president’s moderate solution, it exposes them as simply playing politics on this issue.”Washington, D.C., has taken in 10,500 migrants since the first bus arrived outside the home of Vice President Kamala Harris.Valerie Plesch for The New York TimesBut Democrats are divided on how the administration should respond. Leaders in some of the affected cities want an expansion of humanitarian parole programs and temporary protected status for whole classes of migrants, such as Venezuelans. Those steps would help rush work permits to overcrowded shelters, police stations and airports now housing people who are either forced to sit idle or enter the underground economy.“This does require a national response, but it has to be a humanitarian response, not an iron hand across the border,” said Nubia Willman, who led Chicago’s Office of New Americans as the first buses began arriving.And public displays of division have liberal Democrats worried that more moderate Democratic leaders like Mr. Adams may just play into Republican hands. Former Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy have both quoted Mr. Adams in recent days in their own appeals to harden the southwestern border.Representative Delia Ramirez, a Chicago Democrat, said she understood the “frustration” of some Democrats. But, she said, “I just really hope that my colleagues would show why Democrats need to stick together. The blame game doesn’t get us anywhere.”She called Mr. Adams’s comments “anti-immigrant” and “despicable.”For now, even the fastest way to relieve cities’ burdens — requests for federal funds to help reimburse cities and states — has been caught up in politics. Republicans are threatening to stop any funding that would share the cost of the crisis.“The city and state made a choice,” said Mr. Molinaro, the Republican congressman from New York. “There is no willingness by the president and governor to intervene in a real way. I don’t see subsidizing the city to be a sanctuary city.” More

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      The Georgia Case Against Trump Is The Simplest and Most Direct

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      The best way to think about Georgia’s sprawling indictment against Donald Trump and his allies is that it is a case about lies. It’s about lying, conspiring to lie and attempting to coax, coerce and cajole others into lying. Whereas the attorney general of Michigan just brought a case narrowly focused on the alleged fake electors in her state (Trump is not a defendant in that one), and the special counsel Jack Smith brought an indictment narrowly focused on Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, has brought a case about the entire conspiracy, from start to finish, and targeted each person subject to her jurisdiction for each crime committed in her jurisdiction.In other words, this indictment is ambitious. But it also answers two related questions: Why bring yet another case against Trump in yet another jurisdiction? Isn’t he going to face a federal trial in Washington, D.C., for the same acts outlined in the Georgia indictment?The answers lie in the distinctions between state and federal law. Georgia law is in many ways both broader and more focused than the federal statutes at issue in Smith’s case against Trump. The breadth is evident from the racketeering charges. As Norm Eisen and Amy Lee Copeland wrote in The Times, Georgia’s racketeering statute allows prosecutors to charge, among other crimes, a number of false statement statutes as part of a generalized criminal scheme. In other words, rather than seeing each actionable lie as its own, discrete criminal act, those lies can also be aggregated into part of a larger whole: an alleged racketeering enterprise designed to alter the results of the Georgia presidential election.Yet it’s the focus of Georgia law that’s truly dangerous to Trump. The beating heart of the case is the 22 counts focused on false statements, false documents and forgery, with a particular emphasis on a key statute: Georgia Code Section 16-10-20, which prohibits false statements and writings on matters “within jurisdiction of state or political subdivisions.” The statute is a state analog to a federal law, 18 U.S.C. Section 1001, which also prohibits false statements to federal officials on matters within their jurisdiction, but the Georgia statute is even broader.Simply put, while you might be able to lie to the public in Georgia — or even lie to public officials on matters outside the scope of their duties — when you lie to state officials about important or meaningful facts in matters they directly oversee, you’re going to risk prosecution. That’s exactly what the indictment claims Trump and his confederates did, time and time again, throughout the election challenge.The most striking example is detailed in Act 113 of the indictment, which charges Trump with making a series of false statements to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and his deputies in Trump’s notorious Jan. 2, 2021, telephone call. Most legal commentators, myself included, focused on that call because it contained a not-so-veiled threat against Raffensperger and his counsel. In recorded comments, Trump told them they faced a “big risk” of criminal prosecution because he claimed they knew about election fraud and were taking no action to stop it.Willis’s focus, by contrast, is not on the threats but rather on the lies. And when you read the list of Trump’s purported lies, they are absolutely incredible. His claims aren’t just false; they’re transparently, incandescently stupid. This was not a sophisticated effort to overturn the election. It was a shotgun blast of obvious falsehoods.Here’s where the legal nuances get rather interesting. While Willis still has to prove intent — the statute prohibits “knowingly and willfully” falsifying material facts — the evidentiary challenge is simpler than in Smith’s federal case against Trump. To meet the requirements of federal law, Smith’s charges must connect any given Trump lie to a larger criminal scheme. Willis, by contrast, merely has to prove that Trump willfully lied about important facts to a government official about a matter in that official’s jurisdiction. That’s a vastly simpler case to make.Yes, it is true that the individual lying allegations are also tied to much larger claims about a criminal conspiracy and a racketeering enterprise. But if I’m a prosecutor, I can build from that single, simple foundation: Trump lied, and those lies in and of themselves violated Georgia criminal law. Once you prove that simple case, you’ve laid the foundation for the larger racketeering claims that ratchet up Trump’s legal jeopardy. Compounding the danger to Trump, presidents don’t have the power to pardon state criminal convictions, and even Georgia’s governor doesn’t possess the direct authority to excuse Trump for his crimes.If Trump’s comments on Truth Social are any indication, he may well defend the case by arguing that the Georgia election was in fact stolen. He may again claim that the wild allegations he made to Raffensperger were true. That’s a dangerous game. The claims are so easily, provably false that the better course would probably be to argue that Trump was simply asking Raffensperger about the allegations, not asserting them as fact.But if Trump continues to assert his false claims as fact, then Willis has an ideal opportunity to argue that Trump lied then and is lying now, that he’s insulting the jury’s intelligence just as he insulted the nation’s intelligence when he made his claims in the first place.But declaring that the core of the Georgia case is simpler than the federal case does not necessarily mean that it will be easier to try. Willis chose to bring claims against 19 defendants, and she said she intended to try them together. While that decision makes some sense if you’re trying to prove the existence of a sprawling racketeering enterprise, it is also a massive logistical and legal challenge. Moreover, Trump is likely to try to move the case to federal court, which would require him to demonstrate that his actions were part of his official duties as president — a formidable task, given that he was interacting with Georgia officials in his capacity as a candidate. But if successful, it would expand the available jury pool to include more Trump-friendly areas outside Fulton County.These challenges — especially when combined with Trump’s upcoming criminal trials in Washington, D.C.; Manhattan; and Florida — make it difficult to see how Willis can bring this case to trial within the six months that she has said is her preference.For eight long years, Americans have watched Donald Trump lie. Those lies have been morally indefensible, but some may also be legally actionable. His campaigns and presidency may have been where the truth went to die. But the law lives, and the law declares that Trump cannot lie to Georgia public officials within the scope of their official duties. If Willis can prove that he and his confederates did exactly that, then she will prevail in the broadest, most consequential prosecution in modern American political history.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      With the Latest Trump Indictment, Mind These Lessons From the South

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      With her sweeping indictment of former President Donald Trump and over a dozen co-conspirators, the Fulton County, Ga., district attorney Fani Willis is now set to prosecute her case in a court of law. Just as important, it is essential that she and others continue to explain to the American public why the decision serves a critical purpose beyond the courts and for the health of our constitutional order.The indictment should be situated in the broader arc of American political development, particularly in the South. That history justifies using the criminal justice system to protect the democratic process in Georgia — a critical swing state — for elections now and in the future.We have the benefit of hindsight to heed the great lesson of the Reconstruction era and the period of redemption that followed: When authoritarians attack democracy and lawbreakers are allowed to walk away from those attacks with impunity, they will try again, believing there are no repercussions.We should not make those mistakes again.The period after the American Civil War entrenched many of America’s political ills. Ex-confederates were welcomed back into the body politic without meaningful penance. There were vanishingly few arrests, trials and lengthy punishments. Suffering minimal political disabilities, they could muster enough power to “redeem” Southern governments from biracial coalitions that had considerable sway to remake the South.Examples of democratic decay were regrettably abundant. An early sign occurred in Louisiana. With a multiracial electorate, Reconstruction Louisiana held great promise. During contentious state elections in 1872, Louisiana Democrats intimidated Black voters from casting ballots and corruptly claimed victory. The disputed election spurred political violence to assert white supremacy, including the Colfax Massacre in 1873, where as many as 150 Black citizens were killed in Grant Parish when a white mob sought to take control of the local government.Federal prosecutors brought charges against a number of the perpetrators. But in 1876, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Cruikshank that the federal government could not prosecute private violence under the 14th Amendment because it could only protect citizens against constitutional rights violations by state actors. By its decision, the court gave license to mobs to disrupt the peaceful transition of power with grave consequences.South Carolina could have been a Reconstruction success story. Its state constitution and government reflected the values and priorities of its Black majority. The planter elite attacked the Reconstruction government as a socialist rabble and baselessly mocked elected officials as incompetent. In the lead-up to elections in 1876, political violence brewed across the state, and Democrats secured a narrow victory. But democratic decay was precipitous. Over time, South Carolina imposed new limits on voting, moving precincts into white neighborhoods and creating a confusing system. Legislators passed the Eight Box Law, which required voters to submit a separate ballot for each elected office in a different box and invalidated any votes submitted in the wrong box. This created a barrier to voting for people who could not read.The lack of repercussions for political violence and voter suppression did little to curb the impulse to crush biracial democracy by mob rule. The backsliding spread like cancer to Mississippi, Virginia and North Carolina.In Georgia, just before the state was initially readmitted to the Union, Georgians elected a Republican to the governorship and a Republican majority to the state senate. Yet the promise of a strong Republican showing was a mirage. Conservative Republicans and Democrats joined forces to expel more than two dozen Black legislators from the Georgia General Assembly in September 1868. From there, tensions only grew. Political violence erupted throughout the state as elections drew closer that fall, most tragically in Camilla, where white supremacists killed about a dozen Black Georgians at a Republican political rally.The democratic failures of that era shared three common attributes. The political process was neither free nor fair, as citizens were prevented from voting and lawful votes were discounted. The Southern Redeemers refused to recognize their opponents as legitimate electoral players. And conservatives abandoned the rule of law, engaging in intimidation and political violence to extinguish the power of multiracial political coalitions.At bottom, the theory behind the Fulton County indictment accuses Mr. Trump and his allies of some of these same offenses.The phone call between Mr. Trump and the Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger (“Fellas, I need 11,000 votes,” Mr. Trump demanded) is crucial evidence backing for a charge relating to soliciting a public officer to violate his oath of office. Mr. Trump’s coercive tactics persisted even though he should have known that Joe Biden fairly won the state’s Electoral College votes. But facts never seemed to matter. Mr. Trump’s false allegation of a rigged contest — a claim he and others made well before voting began — was grounded in a belief that opposition to his re-election was never legitimate.Mr. Trump and his allies could not accept that an emerging multiracial coalition of voters across the state rejected him. Election deniers focused on Atlanta, a city whose Black residents total about half the population, as the place where Georgia’s election was purportedly stolen. The dangerous mix of racial grievance and authoritarian impulses left Trump loyalists feeling justified to concoct the fake electors scheme and imploring the General Assembly to go into a special session to arbitrarily undo the will of Georgians.Political violence and intimidation are some of the most obvious symptoms of democratic decay. The charges in Fulton County are an attempt to use the criminal justice system to repudiate political violence.The sprawling case is stronger because the conspiracy to overturn Georgia’s presidential election results was replete with acts of intimidation by numerous people. Mr. Trump and Rudy Giuliani engaged in a full-scale harassment campaign against Fulton County election workers when they baselessly alleged that two individuals added fake votes to Mr. Biden’s tally. Mr. Trump threatened Mr. Raffensperger and a state employee with “a criminal offense” if they declined to join his corruption, warning them they were taking “a big risk.” A healthy democracy cannot tolerate this behavior.Democracy is not guaranteed, and democratic backsliding is never inevitable. The country avoided the worst, but the past few years have still been profoundly destabilizing for the constitutional order in ways akin to some of the nation’s darker moments.Indeed, the case by Ms. Willis can be seen as an effort to avoid darker moments in the future, especially for a critical swing state like Georgia. We should remember the words in 1871 of Georgia’s first Black congressman, Jefferson Franklin Long, who spoke out when Congress debated relaxing the requirements for restoring certain rights to ex-Confederates without meaningful contrition: “If this House removes the disabilities of disloyal men … I venture to prophesy you will again have trouble from the very same men who gave you trouble before.”His prediction proved all too accurate. It now may be up to the people of Fulton County to stop election denialism’s widening gyre.Anthony Michael Kreis is an assistant professor of law at Georgia State University, where he teaches and studies constitutional law and the history of American politics.Source photographs by Bettmann, Buyenlarge, and Corbis Historical, via Getty.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Supreme Court’s Rejection of a Disputed Legal Theory on Elections

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      More from our inbox:Race and ClassDemand Tax Relief‘Make Reading Fun Again’The German Far Right Should Worry Us AllThe case will have no practical impact in the dispute that gave rise to it, involving North Carolina’s congressional voting map. The state has waged many battles over redistricting.Gerry Broome/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Court Rules State Control of U.S. Voting Has Limits” (front page, June 28):Several high-profile cases were decided by the Supreme Court this month, but only one, Moore v. Harper, had the potential to affect the very lifeblood of our democracy — voting. This election law case considered, in part, a controversial constitutional theory known as the “independent state legislature” doctrine.At issue was whether or not state legislatures had absolute power with no electoral oversight authority by state courts to regulate federal elections. With unchecked power, state legislators in key swing states could have rejected the voters’ slate of electors and appointed their handpicked substitutes.The Supreme Court has an obligation to protect our democracy. By rejecting the dangerous independent state legislature theory, the court safeguarded state-level judiciaries, shielding the will of the voters in the process.Jim PaladinoTampa, Fla.To the Editor:In the 6-to-3 Supreme Court ruling Tuesday in Moore v. Harper, the fact that a supermajority including both Democratic and Republican appointees reaffirmed the American constitutional order is the latest example that the Republican-appointed justices are not in the hip pocket of Donald Trump and the extreme right of the Republican Party.This should provide comfort for those who believe in the separation of powers as prescribed in our Constitution.John A. ViterittiLaurel, N.Y.To the Editor:Adam Liptak writes about the Supreme Court’s ruling that soundly dismissed the “independent state legislature” theory.The article quotes Richard L. Hasen, a U.C.L.A. law professor and leading election law scholar, who said the ruling giving the Supreme Court the ultimate say in federal election disputes was “a bad, but not awful, result.”It seems globally accepted that legal disputes, including election disputes, should be decided by courts, and that in federal democracies, the highest national courts are best suited to have the last word in federal election cases.While it is common for politicians and lawyers worldwide to dismiss international best practices based on the uniqueness of their legal systems, in the U.S., too, only the Supreme Court can ensure consistency across all states and thus protect the integrity of federal elections.Jurij ToplakNew YorkThe writer is a visiting professor at Fordham University School of Law.To the Editor:In your article the Supreme Court justices whose opinions pose a threat to voting rights and democracy are referred to as “conservative.” The justices’ positions are not “conservative,” if conservative refers to those who are committed to preserve traditional institutions, practices and values.I would ask that The Times consider a better word to describe these justices, whose positions on legal issues are heavily influenced by considerations of preserving Republican rule, class structures and Christian ideological dominance.Cindy WeinbaumAtlantaRace and Class Pablo DelcanTo the Editor:Re “Reparations Should Be an End, Not a Beginning,” by John McWhorter (Opinion, June 26):Providing support for those who have been hurt by past discrimination is an important step in alleviating the harm caused by America’s long history of racism.However, including all who are economically disadvantaged in any initiatives, as Professor McWhorter suggests, will broaden support for affirmative action programs while assisting more people who need a hand up.Ignoring this slice of the populace is what has led to simmering resentment in many communities and to the election of Donald Trump in 2016.Rather than pitting groups against one another, we should strive to lift up the fallen, regardless of the origin of people’s suffering.Edwin AndrewsMalden, Mass.Demand Tax ReliefHomeowners 65 or older with income of less than $500,000 could qualify for a property tax cut of as much as $6,500 a year.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Property Taxes Could Be Cut in Half for Older New Jersey Homeowners” (news article, June 22):As a suburban homeowner in Nassau County in New York, I find it reassuring to see neighboring New Jersey working hard to address the problem of high property taxes. It just approved a property tax reduction program for homeowners 65-plus called StayNJ, designed to offset some of the highest property taxes in the country.The people of New York State must demand that their elected officials pass similar relief for their constituents, who also live in a state with high property taxes. We are still suffering from a $10,000 state and local taxes deduction cap on our federal income tax that was passed under former President Donald Trump.Congressional Democrats promised to repeal this as one of their legislative priorities and have failed to keep their promise so far. So it is up to us to demand action from the New York State Legislature.Philip A. Paoli Jr.Seaford, N.Y.‘Make Reading Fun Again’To the Editor:Re “13-Year-Olds in U.S. Record Lowest Test Scores in Decades” (news article, June 22):The latest data is out on reading scores for 13-year-olds in the U.S., and it’s not good. Children’s reading levels are at their lowest in decades.In your article, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics states, “This is a huge-scale challenge that faces the nation.”Indeed, we see this challenge every day in the faces of children in our homes, schools and communities. We are responding by bolstering instruction, tutoring and summer learning, all of which offer reason to hope.But what stood out to me most in this story was that fewer kids report reading for fun, with 31 percent saying they “never or hardly ever” read for fun, compared with 22 percent in 2012.Could reigniting a love for reading and the joy of books be an answer we’re missing to this problem? Imagine every child with an abundant home library, cuddled up with a parent or under the covers reading a book, starting from birth.At a time when our education system is struggling, and life is hard for so many children, let’s make reading fun again!Mary MathewDurham, N.C.The writer is director of advocacy for Book Harvest, which provides books and literacy support to children and families.The German Far Right Should Worry Us AllAn AfD demonstration on energy security and inflation, outside of the Reichstag in Berlin in October.Christoph Soeder/DPA, via Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “As German Worries About Future Rise, Far-Right Party Surges” (news article, June 21):The expanding and emboldened far-right element in Germany is not solely a concern for Germans; it is also troubling for the international community in general and Jews in particular.Extremism fueled by xenophobia and a deep sense of nationalism in a country that carried out the systematic murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust is foreboding and a grave threat to democracy.With global antisemitism increasing at an alarming rate and Nazism experiencing an unsettling resurgence, the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany and the political gains that it has made are a proverbial red flag.When extremism becomes normalized and gains a foothold in the mainstream political arena and people flagrantly fan the flames of fanaticism, we have a societal and moral obligation to sound the alarm.N. Aaron TroodlerBala Cynwyd, Pa. More