Presidential Election of 2020

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      Biden’s First Task at HUD: Rebuilding Trump-Depleted Ranks

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      An exodus of top-level officials during the previous administration has left the Department of Housing and Urban Development short of expertise even as its role expands.WASHINGTON — During the 2020 campaign, President Biden pledged to transform the Department of Housing and Urban Development into a frontline weapon in the fight against racial and economic inequality.But when his transition team took over last fall, it found a department in crisis.The agency’s community planning and development division, the unit responsible for a wide array of federal disaster relief and homelessness programs, had been so weakened by an exodus of career officials that it was faltering under the responsibility of managing tens of billions of dollars in pandemic aid, according to members of the team.And it was not just the planning unit. In some divisions, as many as 25 to 30 percent of jobs were unfilled or occupied by interim employees. The losses were concentrated among the ranks of highest-skilled managers and policy experts, many of whom had been overruled, sidelined, exiled and eventually driven away under President Donald J. Trump and his appointees.Roughly 10 percent of the agency’s work force left during Mr. Trump’s first years in office, according to agency estimates. But that came on top of a decade-long decline resulting from attrition, poor recruitment and budget deals cut by the Obama administration with a Republican-led Congress at the time that prevented the agency from replacing departing employees.As a result, the agency’s total head count fell by 20 percent, to 6,837 from 8,576, from 2012 to 2019.Other cabinet departments, like the Education Department and Environmental Protection Agency, face similar problems. But the staffing shortfall at the housing department is a case study in the personnel issues generated in part by Mr. Trump’s conflicts with experienced career government employees who carry out programs and policies. And it is especially worrisome to Biden administration officials because it threatens to undermine their hope of transforming the agency into a central player in the president’s efforts to put more focus on social justice issues.“I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” Marcia L. Fudge, Mr. Biden’s new housing secretary, told a Senate committee last week during budget hearings. “Until we can start to build up our staff, and build up our capacity, we are at risk of not doing the things we should do.”Ms. Fudge, a former congresswoman from the Cleveland area, was there to urge lawmakers to adopt the agency’s 2021 budget request, which includes money to hire hundreds of managers and skilled technical support staff.The problem comes as the department’s responsibilities are growing along with the scale of the programs it manages.The administration’s relief package, passed in March, included $21.55 billion for emergency rental assistance, $5 billion in emergency housing vouchers, $5 billion for homelessness assistance and $850 million for tribal and rural housing, on top of a similar amount allocated under the Trump administration.Some of the funding is routed through the Treasury Department. Even so, it amounts to the greatest increase in housing and related programs in decades. Mr. Biden’s infrastructure bill, now the subject of intense negotiations on Capitol Hill, would provide $213 billion more.A Maricopa County constable preparing eviction orders last year in Phoenix. The Biden administration’s coronavirus relief package included funding for emergency rental assistance and homelessness assistance, among others.John Moore/Getty ImagesThe department has long sought to shake off the legacy of scandals. And under Mr. Trump’s housing secretary, Ben Carson, morale plunged, prompting a wave of resignations and retirements of top-tier civil servants who had managed to hold on during other crises, current and former officials said.One former career official, who departed in early 2020 for a job at a less embattled federal agency, estimated that two-thirds of the most experienced employees he interacted with day to day had left over the previous three years.“It’s more than just the number of valuable staff they have lost, it’s all that expertise that was driven out,” said Lisa Rice, the president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, a group in Washington that has pressured the department to bring more antidiscrimination cases.“It will set back the department for years,” she said. “HUD just doesn’t have the in-house legacy knowledge they used to have.”Mr. Biden’s transition team, made up of Obama-era veterans, deployed several of their most experienced members into interim leadership roles to plug the gap at the planning unit. Ms. Fudge, in turn, has installed experienced officials in other hard-hit divisions, although it has been slow going, as evidenced by the dozens of vacancies still visible on its online organizational chart.The losses are seriously affecting the response to the pandemic, Ms. Fudge told the Senate hearing. They are hindering distribution of emergency aid to low-income tenants and leaving many localities without guidance from experienced HUD employees on how to run new programs funded by the flood of coronavirus assistance cash, she said.In November, the department’s inspector general identified numerous “leadership gaps” at the headquarters, concluding that “employees often do not have the right skill sets, tools or capacity to perform the range of functions” needed to do their jobs.Many of the problems the watchdog identified were chronic, such as an ineffective human resources department. But about two dozen current and former department officials interviewed for this article blamed the chaos and disruption on Mr. Carson, who once admitted the job was more complicated than his previous gig — brain surgery.Mr. Carson, an unsuccessful 2016 Republican presidential candidate, took little interest in the day-to-day operations of the department, and was often informed of key hires by White House officials after the fact, according to people who worked with him. He often ceded control to political appointees, some embedded inside his department, others working from the White House, who pursued their own agendas.Under Ben Carson, the Trump administration’s housing secretary, morale plunged, prompting a wave of resignations and retirements of top-tier civil servants.Lexey Swall for The New York Times“People like to make Carson a scapegoat,” said Armstrong Williams, his spokesman and political adviser. “People moved on from HUD for all kinds of reasons. Blaming him is a cop-out.”Nonetheless, three of the agency’s divisions were especially crippled under his watch. One was the unit responsible for overseeing disbursement of federal block grants to states hit by hurricanes and other natural disasters. Another was the homeless assistance operation. The third was the fair housing division, whose job is to enforce federal laws prohibiting discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity and disability.This was the unit Mr. Trump singled out for attack in the 2020 campaign, stoking white grievance by claiming that an initiative to review discriminatory local zoning restrictions was a war on suburbia.The fair housing division, led by a Texas Republican operative named Anna Maria Farías, became an especially toxic workplace, according to three former staff members with knowledge of the situation.Shortly after taking over, Ms. Farías informed her staff that she intended to root out “Obama plants” and froze antidiscrimination investigations involving large residential construction companies, including Toll Brothers and Epcon Communities, and an inquiry into Facebook’s online advertising division, among others.As part of the overall strategy of reducing regulatory action, Ms. Farías sidelined two of the unit’s most experienced managers, Bryan Greene, who had served as interim chief of the division, and Tim Smyth, a young lawyer working on some of the department’s most complex cases involving housing discrimination.Ms. Farías bypassed Mr. Greene, and stopped inviting him to meetings of his own staff. She marginalized Mr. Smyth in similar fashion, according to officials who worked with both men. The pair eventually left after being reassigned to jobs unrelated to major civil rights cases.Ms. Farías did not respond to an email seeking comment.Mr. Carson’s political staff aides, housed on the agency’s 10th floor, were, at times, unaware of these machinations, and not even knowledgeable about basic departmental functions, according to people who worked with them at the time.After Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017, several Carson aides expressed surprise when told the housing department was responsible for disbursing billions in disaster assistance for tenants and homeowners whose dwellings were damaged by the storms, according to an aide who was present at a briefing session.For a while, their lack of knowledge worked to the benefit of career officials, who quietly slipped in Obama-era provisions to the aid rules — including a stipulation that rebuilding efforts conformed to green building standards.A flooded neighborhood in Beaumont, Texas, after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Several aides to Mr. Carson were unaware that the department was responsible for disbursing billions in disaster assistance.Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times But the White House quickly caught on, further fueling suspicions there about the presence of a so-called deep state hostile to Mr. Trump’s agenda. Mr. Trump, in turn, began seeking opportunities in attacking the agency to make political points, slow-walking $20 billion in relief for Puerto Rico, then stonewalling investigators, according to the department’s inspector general.Frustrated staff members departed for private-sector jobs, taking their expertise with them, most notably Stan Gimont, a 32-year agency veteran with deep knowledge of federal disaster relief programs who was the top career official in the planning division.A long-running ideological fight over how best to deal with the worsening homelessness crisis resulted in other departures, led by the division’s director, Anne Oliva, in 2017. Others fled after religious conservatives began to focus on cultural rather than housing issues, like an edict in 2020 allowing grantees to deny shelter to transgender people.Even units with no policymaking roles were affected by the staffing shortfall.Late last year, the agency’s inspector warned that a 28 percent vacancy rate at the information technology division could compromise the personal information of millions of aid recipients. In her testimony, Ms. Fudge blamed the staffing problems at the unit for slowing the response to a recent virus attack that infected 750 agency computers.Ms. Fudge has expressed frustration at the amount of time she has to spend on recruiting and retaining staff, aides said. And while she had success wooing several high-profile staff though discretionary political hiring, the overall pace of appointments has been sluggish, and career civil servants, like Mr. Greene, have proved difficult to reel back in.Lawmakers in both parties, while expressing confidence in Ms. Fudge, said they were worried the department’s staffing problems might leave it unable to manage all the programs it had been given control over, especially if Mr. Biden’s big infrastructure bill passes.“I’m concerned that HUD lacks the capacity to manage and oversee such an influx of funding, regardless of how well intentioned those proposals may be,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who helped shield the department from deep budget cuts proposed by Mr. Trump and backed by Mr. Carson, said at the recent hearing. More

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      Trump Pressed Rosen to Wield Justice Dept. to Back 2020 Election Claims

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      The former president began pressuring his incoming acting attorney general even before announcing that his predecessor was stepping down, emails show.WASHINGTON — An hour before President Donald J. Trump announced in December that William P. Barr would step down as attorney general, the president began pressuring Mr. Barr’s eventual replacement to have the Justice Department take up his false claims of election fraud.Mr. Trump sent an email via his assistant to Jeffrey A. Rosen, the incoming acting attorney general, that contained documents purporting to show evidence of election fraud in northern Michigan — the same claims that a federal judge had thrown out a week earlier in a lawsuit filed by one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers.Another email from Mr. Trump to Mr. Rosen followed two weeks later, again via the president’s assistant, that included a draft of a brief that Mr. Trump wanted the Justice Department to file to the Supreme Court. It argued, among other things, that state officials had used the pandemic to weaken election security and pave the way for widespread election fraud.The draft echoed claims in a lawsuit in Texas by the Trump-allied state attorney general that the justices had thrown out, and a lawyer who had helped on that effort later tried with increasing urgency to track down Mr. Rosen at the Justice Department, saying he had been dispatched by Mr. Trump to speak with him.The emails, turned over by the Justice Department to investigators on the House Oversight Committee and obtained by The New York Times, show how Mr. Trump pressured Mr. Rosen to put the power of the Justice Department behind lawsuits that had already failed to try to prove his false claims that extensive voter fraud had affected the election results.They are also the latest example of Mr. Trump’s frenzied drive to subvert the election results in the final weeks of his presidency, including ratcheting up pressure on the Justice Department. And they show that Mr. Trump flouted an established anticorruption norm that the Justice Department acts independently of the White House on criminal investigations or law enforcement actions, a gap that steadily eroded during Mr. Trump’s term.The documents dovetail with emails around the same time from Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, asking Mr. Rosen to examine unfounded conspiracy theories about the election, including one that claimed people associated with an Italian defense contractor were able to use satellite technology to tamper with U.S. voting equipment from Europe.Mr. Trump in June 2020. The president emailed Mr. Rosen via his assistant, sending documents that purported to show election fraud.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMuch of the correspondence also occurred during a tense week within the Justice Department, when Mr. Rosen and his top deputies realized that one of their peers had plotted with Mr. Trump to first oust Mr. Rosen and then to try to use federal law enforcement to force Georgia to overturn its election results. Mr. Trump nearly replaced Mr. Rosen with that colleague, Jeffrey Clark, then the acting head of the civil division.Mr. Rosen made clear to his top deputy in one message that he would have nothing to do with the Italy conspiracy theory, arrange a meeting between the F.B.I. and one of the proponents of the conspiracy, Brad Johnson, or speak about it with Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.“I learned that Johnson is working with Rudy Giuliani, who regarded my comments as an ‘insult,’” Mr. Rosen wrote in the email. “Asked if I would reconsider, I flatly refused, said I would not be giving any special treatment to Giuliani or any of his ‘witnesses’, and reaffirmed yet again that I will not talk to Giuliani about any of this.”Mr. Rosen declined to comment. A spokesman for Mr. Trump could not immediately be reached for comment.The documents “show that President Trump tried to corrupt our nation’s chief law enforcement agency in a brazen attempt to overturn an election that he lost,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a New York Democrat who is the chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee.Ms. Maloney, whose committee is looking into the events leading up the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by a pro-Trump crowd protesting the election results, including Mr. Trump’s pressure on the Justice Department, said she has asked former Trump administration officials to sit for interviews, including Mr. Meadows, Mr. Clark and others. The House Oversight Committee requested the documents in May as part of the inquiry, and the Justice Department complied.The draft brief that Mr. Trump wanted the Justice Department to file before the Supreme Court mirrored a lawsuit that Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas had filed to the court, alleging that a handful of battleground states had used the pandemic to make unconstitutional changes to their election laws that affected the election outcome. The states argued in response that Texas lacked standing to file the suit, and the Supreme Court rejected the case.The version of the lawsuit that Mr. Trump wanted the Justice Department to file made similar claims, saying that officials in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania had used the pandemic to unconstitutionally revise or violate their own election laws and weaken election security.To try to prove its case, the lawsuit relied on descriptions of an election monitoring video that appeared similar to one that Republican officials in Georgia rejected as doctored, as well as the debunked notion, promoted by Mr. Trump, that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked.Eager to speak with Mr. Rosen about the draft Supreme Court lawsuit, a lawyer named Kurt Olsen, who had advised on Mr. Paxton’s effort, tried unsuccessfully to reach him multiple times, according to emails sent between 11 a.m. and 10 p.m. on Dec. 29 and obtained by the House Oversight Committee investigators.Mr. Olsen first reached out to Jeffrey B. Wall, the acting solicitor general who would have argued the brief before the Supreme Court. “Last night the President directed me to meet with AG Rosen today to discuss a similar action to be brought by the United States,” Mr. Olsen wrote. “I have not been able to reach him despite multiple calls/texts. This is an urgent matter.”Mr. Rosen’s chief of staff, John S. Moran, told Mr. Olsen that the acting attorney general was busy with other business at the White House. About an hour later, Mr. Olsen drove from Maryland to Washington “in the hopes of meeting” with Mr. Rosen at the Justice Department, the emails show.When Mr. Olsen could not get through to Mr. Rosen or Mr. Moran, he called an employee in the department’s antitrust division, according to the documents.The emails do not make clear whether Mr. Olsen met with Mr. Rosen, but a person who discussed the matter with Mr. Rosen said that a meeting never occurred. Rather, Mr. Olsen eventually cold-called the official’s private cellphone and was politely rebuffed, the person said, requesting anonymity because the matter is part of an ongoing investigation.Mr. Olsen provided more fodder for his case in an email sent later that night to Mr. Moran, saying that it was at Mr. Rosen’s request.On the day that Mr. Trump announced that Mr. Rosen would be the acting attorney general, he wanted him to look at materials about potential fraud in northern Michigan, according to an email obtained by the committee. That fraud claim had been the subject of a lawsuit filed by the former Trump adviser Sidney Powell, who argued that Dominion voting machines had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.The state’s Republican clerk had said that human error was to blame for mistakes there that initially gave more votes to Mr. Biden, and a hand recount at the county level conducted in December confirmed that the machines had worked properly.A federal judge threw out Ms. Powell’s lawsuit on Jan. 7, saying that it was based on “nothing but speculation and conjecture.” She has been accused of defamation in a lawsuit by Dominion in part because of the Michigan claims.Mr. Rosen is in the process of negotiating to give a single interview with investigators from the House Oversight Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee and others who are looking into the final days of the Trump administration; and he has asked the Justice Department’s current leaders to sort what he can and cannot say about the core facts that involve meetings at the Oval Office with Mr. Trump, which could be privileged.Mr. Rosen met with department officials and spoke with Mr. Trump’s representatives within the last week to discuss these matters, according to a person briefed on the meetings. If the parties cannot come to an agreement, the issue could be thrown into court, where it most likely would languish for months, if not years. More

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      What Happens if the Military Starts Doubting Our Elections?

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      The first presidential election I witnessed as a member of the military was George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000. I was in college, as a naval R.O.T.C. midshipman, and on Election Day I remember asking a Marine lieutenant colonel who was a visiting fellow at my university whether he’d made it to the polls. In much the same way one might say “I don’t smoke” when offered a cigarette, he said, “Oh, I don’t vote.” His answer confused me at the time. He was a third-generation military officer, someone imbued with a strong sense of duty. He then explained that as a military officer he felt it was his obligation to remain apolitical. In his estimation, this included not casting a vote on who his commander in chief might be.Although I don’t agree that one’s commitment to remain apolitical while in uniform extends to not voting, I would over the years come across others who abstained from voting on similar grounds. That interaction served as an early lesson on the lengths some in the military would go to steer clear of politics. It also illustrated that those in uniform have by definition a different relationship to the president than civilians do. As that lieutenant colonel saw it in 2000, he wouldn’t be voting for his president but rather for his commander in chief, and he didn’t feel it was appropriate to vote for anyone in his chain of command.As it turned out, the result of that election was contested. Gore challenged the result after Florida was called for Bush, taking his case all the way to the Supreme Court between the election and the inauguration, by which point he’d conceded.There are many ways to contest an election, some of which are far more reckless and unseemly than others, but our last two presidential elections certainly qualify. In 2016, Democrats contested Donald Trump’s legitimacy based on collusion between his campaign and Russia. In 2020, Republicans significantly escalated the level of contestation around the election with widespread and unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, which ultimately erupted in riots on Jan. 6.Little progress has been made to understand this cycle of contested elections we are trapped in, with the most recent attempt — the Jan. 6 commission — failing to pass in Congress. Today, dysfunction runs deep in our politics. While the images from Jan. 6 remain indelible, the images of entire cities in red and blue states boarded up in the days before last Nov. 3 should also concern us. If contested elections become the norm, then mass protests around elections become the norm; and if mass protests become the norm, then police and military responses to those protests will surely follow. This is a new normal we can ill afford.This takes us back to that lieutenant colonel I knew in college and his conviction to stay out of politics. Increasingly, this view has seemed to fall out of favor, particularly among retired officers. In 2016, we saw large speaking roles doled out to prominent retired military leaders at both parties’ national conventions. This trend has accelerated in recent years, and in the 2020 elections we saw some retired flag officers (including the former heads of several high commands) writing and speaking out against Trump in prominent media outlets, and others organizing against Joe Biden’s agenda in groups like Flag Officers for America.The United States military is one of the most trusted institutions in our society, and so support from its leaders has become an increasingly valuable political commodity. That trust exists partly because it is one of the few institutions that resists overt political bias. If this trend of increased military politicization seeps into the active-duty ranks, it could lead to dangerous outcomes, particularly around a contested presidential election.Many commentators have already pointed out that it’s likely that in 2024 (or even 2022) the losing party will cry foul, and it is also likely that their supporters will fill the streets, with law enforcement, or even military, called in to manage those protests. It is not hard to imagine, then, with half of the country claiming an elected leader is illegitimate, that certain military members who hold their own biases might begin to second guess their orders.This might sound alarmist, but as long as political leaders continue to question the legitimacy of our president, some in our military might do the same.After I served in Afghanistan and Iraq, I covered the war in Syria as a journalist. It’s often forgotten that the refusal of Sunnis in the military to follow the orders of Bashar al-Assad was a key factor in pushing that political crisis into a civil war. That’s because when the military splinters, the defecting elements take their tanks, their guns and their jets with them. Obviously, we are very far from that sort of instability. But cautious speculation has its uses; it can be critical in heading off conflict. My experience in the military and my understanding of past conflicts have convinced me that the forces our politicians are playing with when they contest elections are dangerous ones.Last week, Senator Joe Manchin expressed his hopes of reviving the Jan. 6 commission with a second vote in Congress. Understandably, lawmakers crave answers and accountability, and perhaps he’ll find success in that effort. But the solution to our troubles isn’t in looking backward, it’s in looking forward: by passing bipartisan voting rights legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which could create at least some consensus on the terms under which the next election takes place. Consensus on anything in Washington is hard to come by these days, but there is a common interest here: Both parties will certainly agree that if they win the next election, they won’t want the other side to contest 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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      In Congress, Republicans Shrug at Warnings of Democracy in Peril

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      As G.O.P. legislatures move to curtail voting rules, congressional Democrats say authoritarianism looms, but Republicans dismiss the concerns as politics as usual.WASHINGTON — Senator Christopher S. Murphy concedes that political rhetoric in the nation’s capital can sometimes stray into hysteria, but when it comes to the precarious state of American democracy, he insisted he was not exaggerating the nation’s tilt toward authoritarianism.“Democrats are always at risk of being hyperbolic,” said Mr. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “I don’t think there’s a risk when it comes to the current state of democratic norms.”After the norm-shattering presidency of Donald J. Trump, the violence-inducing bombast over a stolen election, the pressuring of state vote counters, the Capitol riot and the flood of voter curtailment laws rapidly being enacted in Republican-run states, Washington has found itself in an anguished state.Almost daily, Democrats warn that Republicans are pursuing racist, Jim Crow-inspired voter suppression efforts to disenfranchise tens of millions of citizens, mainly people of color, in a cynical effort to grab power. Metal detectors sit outside the House chamber to prevent lawmakers — particularly Republicans who have boasted of their intention to carry guns everywhere — from bringing weaponry to the floor. Democrats regard their Republican colleagues with suspicion, believing that some of them collaborated with the rioters on Jan. 6.Republican lawmakers have systematically downplayed or dismissed the dangers, with some breezing over the attack on the Capitol as a largely peaceful protest, and many saying the state voting law changes are to restore “integrity” to the process, even as they give credence to Mr. Trump’s false claims of rampant fraud in the 2020 election.They shrug off Democrats’ warnings of grave danger as the overheated language of politics as usual.“I haven’t understood for four or five years why we are so quick to spin into a place where part of the country is sure that we no longer have the strength to move forward, as we always have in the past,” said Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of Republican leadership, noting that the passions of Republican voters today match those of Democratic voters after Mr. Trump’s triumph. “Four years ago, there were people in the so-called resistance showing up in all of my offices every week, some of whom were chaining themselves to the door.”For Democrats, the evidence of looming catastrophe mounts daily. Fourteen states, including politically competitive ones like Florida and Georgia, have enacted 22 laws to curtail early and mail-in ballots, limit polling places and empower partisans to police polling, then oversee the vote tally. Others are likely to follow, including Texas, with its huge share of House seats and electoral votes.Because Republicans control the legislatures of many states where the 2020 census will force redistricting, the party is already in a strong position to erase the Democrats’ razor-thin majority in the House. Even moderate voting-law changes could bolster Republicans’ chances for the net gain of one vote they need to take back the Senate.And in the nightmare outcome promulgated by some academics, Republicans have put themselves in a position to dictate the outcome of the 2024 presidential election if the voting is close in swing states.“Statutory changes in large key electoral battleground states are dangerously politicizing the process of electoral administration, with Republican-controlled legislatures giving themselves the power to override electoral outcomes on unproven allegations,” 188 scholars said in a statement expressing concern about the erosion of democracy.Demonstrators protesting new voting legislation in Atlanta this month. Fourteen states, including Georgia, have enacted laws to restrict practices like early voting. Brynn Anderson/Associated PressSenator Angus King, an independent from Maine who lectured on American politics at Bowdoin College before going to the Senate, put the moment in historical context. He called American democracy “a 240-year experiment that runs against the tide of human history,” and that tide usually leads from and back to authoritarianism.He said he feared the empowerment of state legislatures to decide election results more than the troubling curtailments of the franchise.“This is an incredibly dangerous moment, and I don’t think it’s being sufficiently realized as such,” he said.Republicans contend that much of this is overblown, though some concede the charges sting. Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, said Democrats were playing a hateful race card to promote voting-rights legislation that is so extreme it would cement Democratic control of Congress for decades.“I hope that damage isn’t being done,” he added, “but it is always very dangerous to falsely play the race card and let’s face it, that’s what’s being done here.”Mr. Toomey, who voted to convict Mr. Trump at his second impeachment trial, said he understood why, in the middle of a deadly pandemic, states sharply liberalized voting rules in 2020, extending mail-in voting, allowing mailed ballots to be counted days after Election Day and setting up ballot drop boxes, curbside polls and weeks of early voting.But he added that Democrats should understand why state election officials wanted to course correct now that the coronavirus was ebbing.“Every state needs to strike a balance between two competing values: making it as easy as possible to cast legitimate votes, but also the other, which is equally important: having everybody confident about the authenticity of the votes,” Mr. Toomey said.Mr. Trump’s lies about a stolen election, he added, “were more likely to resonate because you had this system that went so far the other way.”Some other Republicans embrace the notion that they are trying to use their prerogatives as a minority party to safeguard their own power. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said the endeavor was the essence of America’s system of representative democracy, distinguishing it from direct democracy, where the majority rules and is free to trample the rights of the minority unimpeded.“The idea of democracy and majority rule really is what goes against our history and what the country stands for,” Mr. Paul said. “The Jim Crow laws came out of democracy. That’s what you get when a majority ignores the rights of others.”Democrats and their allies push back hard on those arguments. Mr. King said the only reason voters lacked confidence in the voting system was that Republicans — especially Mr. Trump — told them for months that it was rigged, despite all evidence to the contrary, and now continued to insist that there were abuses in the process that must be fixed.“That’s like pleading for mercy as an orphan after you killed both your parents,” he said.Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, said he feared the empowerment of state legislatures to decide election results more than the troubling curtailments of the franchise.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesSenator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, said in no way could some of the new state voting laws be seen as a necessary course correction. “Not being able to serve somebody water who’s waiting in line? I mean, come on,” he said. “There are elements that are in most of these proposals where you look at it and you say, ‘That violates the common-sense test.’”Missteps by Democrats have fortified Republicans’ attempts to downplay the dangers. Some of them, including President Biden, have mischaracterized Georgia’s voting law, handing Republicans ammunition to say that Democrats were willfully distorting what was happening at the state level.The state’s 98-page voting law, passed after the narrow victories for Mr. Biden and two Democratic candidates for Senate, would make absentee voting harder and create restrictions and complications for millions of voters, many of them people of color.But Mr. Biden falsely claimed that the law — which he labeled “un-American” and “sick” — had slapped new restrictions on early voting to bar people from voting after 5 p.m. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said the Georgia law had ended early voting on Sunday. It didn’t.And the sweep — critics say overreach — of the Democrats’ answer to Republican voter laws, the For the People Act, has undermined Democratic claims that the fate of the republic relies on its passage. Even some Democrats are uncomfortable with the act’s breadth, including an advancement of statehood for the District of Columbia with its assurance of two more senators, almost certainly Democratic; its public financing of elections; its nullification of most voter identification laws; and its mandatory prescriptions for early and mail-in voting.“They want to put a thumb on the scale of future elections,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said on Wednesday. “They want to take power away from the voters and the states, and give themselves every partisan advantage that they can.”Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, who could conceivably be a partner in Democratic efforts to expand voting rights, called the legislation a “fundamentally unserious” bill.Republican leaders have sought to take the current argument from the lofty heights of history to the nitty-gritty of legislation. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, pointed to the success of bipartisan efforts such as passage of a bill to combat hate crimes against Asian Americans, approval of a broad China competition measure and current talks to forge compromises on infrastructure and criminal justice as proof that Democratic catastrophizing over the state of American governance was overblown.But Democrats are not assuaged.“Not to diminish the importance of the work we’ve done here, but democracy itself is what we’re talking about,” said Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii. “And to point at other bills that don’t have to do with the fair administration of elections is just an attempt to distract while all these state legislatures move systematically toward disenfranchising voters who have historically leaned Democrat.”Mr. King said he had had serious conversations with Republican colleagues about the precarious state of American democracy. Authoritarian leaders like Vladimir V. Putin, Viktor Orban and Adolf Hitler have come to power by election, and stayed in power by warping or obliterating democratic norms.But, he acknowledged, he has yet to get serious engagement, largely because his colleagues fear the wrath of Mr. Trump and his supporters.“I get the feeling they hope this whole thing will go away,” he said. “They make arguments, but you have the feeling their hearts aren’t in it.” More

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      How Joe Manchin Can Fix the Filibuster

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      It’s easy to sympathize with the liberal desire to bury the Senate filibuster forever. The 60-vote threshold for Senate legislation is a choke point in a political system defined by gridlock, sclerosis and futility. It provides an excuse for policy abdication, encouraging the legislative branch to cede authority to the presidency and the courts, and the Republican Party to decline to have a policy agenda at all. Its history is checkered, its pervasive use is a novelty of polarization, and its eventual disappearance seems inevitable — so why not adapt now? More

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      Voter Suppression Must Be the Central Issue

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      The right to vote is everything in a democracy.Without influence over power, you are completely vulnerable to that power. There is no way to access prosperity or ensure personal protection when you live in a society in which people who share your interests are inhibited in their political participation. More

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      Biden Aims to Bolster U.S. Alliances in Europe, but Challenges Loom

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      The good will President Biden brings on his first trip abroad papers over lingering doubts about U.S. reliability and the cost that Europe will be expected to pay.WASHINGTON — It should not be that hard to be an American leader visiting Europe for the first time after President Donald J. Trump.But President Biden will face his own challenges when he departs on Wednesday, especially as the United States confronts a disruptive Russia and a rising China while trying to reassemble and rally the shaken Western alliance as it emerges from the coronavirus pandemic.Mr. Biden, who will arrive for a series of summit meetings buoyed by a successful vaccination program and a rebounding economy, will spend the next week making the case that America is back and ready to lead the West anew in what he calls an existential collision between democracies and autocracies.On the agenda are meetings in Britain with leaders of the Group of 7 nations, followed by visits to NATO and the European Union. On Mr. Biden’s final day, in Geneva, he will hold his first meeting as president with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.Mr. Biden’s overarching task is to deliver the diplomatic serenity that eluded such gatherings during four years in which Mr. Trump scorched longstanding relationships with close allies, threatened to pull out of NATO and embraced Mr. Putin and other autocrats, admiring their strength.But the good will Mr. Biden brings simply by not being Mr. Trump papers over lingering doubts about his durability, American reliability and the cost that Europe will be expected to pay. At 78, is Mr. Biden the last gasp of an old-style, internationalist foreign policy? Will Europe bear the cost of what increasingly looks like a new Cold War with Russia? Is it being asked to sign up for a China containment policy? And will Mr. Biden deliver on climate?Those questions will loom as he deals with disagreements over trade, new restrictions on investing in and buying from China and his ever-evolving stance on a natural gas pipeline that will route directly from Russia to Europe, bypassing Ukraine.Throughout, Mr. Biden will face European leaders who are wary of the United States in a way they have not been since 1945 and are wondering where it is headed.“They have seen the state of the Republican Party,” said Barry Pavel, the director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at The Atlantic Council. “They’ve seen Jan. 6. They know you could have another president in 2024.”White House officials say that stable American diplomacy is back for good, but of course they cannot offer any guarantees after January 2025. European officials are following the raging political arguments in the United States, and they note that Mr. Trump’s grip on his party is hardly weakening.Days before Mr. Biden’s departure, Republicans in Congress rejected the creation of a bipartisan commission to examine the Capitol riot. Republican lawmakers embrace Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Democrats are faltering in their efforts to pass sweeping legislation to counter Republican attacks on voting rights at the state level.Through it all, Mr. Trump keeps hinting at a political comeback in four years. “There’s an anxiety about American politics,” said Ian Lesser, a vice president at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “Simply, what is going to happen in the midterm elections? Whether Trumpism will prove more durable than Mr. Trump. What is coming next in American politics?”If the future of the United States is the long-term concern, how to manage a disruptive Russia is the immediate agenda. No part of the trip will be more charged than a daylong meeting with Mr. Putin.Mr. Biden called for the meeting — the first since Mr. Trump embraced Mr. Putin’s denials of election interference at a summit in Helsinki, Finland, three years ago — despite warnings from human rights activists that doing so would strengthen and embolden the Russian leader. Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, has noted that American presidents met with their Soviet counterparts throughout the Cold War, and their Russian successors afterward. But on Monday, he said Mr. Biden would warn Mr. Putin directly that without a change in behavior, “there will be responses.”Yet veterans of the struggle between Washington and Moscow say disruption is Mr. Putin’s true superpower.President Donald J. Trump embraced the denials of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018.Doug Mills/The New York Times“Putin doesn’t necessarily want a more stable or predictable relationship,” said Alexander Vershbow, who was an ambassador to Russia under President George W. Bush. “The best case one can hope for is that the two leaders will argue about a lot of things but continue the dialogue.”White House officials say the president has no intention of trying to reset the relationship with Russia. Having called Mr. Putin a “killer” this year, Mr. Biden is cleareyed about his adversary, they said: He regards Mr. Putin more as a hardened mafia boss, ordering hits with the country’s supply of nerve agents, than a national leader.But Mr. Biden is determined to put guardrails on the relationship, seeing out some measure of cooperation, starting with the future of their nuclear arsenals.But there is a dawning awareness in Europe that while Mr. Putin cherishes his growing arsenal, Russia’s nuclear ability is a strategic remnant of an era of superpower conflict. In what Mr. Putin recently called a new Cold War with the United States, the weapons of choice are cyberweapons, ransomware wielded by gangs operating from Russian territory and the ability to shake neighbors like Ukraine by massing troops on the border.Mr. Biden will embrace NATO and Article V of its charter, the section that commits every member of the alliance to consider an armed attack on one as an armed attack on all. But it is less clear what constitutes an armed attack in the modern age: a cyberstrike like the SolarWinds hacking that infiltrated corporate and government networks? The movement of intermediate-range missiles and Russian troops to the border of Ukraine, which is not a NATO member?Mr. Biden’s associates say the key is for him to make clear that he has seen Mr. Putin’s bravado before and that it does not faze him.“Joe Biden is not Donald Trump,” said Thomas E. Donilon, who was a national security adviser to President Barack Obama and whose wife and brother are key aides to Mr. Biden. “You’re not going to have this inexplicable reluctance of a U.S. president to criticize a Russian president who is leading a country that is actively hostile to the United States in so many areas. You won’t have that.”When Mr. Biden defines the current struggle as “a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies,” though, he appears to be worrying more about China’s appeal as a trading partner and source of technology than Russia’s disruptions. And while Europeans largely do not see China as the kind of rising technological, ideological and military threat that Washington does, it is an argument Mr. Biden is beginning to win.The British are deploying the largest fleet of its Navy warships to the Pacific since the Falklands War, nearly 40 years ago. The idea is to re-establish at least a visiting presence in a region that once was part of its empire, with stops in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand. But at the same time, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has signed on to the effort by Washington — begun by Mr. Trump and accelerated by Mr. Biden — to assure that Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company, does not win new contracts to install 5G cellular networks in Britain.Some in Europe are following suit, but Mr. Biden’s aides said they felt blindsided last year when the European Union announced an investment agreement with China days before Mr. Biden’s inauguration. It was a reflection of fears that if the continent got sucked into the U.S.-China rivalry, European companies would bear the brunt, starting with the luxury auto industry in Germany.The future of the agreement is unclear, but Mr. Biden is going the other way: Last week he signed an executive order banning Americans from investing in Chinese companies that are linked to the country’s military or ones that sell surveillance technology used to repress dissent or religious minorities, both inside and outside China. But to be effective, the allies would have to join; so far, few have expressed enthusiasm for the effort.Mr. Biden may be able to win over skeptics with his embrace of the goal of combating climate change, even though he will run into questions about whether he is doing enough.Four years ago, at Mr. Trump’s first G7 meeting, six world leaders reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris climate accord while the United States declared it was “not in a position to join the consensus.”Protesters outside the White House in 2017 as Mr. Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.Stephen Crowley/The New York TimesMr. Biden is reversing that stance, pledging to cut U.S. emissions 50 percent to 52 percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade and writing in an op-ed in The Washington Post before the summit that with the United States back at the table, countries “have an opportunity to deliver ambitious progress.”But world leaders said they remained wary of the United States’ willingness to enact serious legislation to tackle its emissions and deliver on financial promises to poorer countries.“They have shown the right approach, not necessarily to the level of magnitude that they could,” said Graça Machel, the former education and culture minister of Mozambique.Key to reaching ambitious climate goals is China, which emits more than the United States, Europe and Japan combined. Peter Betts, the former lead climate negotiator for Britain and the European Union, said the test for Mr. Biden was whether he could lead the G7 countries in a successful pressure campaign.China, he said, “does care what the developing world thinks.”Lisa Friedman More

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      in Elections

      How Far Are Republicans Willing to Go? They’re Already Gone.

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      Determined to enforce white political dominance in pivotal states like Georgia, Arizona, Texas and North Carolina, Republicans are enacting or trying to enact laws restricting the right to vote, empowering legislatures to reject election outcomes and adopting election rules and procedures designed to block the emergence of multiracial political majorities.Republicans “see the wave of demography coming and they are just trying to hold up a wall and keep it from smashing them in,” William Frey, a senior fellow at Brookings, told CNN’s Ron Brownstein. “It’s the last bastion of their dominance, and they are doing everything they can.”The actions of Republican state legislators to curtail absentee voting, limit days for early voting and seize control of local election boards have prompted 188 scholars to sign a “Statement of Concern: The Threats to American Democracy and the Need for National Voting and Election Administration Standards,” in which they assert:We have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures.Among statutes Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed or are in the process of approving are “laws politicizing the administration and certification of elections” thatcould enable some state legislatures or partisan election officials to do what they failed to do in 2020: reverse the outcome of a free and fair election. Further, these laws could entrench extended minority rule, violating the basic and longstanding democratic principle that parties that get the most votes should win elections.The precipitating event driving the current surge of regressive voting legislation in Republican-controlled states is Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the widespread acceptance on the right of Trump’s subsequent claim that the presidency was stolen from him. The belief among Republicans that Trump is essential to their drive to slow or halt the growing power of nonwhite voters aligned with the Democratic Party has powered the broad acquiescence to that lie both by people who know better and by people who don’t.Virginia Gray, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, argued in an email that for Republicans, “the strongest factors are racial animosity, fear of becoming a white minority and the growth of white identity.” She noted that Tucker Carlson of Fox News articulated Republican anxiety during his show on April 8:In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.Trump, Carlson and their allies in the Republican Party, Gray continued,see politics as a zero-sum game: as the U.S. becomes a majority-minority nation, white voters will constitute a smaller portion of the voting electorate. So in order to win, the party of whites must use every means at its disposal to restrict the voting electorate to “their people.” Because a multiracial democracy is so threatening, Trump supporters will only fight harder in the next election.Aziz Huq and Tom Ginsburg, law professors at the University of Chicago, make the case in their 2018 paper, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” that in the United States and other advanced democracies, the erosion of democracy will be gradual and stealthy, not an abrupt shift to authoritarianism.“Is the United States at risk of democratic backsliding? And would the Constitution prevent such decay?” Huq and Ginsburg ask:There are two modal paths of democratic decay. We call these authoritarian reversion and constitutional retrogression. A reversion is a rapid and near-complete collapse of democratic institutions. Retrogression is a more subtle, incremental erosion to three institutional predicates of democracy occurring simultaneously: competitive elections; rights of political speech and association; and the administrative and adjudicative rule of law. We show that over the past quarter-century, the risk of reversion in democracies around the world has declined, whereas the risk of retrogression has spiked. The United States is neither exceptional nor immune from these changes.In an email, Ginsburg wrote that there are two forces that lead to the erosion of democracy: “charismatic populism and partisan degradation, in which a party just gives up on the idea of majority rule and seeks to end democratic competition. Obviously the U.S. has faced both forces at the same time in Trumpism.”From a different vantage point, Sheri Berman, a political scientist at Barnard, argues that there is a crucial distinction to be drawn in examining the consequences of Republican tampering with election administration, with one more dangerous than the other. In an email, Berman writes:The downward spiral refers to attempts by Republicans to do two related things. First, effectively making voting more difficult by, for example, restricting voting by mail, shrinking voting times and places, adding ID requirements and so on. The second is injecting partisanship into the electoral oversight process. As potentially harmful as the first is, the latter is even more worrying.In other circumstances, Berman argues, one could imagine “having a good faith debate about the conditions under which mail-in ballots are distributed and counted, whether ID should be required to vote and if so of what type, etc.”But in the current contest, “these concerns are not motivated by a general desire to improve the quality of our elections, but rather by false, partisan accusations about the illegitimacy of Biden’s victory and so good faith discussions of reform are impossible.”The Republican initiatives to inject partisanship into the oversight process, in her view,are even more straightforwardly dangerous: elections are democracy’s backbone, anything that subjects them to partisan manipulation will fatally injure its functioning and legitimacy. The officials who oversee elections are democracy’s referees — once they lose their objectivity, the entire game loses its legitimacy. Republican attempts, accordingly, to diminish the objectivity of the electoral oversight process by, for example, giving more power to legislative branches and elected politicians over it, are direct attempts to rig the game so that, should Democrats win another election that Republicans consider contested, the outcome can be manipulated. There is simply no way democracy can function if those designated to oversee its most basic institution are motivated by partisan rather than legal and constitutional concerns.Among those I consulted for this column, there was wide agreement that democratic backsliding is a process difficult for the average voter to detect — and that one of the crucial factors enabling the current procedural undermining of democracy in the states is that voters have little interest in or understanding of election rules and regulations.“Democratic erosion is subtle and slow, often nearly imperceptible until it’s too late,” Robert Blair, a political scientist at Brown, wrote in an email:The U.S. will not become an autocracy. Political parties will not be banned; elections will not be canceled or overturned willy nilly. But the U.S. may increasingly become a “democracy with asterisks,” one in which the playing field is tilted heavily in favor of whichever party writes the rules of the game.Blair is decidedly pessimistic about the likelihood that American voters will succeed in opposing the degradation of the system:I have very little faith in the American public as a bulwark against these threats. In general Americans do not prioritize democratic principles in our vote choices, and we are alarmingly willing to tolerate antidemocratic ideas and actions by co-partisans. Polarization seems to make this worse. If American democracy is at risk, citizens will not save it.Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, stressed this point in an email:“We all grow up knowing that the person who wins more votes should win the election,” Hopkins continued,but none of us grow up knowing anything about how to handle provisional ballots or which allegations of voter fraud are credible. Relatively few people are equipped to directly evaluate claims that an election was fraudulent, so voters necessarily rely on politicians, media commentators and other elites to tell them if something ran afoul. In fact, it’s precisely the public’s general commitment to democracy that can be used against democracy by political leaders willing to lie about elections.The low visibility and lack of public understanding of arcane shifts in election law — for example, the shift of responsibility for determining winners and losers from election officials to state legislatures — greatly empowers partisan elites.Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at the New America think tank and one of the organizers of New America’s “Statement of Concern,” wrote by email:A longstanding finding in political science is that it is elites who preserve democracy, and elites who destroy democracy. Overwhelming majorities of voters support democracy in the abstract, but if they are told by elites that “the other party is trying to destroy democracy and these emergency measures are needed to preserve democracy by keeping the other side out of power,” most partisan voters are going to follow their leaders and support anti-democratic changes. This is especially the case in a highly-polarized binary political system in which the thought of the opposing party taking power seems especially odious and even existential.Like many of the co-signers of the “Statement of Concern,” Drutman has no expectation that the Supreme Court would step in to block states from tilting the partisan balance by tinkering with election rules and procedures:The conservative Supreme Court has given states wide latitude to change electoral laws. I don’t see how a 6-3 conservative court does much to interfere with the ability of states to choose their own electoral arrangements. The conservative majority on the Court has clearly decided it is not the role of the Supreme Court to place reasonable boundaries on the ability of partisan legislatures to stack elections in their favor.Laura Gamboa, a political scientist at the University of Utah, is less harsh in her assessment of the citizenry, but she too does not place much hope in the ability of the American electorate to protect democratic institutions from assault:I don’t think Americans (or most other people) have a normative preference for dictatorship. Overall, people prefer democracy over authoritarianism. Having said that, polarization and misinformation can lead people to support power grabs. Research has shown that when a society is severely polarized and sees the out-group (in this case out-party) as “enemies” (not opponents), they are willing to support anti-democratic moves in order to prevent them from attaining power. More so, when they are misled to believe that these rules are put in place to protect elections from fraud.More important, Gamboa argued that the corrosion of political norms that protect democratic governancecan definitively evolve into a broader rejection of the rule of law. Institutions do not survive by themselves, they need people to stand by them. This type of manipulation of electoral laws undermines the legitimacy of elections. Rules and norms that were once sacred become part of the political game: things to be changed if and when it serves the political purpose of those in power. Once that happens, these norms lose their value. They become unreliable and thus unable to serve as channels to adjudicate political differences, in this case, to determine who attains and who does not attain power.The fact that public attention has been focused on Trump’s claim that the election was stolen, the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and Republican stonewalling against the creation of a commission to investigate the attack on Congress, helps mask the fact that the crucial action is taking place across the country in state capitols, with only intermittent national coverage, especially on network television.These Republican-controlled state governments have become, in the words of Jacob Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, “Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding,” the title of his April paper.Grumbach developed 61 indicators of the level of adherence to democratic procedures and practices — what he calls a “State Democracy Index” — and tracked those measures in the states over the period from 2000 to 2018. The indicators include registration and absentee voting requirements, restrictions on voter registration drives and gerrymandering practices.Grumbach’s conclusion: “Republican control of state government, however, consistently and profoundly reduces state democratic performance during this time period.”The results, he writes,are remarkably clear: Republican control of state government reduces democratic performance. The magnitude of democratic contraction from Republican control is surprisingly large, about one-half of a standard deviation. Much of this effect is driven by gerrymandering and electoral policy changes following Republican gains in state legislatures and governorships in the 2010 election.In terms of specific states and regions, Grumbach found that “states on the West Coast and in the Northeast score higher on the democracy measures than states in the South,” which lost ground over the 18 years of the study. At the same time, “states like North Carolina and Wisconsin were among the most democratic states in the year 2000, but by 2018 they are close to the bottom. Illinois and Vermont move from the middle of the pack in 2000 to among the top democratic performers in 2018.”Grumbach contends that there are two sets of motivating factors that drive key elements of the Republican coalition to support anti-democratic policies:The modern Republican Party, which, at its elite level, is a coalition of the very wealthy, has incentives to limit the expansion of the electorate with new voters with very different class interests. The G.O.P.’s electoral base, by contrast, is considerably less interested in the Republican economic agenda of top-heavy tax cuts and reductions in government spending. However, their preferences with respect to race and partisan identity provide the Republican electoral base with reason to oppose democracy in a diversifying country.At one level, the Republican anti-democratic drive is clearly a holding action. A detailed Brookings study, “America’s electoral future: The coming generational transformation,” by Rob Griffin, Ruy Teixeira and Frey, argues that Republicans have reason to fear the future:Millennials and Generation Z appear to be far more Democratic leaning than their predecessors were at the same age. Even if today’s youngest generations do grow more conservative as they age, it’s not at all clear they would end up as conservative as older generations are today.In addition, the three authors write, “America’s youngest generations are more racially and ethnically diverse than older generations.”As a result, Griffin, Teixeira and Frey contend,the underlying demographic changes our country is likely to experience over the next several elections generally favor the Democratic Party. The projected growth of groups by race, age, education, gender and state tends to be more robust among Democratic-leaning groups, creating a consistent and growing headwind for the Republican Party.From 2020 to 2036, the authors project that the percentage of eligible voters who identify as nonwhite in Texas will grow from 50 to 60 percent, in Georgia from 43 to 50 percent, in Arizona from 38 to 48 percent.As these percentages grow, Republicans will be under constant pressure to enact state legislation to further restrict registration and voting. The question will become: How far are they willing to go?I posed that question to Terry Moe, a political scientist at Stanford. His reply:As for whether this electoral manipulation will “devolve into a broader rejection of the rule of law,” I would say that the Republican Party has already crossed the Rubicon. For four years during the Trump presidency, they defended or ignored his blatant abuses of power, his violations of democratic norms, and his attacks on our democratic institutions, and they routinely circled the wagons to protect him. They had countless opportunities to stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law, and they consistently failed to do so.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