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    DeSantis Won’t Loom as Large Over Florida Legislative Session This Year

    With Gov. Ron DeSantis focused on the presidential primaries, the session that starts next week could be unusually low key.When the Florida Legislature begins its annual session on Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis will be on hand — fleetingly. After giving his State of the State address, he will leave for Iowa, where he has a packed campaign schedule ahead of the Republican presidential caucuses on Jan. 15. Few in Tallahassee expect to see much of him in the months that follow.His absence will be a conspicuous change from the last few years, when Mr. DeSantis loomed large over the Legislature, his every major wish granted by friendly lawmakers. The Republicans who control both chambers were eager to curry favor with the state’s political superstar, who seemed poised to lead their party’s presidential field.Instead, Mr. DeSantis’s presidential bid has struggled. His pitch to make America more like Florida has lost much of its fizz, with the frenzied culture wars that have gripped the state proving less appealing to a national audience. To date, the governor has lagged far behind former President Donald J. Trump in the polls.Mr. DeSantis’s job approval among Floridians has dipped, polls show. He remains a powerful figure, able to destroy lawmakers’ dreams with his veto. But everyone in the Capitol knows that Mr. DeSantis is not as invincible as he once seemed.“If he were the front-runner in the presidential race, things would be very different,” said State Representative Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa Democrat and the House minority leader. “He’s finding out that all these culture wars that he fought for in Florida aren’t winning him votes.”So lawmakers have prepared for a different kind of session, one that could feel like a breather after Mr. DeSantis’s resolve over the last two years to reshape state policies in eye-catching ways that he hoped would appeal to Republican primary voters.To be sure, Mr. DeSantis has proposed a budget that prioritizes some of his top issues on the campaign trail. He has asked for more money to fly newly arrived migrants from the Southwest border to states like Massachusetts and California, and to pay teachers extra if they take a state-sanctioned civics course with a clear conservative ideological bent.“The state is in really good fiscal shape,” Mr. DeSantis said last month when he announced his budget plan. “Here in Florida, we’re doing it right.”But while in previous years he barnstormed nearly every corner of Florida to stump for his proposals, unveiling new ones nearly every day as the Legislature prepared to convene, Mr. DeSantis spent the weeks leading to this session crisscrossing early voting states. It is unclear how long Mr. DeSantis will stay in the race if he does poorly in those contests. But by March 8, when the legislative session is scheduled to end, about half the states will have held their primaries.“It’s going to be a different session for sure,” said State Representative Randy Fine, a Brevard County Republican. But he added that a slower pace would merely reflect the governor’s success in transforming Florida over the past two years, noting, “He got everything passed.”Mr. DeSantis has enacted so many significant and divisive policies since 2021 that they — and the lawsuits challenging many of them — have become difficult to track.Vouchers toward private school tuition for all public school students who want them. Abortions restrictions after six weeks of pregnancy. Bans on diversity and equity programs at public universities. Death sentences without unanimous juries. Carrying concealed weapons without a permit. Redrawn congressional districts to further favor Republicans. Outlawing transition care for transgender children. Weaker tenure protections for public university professors. An office to investigate election crimes. Stripping Disney of some of its powers.But a month before the new session was scheduled to begin, as lawmakers met in Tallahassee for committee meetings, few could articulate the governor’s 2024 priorities. (A sex scandal involving the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, who is expected to be replaced on Monday, did not help).Privately, some lawmakers say they are just fine with a slower session — especially going into an election year, when many politicians would prefer to finish in Tallahassee quickly and then be free to campaign. That is, in fact, why every other year, legislative sessions in Florida begin in January rather than in March.New bills proposed by legislators include one that would remove state restrictions on when 16- and 17-year-olds can work, and others aiming to expand the health care work force.Nick Iarossi, a Tallahassee lobbyist and co-chairman of Mr. DeSantis’s campaign finance committee, said that lawmakers and the governor have done more than just focus on culture war issues in recent years but that those issues have captured most of the attention. With fewer contentious proposals from Mr. DeSantis on tap, “the things that made him popular in Florida,” such as raising teacher pay and funding Everglades restoration, might get more notice, Mr. Iarossi said.Democrats, who hold little sway in Republican-controlled Tallahassee, accuse the governor of being an absentee executive while he campaigns for higher office. They say he and Republican lawmakers have failed to help Floridians get relief from steep housing and insurance costs.Floridians “wonder why the government is so focused on banning books,” Ms. Driskell said. “They want to know, ‘What is the Legislature doing for me?’ And we have no answer for them, because everything has been about DeSantis’s ambitions.”In his new budget, Mr. DeSantis recommended a one-year exemption on taxes, fees and assessments on property insurance for homes worth up to $750,000. Floridians’ rates rose by an average of 57 percent in 2022, the highest in the nation.Kathleen Passidomo, the Senate president, said Mr. DeSantis is still in Tallahassee often — “He’s here more than you think” — and even when he is away, stays in frequent touch.And lawmakers know that, even if the governor bows out of the presidential race, he will remain a political force in the Capitol, with three more years left in his term.“He still has his veto pen,” Ms. Driskell said. More

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    A Midwestern Republican Stands Up for Trans Rights

    As 2023 slouches to an ignominious end, some news came Friday that gave me an unexpected jolt of hope. I have spent much of the year watching with horror and trying to document an unrelenting legal assault on queer and trans people. Around 20 states have passed laws restricting access to gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary people, and several have barred transgender and nonbinary people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.So it was shocking — in a good way, for once — to hear these words from Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, as he vetoed a bill that would have banned puberty blockers and hormones and gender-affirming surgeries for trans and nonbinary minors in Ohio and blocked transgender girls and women from participating in sports as their chosen gender:“Were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most — the parents,” DeWine said in prepared remarks. “Parents are making decisions about the most precious thing in their life, their child, and none of us, none of us, should underestimate the gravity and the difficulty of those decisions.”DeWine, by situating his opposition to the bill on the chosen battlefield of far-right activists — parents’ rights — was tapping into an idiom that is at once deeply familiar to me and yet has almost entirely disappeared from our national political discourse: that of a mainstream, Midwestern Republican. It is a voice I know well because it is one I heard all my life from my Midwestern Republican grandparents.I did not agree with all of their beliefs, especially as I got older. But I understood where they were coming from. My grandfather, a belly gunner in the Pacific Theater in World War II, believed a strong military was essential to American security. My grandmother was a nurse, and she believed that science, medicine and innovation made America stronger. They made sure their children and grandchildren went to college — education was a crucial element of their philosophy of self-reliance. And above all, they believed the government should be small and stay out of people’s lives as much as humanly possible. This last belief, in individual freedom and individual responsibility, was the bedrock of their politics.And so I am not surprised that defeats keep coming for anti-transgender activists. At the ballot box, hard-right candidates in swing states have tried to persuade voters with lurid messaging about children being subjected to grisly surgeries and pumped full of unnecessary medications. But in race after race, the tactic has failed.Legally, the verdict has been more mixed, which is unsurprising given how politically polarized the judiciary has become. This week a federal judge in Idaho issued a preliminary ruling that a ban on transgender care for minors could not be enforced because it violated the children’s 14th Amendment rights and that “parents should have the right to make the most fundamental decisions about how to care for their children.” The state is expected to appeal the decision.In June, a federal court blocked an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for minors. “The evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients,” the ruling said, “and that, by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing” of protecting children and safeguarding medical ethics. In 2021, Asa Hutchinson, then the governor, had vetoed the ban for reasons similar to DeWine, but the Arkansas Legislature overrode his veto. (The Ohio Legislature also has a supermajority of Republicans and may decide to override DeWine’s veto.)In other states, like Texas and Missouri, courts have permitted bans to go into effect, forcing families to make very difficult decisions about whether to travel to receive care or move to a different state altogether. The issue seems destined to reach the Supreme Court soon. The A.C.L.U. has asked the Supreme Court to hear its challenge to the care ban in Tennessee on behalf of a 15-year-old transgender girl. Given how swiftly and decisively the court moved to gut abortion rights, it seems quite possible that the conservative supermajority could choose to severely restrict access to transgender health care for children or even adults.But maybe not. After all, the overturning of Roe has deeply unsettled the country, unleashing a backlash that has delivered unexpected victories to Democrats and abortion-rights advocates. Ohio voters just chose by a wide margin to enshrine the right to end a pregnancy in the state Constitution.This is why I think DeWine’s veto speaks to a much bigger truth: Americans simply do not want the government making decisions about families’ private medical care. Polling on abortion finds a wide array of views on the morality of ending a pregnancy at various points up to viability, but one thing is crystal clear: Large majorities of Americans believe that the decision to have an abortion is none of the government’s business.Rapidly changing norms around gender have many people’s heads spinning, and I understand how unsettling that can be. Gender is one of the most basic building blocks of identity, and even though gender variations of many kinds have been with us for millenniums, the way these changes are being lived out feel, to some people, like a huge disruption to their way of life. Even among people who think of themselves as liberal or progressive, there has been a sense that gender-affirming care has become too easily accessible, and that impressionable children are making life-changing decisions based on social media trends.It has become a throwaway line in some media coverage of transgender care in the United States that even liberal European countries are restricting care for transgender children. But this is a misleading notion. No democracy in Europe has banned, let alone criminalized, care, as many states have done in the United States. What has happened is that under increasing pressure from the right, politicians in some countries have begun to limit access to certain kinds of treatments for children through their socialized health systems, in which the government pays for care and has always placed limits on what types are available. In those systems, budgetary considerations have always determined how many people will be able to get access to treatments.But private care remains legal and mostly accessible to those who can afford it.Republicans are passing draconian laws in the states where they have total control, laws that could potentially lead to parents being charged with child abuse for supporting their transgender children or threaten doctors who treat transgender children with felony convictions. These statutes have no analog in free Europe, but they have strong echoes of laws in Russia, which is increasingly criminalizing every aspect of queer life. These extreme policies have no place in any democratic society.Which brings me back to my Midwestern Republican grandparents, Goldwater and Reagan partisans to their core. My grandfather died long before Donald Trump ran for president, and 2016 was the first presidential election in which my grandmother did not vote for the Republican candidate. But she did not vote for Hillary Clinton, choosing another candidate she declined to name to me. Like a lot of Republicans, she really didn’t like Clinton, and one of the big reasons was her lifelong opposition to government health care. She didn’t want government bureaucrats coming between her and her doctors, she told me.I think many, many Americans agree with that sentiment. Transgender people are no different. They don’t want government bureaucrats in their private business.“I’ve been saying for years that trans people are a priority for enemies and an afterthought to our friends,” Gillian Branstetter, a strategist who works on transgender issues at the A.C.L.U., told me. “I’ve made it my job to try and help people understand that transgender rights are human rights, not just because transgender people are human people, but because the rights we’re fighting for are grounded in really core democratic principles, like individualism and self-determination.”Those are core American values, but 2024 is an election year, and even though transphobia has proved to be a loser at the ballot box, many Republicans are sure to beat that drum anyway. Mike DeWine has me hoping that some Republicans will remember what was once a core principle of their party, and embrace the simple plain-spoken truth of my heartland forebears: Keep the government out of my life, and let me be free to live as I choose.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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    How to Boost Voter Turnout With Just One Signature

    In a rare bit of political good news in the final days of 2023, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has signed into law legislation aimed at increasing voter turnout.For so many people, the temptation to tune out in this moment of uninspiring politics is stronger than ever. But in Albany, as in Washington, one of the clearest ways to build a saner, more responsive political system is to vastly increase the number of voters who cast ballots.The bill enacted by Ms. Hochul and the State Legislature would do just that, by moving many county and local elections across New York to even-numbered years, aligning them with federal, statewide and State Legislature elections that draw more voters to the polls.Abysmally low turnout in New York is a key culprit behind Albany’s dysfunctional politics, which sometimes seem mystifyingly divorced from the urgent needs of millions of residents. Consider, for example, the state’s failure over the past year to address a brutal housing crisis by adopting policies to build housing in the New York City suburbs and enact protections for tenants such as requiring a good cause for evictions.When smaller numbers of people show up at the polls, elections are less competitive, enhancing the power of special interests — from donors to industry lobbyists and the so-called NIMBYs who have resisted the development of much-needed housing across New York State.The research backs this up. One report, from the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, found that changing local elections to coincide with national elections led to more accountable and responsive government and saved taxpayers money.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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    How Much Can Trump 2.0 Get Away With?

    “I am your warrior, I am your justice,” Donald Trump told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md. on March 4. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”How much power would Trump have in a second term to enact his agenda of revenge?I asked Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, how free Trump would be to pursue his draconian plan.Tribe replied by email:There is little doubt that Donald Trump could impose authoritarian policies that endanger dissent, erase the requirements that ensure at least a modicum of the consent of the governed, and are downright dictatorial while acting entirely within the literal scope of the law although, needless to say, in flagrant defiance of its spirit. Neither the Constitution’s text nor the language of the federal statutes and regulations in force create guardrails that Trump would need to crash through in a way that courts hewing to the text would feel an obligation to prevent or to redress.Congress and the courts have granted the president powers that, in Trump’s hands, could fundamentally weaken rights and freedoms most Americans believe are secure and guaranteed under law.Tribe continued:Many of the statutes Congress has enacted, especially in the post-World War II era, delegate to any sitting president such extraordinary powers to declare “national emergencies” when, in their own unreviewable judgment, the “national interest” or the ‘national security’ warrants, and give presidential declarations of that kind the power to trigger such sweeping executive authorities that a president could comfortably indulge authoritarian aspirations of demoting or detaining all those who stand in their way or of seizing property or otherwise restricting personal liberty and the rights of private citizens and organizations without raising a legal eyebrow.Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, argued that the same lack of restraint applies if a president wants to initiate criminal investigations of his or her opponents and critics. In an email replying to my queries, Balkin wrote:A president giving orders to an obedient Justice Department can exact revenge on political enemies and chill political opposition. It is not even necessary to send anyone to prison. For many people and organizations, the costs of defending a criminal investigation and prosecution can be ruinous and a sufficient deterrent. Moreover, if the public merely believed that the president was using the intelligence services and the I.R.S. to investigate political opponents, this could also chill opposition.Balkin noted that after Watergate, “the Justice Department adopted internal guidelines to prevent presidents from abusing the prosecution power, but the president, as head of the executive branch, can direct his subordinates to alter these guidelines.”President Trump, Balkin wrote,has declared the press to be the enemy of the people and so such prosecutions might even be popular among his supporters. Second, a leader who wishes to amass power and avoid accountability benefits from making the press docile and afraid of retribution. Once again, even if the government never obtains a criminal conviction, the chilling effect on the press can be significant.Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at N.Y.U.’s Brennan Center for Justice, is an expert on emergency powers delegated to the president. She replied by email to my questions concerning presidential powers:The Brennan Center has identified more than 130 statutory provisions that may be invoked when the president declares a “national emergency.” The president has near-total discretion to declare such an emergency, and he may renew the declaration every year without limit.One of the most worrisome statutory provisions, given Trump’s threats to deploy the military in large cities, Goitein continued, “is the Insurrection Act, which was intended to allow the president to deploy federal troops domestically to quell insurrections or civil unrest that overwhelms civilian authorities, or to enforce civil rights laws against obstruction.”The law, she wrote,is written in such broad and archaic terms (it was last amended 150 years ago) that it places few clear limits on the president’s ability to deploy troops to act as a domestic police force. And what limits can be inferred are effectively unenforceable, as the Supreme Court has held that the statute does not, on its face, permit judicial review of a president’s decision to deploy. Similarly, Congress has no role in approving deployments, leaving this powerful authority with no effective checks against abuse.Goitein identified three other laws that are particularly concerning:A provision of the Communications Act allows the president to shut down or take over radio communications facilities in a national emergency. If the president declares “a threat of war,” he can also shut down or take over wire communications facilities. Today, it could be interpreted to give the president control over U.S.-based internet traffic.The International Emergency Economic Powers Act allows the president to freeze any asset (including those of Americans) or prevent any financial transaction with a designated person or entity (including Americans) if he deems it necessary to address a threat emanating at least partially from overseas.One statute permits the Transportation Security Administration, during a national emergency, to carry out such duties and exercise such powers “relating to transportation during a national emergency” as the Secretary of Homeland Security shall prescribe. This provision is so vague and ill-defined, it could conceivably authorize an administration to exert compete control over domestic transportation — including shutting it down entirely — during a national emergency.These concerns are held by both Democrats and Republicans.Michael W. McConnell, who served as a George W. Bush appointee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit and is now director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, shared some of Goitein’s qualms, writing by email:The Emergencies Act is dangerously sweeping and should be reconsidered. At the time it was passed, Congress retained a congressional veto, but congressional vetoes were subsequently declared unconstitutional. Now there is no mechanism for congressional override except by passage of ordinary legislation, which is subject to presidential veto and thus politically almost impossible.One of Trump’s most startling proposals is to create a new category of federal employee known as Schedule F. It would eliminate civil service protections against arbitrary firing and other punishments for an estimated 50,000 or more elite federal workers. Their jobs would, in effect, become political patronage appointments.The Office of Personnel Management described Schedule F as directing federal agencies “to move potentially large swaths of career employees into a new ‘at will’ status that would purportedly strip them of civil service protection.”Experts in federal employment law disagree over whether, in a second term, Trump would have the power to initiate a radical change like Schedule F without congressional approval.Anne Joseph O’Connell, a law professor at Stanford whose research focuses on administrative law and the federal bureaucracy, wrote by email that Trump may have the authority to create a new Schedule F. But, she added, the scope of the change in traditional practices called for by the proposal may make it subject to judicial review.“The statute provides the president broad authority to create exceptions to the civil service,” O’Connell wrote, but compared to earlier executive changes “Schedule F would cover vastly more positions. I think such an enactment might run up against the major questions doctrine.”In 2022, the Congressional Research Service described the Major Questions Doctrine:Congress frequently delegates authority to agencies to regulate particular aspects of society, in general or broad terms. However, in a number of decisions, the Supreme Court has declared that if an agency seeks to decide an issue of major national significance, its action must be supported by clear congressional authorization.Donald F. Kettl, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, has been working with fellow of scholars seeking to prevent the creation of Schedule F, emailed me that:The one thing for certain is this: Any effort to recreate a Schedule F — and I’m told that conservative circles have a new executive order ready to go on Day 1 of a new Republican presidency — is certain to be challenged in the courts. The challenge would be on the grounds that creating a massive new effort would violate the letter and spirit of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978.Kettl agreed with O’Connell thatthe consensus is that the president has the authority to create a Schedule F, under the same rules as applied to the other schedules. The big difference, of course, is that Schedule F could potentially apply to far more employees. Its proponents say it could apply to 50,000, to perhaps as many as 100,000 federal employees.The court challenge to Schedule F, Kettl continued, would be based “on its scope and its effort to undo the civil service protections now being provided to tens of thousands (or many more) federal employees.”The key issue in the case of Schedule F is how the Supreme Court would view such an extreme alteration of federal employment practices resulting from a unilateral presidential decision.David Engstrom, who is also a law professor at Stanford, wrote by email:As with so much else in American politics nowadays, it will be for courts to decide whether Schedule F runs afoul of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. There are good arguments either way. Trump’s executive order ran contrary to several decades of congressional actions creating a professional and independent civil service — a notable strike against longstanding case law sketching the limits of the President’s policy initiation power.But, Engstrom added,were the issue to go before courts in a second Trump administration, it is equally notable that Schedule F is consistent with a pillar of the Roberts Court’s separation-of-powers jurisprudence, the “unitary executive” theory, which holds that the Constitution vests the President with extensive control over the workings of the executive branch. That broad, pro-president view will surely overhang legal challenges, particularly at the Supreme Court.Erica Newland, counsel at Project Democracy, disputed the claim that the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 gives Trump the power to create a Schedule F, writing by email: “The C.S.R.A. doesn’t give Trump and his allies the power they say it does and we have 70 years of history to back that up.” Instead, “the C.S.R.A. in fact limits who Trump can exempt from hiring and firing protections.”But, Newland quickly pointed out,unlawfulness rarely stops Trump. Even if the courts ultimately strike down Schedule F, by issuing the executive order, Trump will send a message across government that personal loyalty to him — rather than the Constitution — is a job qualification. This is a classic authoritarian move.In that political environment, she contended, “the first responsibility of those who manage government services — such as our food safety, aviation, and weather services — would be demonstrating fealty to Trump, not protecting the American people.”Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia and a Times contributing Opinion writer, argued by email that the major constraints on Trump during a second term would not be legal but the power of public opinion, what Wu calls the “unwritten constitution: “Many of the things that Trump might want to do may not be explicitly barred by the written Constitution, enforced by courts, but by the unwritten constitution, enforced by longstanding practice and the refusal of individuals to contravene it.”Trump, Wu wrote, wouldlike to (1) direct specific U.S. prosecutors whom to indict (2) directly tell the U.S. Justice Department who to sue (3) have the U.S. military intervene domestically to suppress civil disorder (4) fire a far greater number of federal employees than has been the practice, and (5) rely on Senate-unconfirmed acting appointees. To various degrees these are all things within the theoretical limits of Article II and there are limited if any Congressional restraints.Wu argued that individual citizens would be very likely to defy some of Trump’s orders:Take prosecutorial independence. The ordering by a president of an individual indictment breaks unwritten norms prevalent since the revolution. If Trump made the order, it would likely be refused. It might lead to a joint refusal among all prosecutors, a Constitutional crisis, and possible Congressional intervention to codify the norms of prosecutorial independence.John Lawrence, a former chief of staff to Nancy Pelosi, when she was speaker of the House, makes the point that presidents cherish their autonomy.Any executive action is subject to review by the courts or Congress, even if the president claims to be acting within these authorities. The problem would come if Trump decided to defy the courts, as did President Andrew Jackson when, disagreeing with a ruling against Georgia on the issue of Indian relocation, he dismissed Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1832 ruling with the admonition, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”The imprecision of many laws governing the nation’s chief executive would offer Trump the opportunity to enlarge his powers. One such technique would be to fill key posts with “acting” appointees, effectively circumventing the senatorial review that would come through the confirmation process.Max Stier, founding president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, wrote in an email that “Congress needs to both fix the confirmation process and address the large holes in the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998.”There are, Stier wrote:a cascade of options available that could potentially be used to significantly extend the shelf life of an acting appointee. There is a nominal 210-day limit for acting officials, but the relevant legislation offers a number of ways that timeline can be extended, especially if formal nominations fail in the Senate. Under certain circumstances, an acting leader could serve in that role for more than 500 days under the law. Pushing the boundaries beyond that is untested and pursuing it would likely trigger legal challenges.Newland (of Project Democracy) argued that Trump could keep an acting appointee in office even longer than 500 days: “Although the law was intended to establish an overarching time limit on temporary appointments, the 210-day period can be extended, without a clear limit, as long as the president has nominated someone to permanently fill the vacant office.”All told, Newland wrote, “the cumulative effect of the law’s generous grace periods could allow an acting official to serve for two years or more.”Much of the focus on the prospect of a second Trump term has been on the willingness of his supporters to accept without qualm his more outrageous proposals and claims, including the “big lie” that Biden and his allies stole the 2020 election.What the comments by legal and employment experts in this column suggest is that American democracy is itself ill-equipped to fend off a president willing to adopt authoritarian tactics.When he took office on Jan. 20, 2017, Trump had little or no preparation for his obligations as president.On Jan. 20, 2025, in contrast, a newly elected Trump would assume the presidency armed with voluminous research conducted by a virtual White House in waiting, dominated by a network of think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, the Center for Renewing America and the America First Policy Institute.Together, these pro-Trump nonprofits have been drawing up legislation, collecting lists of loyal personnel, writing budgets and detailing executive orders designed to get the administration up and running from its first day.The Heritage Foundation has organized Project 2025, a coalition of 84 state and national conservative groups, to pave “the way for an effective conservative Administration based on four pillars: a policy agenda, Presidential Personnel Database, Presidential Administration Academy and playbook for the first 180 days of the next Administration.”The project has already published an 887-page document, “Mandate for Leadership 2025: the Conservative Promise,” with the goal of arming “an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day 1 to deconstruct the Administrative State.”The first Trump term was both deeply alarming and a comedy of errors; a second Trump administration will be far more alarming, with many fewer errors.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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    McCarthy’s Exit May Create Even More Headaches for the Tiny G.O.P. Majority

    The former speaker’s decision to leave his seat a year early could affect control of the House, the legislative agenda and his party’s efforts to keep its majority in the 2024 election.Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s announcement that he would leave Congress came as little surprise to his closest colleagues, but his decision to do so a year before the end of his term poses challenges for his party. It will shrink Republicans’ already razor-thin majority in the House as they face a number of issues in the coming months that will require near-unanimous party support.The departure of Mr. McCarthy, who was his party’s strongest fund-raiser in the House and spent two election cycles helping to build the Republican majority, also could put a dent in the G.O.P.’s ability to rake in campaign cash, although he has said he wants to continue to play a role in politics.Here’s how Mr. McCarthy’s departure could affect the House and his party.A slim majority will get even slimmer.Republicans started the year acknowledging that one of their biggest challenges would be keeping their party unified as their midterm victories delivered a tiny majority. They had 222 members while Democrats had 213, leaving little room for defectors and making it easier for a small number of disgruntled Republicans to influence policy and vote outcomes.They could afford to lose no more than four votes on any bill if all Democrats showed up and voted against them. Any more than that would doom G.O.P. legislation.With the expulsion last week of former Representative George Santos of New York, Republicans now have only 221 members, meaning their four-vote margin has shrunk to three. Any more defections than that would result in a 217-to-217 tie or give the Democratic side more votes than the Republican one.With Mr. McCarthy gone, Republicans will enter the new year with 220 votes, leaving the same margin since they could still lose three votes and be ahead of Democrats, 217 to 216.A special election for Mr. Santos’s seat is set for Feb. 13, and Democrats hope to recapture the politically competitive district, which President Biden won in 2020. That would further erode the Republicans’ edge.A winter shutdown showdown could become even more unmanageable.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California will have 14 days after Mr. McCarthy’s final day to call a special election, which must take place about four months later. The Bakersfield-anchored district is solidly Republican, meaning that a G.O.P. candidate is likely to win the race to serve out the remainder of his term. But that won’t happen before mid-January, when lawmakers face the first of two deadlines for funding the government.Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, has struggled to push critical legislation through the House, and a slimmer majority would probably empower the rebellious hard-right wing of his party to double down on its policy demands ahead of the deadlines, the second of which is in early February.The smaller majority could also affect the fight over an emergency national security spending bill to fund the war in Ukraine, along with help for Israel in its war against Hamas and border security funding.On Wednesday, Republicans blocked the measure in the Senate. The bill would face an uphill battle in the House, where Republican support for Ukraine’s war effort is dwindling.Republicans will lose their best House fund-raiser.For years, Mr. McCarthy has traveled to hundreds of districts across the country, bringing in millions of dollars in campaign cash for candidates and helping Republicans win control of the House in 2022. He has said he planned to remain engaged in Republican politics.“I will continue to recruit our country’s best and brightest to run for elected office,” Mr. McCarthy said in announcing his plans to leave the House in The Wall Street Journal. “The Republican Party is expanding every day, and I am committed to lending my experience to support the next generation of leaders.”During his time as speaker, Mr. McCarthy brought in $78 million for his colleagues’ re-election efforts, more than 100 times the amount of money Mr. Johnson had collected before becoming speaker.His support of new candidates will be aided by a campaign account with more than $10 million at his disposal. Even after leaving office, Mr. McCarthy can use the campaign funds to establish a political action committee or directly support other campaigns. He has signaled that he would like to play a substantial role, and many lawmakers and aides believe he may intervene in party primaries to target the far-right Republicans who led the push to oust him from the speakership.Republicans are holding their breath for more exits.More than three dozen incumbents from both parties in both chambers have said they will not seek re-election. If even a handful more House Republicans leave in the coming months, it could wipe away their majority before a single vote is cast in the 2024 election. Another Republican, Representative Bill Johnson of Ohio, has announced that he will leave Congress in several months to become the president of Youngstown State University, though he has not said precisely when.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, and one of Mr. McCarthy’s strongest allies, expressed her frustration over the eroding majority in a post on social media, saying, “Hopefully no one dies.” More

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    The Insurrection Act Has to Go

    There is a land mine embedded in the United States Code, one that Donald Trump, if re-elected president, could use to destroy our republic. But it’s not too late for Congress to defuse the mine now and protect America.I’m talking about the Insurrection Act, a federal law that permits the president to deploy military troops in American communities to effectively act as a domestic police force under his direct command. In theory, there is a need for a well-drafted law that permits the use of federal troops in extreme circumstances to maintain order and protect the rule of law. The Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792 but has since been amended, is not, however, well drafted. And its flaws would give Trump enormous latitude to wield the staggering power of the state against his domestic political enemies.These flaws are especially relevant because Trump and his allies are keenly aware of the act’s provisions and have long expressed interest in its use. Trump has publicly regretted not using more military force to suppress riots in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in 2020, there were suggestions that he utilize the act as part of his plot to steal the 2020 election, and now there are reports that Trump might invoke the act on the first day of his next term, to suppress demonstrations, to control the border or both.Moreover, these reports have to be read in the context of Trump’s latest public pronouncements. He has declared many of his domestic political opponents to be “vermin.” His campaign has promised that his critics’ “sad, miserable existence” will be “crushed.” And he has specifically told his followers, “I am your vengeance.”Some version of the Insurrection Act is probably necessary. After all, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Civil War to Trump’s own insurrection on Jan. 6, we have seen direct, violent challenges to federal authority. But any such authorization should be carefully circumscribed and subject to oversight. The authority granted by the act, however, is remarkably broad, and oversight is virtually nonexistent.The Insurrection Act contains a number of provisions, and not all are equally bad. For example, the first provision, 10 U.S.C. Section 251, provides that the president may deploy troops “upon the request of [a state’s] legislature or of its governor if the legislature cannot be convened” in the event of an insurrection. There is no unilateral presidential authority under this provision; the president’s power is activated only by a state request.But the act gets worse, much worse. The next section takes the gloves off, giving the president the ability to call out the National Guard or the regular army “whenever the president considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any state by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” Note the key language: “whenever the president considers.” That means deployment is up to him and to him alone.The section after that does much same thing, again granting the president the power to “take such measures he considers necessary” to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy.” This broad grant of power makes the Insurrection Act far more immediately dangerous than many other threatened Trump actions, such as prosecuting political opponents and transforming the federal work force. Judicial review can blunt many of Trump’s worst initiatives, but there’s no such obvious check on the use of his power under the act.You might wonder why the Insurrection Act hasn’t presented much of a problem before now. It’s been used rarely, and when it has been used, it’s been used for legitimate purposes. For example, it was used repeatedly to suppress racist violence in the South during the Reconstruction era and the civil rights movement. Most recently, George H.W. Bush invoked it in 1992 — at the request of the governor of California — to assist in quelling the extreme violence of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.That historical restraint has been dependent on a factor that is utterly absent from Trump: a basic commitment to the Constitution and democracy. Previous presidents, for all their many flaws, still largely upheld and respected the rule of law. Even in their most corrupt moments, there were lines they wouldn’t cross. Trump not only has no such lines but also has made his vengeful intentions abundantly clear.There is still time, however, to take this terrible tool out of Trump’s potential hands. The Insurrection Act has not always been so broad. In its earliest versions, the president’s power was much more carefully constrained. But Congress expanded the president’s power after the Civil War, in part to deal with racist insurgencies in the defeated Confederacy.It’s time to rein in the excesses of the act. In 2022, Elizabeth Goitein and Joseph Nunn from the Brennan Center for Justice submitted a comprehensive reform proposal to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The proposal would narrow and carefully define the circumstances in which the president can deploy troops, provide for a congressional review and approval process and enable judicial review of claims that the legal criteria for deployment were not met. It’s a proposal worth adopting.I’m not naïve. I recognize that it will be difficult if not impossible for any reform bill to pass Congress. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the Republican-led House of Representatives, was a central player in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. Many of Trump’s congressional allies share his thirst for vengeance. But it’s past time to highlight this problem in the federal code. It’s past time to strip unilateral authority from the president.It’s not hard to imagine what could happen if we don’t. An angry, vindictive president could send regular army troops straight into American cities at the first hint of protest. This would place both the American polity and the American military under immense strain. While the former consequence may be more obvious, the latter is also important. Many soldiers would be deeply unhappy to be deployed against their countrymen and would be rightly concerned that a reckless deployment would be accompanied by reckless orders. Dominating the streets of New York is not the mission they signed up for.When you read misguided laws like the Insurrection Act, you realize that the long survival of the American republic is partly a result of good fortune. Congress, acting over decades, has gradually granted presidents far too much power, foolishly trusting them to act with at least a minimal level of integrity and decency.Trump has demonstrated that trust is no longer a luxury we can afford. It’s time to take from presidents a power they never should have possessed. No man or woman should be able to unilaterally deploy the armed forces to control America’s streets.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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    I Clerked for Justice O’Connor. She Was My Hero, but I Worry About Her Legacy.

    When I learned that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor had died, I felt not just the loss of a world historical figure but also the loss of someone who formed a part of my identity.As a young woman, I was in awe of Justice O’Connor. Her presence on the Supreme Court offered an answer to any doubts I had that I belonged in the law. As a young lawyer, I was lucky enough to work for a year as her law clerk.While clerking for her, I came to understand and appreciate not only her place in history but also her vision of the law. She refused opportunities to issue sweeping opinions that would substitute her ideals for the democratic process. This made it all the more tragic that toward the end of her career, she joined in a decision — Bush v. Gore — that represented a rejection of her cautious approach in favor of a starkly political one.For me, she stands as a shining example of how women — everyone, really — can approach life and work. I witnessed her warmth, humor and humanity while experiencing the gift of learning and seeing the law through her eyes. Those personal and legal impressions have left an enduring mark on me as a person and as a lawyer.At the time Justice O’Connor became a lawyer, women in that role were rare. As has now become familiar lore, after she graduated near the top of her class from Stanford Law School in 1952, she was unable to find work as a lawyer. As a justice, she made sure that opportunities denied to her were available to others. Shortly after I graduated from law school, I joined two other women and one man in her chambers, making a rare majority-woman chamber when just over a third of the clerks for Supreme Court justices were women.I always found it remarkable that I never heard Justice O’Connor talk with any bitterness of the barriers she faced pursuing her career. Instead, she worked hard and without drama to overcome them. Remarkably, that experience did not harden her.She had a wicked sense of humor. The door to our clerks’ office held a photocopied image of her hand with the words “For a pat on the back, lean here.” Her face transformed in an almost girlish way when she laughed, which she did often.When she met with the clerks on Saturday to discuss upcoming cases, she brought us a home-cooked lunch — often something inspired by her Western roots. (One memorable example was tortillas and a cheesy chicken filling, to make a kind of cross between a burrito and a chicken quesadilla. It was a bit of a mess to eat but delicious.) She insisted that we get out of the courthouse and walk with her to see the cherry blossoms, and she took us to one of her favorite museums; once we visited the National Arboretum and lingered at the bonsai exhibit. She believed firmly in the benefits of exercise, and she invited us to join daily aerobics sessions with a group of her friends early in the morning in the basketball court above the Supreme Court chamber, which she delighted in calling the “highest court in the land.”She was also a hopeless romantic, and she was well known for trying to find partners for her single clerks. She met her husband, John, in law school, and they married shortly after graduation. He had received an Alzheimer’s diagnosis when I clerked for her, though that knowledge was not yet public. He often came by her chambers as she worked to maintain a sense of normalcy. She retired in 2006 largely because of his progressing dementia. In a powerful lesson of what it is to love, she was happy for him when he struck up a romance with a fellow Alzheimer’s patient. It was devastating to learn that she was subsequently diagnosed with dementia herself.When I clerked for her in 1998 and ’99, she was at the height of her powers. She was the unquestioned swing justice, and some called her the most powerful woman in the world.But she approached the role with humility. Considered a minimalist, she worked to devise opinions that decided the case and usually little more. She was sometimes criticized for that approach. Justice Antonin Scalia made no secret of his frustration. When she refused to overturn Roe v. Wade, in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he snarlingly referred to the opinion as a “jurisprudence of confusion.” She was criticized by many academics for failing to articulate a grand vision of the law.What they missed was that this was her grand vision of the law — or at least of the Supreme Court. She had spent the formative part of her career before she entered the court as a member of the Arizona State Legislature, where she rose to become the first female majority leader of a State Senate.She believed that the most important decisions about how to govern the country belonged to the political branches and to state legislatures, not to a court sitting in Washington. Seeing the law through her eyes during the year I worked for her, I realized that she was not looking for a sweeping theory that would change the face of the law. She wanted to decide the case before her and provide a bit of guidance to the lower courts as necessary but leave the rest to the democratic process.In December 2000, this made reading the opinion she joined in Bush v. Gore all the more heartbreaking. Her vote made a 5-to-4 majority for the decision to halt the recount in Florida rather than allow that process to play out, throwing the election to George W. Bush, who became the first president since 1888 to be elected without winning the popular vote. The decision, widely criticized for its shoddy reasoning, was the opposite of the careful, modest decisions she had spent her career crafting. It disenfranchised voters whose ballots had been rejected by ballot-counting machines in the interests of finality — in the process substituting the judgment of the court for the expressed will of the people.The court showed that it could — and would — behave in nakedly political ways. It had given into the temptation to engage in ends-driven reasoning that was utterly unpersuasive to those who did not already share its view of the right result. In doing so, the court might have opened the door to what has now become something of a habit.Justice O’Connor retired just over five years later, and she was replaced by Samuel Alito. It has been painful to watch as, in decision after decision, he has voted to undo much of the legacy she so carefully constructed. The blunt politics of Bush v. Gore now look less like an embarrassing outlier and more like a turning point toward a court that has cast aside Justice O’Connor’s cautious minimalism for a robustly unapologetic political view of the law. Unsurprisingly, public opinion of the court has fallen to a near historic low.Justice O’Connor remains a transformative figure in the law, a woman who charted a path that I and so many others have followed. If the court is to regain the public trust, it should look, once again, to her shining example, which embodied a powerful ideal: the court is not a body meant to enact the justices’ vision of what the law should be. Its role is, instead, to encourage our imperfect democracy to find its way forward on its own.Oona A. Hathaway is a professor of law and political science at Yale University and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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    O’Connor’s Most Vital Work Was After She Stepped Down

    You can tell a lot about a person by what he or she regrets. This holds especially for Supreme Court justices, whose decisions can, with a single vote, upend individual lives and alter the course of history. Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. said he probably made a mistake in upholding a law criminalizing gay sex; Justice Harry Blackmun was sorry he ever voted to impose the death penalty.Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who died on Friday at the age of 93, expressed regret publicly over one vote she cast: in the case of Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, a 2002 ruling that judicial candidates could not be prohibited from expressing their views on disputed legal and political issues. Minnesota, like many states that elect judges, had imposed such a ban in order to preserve the appearance of judicial impartiality. The court rejected the ban for violating the First Amendment. The decision was 5 to 4, with Justice O’Connor joining the majority.The court’s ruling led to an explosion of partisan spending on judicial elections around the country and judicial candidates freely spouting their predetermined views on the very issues they would be entrusted to decide if elected.There are many ways to remember Justice O’Connor — as the first woman on the Supreme Court, as one of the justices who saved Roe v. Wade 30 years ago, as the author of the landmark decision protecting affirmative action in 2003. As impressive as those achievements were, they have mostly been surpassed or reversed. What stands out for me is what she said and did after leaving the court.Her response to the 2002 ruling would define most of her last years and underline her commitment to American democracy not just in the halls of justice but also on the ground. It was as if she could see what was coming as the judiciary grew ever more politicized, and she devoted much of her postcourt public life to combating that trend.In March 2006, only weeks after she stepped down, she gave a speech calling out Republican lawmakers for attacking the judiciary. She highlighted the comment by Senator John Cornyn of Texas that deadly violence against judges might be related to their rulings.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