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New Voting Laws Add Difficulties for People With Disabilities
Laura Halvorson was ready to vote. On Thursday afternoon, she sat in front of a ballot screen at the Igo Library in San Antonio, after spending a month preparing for this moment. It was the first time in years that she had been in a public place, other than a doctor’s office.Sitting in her wheelchair, she wore two masks — one a KN95, the other a part of her breathing machine. Because Ms. Halvorson, 38, has muscular dystrophy, a condition that progressively decreases muscle mass, and makes her more vulnerable to Covid-19, she needed to use a remote-control device supplied by poll workers to make her ballot selections.No one knew how it worked.The glitch was one of many obstacles she had to navigate, both on that day and over the previous weeks, to fulfill what she saw as her civic duty. For Ms. Halvorson and others with disabilities, casting a ballot can always present a challenge. But new voting restrictions enacted in several states over the past two years have made it even harder.A law signed last year by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, has made it more difficult for voters to cast ballots by mail and narrowed their options for voting in person, according to groups that advocate for people with disabilities and voting rights. Other Republican-led state legislatures, including in Georgia and Florida, have passed similar measures as a part of what they say are efforts to prevent voter fraud, despite rare occurrences of the crime.“Instead of embracing the more accessible forms of voting that sparked record turnout, including among voters with disabilities,” said Brian Dimmick, a senior staff attorney for the disability rights program of the American Civil Liberties Union, “states have doubled down on new and more restrictive voter-suppression laws.”None of the new laws single out those with disabilities, but advocates say they have left many people who would otherwise vote by mail with burdensome options: face the greater risk that their mail-in ballot could be thrown out — as Texas did at a higher-than-usual rate during the March primary — or go to the polls in person, which involves its own set of inconveniences or, worse, physical barriers, and often deprives people with disabilities of a sense of privacy and independence that other voters can take for granted.A polling place in Brooklyn. Nearly two million people with disabilities reported that they had some difficulty voting in the November 2020 election — double the rate of people without disabilities.Anna Watts for The New York Times“Voters with disabilities are being disenfranchised by all these new laws, from onerous ID requirements to longer lines, making the entire process less accessible,” said Shira Wakschlag, the senior director of legal advocacy at The Arc, a disability advocacy organization.Several Texas Republicans who supported the new voting law did not respond to requests for comment about its effect on people with disabilities, although a spokeswoman for Governor Abbott said in a statement that it “protects the rights of disabled Texans to request reasonable accommodations or modifications.” At a hearing last year, State Senator Bryan Hughes, the Texas bill’s author, described accommodations for voters with disabilities as potential security risks, and said narrowing them would stop others from “using those opportunities to cheat.”Voting could already be difficult for those with disabilities. About 17.7 million reported voting in the November 2020 election, according to a report by the Program for Disability Research at Rutgers University and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Eleven percent of them, or nearly two million people, reported that they had some difficulty voting in that election — almost double the rate of people without disabilities.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Final Landscape: As candidates make their closing arguments, Democrats are bracing for potential losses even in traditionally blue corners of the country as Republicans predict a red wave.The Battle for Congress: With so many races on edge, a range of outcomes is still possible. Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, breaks down four possible scenarios.Voting Worries: Even as voting goes smoothly, fear and suspicion hang over the process, exposing the toll former President Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods have taken on American democracy.The right to vote privately and independently was enshrined 20 years ago by Congress in the Help America Vote Act, which was the first law to require polling places to have accessible voting systems. The law also established the federal Election Assistance Commission, an independent body that sets guidelines for states and counties to accommodate disabled voters, which can be enforced by the Justice Department.Despite the law, Thomas Hicks, the commission chairman, said disabled voters still encountered problems, including those who are blind and have trouble locating accessible voting locations, and those who use wheelchairs and need voting machines to be low enough or adjustable to eye level.For Ms. Halvorson, a former special education teacher, the difficulties include being able to raise her hands and tap the screen of a voting machine, she said, because of her reduced motor skills. She lives with her partner, accompanied by different caregivers, in a one-story house in San Antonio, and also relies on a breathing machine to survive; a bad case of pneumonia in 2014 weakened her lungs, and she was not able to make a full recovery.Voting by mail made things simpler for her. But after reports that Texas had thrown out more than 18,000 mail-in ballots from its most populous counties during the March primaries, Ms. Halvorson — who cannot write on her own and feared having to appeal a rejected ballot — felt she had no other choice but to vote in person. She wanted to “see the ballot go in” herself, she said — even if it meant risking her health.“This election is too important to wait to find out if my vote counted,” she said.A week of research about voting in person led Ms. Halvorson to a new kind of machine that Texas had recently put in place, allowing a remote to be connected to the screen and used to make selections. She called her county clerk to ensure those machines would be present at the Igo Library, her local polling place. She did not hear back, she said.Ms. Halvorson entered her polling place on Thursday, on a trip that she began preparing for a month earlier. Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesLydia Nunez Landry, a disability rights activist in Houston who has a different form of muscular dystrophy, said her experience using the remote on the first day of early voting went so poorly — including a poll worker seeing Ms. Landry’s chosen candidates — that she immediately filed a complaint with the Justice Department.“I’m just so angry,” Ms. Landry said. “They constantly are changing things, it feels like, to the disability community. We’re just so confused.”Ms. Halvorson wanted a caregiver to accompany her to the polling place in case she had a similar experience and needed help. She also scheduled a coronavirus vaccine booster shot exactly two weeks before the end of early voting..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How we call winners on election night. We rely on The Associated Press, which employs a team of analysts, researchers and race callers who have a deep understanding of the states where they declare winners. In some tightly contested races, we independently evaluate A.P. race calls before declaring a winner.Here’s more about how it works.On Thursday morning, Ms. Halvorson viewed an online guide to the candidates one more time. Her former service dog, Houston, wagged his tail as he put his paws in her lap and begged for treats.She drove to the library with one of her daytime caregivers, Shae-Lynn Lewis, in a large orange, wheelchair-accessible van. A parking spot for the disabled was available, which often is not the case, Ms. Halvorson said. Then it was time to take an inventory. Ms. Halvorson ticked off aloud what to bring inside: phone, identification, water bottle, hand sanitizer and wipes, and the absentee ballot she needed to turn in.Inside the library, a voting clerk wearing a U.S. Marine Corps veteran cap waved people through to the polling room.One of the tokens of Ms. Halvorson’s day. Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesMs. Halvorson and her caregiver entered and waited in line to turn in the absentee ballot and receive a remote. Ms. Halvorson later said her heart “was beating out of her chest” as she saw all the people around her without masks on in such close quarters.After securing the remote and pulling in front of a voting machine, she began trying to click through on the side buttons, but the screen did not respond. She said she asked for help, but none of the workers seemed to know how it worked, either.After a few tries, she said, the up and down buttons on the remote made the screen respond. It was still hard to read, however, as the font seemed to be enlarged and cut off the party affiliations for candidates she didn’t know.The Bexar County elections administrator, Jacquelyn Callanen, did not respond to requests for comment about Ms. Halvorson’s voting experience.While at least two dozen people entered and exited the voting area within minutes, Ms. Halvorson remained inside, trying to navigate the machine. After about half an hour, she was able to deposit her ballot.Later, she said she felt fortunate that her experience was not worse. Still, she said, “It should be smooth for literally everybody.”Before Ms. Halvorson left, one observer acknowledged her efforts. “The man gave me two ‘I voted’ stickers,” she said. “He said it’s because I had to go through twice as much as everybody else.”Ava Sasani More
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Don’t Believe Lee Zeldin When He Says He Can’t Touch Abortion Access in New York
I called Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president, on Monday morning to see how worried he was about New York’s governor’s race. Levine, a Democrat who’d just come from campaigning with Gov. Kathy Hochul, was pretty worried. Yes, polls have shown Hochul consistently ahead of the Trumpist Republican congressman Lee Zeldin, but Levine thought the race could go either way.“I don’t think we know how accurate polls are in New York State,” Levine told me, noting how long it’s been since New York has had a competitive statewide general election. “And there’s no doubt that Zeldin has used the crime issue to whip up energy on his side.”There are many reasons to be aghast at the idea of a gun-loving election denier taking power in a state that’s been as reliably liberal as New York. One of them is what Zeldin might do to New York’s status as a haven for abortion access.Though Zeldin is a co-sponsor in the House of the Life at Conception Act, which would bestow full personhood rights on embryos, he’s tried to neutralize abortion as a campaign issue by insisting that he couldn’t change New York’s abortion law even if he wanted to.There’s something bizarre about this argument: As Assemblywoman Deborah Glick pointed out to me, Zeldin is telling pro-choice New Yorkers that we can rely on the Legislature to protect us from him. And while it’s true that Zeldin wouldn’t be able to ban abortion anytime soon, there are many things, short of making abortions illegal, that a governor can do to make them harder to get.Zeldin’s strategy is similar to the one that Christine Drazan, the anti-abortion Republican with a decent chance of becoming governor of Oregon, is employing in her race. Both are trying to use Democrats’ success in passing state-level abortion protections against them, by arguing that these laws make their personal opposition to abortion moot.“I will not change and could not change New York’s abortion law,” Zeldin said in one ad, while Drazan told Oregon Public Broadcasting that “Roe is codified into Oregon law. Regardless of my personal opinions on abortion, as governor, I will follow the law.” But when it comes to reproductive rights, the letter of the law isn’t the only thing that matters.New York, for example, recently passed a statute that, among other things, prohibits law enforcement from cooperating with out-of-state prosecutors on most abortion cases. But whether a Governor Zeldin would be totally constrained by the law is unclear. He has promised to remove Manhattan’s district attorney, Alvin Bragg, from office, even though Bragg was elected last year with 84 percent of the vote, suggesting a willingness to push the limit of his authority. Oregon, meanwhile, has no such law, only a written commitment from the governor, the Democrat Kate Brown, to resist out-of-state legal actions over abortion.In both Oregon and New York, there are lots of administrative levers governors could pull to stymie reproductive health care. Zeldin has said it would be a “great idea” to appoint an anti-abortion health commissioner, a position with a lot of power in the state. Shortly after the draft of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe was leaked in May, Hochul created the $25 million Abortion Provider Support Fund to help New York providers care for an expected influx of out-of-state patients, and allocated $10 million more to help clinics beef up their security. Zeldin would almost certainly do away with grants like these. Drazan has criticized a similar grant program in Oregon, referring derisively to the funding of “abortion tourism.”New York’s governor “controls the purse strings, because he controls the division of the budget,” said Glick, who led the fight to pass the 2019 Reproductive Health Act, which codified Roe and expanded the number of health professionals who can legally perform abortions in the state. As governor, she said, Zeldin could withhold money from Planned Parenthood and restrict Medicaid funding for abortion. “You can slowly starve some programs by simply not providing resources in a timely fashion.”Of course, the people who care deeply about the nuances of reproductive health policy are probably already voting for Democrats, which is why pointing out all the ways right-wing governors could erode abortion access feels so dispiriting. Politically, the anti-abortion movement has often been at its strongest when it’s fighting for regulations that strangle providers with red tape or cut off public funding, because most people aren’t going to get far enough into the weeds to get outraged.While Roe still stood, the anti-abortion movement used a strategy of regulatory siege to chip away at abortion rights in red states. With anti-abortion governors, a similar strategy could be deployed in blue ones. Speaking to New York Right to Life in April, Zeldin promised an open-door policy. “Come on in to the second floor of the New York State Capitol,” he said. “It’s been a while, but you come right on in.”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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What’s at Stake in These Elections
Midterm elections in the United States are often presented as a referendum on the party in power, and that message appears to be resonating this fall. But voters need to consider the intentions of the party that hopes to regain power, too, and what each vote they cast will mean for the future of this country.Eight Republican senators and 139 Republican representatives sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election on the basis of spurious allegations of voter fraud and other irregularities. Many of them are likely to win re-election, and they may be joined by new members who also have expressed baseless doubts about the integrity of the 2020 election. Their presence in Congress poses a danger to democracy, one that should be on the mind of every voter casting a ballot this Election Day.It will also be the first time that the U.S. electoral machinery will be tested in a national election after two years of lawsuits, conspiracy theories, election “audits” and all manner of interference by believers in Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. That test comes alongside the embrace of violent extremism by a small but growing faction of the Republican Party.The greatest danger to election integrity may, in fact, come from the results of state and local races that will determine who actually conducts the election and counts the votes in 2024. In the weeks that followed the 2020 election, Mr. Trump and his supporters saw their efforts to deny the election results and prove rampant voter fraud thwarted by two things: first, their inability to produce credible evidence that such fraud had occurred and, second, an election infrastructure that was defended by honorable public servants who refused to accept specious claims of wrongdoing.Over the past two years, Republicans in dozens of states have tried to dismantle that infrastructure piece by piece, particularly by filling key positions with Trump sympathizers. As this board wrote in September, “Rather than threatening election officials, they will be the election officials — the poll workers and county commissioners and secretaries of state responsible for overseeing the casting, counting and certifying of votes.” Many of those positions are being contested this week.With Mr. Trump said to be readying his bid to return to the White House, this board urges American voters to consider how important each vote cast on Election Day, at every level of government, will be. Even if the member of Congress in your district has refused to accept Mr. Trump’s lies about this election, there are other races on the ballot in many states for offices — including secretary of state, attorney general and governor — that will play crucial roles in overseeing and certifying the 2024 presidential election.Still, with that election two years away, many voters say they are more concerned with the present threats to their livelihoods than with the equally serious but less visible threat to democracy. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll found that “more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system.”Indeed, voters have good reason to look at the current moment and wonder whether the Biden administration and congressional Democrats are doing enough to meet it. High inflation is making it harder for Americans to afford what they need and want. Overall crime has risen, causing people to fear for their safety. The federal government is struggling to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and America’s increasingly tense relations with China are undermining global peace and prosperity.Republicans have presented these midterm elections as a referendum on Democratic leadership, and that message appears to be resonating.But voters need to consider the intentions of the party that hopes to regain power, too.Republicans have offered few specific plans for addressing issues like inflation, immigration and crime — and even if they win control of Congress, they are unlikely to win enough seats to shift federal policy significantly over the next two years.A Republican-controlled Senate would, however, be able to block President Biden from filling vacancies on the federal bench and on the Supreme Court. It would become more difficult to obtain confirmations for executive branch officials, as well.Republican candidates have also pledged to devote significant time and energy to investigating the Biden administration. “I don’t think Joe Biden and his handlers are exactly eager to sign Republican legislation into law, so our hearings are going to be the most important thing that we can have,” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado told a recent rally.In addition to that spectacle, Republicans are threatening to stage another showdown over federal spending.At some point in the next year, the government is expected to hit the limit of its authorized borrowing capacity, or debt ceiling. To meet the commitments Congress already has authorized, it will need to raise that limit. This ought to be a matter of basic housekeeping, because failing to pay the nation’s bills would risk a global financial crisis. But debt ceiling votes have instead become recurring opportunities for extortion.This board has called for Congress to eliminate the debt ceiling, replacing it with a common-sense law that says the government can borrow whatever is necessary to provide for the spending authorized by Congress. There is no public benefit in requiring what amounts to a second vote on spending decisions. But for now, the ceiling endures, and Republicans have made clear that if they win control of Congress, they intend to use it as a bargaining chip with the White House to advance their party’s fiscal goals.One priority on that list is cutting taxes. Republicans already are preparing to move forward with legislation to extend the 2017 tax cuts for individuals, which mostly benefit wealthy households, while eliminating some of the offsetting increases in corporate taxation — a plan that is not easily reconciled with the party’s stated concerns about inflation or the rising federal debt.Republican proposals would also make it more difficult for the Internal Revenue Service to prevent wealthy Americans from cheating on their taxes. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, who is in position to become speaker if Republicans win a majority, has said the “first bill” that would pass under his leadership would reverse an $80 billion funding increase for the I.R.S. Congress approved that funding in August so the I.R.S. can crack down on rampant tax fraud by high-income households.Some senior Republicans have called for repealing another key piece of the August legislation, known as the Inflation Reduction Act: a measure that limits drug costs for seniors on Medicare, including a $35 monthly cap on payments for insulin.Republicans also have floated plans to roll back more firmly established benefits. The Republican Study Committee, a conservative policy working group whose membership includes more than half of the current crop of House Republicans, published a budget plan in June calling for Congress to gradually increase the retirement age for full Social Security benefits to 70 to check the rising cost of the program. The plan also would increase the age of eligibility for Medicare.Democrats could make it more difficult for Republicans to pursue these goals by raising the debt limit or changing the rules in the weeks between the election and the end of the year.Democrats have largely failed to connect with voters’ concerns about inflation and public safety during this campaign season. They have struggled to communicate their tangible achievements, including a big boost in funding for local law enforcement and bipartisan gun safety legislation, a historic federal investment in developing clean and low-cost sources of energy to confront climate change and the cost of living, and a breakthrough measure to bring down the cost of prescription drugs for Medicare recipients.Undoubtedly, there is more work to be done on these and other issues, including the health of the economy and the broken state of immigration policy. Voters need to decide which party they trust to do that work.But the 2022 elections are also an opportunity for every American to do their part in defending the integrity of American elections. The task of safeguarding our democracy does not end with one election, and it requires all of us to play a role. Our nation’s governance depends on it.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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Can Republicans and Democrats Find a Way Forward on Immigration?
Any hope for immigration reform on undocumented Dreamers, border security or legal immigration will likely hinge on compromise, something that has eluded lawmakers for decades.WASHINGTON — A drug needle goes into a person’s arm; an adult and child walk through a graveyard; and footage of migrants walking along a sandy stretch of a border wall, in Yuma, Arizona, streams while ominous music plays in the background of this video.It is a 40-second political ad in support of Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona, who is running against Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat. The ad connects fatal overdoses of fentanyl and methamphetamines to a spike in illegal migration at the southwestern border. It is one of more than 400 political ads tying immigration to drugs this election cycle, according to America’s Voice, a pro-immigration advocacy group.And it is part of a false G.O.P. narrative that connects fatal overdoes of fentanyl to a spike in illegal migration and presents Republican immigration hard-line immigration policies as an answer to crime and the drug epidemic. Most of the fentanyl comes into the country through official ports of entry on the southwestern border, hidden in legitimate commerce.The false narrative, which resonates with voters across the country, is just one example of how toxic the issue of immigration has become. Republicans have stepped up attacks against President Biden as weak and ineffective on immigration, making it even more difficult for the Biden administration to secure any meaningful immigration reform after the midterm elections, especially if the G.O.P. controls at least one legislative chamber.But even if Republicans win control in Congress and want to advance their immigration policies, particularly on border security, they will have to find some compromise with Democrats to overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate — something that has been elusive for years, regardless of party control.Here are some of the major immigration issues facing the Biden administration that would require striking a compromise with Republicans for any legislation to move forward.The DreamersImmigration advocates demonstrating in front of the Capitol to support protections for DACA recipients earlier this year.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesThe Obama-era program, known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, protects hundreds of thousands of immigrants who came to the country as children and have grown up in the United States. Court challenges against the policy have been successful and appeals have largely been exhausted, leaving the fate of these immigrants — many of whom hold jobs in sectors that are already struggling to find workers, such as agriculture and manufacturing — in the hands of Congress.If Congress is unable to come to an agreement to enshrine the policy in law, and a judge stops allowing current participants, known as “Dreamers,” to renew their status, about 1,000 of them will lose the ability to work every business day over a two-year period, said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, an immigration reform advocacy group that draws support from the tech industry.“This would cause terrible, unneeded human and economic hardship for millions of individuals,” Mr. Schulte said in a recent letter to Democrats, referring to the Dreamers, others who would be eligible for the benefit and their family members. He said the results of so many forced out of the work force “would be extremely harmful” for the country’s economy.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.House Democrats: Several moderates elected in 2018 in conservative-leaning districts are at risk of being swept out. That could cost the Democrats their House majority.A Key Constituency: A caricature of the suburban female voter looms large in American politics. But in battleground regions, many voters don’t fit the stereotype.Crime: In the final stretch of the campaigns, politicians are vowing to crack down on crime. But the offices they are running for generally have little power to make a difference.Abortion: The fall of Roe v. Wade seemed to offer Democrats a way of energizing voters and holding ground. Now, many worry that focusing on abortion won’t be enough to carry them to victory.The top Republican in the House, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who is in line for the speaker role, has said that if the G.O.P. wins back control, striking a deal to protect DACA recipients in exchange for border security is a non-starter. But significant job losses in Republican districts among DACA recipients could force the Republicans’ hands if their employers put pressure on their elected officials to find a solution.There has been and continues to be bipartisan support to create a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers, according to a recent poll commissioned by FWD.us. But previous efforts have failed without enough Republican support.“It’s put up or shut up time” for Republicans if they actually want to do something on border security, Mr. Schulte said in an interview with The New York Times.Democrats have already shown that they are open to some kind of compromise measure.Border SecurityA Border Patrol agent detaining migrants who crossed the border near Yuma, Ariz.John Moore/Getty ImagesFor Republicans, when it comes to immigration, border security is the top priority.During Mr. Biden’s time in office, there has been a record-breaking spike in illegal migration at the southwestern border, part of a global trend exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.Many migrants are fleeing violence and poverty with the hope that they will find work or asylum in the United States. They are coming across the southwest border illegally, because there are not enough legal pathways for them to come to the United States. Limits on visas were set based on the U.S. economy in the 1990s and have largely remained the same, even though the country’s economy has grown more than twice as large since then.Even so, Republicans blame the Biden administration. House Republicans have threatened to impeach the Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, should they retake the majority, blaming him for the extraordinary number of illegal border crossings. They have also threatened to impeach the attorney general, among other officials.For Republicans, improving border security starts with restoring former President Donald J. Trump’s restrictive immigration measures. Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said the first step is completing Mr. Trump’s border wall, a pricey project that Mr. Biden paused when he took office. Fights over the wall also led to a government shutdown in 2018. Democrats say the wall is ineffective and sends a message that the country does not want to let anyone in.Republicans also argue that restricting asylum and withholding welfare benefits for immigrants are two policy changes that would deter migrants from crossing the southwestern border illegally, though undocumented immigrants are not eligible for most federal public benefits.“We have plenty of welfare recipients; we need productive citizens instead,” Mr. Scott said on his campaign website.There may be room for movement. Legislation introduced last year by Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, had the support of two Democratic senators, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, and could provide a road map for compromise. The bill calls for hiring more people in the immigration agencies to address spikes in migration and speeding the process for determining an asylum case in immigration court. That proposal did not include a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers, and the measure has yet to advance.So far, bills that included both border security and new pathways for legal immigration have hit dead-ends. Senator Dick Durban, Democrat of Illinois, recently reminded Republicans of a proposal in 2013 that had bipartisan support in the Senate. Mr. Durbin said if the legislation had passed, the country would not be in the current situation where there are not enough immigrants legally authorized to work in the agriculture sector. Legal ImmigrationFarm workers harvesting asparagus in Firebaugh, Calif.Ryan Christopher Jones for The New York TimesAnother challenge facing the Biden administration is the labor shortage across the country, which continues to worsen as the economy adds new jobs, even as fears of a recession grow. Democrats and many businesses that employ both low and high-skilled workers argue the labor shortage could be addressed through issuing work authorizations and paths to citizenship as well as expanding programs for immigrants to come work in the United States.Many businesses argue that allowing the expiration of work authorizations for Dreamers and other immigrants in the country on a temporary status would result in significant disruptions to the work force. Businesses pushing for immigration reform have pressed Congress to pass measures providing work authorizations that could give an immediate boost to the economy, lower food prices and fill critical job openings.Businesses, particularly in the agriculture industry, are also pushing to fix the country’s current farm labor shortages by passing new laws for immigrants to work in the agriculture work force.The House last year approved measures that would give about four million immigrants currently in the United States without documentation or with expiring permissions a path to citizenship. But the bills died without enough support in the Senate.While Democrats want to expand legal immigration, Republicans typically want to decrease it. Many Republicans see adding more paths to citizenship for immigrants already in the country on an expired or temporary status as a form of amnesty. They also argue that immigrants take jobs away from Americans.What’s NextMigrants seeking asylum wait to be processed by Border Patrol agents along a section of border wall near Yuma, Ariz.John Moore/Getty ImagesFor years, Republicans have largely owned the narrative on immigration, which is mostly focused on illegal immigrants and border crossings. In this election cycle, Republicans outspent Democrats on immigration-related ads on streaming services and traditional television nearly 15 to 1 — with $119.4 million compared to Democrats’ $8.1 million, according to BPI, a communications and marketing agency that tracks this data.Democrats see little political advantage in talking about immigration during the campaign. But letting Republicans fill that void means the G.O.P. message is often the only narrative Americans hear about immigration.In general, border and immigration policy are two of Mr. Biden’s least favorite issues to discuss, his staff has said, since it is an enormous challenge with no clear, quick solution. And there has been disagreement within the Biden administration over how to approach the border, with some aides supporting some of the restrictive policies of the last administration, according to two people familiar with the discussions.But immigration advocates say if Mr. Biden is serious about protecting Dreamers and pursuing other immigration reforms, Democrats must start reclaiming the narrative on immigration with a positive message that resonates with voters.“They’d better get on the messaging train,” said Beatriz Lopez, the chief political and communications officer with the advocacy group, Immigration Hub.There are brighter messages on immigration for Democrats to talk about, Ms. Lopez said. Her organization has found that voters in battleground states largely agree on protecting the Dreamers. She said they also approve of what the Biden administration has done to reunite immigrant families who were separated during the Trump administration. And voters support efforts to crack down on international drug cartels.Customs and Border Protection, for example, seized 14,700 pounds of fentanyl between October of last year and the end of September, which is more than five times the amount in 2019. About 80 percent of the fentanyl seized by the agency last year was done at ports of entry on the southwestern border.“Democrats have an opportunity to lean in,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-immigration group. “Talk about the fact that we can do big things, and get the ball rolling on affirmative positive immigration action, versus just playing into the right and talking about enforcement.”Jeanna Smialek More
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Most Candidates Running on Crime Don’t Have Much Power to Solve It
Your congressman doesn’t control the police budget. Your senator probably doesn’t know where the worst hot spots are.Politicians around the country have promised in the closing days of the midterm election to crack down on crime. Would-be governors will crack down on crime. Senators will crack down on crime. Members of Congress will do it, too. Obviously, their opponents won’t.The law-and-order messaging is often disconnected from the nuance of crime trends (in 2022, homicide is up in some places, but down in others like New York City; yes, Oklahoma has higher violent crime rates than California). But it’s also devoid of the reality that these offices generally have little power to bend crime trends on the ground tomorrow.Crime surges and falls for reasons that experts don’t fully understand, and it’s hard for even the most proven ideas to quickly reverse its direction. But the people with ready levers to pull are not sitting in the Senate. And your current sense of order in your community is definitely not controlled by your congressman.“You’re not going to fix the problems from there,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and consultant with AH Datalytics in New Orleans (and a former Upshot contributor). “If you want to fix the problems, go run for mayor.”Your governor isn’t going to solve a spike in murder, he added. And it’s generally not the governor who’s been failing to solve it, either. As for Senate candidates who say they will make sure we keep criminals behind bars who don’t belong on our streets?“U.S. senators don’t determine state prison release policies,” said John MacDonald, a professor of criminology and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. “Who you elect to Senate is going to have zero impact on state prisons.”When voters choose candidates for higher office thinking of crime, they often misunderstand where and how criminal justice decisions get made, said Amy Lerman, a political scientist at Berkeley. The federal government controls a small fraction of the whole picture. In the U.S., there are 51 prison systems, and about 18,000 police departments.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Biden’s Speech: In a prime-time address, President Biden denounced Republicans who deny the legitimacy of elections, warning that the country’s democratic traditions are on the line.State Supreme Court Races: The traditionally overlooked contests have emerged this year as crucial battlefields in the struggle over the course of American democracy.Democrats’ Mounting Anxiety: Top Democratic officials are openly second-guessing their party’s pitch and tactics, saying Democrats have failed to unite around one central message.Social Security and Medicare: Republicans, eyeing a midterms victory, are floating changes to the safety net programs. Democrats have seized on the proposals to galvanize voters.If you see a police officer while walking or driving around your community, that officer is most likely a local one. And those local officers generally report to locally elected bosses like sheriffs, or people appointed by locally elected officials like mayors, said Thomas Ogorzalek, a visiting scholar at the Center for Urban Research at CUNY.Those are the people, in turn, who decide what share of the city budget the police get, how many officers they’ll hire, where those officers will focus, if they’ll wear body cameras, and whether they’ll work alongside violence interruption workers, social workers and mental health clinicians.This may seem counterintuitive to voters: Broad crime trends are often national in scale (that was the case when crime plummeted across the country starting in the 1990s, and when gun violence surged just about everywhere during the pandemic). But it doesn’t follow that the answers are primarily federal ones.“We have a national problem that isn’t solved at the national level,” said Phillip Atiba Goff, a Yale professor and co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. “But our national narrative makes it harder to solve it at the local level — which is the only level where it’s going to get solved.”The federal government does play an important role. It funnels money to states and local governments, and often uses that money to incentivize local police to shift policies. Major components of the 1994 crime bill, for example, dedicated federal money to hire local police officers, fund victims’ services and construct state prisons.The federal government has also sent military-grade equipment to local police, although research suggests that has done little to reduce crime. In its other roles, the federal government offers technical assistance to local agencies and supports research on which policing strategies work.And it has a bully pulpit. President Biden signed an executive order in May directing federal law enforcement to restrict tactics like chokeholds and no-knock warrants. While the order has a limited reach, it could still nudge cultural changes among local departments. And individual senators and members of Congress can use their own megaphones to push policing priorities to local officials.As a whole, Congress could play a bigger role — but often chooses not to.“One of the reasons that we talk about the federal government having so little authority is not just because it can’t do a lot of things, but also because it won’t do certain things,” said Thomas Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, and chair of the Violent Crime Working Group. “The single biggest thing that the federal government could do to limit violent crime in particular would be to pass reasonable regulations that limit access to deadly firearms.”Relaxed gun laws at the federal and state level have allowed more guns on the street and made the problem of local violent crime worse, said Darrel Stephens, a retired chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, and former longtime head of the Major Cities Chiefs Association.With that solution off the table, the Council on Criminal Justice released earlier this year a report on tangible actions that could reduce violence now, all of them aimed at local officials. A central tactic involves identifying the small subset of residents and places that drive the bulk of violence, a pattern that occurs across cities. Officials can then target those areas with police resources, outreach workers, city programs and community partnerships.“The strongest evidence deals with focusing on concentrations,” Mr. Stephens said, including crime that victimizes a small concentration of people. “What you’re trying to do is to tailor your response to your understanding of what’s contributing to the problem.”That might mean changing traffic patterns on specific streets, or offering behavioral therapy programs to particular residents. That level of specificity isn’t something you would expect a senator or governor to know much about: this intersection, this family, this apartment with unsecured doors.Local officials, on the other hand, oversee many of the levers voters may not think of as part of crime policy — whether that’s street lighting, public schools, summer jobs programs, recreation departments or housing programs. And they wield the most influence over other kinds of disorder, like uncleared trash, graffiti and vacant properties, that may shape the sense of unease voters connect to their fears of crime.Those other tools are “extremely important,” said Art Acevedo, a former chief of police in Houston, Austin and Miami. He offered as an example pre-K education, citing the greater likelihood that students who eventually drop out of school will go to prison.Mr. Acevedo lamented national politicians who parachute into communities after mass shootings, offer prayers and no legislation, while local police and elected officials face those families and manage everyday violence.“When it comes to actually being closest to it, and actually focusing on good policy — rather than good politics — it’s those local officials,” he said.There is a parallel case that good crime policy at the state and federal level is inseparable from education investments, safety-net supports and housing programs that could help break up concentrated poverty and despair. Research, for example, suggests that people newly released from prison who are given federal health coverage through Medicaid are less likely to return to prison.But these interconnected benefits play out over years, not immediately in the midst of a crime surge. And this is not the conversation about crime that’s happening in 30-second campaign ads and on debate stages with an election around the corner. More
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Cherokees Ask U.S. to Make Good on a 187-Year-Old Promise, for a Start
The demand that Congress honor a treaty and seat a nonvoting delegate comes amid growing clashes over sovereignty and a tight race for Oklahoma’s governor, a Cherokee citizen.TAHLEQUAH, Okla. — In 1835, U.S. officials traveled to the Cherokee Nation’s capital in Georgia to sign a treaty forcing the Cherokees off their lands in the American South, opening them to white settlers. The Treaty of New Echota sent thousands on a death march to new lands in Oklahoma.The Cherokees were forced at gunpoint to honor the treaty. But though it stipulated that the Nation would be entitled to a nonvoting seat in the House of Representatives, Congress reneged on that part of the deal. Now, amid a growing movement across Indian Country for greater representation and sovereignty, the Cherokees are pushing to seat their delegate, 187 years later.“For nearly two centuries, Congress has failed to honor that promise,” Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, said in a recent interview in the Cherokee capital of Tahlequah, in eastern Oklahoma. “It’s time to insist the United States keep its word.”The Cherokees and other tribal nations have made significant gains in recent decades, plowing income from sources like casino gambling into hospitals, meat-processing plants and lobbyists in Washington. At the same time, though, those tribes are seeing new threats to their efforts to govern themselves.A U.S. Supreme Court tilting hard to the right seems ready to undermine or reverse sovereignty rulings that were considered settled, while new state laws may affect how schools teach Native American history. And tribes are embroiled in a caustic feud with Oklahoma’s Republican governor — despite his distinction as the first Cherokee citizen to lead the state — that has helped to make his re-election bid next week a tossup.Amid such challenges, the Nation is trying to cobble together bipartisan support for its delegate, who, if seated, would resemble the nonvoting House members representing several territories and the District of Columbia. Such delegates cannot take part in final votes, but can introduce legislation and serve on committees.A new hospital for the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah. Many tribal nations are pouring income from sources like casino gambling into health care and other needs.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesKimberly Teehee, the Cherokee Nation’s nominated delegate for a nonvoting seat in Congress. She is a Democrat and former adviser to President Barack Obama.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesKimberly Teehee, nominated in 2019 for the delegate position, said the role would open a new space for Indigenous representation. “We have priorities that are similar to other tribes when it comes to deployment of dollars, accessing health care, public safety, preserving our culture,” Ms. Teehee said. “This treaty right allows us to have a seat at the table.”The Cherokee Nation has about 430,000 citizens, Ms. Teehee said, which is more than the combined population of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands, all of which have their own delegates in Congress.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Governor’s Races: Democrats and Republicans are heading into the final stretch of more than a dozen competitive contests for governor. Some battleground races could also determine who controls the Senate.Democrats’ Mounting Anxiety: Top Democratic officials are openly second-guessing their party’s pitch and tactics, saying Democrats have failed to unite around one central message.Social Security and Medicare: Republicans, eyeing a midterms victory, are floating changes to the safety net programs. Democrats have seized on the proposals to galvanize voters.Debunking Misinformation: Falsehoods and rumors are flourishing ahead of Election Day, especially in Pennsylvania. We debunked five of the most widespread voting-related claims.So far, the Nation has drawn backing from Native American leaders across the country, as well as measured support from members of Oklahoma’s congressional delegation, including Representative Tom Cole, a Republican and member of the Chickasaw Nation.The House Rules Committee, led by Mr. Cole and Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, is expected to hold a hearing on the Cherokee delegate in mid-November. Even if control of Congress changes in next week’s midterm elections, that could open the way for a vote before the end of the year.Tribal nations across the United States are closely following the debate, eyeing the possibility that it could set a precedent. The Choctaw Nation may also have the right to a delegate under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek of 1830, signed before its removal from what is now Mississippi. Similarly, the Delaware Nation’s treaty with the United States in 1778 could allow its members a delegate.“I think you’ll see a significant outcry from the rest of Indian Country saying, ‘We want one, too,’” said M. Alexander Pearl, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma and a citizen of Chickasaw Nation. “And I think that they’re right.”Still, the Cherokees could face headwinds in the deeply divided House. Ms. Teehee is a Democrat and former adviser to President Barack Obama. A spokesman for Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the Cherokees’ effort.Mr. Cole, the Oklahoma Republican, has said that he doesn’t object to seating the delegate, but he also noted that “there’s a lot of challenges to it,” including the question of dual representation in the House.“There’s a lot of people that will say, ‘Well, that delegate’s chosen by a council, not by a general election,’” Mr. Cole said this year. “And Cherokees then get two votes: your vote for a council member and their vote for the congressman of their own district, so they sort of get to two bites of the apple.”Downtown Tahlequah on the Cherokee Reservation. The Cherokees were forced to march to Oklahoma after their land in the American South was signed over for use by white settlers.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesSeveral Cherokee leaders and representatives of the federal government celebrated the opening of a meat-processing plant in Tahlequah last month.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesA report by the Congressional Research Service raised other potential legal issues, including the possibility that the delegate provision would not apply now that Oklahoma is a state, not Indian Territory.The debate is lifting the veil on one of the most contentious periods between the United States and Indigenous peoples, when about a quarter of the 16,000 Cherokees who walked what’s known as the Trail of Tears died on their way to Oklahoma. “This is a chance to finally reckon with ethnic cleansing, and massive and catastrophic loss of life,” said Julie Reed, a historian and Cherokee Nation citizen who teaches at Penn State University.The push for a delegate after nearly two centuries also reflects the wider effort by Native Americans to exercise self-governance in ways that would have been unrecognizable to previous generations in Indian Country, a federal designation for land under tribal jurisdiction.Native candidates have recently won congressional seats in states ranging from Alaska to Kansas. Some tribes are buying back ancestral lands. And Indigenous nations are expanding their own criminal justice systems across the country.“The 1950s was the lowest point of Indian sovereignty,” said Robert J. Miller, a citizen of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and a law professor at Arizona State University, citing the failed attempt by the U.S. government to disband tribes and relocate their members to cities. “The comeback has been incredible.”Such breakthroughs, however, are taking place against the backdrop of other challenges, including those before the Supreme Court. In one ruling in June that upended longstanding precedents, the justices expanded the power of state governments over tribal nations.The 5-4 ruling, which allows states to charge non-Indians for crimes committed against Indians on tribal land, stunned experts on Native American law and weakened a major decision from just two years before that had established the authority of tribal or federal courts on Indian land. (Tribal courts would retain authority over Native Americans who commit crimes on the reservation.)Another case set to be heard by the court this year, challenging a 1978 law giving Native Americans preference in adopting Native children, could be just as unsettling. The law was intended to put an end to policies allowing Native children to be forcibly taken from their homes and placed by child welfare agencies in non-Native homes.Plaintiffs, including the State of Texas, argue that the law created a system illegally based on race. But many tribal nations, including the Cherokees, have lined up against the challenge.New measures at the state level are also flaring tempers, including an Oklahoma law banning schools from teaching material that could cause students discomfort or psychological stress because of their race.Fourth graders studying at the Cherokee Immersion School. A lawsuit by teachers and civil rights advocates says that an Oklahoma law could limit the teaching of Native American history.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesChuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, center, said it was “time to insist the United States keep its word” and seat a Cherokee delegate to Congress.Joseph Rushmore for The New York TimesGov. Kevin Stitt signed the law as part of a wave of legislation against “critical race theory,” a phrase used by conservative leaders to describe what they see as efforts to infiltrate classrooms with lessons about structural racism.A lawsuit by teachers and civil rights advocates warned that the law could silence classroom discussion about subjects like the Trail of Tears. And a high school English teacher in the town of Dewey, Okla., recently said she would stop teaching “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the best-selling book by David Grann about the murders of wealthy Osage people in the 1920s.Because the Osage were targeted for their race, the teacher told The Oklahoman that she was afraid of losing her license under the new law.Whitney Red Corn, a director of an early learning center and member of the Osage Nation Congress, said the law felt like “pushback” at a time when tribal nations were exercising rights. “It’s heartbreaking for me that something from our history could be avoided because it’s hard to hear,” said Ms. Red Corn, who took part in an Osage vote calling for the repeal of the law.One of the most bitter disputes of the moment involves Oklahoma’s largest tribes and Governor Stitt, a mortgage banker. After taking office, the governor proposed sharp increases in the fees that the tribes pay to operate more than 100 casinos around the state, prompting backlash.Mr. Hoskin, the Cherokee chief, said he expected a different approach from Mr. Stitt as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. (The New York Times and High Country News previously reported on claims that his citizenship may have been fraudulently obtained by an ancestor, which Mr. Stitt has called “unsubstantiated slander.”)Mr. Stitt has clashed repeatedly with Oklahoma’s tribes. In June, he celebrated the Supreme Court ruling diluting the authority of tribal nations. Donelle Harder, a spokeswoman for Mr. Stitt, declined to say directly whether he supported or objected to the efforts to seat a Cherokee delegate.Regarding Mr. Stitt’s relations with tribal nations, Ms. Harder said, “Governor Stitt has worked to create more fair opportunities for all sovereign nations and all people who call Oklahoma home.”Five of Oklahoma’s largest tribes have publicly endorsed Mr. Stitt’s rival, Joy Hofmeister, a former Republican who switched parties last year. Recent polls in the heavily Republican state have shown the race in a dead heat.Mr. Hoskin called the clash with Mr. Stitt a crucial factor in the Cherokee efforts to bolster sovereignty: “I think he’s the most anti-Indian tribe governor in the history of this state.”Emily Cochrane More
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We Are Very Far From Turning the Page on Trump
It’s often said that hindsight is 20/20. As far as politics goes, I’ve never believed it. Much punditry relies on what I’ve come to think of as the counterfactual fallacy. It goes like this: The party in power did X rather than Y. X didn’t work out as well as Democrats or Republicans hoped. They clearly should have done Y.We only get to run the tape once. We can never know if different decisions would have nudged us toward a better world or returned yet worse outcomes. But elections force an assessment of how the party in power has performed, despite the unknowability of other paths. And so, with Election Day nearing and voting underway all over America, I’ve been trying to work through my own answer to the question: How well did the Democrats do with the power they had, given the constraints they faced?I find it useful to think back to the three interlocking promises Democrats ran on. First and foremost, they ran on bringing competent, concerned governance to Covid. Second, they ran on a Franklin Roosevelt-size legislative agenda, believing this a Great Depression-like moment of rupture that demanded a new vision of what the state could and must do. And they ran vowing to restore the soul of America, to reestablish a civic promise and communal decency that Donald Trump and the Republican Party never understood and regularly betrayed.The Covid record is more mixed than I wish. Judged by what was promised in 2020, the Biden administration made remarkable strides. About 80 percent of Americans have had at least one vaccination, and anyone, anywhere in the country, can get shots and boosters with little effort and at no cost. Rapid tests rolled out slowly, but they are here now, and for a while the government would send them, free, to your door. The U.S. government bought up more Paxlovid than any other country in the world, and it is now widely available. Masks are cheap and plentiful.But judging by what was possible by 2022, even four of President Biden’s former Covid advisers wrote in The Times that they “are deeply dismayed by what has been left undone.” The shift from emergency response to a new architecture for preparedness never came. At-home testing was never integrated into any kind of collective policy or even data reporting system. The funding for the government to provide tests directly lapsed, with little protest from the White House. Wastewater monitoring “remains limited, uncoordinated and insufficiently standardized for a robust national surveillance system,” Biden’s former advisers wrote. So much more could have been done to improve indoor air quality and to make it clear which buildings meet the higher standards.After I criticized the Biden administration for failing to build on the successes of the Operation Warp Speed program, I heard from its Covid coordinator, Ashish Jha, that the White House was pushing Congress for $8 billion to create a Warp Speed-like program called Covid Shield for next-generation vaccines. But that push was quiet, and the administration committed itself to a bipartisan path that never opened. When Congress failed to provide the money, the administration never went public, much less turned to hardball measures. Biden could have refused to sign spending bills that didn’t include the Covid preparedness money he sought. Democrats should have made this a must-pass provision of the Inflation Reduction Act; as the past few years have proved, little is worse for inflation than a raging pandemic.The White House understands all of this. Jha is out there, even now, raising the alarm that current treatments are losing efficacy and future variants might evade them more easily. “Lack of congressional funding has made it difficult for us to replenish our medicine cabinet,” he said on Wednesday. “Because of a lack of congressional funding, the medicine cabinet has actually shrunk, and that does put vulnerable people at risk.” Republicans deserve scorn for refusing to fund pandemic preparedness. But Democrats deserve blame for letting it sink to one priority among many.To be fair, there’s been much else on the Democrats’ agenda. The central tension of Biden’s legislative strategy is that it paired ambitions of astonishing scale with congressional majorities that barely existed. The Senate, in a technical sense, saw no majority at all: It’s a 50-50 split, and Democrats carry votes only because Vice President Kamala Harris has the constitutional authority to break ties. It is remarkable how much Democrats have done, even so.There were two sides to Biden’s long-term agenda: construction and care. The construction side — decarbonizing the country, building and repairing infrastructure, and investing in semiconductor production and scientific research — largely passed. And much of what passed is thrilling.Trump was much mocked for infrastructure weeks that almost never resulted in new infrastructure. Biden and the Democrats have set the conditions for an infrastructure decade that could transform what America makes and how it’s made. And to my surprise, Biden has put invention at the center of his policymaking, and while we cannot yet know what fruits that will bear, it may prove his most lasting legacy.But the care side of Biden’s agenda — universal pre-K, the expanded child tax credit, subsidies for child and elder care, paid leave — collapsed almost entirely (the sole exception being an increase to the subsidies under Obamacare). Was that inevitable?This is murky territory, given the contradictory accounts that Biden and Senator Joe Manchin have given of their negotiations. Was there truly a $1.8 trillion Build Back Better package that Manchin would have voted for? The Biden team thought they had a deal. Manchin says they never did. And at the end of the day, no one forced Manchin to decide child care wasn’t worth doing and child poverty wasn’t worth reducing. That so many in the Senate care so much for bridges and so little for bodies is a scandal.Still, if you’d told me in 2020 that the next Democratic president would have a 50-50 Senate, with Manchin as the hinge vote, and a House margin of just a handful of members, I would not have predicted that the Democrats could pass more than $400 billion in climate investments or significant corporate tax increases or the most important infusion of cash and capital into scientific research in a generation.Three criticisms are worth airing. One is that Democrats could have gotten more of the care agenda passed by refusing to allow a separate vote on the infrastructure bill. The Biden administration believes now, and believed then, that it didn’t have the votes to tie the two together. That strategy ran an unacceptable risk of nothing passing. Given that Manchin proved perfectly willing to kill huge swaths of Biden’s agenda and let the administration twist in the wind for month after month, I suspect they’re right. But there’s no way to truly know.Another is that the American Rescue Plan was too large, and however well meaning the intentions behind it were, it was a handmaiden to inflation. I think the Biden administration erred on the right side of the ledger here. Unemployment is 3.5 percent. Workers got raises and stimulus checks. Poverty fell — sharply. The unemployed weren’t forced into indigency. All of this is easy to dismiss now, but none of it was guaranteed. And with inflation running at 10 percent in Germany and Britain and 7 percent in Canada, I’m skeptical of explanations that make one piece of legislation passed in one country too central to the story.I think the case is stronger that the Fed should’ve raised interest rates earlier and that Biden and the Democrats should’ve undershot economic support in the teeth of a pandemic that had frozen the global economy. Perhaps the rescue plan should’ve been built with more automatic stabilizers so aid rose as unemployment rose and vanished more quickly if it fell. But that’s true in every economic downturn, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, Congress refuses to learn that lesson.That leaves a criticism that I think is fairer: The Biden administration and congressional Democrats have had a the-more-the-merrier approach to every piece of legislation they’ve pushed. One reason the expanded child tax credit expired quickly was that the rescue plan was stuffed with so many policies, all of which needed funding. One reason Build Back Better was hard to defend was that so much was jammed into the package that the main thing anyone knew about it was its $3.5 trillion price tag. The push for a package of democracy reforms was similarly unfocused. It included virtually everything anyone who was worried about voting rights or campaign financing could think of and yet would have done little to block the kind of electoral subversion that Trump and his supporters attempted in 2020 and appear to be gathering forces to attempt again in 2024.Even when cornered, the Democrats kept trying to resist prioritization: Manchin said at the time that the White House lost his vote on Build Back Better by trying to keep the package intact and simply letting the policies expire earlier, in the hopes that they’d be extended en masse. He saw it as a gimmick that brought down the bill’s price tag without bringing down its long-term cost, and he abandoned the process.Whether that’s truly what motivated Manchin is debatable. What’s not debatable is that Democrats ran a very loose policy process. Compared with past administrations and Congresses I’ve covered, it felt as if Democratic leaders said yes to almost everything. Perhaps Democrats simply did not want to negotiate among themselves, knowing that Manchin or Senator Kyrsten Sinema or the Republicans would cull on their behalf. But the result was many policies that were poorly or opaquely constructed and packages that were hard to explain or defend.Biden always framed 2020 as a fight for America’s soul, not just its steering wheel. This is harder to assess. I’ve never believed he thought he could knit together a divided nation. He’s an optimist but not a fantasist. On a more literal level, he’s done what he promised — he has run a low-drama, low-scandal White House and comported himself with dignity and grace.But Biden has also run a relatively quiet administration. He gives comparatively few interviews, news conferences and speeches. He has filled the office Trump vacated but not the space Trump took up in the national conversation. I have argued that Biden’s laid-back approach is, in some ways, a strategy: By letting Trump and his successors fill the airwaves, Biden and the Democrats remind their voters what’s at stake. But this strategy runs deep risks. Biden’s low-drama approach to leadership leaves room for Trump’s high-drama antics.Politics has not moved on from Trump, in ways that it might have under a president who created new political cleavages and alignments. Biden has not been a strong enough communicator or presence to make Trump seem irrelevant. To make this more concrete: I wonder whether Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren could have won in 2020. But if one of them had, I suspect politics would have reorganized around their concerns and conflicts and Trump would seem a more passé figure. I worry that Biden thinks too much about America’s soul and not enough about its attention.What can be said, I think, is this: Biden and the Democrats got a lot done, despite very slim majorities. They rolled out vaccines and therapeutics nationwide but we remain far from finishing the job on pandemic preparedness. They have run the government in a dignified, decent way, but we remain far from turning the page on Trump.Next week, I’ll take a closer look at what Republicans are promising to do if they are given the power to do it. Because these elections are more than just a referendum. They are a choice.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
