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      After Record Turnout, Republicans Are Trying to Make It Harder to Vote

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyAfter Record Turnout, Republicans Are Trying to Make It Harder to VoteThe presidential election results are settled. But the battle over new voting rules, especially for mail-in ballots, has just begun.Hundreds of people waited in line in Marietta, Ga., during early voting for last year’s presidential election.Credit…Ron Harris/Associated PressJan. 30, 2021, 2:18 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — In Georgia, Arizona and other states won by President Biden, some leading Republicans stood up in November to make what, in any other year, would be an unremarkable statement: The race is over. And we lost, fair and square.But that was then. Now, in statehouses nationwide, Republicans who echoed former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of rampant fraud are proposing to make it harder to vote next time — ostensibly to convince the very voters who believed them that elections can be trusted again. And even some colleagues who defended the legitimacy of the November vote are joining them.According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, state legislators have filed 106 bills to tighten election rules, generally making it harder to cast a ballot — triple the number at this time last year. In short, Republicans who for more than a decade have used wildly inflated allegations of voter fraud to justify making it harder to vote, are now doing so again, this time seizing on Mr. Trump’s thoroughly debunked charges of a stolen election to push back at Democratic-leaning voters who flocked to mail-in ballots last year.In Georgia, where the State House of Representatives has set up a special committee on election integrity, legislators are pushing to roll back no-excuse absentee voting. Republicans in Pennsylvania plan 14 hearings to revisit complaints they raised last year about the election and to propose limitations on voting.Arizona Republicans have subpoenaed November’s ballots and vote tabulation equipment in Maricopa County, a Democratic stronghold that includes Phoenix. Legislators are taking aim at an election system in which four in five ballots are mailed or delivered to drop boxes.Those and other proposals underscore the continuing power of Mr. Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the November election, even as some of his administration’s top election experts call the vote the most secure in history. And they reflect longstanding Republican efforts to push back against efforts to expand the ability to vote.Proposals to toughen voting laws underscore the continuing power of Donald J. Trump’s campaign to delegitimize the election. Credit…Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesDemocrats have their own agenda: 406 bills in 35 states, according to the Brennan Center, that run the gamut from giving former felons the vote to automatically registering visitors to motor vehicle bureaus and other state offices. And Democrats in the Senate will soon unveil a large proposal to undergird much of the election process with what they call pro-democracy reforms, with lowering barriers to voting as the centerpiece. Near-identical legislation has been filed in the House.“There’s going to be a rush in the next year to legislate certain types of election reforms,” said Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor and co-director of the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project. “The jury is still out on whether the lesson from this election will be that we need to make voting as convenient as possible, or whether there will be a serious retrenchment that makes voting less accessible.”In truth, who controls a given legislature will largely decide what chances a bill has.In the 23 states wholly run by Republicans, Democratic bills expanding ballot access are largely dead on arrival. The same is true of Republican proposals to restrict ballot access in the 15 states completely controlled by Democrats.But in some states where legislators’ control and interests align, the changes could be consequential.In Arizona, where Democrats captured a second Senate seat and Mr. Biden eked out a 10,500-vote victory, lawmakers are taking aim at an election system in which absentee ballots have long been dominant.One bill would repeal the state’s no-excuse absentee ballot law. Others would pare back automatic mailings of absentee ballots to the 3.2 million voters who have signed up for the service. One ardent advocate of the stolen-election conspiracy theory, State Representative Kevin Payne of Maricopa County, would require that signatures on all mail ballots be notarized, creating an impossibly high bar for most voters. Yet another bill, paradoxically, would require early ballots that are mailed to voters to be delivered by hand.Legislators in Arizona are taking aim at an election system in which four in five ballots are mailed or delivered to drop boxes.Credit…Pool photo by Ross D. FranklinIn Georgia, where Mr. Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, both Republicans, have repeatedly defended the election results. The two are nevertheless supporting stricter voting requirements.A proposal by Republicans in the State Senate to eliminate no-excuse absentee ballots — a quarter of the five million votes cast in November — has drawn opposition even before it has been filed. But Republicans broadly support a bill to require submitting a photocopied identification card such as a driver’s license with both applications for absentee ballots and the ballots themselves. Mr. Raffensperger has said he supports that measure and another to make it easier to challenge a voter’s legitimacy at the polls.Brian Robinson, a Republican political consultant in Atlanta, said, “The overall purpose of these reforms is to restore faith in our election systems.” He added, “That’s not to say that it was a giant failure; that’s to say that faith has been diminished.”He allowed that Mr. Trump’s false charges of fraud “drives a lot of the loss of faith among Republicans,” but he also took aim at Democrats, noting that the Democrat who lost the 2018 governor’s race, Stacey Abrams, also had refused to concede, saying voter suppression had caused an “erosion of our democracy.”“Both sides have dipped their toes in those waters,” he said.But it’s clear that Republicans are now dipping much more than their toes. Democrats and some voting-rights advocates say the Republican agenda on voting is less about lost trust than lost elections. A Republican election official in suburban Atlanta said as much this month, arguing for tougher voting laws that reduce turnout after Democratic candidates won both of the state’s Senate seats in runoffs.“They don’t have to change all of them,” said Alice O’Lenick, who heads the Gwinnett County Board of Registrations and Elections, “but they have got to change the major parts of them so we at least have a shot at winning.”Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer who led legal battles against restrictive voting rules last year, said the reason for the state’s voting-law crackdown was transparent. “These were elections that withstood the scrutiny of two recounts, an audit and a whole lot of attention in the political arena and the courts,” he said. “The only reason they’re doing this is to make voting harder because they didn’t like the results. And that’s shameful.”A Republican election official in Georgia argued for voting laws that reduce turnout after the Democratic candidates won both of the state’s Senate seats in runoffs.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesIndeed, a handful of bills seem to make no bones about their partisan goals. One Arizona proposal would give the Legislature the power to decide presidential elections by overriding the secretary of state’s certification of electoral votes.Bills in Arizona, Mississippi and Wisconsin would end the practice of awarding all electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the statewide vote. Instead, they would be allotted according to votes in congressional districts — which in Republican states are generally gerrymandered to favor Republicans. In Arizona, the Legislature also would choose two electors.In the last election, the moves would have reduced Mr. Biden’s electoral vote total by 11 votes.Nebraska, on the other hand, would do the reverse with a similar partisan outcome: The state now awards presidential electors by congressional district, but legislation would move the state to the winner-take-all system. One of Nebraska’s three House districts voted for Mr. Biden in November.Even Republicans in states where the November election was not close are proposing to tighten voting laws. In Texas, a state with perhaps the nation’s strictest voting rules and one of the lowest levels of turnout, the state party has declared “election integrity” the top legislative priority. Among other proposals, legislators want to cut the time allotted for early voting, limit outsiders’ ability to help voters fill out ballots and require new voters to prove they are citizens.Republicans who control the Pennsylvania Legislature have mounted one of the most aggressive campaigns, even though any laws they enact probably would have to weather a veto by the state’s Democratic governor.A handful of Republican state lawmakers want to abolish no-excuse absentee voting only 15 months after the Legislature approved it in an election-law package backed by all but two of its 134 G.O.P. members who cast votes. The main supporter of the bill, State Senator Doug Mastriano, has claimed that Mr. Biden’s victory in the state is illegitimate, and spent thousands of dollars to bus protesters to the Jan. 6 demonstration that ended in the assault on the Capitol.Rolling back the law appears a long shot. But there seems to be strong Republican support for other measures, including eliminating drop boxes for absentee ballots, discarding mail-in ballots with technical errors and ending a grace period for receiving ballots mailed by Election Day.State Representative Seth Grove, the Republican chair of the committee holding 14 hearings into election practices, said at the initial gathering on Jan. 21 that he was not interested in dwelling on the 2020 election. “We want a better process going forward, and we’re committed to that,’’ Mr. Grove said.But at that hearing, legislators grilled Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, for three hours on her emailed guidance to county election officials before the Nov. 3 vote. In an interview, Ms. Boockvar said the purpose of the hearings was to further undermine voters’ confidence in democracy and to “lay the groundwork for disenfranchisement.’’“We are at a watershed, and we have a choice to make right now,” she said. “Acknowledge the truth — have public, vocal, strong support for the strength and resilience of our democracy. Or we can continue to perpetuate the lies.”Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvnia’s secretary of state, said Republicans were intent on undermining confidence in democracy.Credit…Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesIn Washington, a Democratic agenda can be seen in the latest version of a far-ranging elections and voting bill that passed the House last year but died in the Republican-controlled Senate.This time, the Democrat-controlled Senate will file its own version, with committee hearings expected in February.Its voting provisions include allowing automatic and same-day voter registration, 15 days of early voting, no-excuse voting by mail, and online voter registration, as well as the restoration of voting rights nationwide to felons who complete their sentences. In one fell swoop, it would set minimum standards for American federal elections that would erase a host of procedural barriers to casting a ballot.It also would require the states to appoint independent and nonpartisan commissions to draw political boundaries, eliminating the profusion of gerrymanders that the Supreme Court said in 2019 were beyond its authority to control.Few expect much chance of passage in a deeply divided Senate, but the Democratic leaders in both houses have made it the first bill of the new congressional session, a statement that — symbolically, at least — it is the first priority of the new Democratic majority.Whether any of it goes beyond symbolism remains to be seen.Trip Gabriel More

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      Fact-Checking Biden’s First Week in Office

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The New WashingtonliveLatest UpdatesExpanding Health CoverageBiden’s CabinetPandemic ResponseAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFact CheckFact-Checking Biden’s First Week in OfficeAll but three of 20 claims the president made were accurate, demonstrating his regard for basic facts and his proclivity to err when speaking off the cuff.In the past week, President Biden used the presidential podium mostly to promote his policy priorities.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesJan. 30, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETPresident Biden, in his first week in office, typically stuck to vetted scripts and verified facts — a departure from his predecessor’s freewheeling and fact-free rhetorical style.Over all, Mr. Biden used the presidential podium to promote his policy priorities. His remarks were aspirational and light on empirical assertions. Of 20 factual claims The New York Times analyzed from Jan. 20 to Jan. 26, all but three were largely if not completely accurate. One claim was an overly optimistic projection, another falsely criticized former President Donald J. Trump and a third Mr. Biden corrected almost immediately.Here’s a review.The president got basic facts right on the toll and racial disparities of the pandemic.Mr. Biden most often used statistics from government agencies and think tanks to emphasize the severity of the coronavirus pandemic.His assertions that 900,000 Americans filed for unemployment the week before his inauguration, and that almost 16 million continued to claim unemployment benefits, that almost 10 percent of Black Americans and just over 9 percent of Hispanic Americans are unemployed, and that 600,000 workers in local education have lost their jobs are all backed by the latest Labor Department reports.His claims that one in seven households and more than one in five Black and Latino households “don’t have enough food to eat” come from a Census Bureau survey from December. (A day after Mr. Biden made those assertions while signing executive orders meant to promote racial equity, the Census Bureau released a more recent survey showing that the situation had improved slightly in January; one in 10 households and one in six Black and Latino households reported food insecurity.)He was also right that Black and Latino Americans are dying from and being hospitalized because of the coronavirus at rates almost three times that of white Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Research from the left-leaning think tanks the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center for Economic and Policy Research buttress Mr. Biden’s claims that 14 million people are behind on rent and 40 percent of frontline workers are Black and Latino.And it was true, as he first claimed during his inauguration, that more Americans have died from the coronavirus (406,194 on Jan. 20) than in all of World War II (405,399, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs). He often accurately cited positive analyses of his plans, and sometimes omitted the less flattering.When promoting his policy priorities, Mr. Biden was armed with favorable citations.He accurately quoted Kevin Hassett, a former top economic adviser to Mr. Trump, as “absolutely” in favor of the Biden administration’s proposed $1.9 trillion fiscal rescue package.It would lift 12 million Americans out of poverty, Mr. Biden said, referring to a study by Columbia University. And he referred to estimates from Moody’s Analytics that the package would create 7.5 million jobs this year, and that his broader economic plan would create about 18.6 million over four years if enacted in full.Mr. Biden, unsurprisingly, did not mention other analyses of his economic plan that projected a smaller effect on employment. The research institution Oxford Economics, which is based in England, estimated that it would create two million more jobs in four years. Nor did the president cite Mr. Hassett’s October paper, written with another economist for the conservative Hoover Institution, estimating that it would result in 4.9 million fewer jobs over a decade.The plan’s call for a $15 minimum wage, Mr. Biden said, would lift people out of poverty. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2019 that a $15 minimum wage would bring 1.3 million people above the poverty line — and also put 1.3 million people out of work.The president also repeatedly urged masking up, twice claiming that “wearing masks from just now until April would save 50,000 lives.” That is in line with a study that found about 130,000 lives could be saved if 95 percent of people wore masks in the 160 days from Sept. 22, 2020, to Feb. 28, 2021, equivalent to about 52,000 lives saved in 70 days.The New WashingtonLive UpdatesUpdated Jan. 29, 2021, 9:45 p.m. ETThe retired general in charge of the Air Force Academy alumni association refuses to condemn Jan. 6 riot, angering its members.Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Police officer who died from injuries at the Capitol riot, will lie in honor in the Rotunda.Biden intelligence briefings to be led by veteran C.I.A. officer, who previously briefed George W. Bush.He strayed from the facts when selling his own policies and critiquing his predecessor.During the 2020 Democratic primary and general election races, Mr. Biden was more prone to factual errors when speaking off the cuff, particularly in attacks on political opponents or as he defended or embellished his own record. The three inaccurate claims of his first week in office demonstrated those tendencies.While signing an executive order on strengthening domestic manufacturing, Mr. Biden suggested on Monday that his predecessor paid only lip service to supporting American businesses but “didn’t take it seriously enough.”“Under the previous administration, the federal government contracts awarded directly to foreign companies went up 30 percent,” Mr. Biden said.That was false. A White House spokesman said that Mr. Biden was referring to contract obligations that rose from 2017 to 2019. But a database of government contracts shows that the value awarded to foreign companies rose from about $11.9 million in the 2017 fiscal year to about $13.2 million in the 2019 fiscal year (an increase of 11 percent) and to about $12.9 million in the 2020 fiscal year (an increase of about 8.4 percent).Moreover, raw dollars do not take into account increased government spending or inflation. The same database shows that the share of foreign contracts actually decreased under Mr. Trump to 1.9 percent of all contracts in the 2020 fiscal year from about 2.3 percent in the 2017 fiscal year.At that same event, Mr. Biden overhyped the effect of one of his clean energy policies when he claimed that replacing all of the cars and trucks owned by the federal government with electric vehicles would create “a million autoworker jobs in clean energy.”It is dubious that electrifying the federal fleet of 645,000 cars and trucks would create one million auto jobs, even by the rosiest projections. After all, the entire auto sector employs just under three million people in manufacturing and dealership jobs, while 15 million to 20 million cars are sold a year.Existing research also shows a far more moderate influence on employment than Mr. Biden claims. For example, a 2010 study estimated 1.9 million jobs created if 123 million vehicles are powered by electricity, while a 2009 paper projected 129,000 to 351,000 jobs added if two-thirds of vehicles sold by 2030 are electric.The president also took aim at some critics of his goal to deliver 100 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine in 100 days.“I found it fascinating — yesterday the press asked the question: Is, you know, 100 million enough? A week before, they were saying, ‘Biden, are you crazy? You can’t do 100 million in a hundred days,’” he said last week. “Well, we’re going to, God willing, not only do 100 million, we’re going to do more than that.”Mr. Biden has a point that some were skeptical that the administration could meet that benchmark when he first made the pledge in early December, a few days before the Food and Drug Administration approved the Pfizer vaccine. Experts told The Times at the time that the goal was achievable, but optimistic. Mr. Biden himself noted in late December — when the country was administering about 200,000 vaccine doses daily — that it would take the United States years to adequately vaccinate the public.But by the week before he took office, the number of shots administered daily reached almost one million. That is the pace required to reach the 100 million doses goal, leading to some criticism that such a goal is now no longer ambitious enough.The president acknowledged in remarks this week that the 100 million number was a floor, not a ceiling.“I’m quite confident that we will be in a position, within the next three weeks or so, to be vaccinating people at the range of a million a day or in excess of that,” he said. “I think we may be able to get that to 1.5 million a day, rather than one million a day. But we have to meet that goal of a million a day.”After a reporter pointed out that the country had already crossed the threshold of one million, Mr. Biden readily corrected himself, using two words his predecessor virtually never uttered: “I misspoke.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Election Reform: Here Are Some Ideas

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storylettersElection Reform: Here Are Some IdeasReaders offer their own suggestions in response to a Sunday Review article.Jan. 29, 2021, 11:16 a.m. ET Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; from left: Eli Durst for The New York Times, Angela Weiss, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, Drew Angerer via Getty Images and Pool photos by J. Scott Applewhite.To the Editor:Re “Let’s Ensure This Never Happens Again” (Sunday Review, Jan. 10):In the aftermath of the Capitol riot, Beverly Gage and Emily Bazelon offer a broad range of ideas for “fixing what ails” our elections, with one gobsmacking omission: Nowhere do they touch upon the restoration of public, observable vote-counting.It was primarily the lack of transparency of our computerized voting process that gave oxygen to Team Trump’s bad-faith attacks on that process. Defenders of the shield were quick to circle the wagons and declare the 2020 election “the most secure in our history.” But such declarations do not make it so.What would make it so is nothing less than a first count of hand-marked ballots by humans working in multi-partisan teams observable to the public.All the reforms Ms. Gage and Ms. Bazelon put forth would be beneficial. But without the de-computerization now adopted by many of our fellow advanced democracies, every idea they propose will fall short of the goal that election results be trusted and accepted by winners and losers alike so that the trauma of the 2020 election will not be repeated.Jonathan D. SimonFelton, Calif.The writer is the author of “CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy.”To the Editor:Beverly Gage and Emily Bazelon propose a number of remedies for certain aspects of our electoral system. We believe that an essential additional corrective measure is evaluating the mental health and psychological stability of presidential candidates before the primary voting process.It is highly probable that if three commonly used and reliable psychological assessment evaluations (Rorschach Inkblot Test, Thematic Apperception Test and Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2) had been administered to Donald Trump when he was a candidate, his now manifestly evident mental aberrations would have been discovered.Now is a most advantageous time to correct this significant and potentially dangerous omission in the presidential candidate vetting protocol.C. William KaiserDavid E. CreaseyThe writers are retired from Harvard Medical School. Dr. Kaiser was an assistant professor of surgery, and Dr. Creasey was a clinical instructor in psychiatry.To the Editor:There are two additional fixes that need to be added: making money less central to politics, and devising a way to protect the public from the unqualified and incapable from running in the first place.The first requires campaigns to be paid for by government, for political messages to be fact-based and subject to libel/defamation suits, and for Citizens United to be overturned.The second requires that some independent assessment be shared of a candidate’s qualification to run and evidence of a grasp of what the job entails. A nonpartisan credentialing commission could be instituted.Adding these would give candidates more time to address policy and free the public to have greater confidence that whoever gets in office has, at least, a basic understanding of what is required.If we fix the structure, minimize money and protect the public from the charlatan or the incompetent, we might have a chance of ensuring stability.Greg RathjenMilton, Ga.To the Editor:This article put forth some good ideas to improve our voting system. But one crucial change was overlooked: Change Election Day to a Sunday, as in most European countries.How do we expect people to leave work or school or other weekday activities in order to go cast a ballot? Voting on Sunday would turn the day into a holiday, rather than an arduous patriotic task.Joan Z. ShoreParisAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      After Capitol Riot, Republican Ties to Extremist Groups Are Under Scrutiny

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutVisual TimelineInside the SiegeNotable ArrestsThe Global Far RightAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRepublican Ties to Extremist Groups Are Under ScrutinyA number of members of Congress have links to organizations and movements that played a role in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.Members of a Three Percenters group provided security for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, right, during a campaign event last year in Ringgold, Ga.Credit…C.B. Schmelter/Chattanooga Times Free Press, via Associated PressLuke Broadwater and Jan. 29, 2021Updated 10:09 a.m. ETWASHINGTON — The video’s title was posed as a question, but it left little doubt about where the men who filmed it stood. They called it “The Coming Civil War?” and in its opening seconds, Jim Arroyo, who leads an Arizona chapter of Oath Keepers, a right-wing militia, declared that the conflict had already begun.To back up his claim, Mr. Arroyo cited Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, one of the most far-right members of Congress. Mr. Gosar had paid a visit to the local Oath Keepers chapter a few years earlier, Mr. Arroyo recounted, and when asked if the United States was headed for a civil war, the congressman’s “response to the group was just flat out: ‘We’re in it. We just haven’t started shooting at each other yet.’”Less than two months after the video was posted, members of the Oath Keepers were among those with links to extremist groups from around the country who took part in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, prompting new scrutiny of the links between members of Congress and an array of organizations and movements that espouse far-right beliefs.Nearly 150 House Republicans supported President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims that the election had been stolen from him. But Mr. Gosar and a handful of other Republican members of the House had deeper ties to extremist groups who pushed violent ideas and conspiracy theories and whose members were prominent among those who stormed the halls of Congress in an effort to stop certification of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.Their ranks include Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, who like Mr. Gosar was linked to the “Stop the Steal” campaign backing Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the election’s outcome.Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado has close connections to militia groups including the so-called Three Percenters, an extremist offshoot of the gun rights movement that had at least one member who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose adherents were among the most visible of those who stormed the building, and she appeared at a rally with militia groups. Before being elected to Congress last year, Ms. Greene used social media in 2019 to endorse executing top Democrats and has suggested that the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., was a staged “false flag” attack. The liberal group Media Matters for America reported on Thursday that Ms. Greene also speculated on Facebook in 2018 that California wildfires might have been started by lasers from space, promoting a theory pushed by followers of QAnon.Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida appeared last year at an event also attended by members of the Proud Boys, another extremist organization whose role in the Jan. 6 assault, like those of the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, is being investigated by the F.B.I.It is not clear whether any elected officials played a role in directly facilitating the attack on the Capitol, other than helping to incite violence through false statements about the election being stolen from Mr. Trump. Officials have said they are investigating reports from Democrats that a number of House Republicans provided tours of the Capitol and other information to people who might have gone on to be part of the mob on Jan. 6. So far, no evidence has surfaced publicly to back up those claims.Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, speaking to protesters in November outside the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center in Phoenix.Credit…Jim Urquhart/ReutersMs. Boebert said in a statement that she had “never given a tour of the U.S. Capitol to anyone besides family members in town for my swearing-in,” and she called accusations from Democrats that she gave a “reconnaissance tour” to insurgents an “irresponsible lie.” After the riot at the Capitol, she said she did not support “unlawful acts of violence.”Mr. Biggs has denied associating with Stop the Steal organizers and condemned violence “of any kind.”“Were you aware of any planned demonstration or riot at the U.S. Capitol to take place after the rally on Jan. 6, 2021? No,” Mr. Biggs said in a statement.A spokesman for Ms. Greene said she now rejects QAnon, and he tried to distance her from militia members.“She doesn’t have anything to do with it,” her communications director, Nick Dyer, said of QAnon. “She thinks it’s disinformation.” As for the militia members, he said, “Those people were at one event independently of Congresswoman Greene.”Mr. Gosar did not respond to requests for comment.Mr. Gaetz, on his podcast, said the Proud Boys were at the event he attended to provide security, and that “just because you take a picture with someone,” it does not mean “you’re tied to every viewpoint they’ve ever had or that they will ever have in the future.”But in signaling either overt or tacit support, a small but vocal band of Republicans now serving in the House provided legitimacy and publicity to extremist groups and movements as they built toward their role in supporting Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election and the attack on Congress.Aitan D. Goelman, a former federal prosecutor who helped convict the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, said that when elected officials — or even candidates for office — took actions like appearing with militia groups or other right-wing groups it “provides them with an added imprimatur of legitimacy.”An examination of many of the most prominent elected Republicans with links to right-wing groups also shows how various strands of extremism came together at the Capitol on Jan. 6.In July, Mr. Gosar, a dentist, posed for a picture with a member of the Proud Boys. Two years earlier, he spoke at a rally for a jailed leader of Britain’s anti-immigrant fringe in London, where he vilified Muslim immigrants as a “scourge.” And in 2014, he traveled to Nevada to support the armed standoff between law enforcement and supporters of the cattle rancher Cliven Bundy, who had refused to stop trespassing on federal lands.Mr. Biggs, the chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, was seen by leaders of the Stop the Steal movement as an inspiration and has spoken at events hosted by extremists, including one at which a founder of the Oath Keepers called for hanging Senator John McCain.Ms. Boebert, elected to the House in November, said on Twitter that “Today is 1776” on the morning of Jan. 6, and she has connections to the Three Percenters, which shares her view that gun rights are under assault. At least one member of the group has been arrested in the breach of the Capitol.Ms. Greene has for years trafficked in conspiracy theories, expressed support for QAnon and made offensive remarks about Black people, Jews and Muslims. She also appeared at a campaign event alongside members of the Three Percenters.To some degree, the members of Congress have been reflecting signals sent by Mr. Trump.During a presidential debate in October, he made a nod toward the Proud Boys, telling them to “stand back and stand by.” Two months earlier, Mr. Trump described followers of QAnon — several of whom have been charged with murder, domestic terrorism, planned kidnapping and, most recently, storming the Capitol — as “people that love our country,” adding that “they do supposedly like me.”A Stop the Steal protest in November near the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix.Credit…Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesStop the StealFew Republicans have been more linked to extremist groups than Mr. Gosar.“He’s been involved with anti-Muslim groups and hate groups,” said Mr. Gosar’s brother Dave Gosar, a lawyer in Wyoming. “He’s made anti-Semitic diatribes. He’s twisted up so tight with the Oath Keepers it’s not even funny.”Dave Gosar and other Gosar siblings ran ads denouncing their brother as a dangerous extremist when he ran for Congress in 2018. Now they are calling on Congress to expel him.“We warned everybody how dangerous he was,” Dave Gosar said.In the days after the 2020 election, Mr. Gosar and Mr. Biggs helped turn Arizona into a crucible for the Stop the Steal movement, finding common cause with hard-liners who until then had toiled in obscurity, like Ali Alexander. The two congressmen recorded a video, “This Election Is A Joke,” which was viewed more than a million times and spread disinformation about widespread voter fraud.Mr. Alexander has said he “schemed up” the Jan. 6 rally with Mr. Gosar, Mr. Biggs and another vocal proponent of Stop the Steal, Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama. Mr. Alexander’s characterization of the role of the members of Congress is exaggerated, Mr. Biggs said, but the lawmakers were part of a larger network of people who helped plan and promote the rally as part of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the will of the voters.After the election, Mr. Alexander emerged as a vocal proponent of the president’s stolen election claims, setting up a Stop the Steal website on Nov. 4 and making incendiary statements. On Dec. 8, he tweeted that he was willing to give up his life to keep Mr. Trump in office.The Arizona Republican Party followed up, retweeting Mr. Alexander’s post and adding: “He is. Are you?” Mr. Alexander has since been barred from Twitter.Ten days later, Mr. Gosar was one of the headliners at a rally in Phoenix that Mr. Alexander helped organize. Mr. Gosar used the rally to deliver a call to action, telling the crowd that they planned to “conquer the Hill” to return Mr. Trump to the presidency.During his time onstage, Mr. Alexander called Mr. Gosar “my captain” and added, “One of the other heroes has been Congressman Andy Biggs.”Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, was cited as an inspiration by one of the organizers of the Stop the Steal campaign.Credit…Al Drago for The New York TimesAlthough Mr. Biggs has played down his involvement with the Stop the Steal campaign, on Dec. 19, Mr. Alexander played a video message from Mr. Biggs to an angry crowd at an event where attendees shouted violent slogans against lawmakers. At the event, Mr. Biggs’s wife, Cindy Biggs, was seen hugging Mr. Alexander twice and speaking in his ear.In 2019, Mr. Biggs spoke at an event supported by the Patriot Movement AZ, AZ Patriots and the American Guard — all identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, according to The Arizona Republic. In 2015, he sat silent at an event as a founder of the Oath Keepers called for the hanging ​of Senator McCain, calling him a traitor to the Constitution. Mr. Biggs told The Republic at the time that he did not feel it was his place to speak up and denounce the comments..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1amoy78{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1amoy78{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1amoy78:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}Capitol Riot FalloutFrom Riot to ImpeachmentThe riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.Mr. Arroyo, of the Oath Keepers in Arizona, said Mr. Gosar had attended two of their meetings, about a year apart. Mr. Arroyo said that his organization “does not advocate for breaking the law” and that he was “saddened to see the display of trespassing on the Capitol building by a few out-of-control individuals.”Just like Mr. Gosar’s family, Mr. Biggs’s two brothers have publicly denounced him, saying he was at least partly responsible for the violence on Jan. 6. In addition, a Democratic state representative in Arizona, Athena Salman, has called on the Justice Department to investigate the actions of Mr. Gosar and Mr. Biggs before the riot, saying they “encouraged, facilitated, participated and possibly helped plan this anti-democratic insurrection.”Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado tweeted, “Today is 1776,” on the morning of the Capitol riot.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times‘I Am the Militia’In December 2019, hundreds of protesters descended on the Colorado Statehouse to oppose a new state law meant to take firearms out of the hands of emotionally disturbed people.Among those at the rally were members of the Three Percenters, which federal prosecutors describe as a “radical militia group,” and a congressional hopeful with a history of arrests named Lauren Boebert, who was courting their votes. Armed with her own handgun, she posed for photographs with militia members and defiantly pledged to oppose the law.In the months that followed, militia groups would emerge as one of Ms. Boebert’s crucial political allies. As her campaign got underway last year, she wrote on Twitter, “I am the militia.”Militia members provided security for her campaign events and frequented the restaurant she owns, Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colo. In a recently posted video, a member of the Three Percenters was filmed giving Ms. Boebert a Glock 22 handgun.Another member of the group, Robert Gieswein, who posed for a photograph in front of Ms. Boebert’s restaurant last year, is facing federal charges in the storming of the Capitol and attacking the police.Photographs from the attack show him clad in tactical gear, goggles and a helmet, wrestling with Capitol Police officers to remove metal barricades and brandishing a baseball bat. Prosecutors have also cited a video of Mr. Gieswein encouraging other rioters as they smashed a window at the Capitol.Once inside, Mr. Gieswein was photographed with another suspect, Dominic Pezzola, a former Marine and a member of the Proud Boys, who has also been charged in the Capitol attack.Ms. Boebert’s communications director, Benjamin Stout, said in an email that she “has always condemned all forms of political violence and has repeatedly made clear that those who stormed the U.S. Capitol should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”He added, “Simply because she takes a photo with someone that asks for one doesn’t mean she endorses every single belief they have or agrees with all other public statements or causes they support.”Robert Gieswein, in a helmet and tactical gear during the riot at the Capitol, is a member of the Three Percenters extremist group, which has supported Ms. Boebert.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe QAnon CaucusOne of the animating forces behind the attack on the Capitol was the movement known as QAnon, and QAnon has few more high-profile supporters than Ms. Greene.QAnon is a movement centered on the fantastical claim that Mr. Trump, secretly aided by the military, was elected to smash a cabal of Democrats, international financiers and “Deep State” bureaucrats who worship Satan and abuse children. It prophesied an apocalyptic showdown, known as “the Storm,” between Mr. Trump and his enemies. During the Storm, their enemies, including Mr. Biden and many Democratic and Republican members of Congress, would be arrested and executed.The mob that attacked the Capitol included many visible QAnon supporters wearing “Q” shirts and waving “Q” banners.Among them was Jake Angeli, a QAnon devotee who styled himself the “Q Shaman.” Mr. Angeli, whose real name is Jacob Chansley, stormed the Capitol in horns and animal furs, and left a note threatening Vice President Mike Pence.Also among them was Ashli Babbitt, a QAnon believer who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to climb through a window in a barricaded door near the House chamber.Ms. Greene was an early adherent, calling QAnon “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out.” Many of her Facebook posts in recent years reflected language used by the movement, talking about hanging prominent Democrats or executing F.B.I. agents.Ms. Greene has also displayed a fondness for some of the militia groups whose members were caught on video attacking the Capitol, including the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters. Speaking in 2018 at the Mother of All Rallies, a pro-Trump gathering in Washington, she praised militias as groups that can protect people against “a tyrannical government.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The G.O.P. Is in a Doom Loop of Bizarro

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe G.O.P. Is in a Doom Loop of BizarroBut will it doom the rest of us, too?Opinion ColumnistJan. 28, 2021Credit…L.E. Baskow/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHere’s what we know about American politics: The Republican Party is stuck, probably irreversibly, in a doom loop of bizarro. If the Trump-incited Capitol insurrection didn’t snap the party back to sanity — and it didn’t — nothing will.What isn’t clear yet is who, exactly, will end up facing doom. Will it be the G.O.P. as a significant political force? Or will it be America as we know it? Unfortunately, we don’t know the answer. It depends a lot on how successful Republicans will be in suppressing votes.About the bizarro: Even I had some lingering hope that the Republican establishment might try to end Trumpism. But such hopes died this week.On Tuesday Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who has said that Donald Trump’s role in fomenting the insurrection was impeachable, voted for a measure that would have declared a Trump trial unconstitutional because he’s no longer in office. (Most constitutional scholars disagree.)On Thursday Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader — who still hasn’t conceded that Joe Biden legitimately won the presidency, but did declare that Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack on Congress — visited Mar-a-Lago, presumably to make amends.In other words, the G.O.P.’s national leadership, after briefly flirting with sense, has surrendered to the fantasies of the fringe. Cowardice rules.And the fringe is consolidating its hold at the state level. The Arizona state party censured the Republican governor for the sin of belatedly trying to contain the coronavirus. The Texas G.O.P. has adopted the slogan “We are the storm,” which is associated with QAnon, although the party denies it intended any link. Oregon Republicans have endorsed the completely baseless claim, contradicted by the rioters themselves, that the attack on the Capitol was a left-wing false flag operation.How did this happen to what was once the party of Dwight Eisenhower? Political scientists argue that traditional forces of moderation have been weakened by factors like the nationalization of politics and the rise of partisan media, notably Fox News.This opens the door to a process of self-reinforcing extremism (something, by the way, that I’ve seen happen in a minor fashion within some academic subfields). As hard-liners gain power within a group, they drive out moderates; what remains of the group is even more extreme, which drives out even more moderates; and so on. A party starts out complaining that taxes are too high; after a while it begins claiming that climate change is a giant hoax; it ends up believing that all Democrats are Satanist pedophiles.This process of radicalization began long before Donald Trump; it goes back at least to Newt Gingrich’s takeover of Congress in 1994. But Trump’s reign of corruption and lies, followed by his refusal to concede and his attempt to overturn the election results, brought it to a head. And the cowardice of the Republican establishment has sealed the deal. One of America’s two major political parties has parted ways with facts, logic and democracy, and it’s not coming back.What happens next? You might think that a party that goes off the deep end morally and intellectually would also find itself going off the deep end politically. And that has in fact happened in some states. Those fantasist Oregon Republicans, who have been shut out of power since 2013, seem to be going the way of their counterparts in California, a once-mighty party reduced to impotence in the face of a Democratic supermajority.But it’s not at all clear that this will happen at a national level. True, as Republicans have become more extreme they have lost broad support; the G.O.P. has won the popular vote for president only once since 1988, and 2004 was an outlier influenced by the lingering rally-around-the-flag effects of 9/11.Given the unrepresentative nature of our electoral system, however, Republicans can achieve power even while losing the popular vote. A majority of voters rejected Trump in 2016, but he became president anyway, and he came fairly close to pulling it out in 2020 despite a seven million vote deficit. The Senate is evenly divided even though Democratic members represent 41 million more people than Republicans.And the Republican response to electoral defeat isn’t to change policies to win over voters; it is to try to rig the next election. Georgia has long been known for systematic suppression of Black voters; it took a remarkable organizing effort by Democrats, led by Stacey Abrams, to overcome that suppression and win the state’s electoral votes and Senate seats. So the Republicans who control the state are doubling down on disenfranchisement, with proposed new voter ID requirements and other measures to limit voting.The bottom line is that we don’t know whether we’ve earned more than a temporary reprieve. A president who tried to retain power despite losing an election has been foiled. But a party that buys into bizarre conspiracy theories and denies the legitimacy of its opposition isn’t getting saner, and still has a good chance of taking complete power in four years.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Violence May Delay U.S. Troop Withdrawal From Afghanistan

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyViolence May Delay U.S. Troop Withdrawal From AfghanistanThe new Biden administration is reviewing a deal between its predecessor and the Taliban for a May 1 deadline to pull all American troops out of the country.Afghan police at a checkpoint in Kabul earlier this month.Credit…Jim Huylebroek for The New York TimesAdam Nossiter and Jan. 29, 2021, 9:51 a.m. ETKABUL, Afghanistan — Both the Afghan government and its Taliban foes appear to be gearing up for a violent spring amid uncertainty over whether the Biden administration will meet a May 1 deadline for the withdrawal of all American troops from Afghanistan.On Thursday, the Pentagon raised questions about whether the pullout — agreed to in a February 2020 U.S.-Taliban peace deal — would go ahead on schedule as the incoming Biden administration reviews the agreement made by its predecessor. That statement followed bellicose remarks by Taliban and Afghan government officials, amplified by waves of violence across the country.“Without them meeting their commitments to renounce terrorism and to stop the violent attacks against the Afghan National Security Forces, it’s very hard to see a specific way forward for the negotiated settlement,” Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby said at a news briefing. “But we’re still committed to that.”Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said Friday on social media that Mr. Kirby’s assertions were “unfounded.”The agreement between the Taliban and the U.S. government started the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan in exchange for counterterrorism pledges from the Taliban and a promise to push the Afghan government to release 5,000 prisoners. The move amounted to the strongest attempt yet by the United States to extricate itself from its longest war and potentially paving the way for the Taliban’s future inclusion in the Afghan government.But the talks excluded the Afghan government and left it feeling sidelined and unheard, according to Afghan officials. Under former President Donald J. Trump, they said that U.S. diplomats frequently ignored concerns from Kabul in an attempt to expedite the negotiations.There are currently 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, down from 12,000 this time last year. And while the Afghan government is in favor of the withdrawal of Western forces, it wants a slower timetable than the one agreed to with the Taliban.Now, it faces the prospect that the uncertainty around meeting the troop withdrawal deadline could fuel even more violence.With the peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, at a standstill, Washington’s review will examine the Taliban’s commitments to severing ties with terrorist groups and reducing violence as agreed.U.S. officials have long insisted that the agreement was “conditions based,” and if the Taliban does not meet those terms it would extend the presence of U.S. forces in the country.The Taliban, gearing up for the spring fighting season, is already well positioned around several Afghan cities after making steady gains across the country in recent years.A member of the Taliban in March last year in an area controlled by the group in Laghman Province’s Alingar District.Credit…Jim Huylebroek for The New York TimesBut recent overtures from the Biden White House have sent a more reassuring message to Afghan President Ghani and other government officials, raising their hopes that they will no longer be sidelined and that the Americans will not leave any time soon.Afghan National Security Advisor Hamdullah Mohib unleashed a harsh diatribe against the Taliban last week while speaking to a group of Afghan commandos at an air base outside Kabul.“They have proved that they don’t have any desire for peace and that they are a terrorist group,” said Mr. Mohib, who has long history of spouting such sharp rhetoric. His latest remarks came on the heels of a phone call with his new U.S. counterpart, Jake Sullivan.Afghan officials have said privately that Mr. Sullivan’s hourlong call restored a certain level of trust between the Ghani administration and the White House and made them confident that their voices will be heard as the peace talks in Doha continue.On Thursday, the new secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, talked with Mr. Ghani and expressed “the U.S. desire for all Afghan leaders to support this historic opportunity for peace while preserving the progress made over the last 20 years.”Assurances from the White House that the Ghani administration will have ample lines of communication to Mr. Biden’s cabinet seem to have also assuaged the Afghan government’s concerns over the U.S. decision to retain Zalmay Khalilzad, the diplomat who spearheaded the U.S.-Taliban negotiations that excluded the Afghan government.President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan during a visit to Herat this month.Credit…Hoshang Hashimi/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSome Afghan officials distrust Mr. Khalilzad and were hostile to his dialogue with the Taliban under the Trump administration, particularly his pressure on them to release the roughly 5,000 Taliban prisoners with hopes that a reduction in violence would follow.It didn’t. But it did open the way for talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban that began in Doha in September.Asfandyar Mir, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, said that an additional complication for the Biden administration is that the Afghan government is a “house divided” with rivalries throughout.Many Afghan officials say they believe that the Taliban have only a single interest: to seize power by force. And all sides in the conflict agree that missing the May troop withdrawal deadline would quickly change whatever equilibrium has been established on the country’s battlefields and could risk setting off a concerted Taliban effort to enter cities.In the meantime, regional powers, especially Iran and Pakistan, are biding their time and waiting to see what comes next under Mr. Biden.Iran, for instance, hosted Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s deputy leader, in Tehran on Wednesday, which could be perceived as demonstrating the country’s willingness to play a more active role in the talks.Iran’s involvement in the Afghan war has shifted since 2001, underscoring the changing geopolitical currents over the war’s duration. On one hand, Tehran’s official line has denounced the return of the Taliban as a direct threat to Iran. But on the other, Iranian operatives have made quiet overtures to the insurgent group, offering weapons and other equipment, in Afghanistan’s southwest, Afghan officials say.The Taliban does not “trust the United States and we will fight any group that is a mercenary for the United States,” Mr. Baradar was quoted as saying in the Iranian news media in an apparent reference to the Afghan government.But just a month earlier, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, all but offered up an Iran-trained Afghan Shiite militia to serve the Kabul government in “the fight against terrorism.” He was speaking in an interview with an Afghan news outlet.Officials here took that as a clear signal from its powerful neighbor that it intends to get further involved in the Afghan conflict.The Biden administration decided to retain Zalmay Khalilzad, the diplomat who spearheaded the U.S.-Taliban peace talks last year.Credit…Jim Huylebroek for The New York TimesEarlier this week, a Taliban delegation met with officials in Moscow, and on Friday, Abbas Stanekzai, a Taliban negotiator, told reporters that the Ghani’s administration is not “honest about peace.”Abdullah Abdullah, the chairman of the Afghan government council leading the peace negotiations, sounded a pessimistic note in an interview with The New York Times on Thursday.“The Taliban have taken a sort of maximalist position,” Mr. Abdullah said. “Before the negotiations, we were led to believe there would be a significant reduction in violence,” he added.“The recent attitude of the Taliban has not been encouraging,” Mr. Abdullah said, noting that the group had yet to make a promised break with Al Qaeda, the terror group responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks and the main reason U.S. forces invaded the country in 2001.A report from the U.S. Treasury Department earlier this month indicated that Al Qaeda had only gained strength in Afghanistan and continued its ties with the Taliban throughout 2020.Despite waves of targeted killings across the country — striking fear in some Afghanistan’s most populated cities, including Kabul, the Afghan Independent Human Rights commission found that the number of civilian deaths had decreased by more than 20 percent compared to 2019.The report also found that 8,500 civilians had been killed and wounded in Afghanistan in 2020.Najim Rahim and Fahim Abed contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The First Post-Reagan Presidency

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      Credit…Timo LenzenSkip to contentSkip to site indexOpinionThe First Post-Reagan PresidencySo far, Joe Biden has been surprisingly progressive.Credit…Timo LenzenSupported byContinue reading the main storyOpinion ColumnistJan. 28, 2021, 8:50 p.m. ETDuring Donald Trump’s presidency, I sometimes took comfort in the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s concept of “political time.”In Skowronek’s formulation, presidential history moves in 40- to 60-year cycles, or “regimes.” Each is inaugurated by transformative, “reconstructive” leaders who define the boundaries of political possibility for their successors.Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a figure. For decades following his presidency, Republicans and Democrats alike accepted many of the basic assumptions of the New Deal. Ronald Reagan was another. After him, even Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama feared deficit spending, inflation and anything that smacked of “big government.”I found Skowronek’s schema reassuring because of where Trump seemed to fit into it. Skowronek thought Trump was a “late regime affiliate” — a category that includes Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover. Such figures, he’s written, are outsiders from the party of a dominant but decrepit regime.They use the “internal disarray and festering weakness of the establishment” to “seize the initiative.” Promising to save a faltering political order, they end up imploding and bringing the old regime down with them. No such leader, he wrote, has ever been re-elected.During Trump’s reign, Skowronek’s ideas gained some popular currency, offering a way to make sense of a presidency that seemed anomalous and bizarre. “We are still in the middle of Trump’s rendition of the type,” he wrote in an updated edition of his book “Presidential Leadership in Political Time,” “but we have seen this movie before, and it has always ended the same way.”Skowronek doesn’t present his theory as a skeleton key to history. It’s a way of understanding historical dynamics, not predicting the future. Still, if Trump represented the last gasps of Reaganism instead of the birth of something new, then after him, Skowronek suggests, a fresh regime could begin.When Joe Biden became the Democratic nominee, it seemed that the coming of a new era had been delayed. Reconstructive leaders, in Skowronek’s formulation, repudiate the doctrines of an establishment that no longer has answers for the existential challenges the country faces. Biden, Skowronek told me, is “a guy who’s made his way up through establishment Democratic politics.” Nothing about him seemed trailblazing.Yet as Biden’s administration begins, there are signs that a new politics is coalescing. When, in his inauguration speech, Biden touted “unity,” he framed it as a national rejection of the dark forces unleashed by his discredited predecessor, not stale Gang of Eight bipartisanship. He takes power at a time when what was once conventional wisdom about deficits, inflation and the proper size of government has fallen apart. That means Biden, who has been in national office since before Reagan’s presidency, has the potential to be our first truly post-Reagan president.“Biden has a huge opportunity to finally get our nation past the Reagan narrative that has still lingered,” said Representative Ro Khanna, who was a national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. “And the opportunity is to show that government, by getting the shots in every person’s arm of the vaccines, and building infrastructure, and helping working families, is going to be a force for good.” More

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      Democrats Prepare to Move on Economic Aid, With or Without the G.O.P.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The New WashingtonliveLatest UpdatesBiden’s Climate AmbitionsBiden’s CabinetPandemic ResponseAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDemocrats Prepare to Move on Economic Aid, With or Without the G.O.P.President Biden is trying to persuade Republicans to back a $1.9 trillion spending package, but Democrats are pursuing another path to get the relief approved without bipartisan support.“We want it to be bipartisan always, but we can’t surrender if they are not going to be doing that,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesJim Tankersley and Jan. 28, 2021Updated 7:19 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Democrats are preparing to bypass Republican objections to speed President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic aid package through Congress, rather than pare it back significantly to attract Republican votes, even as administration officials and congressional moderates hold out hopes of passing a bill with significant bipartisan support.On a day when new data from the Commerce Department showed that the economic recovery decelerated at the end of last year, Democratic leaders in Congress and administration officials said publicly and privately on Thursday that they were committed to a large-scale relief bill and would move next week to start a process that would allow it to pass with only Democratic votes, if necessary. Behind closed doors, congressional committees are already writing legislative text to turn Mr. Biden’s plans into law.Party leaders remain hopeful that Mr. Biden can sign his so-called American Rescue Plan into law by mid-March at the latest, even with the competing demands of a Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald J. Trump, which is set to begin the week of Feb. 8.“We want it to be bipartisan always, but we can’t surrender if they are not going to be doing that,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said at a news conference on Capitol Hill. “I do think that we have more leverage getting cooperation on the other side if they know we have an alternative as well,” she added.Officials across the administration are engaged in a whirlwind series of virtual conversations with key lawmakers, governors, mayors, civil rights leaders and a wide range of lobbying groups in an effort to build as much support as possible for the aid package. It includes $1,400 checks to many individual Americans, extensions of supplemental safety net benefits through the fall, and hundreds of billions of dollars for vaccine deployment and other efforts to curb the coronavirus pandemic.Yet there are early signs that Mr. Biden will need to at least partially trim his ambitions in order to secure even the full support of his party in the Senate — which he almost certainly needs to pass any bill.Some moderate Democrats have joined many Republicans in pushing the administration to narrow the scope of recipients for the direct checks to more directly target low- and middle-income Americans. Such a move would shave hundreds of billions of dollars off the proposal’s overall price tag. Officials privately concede that they would consider reducing the income threshold at which the size of the checks would begin phasing out for individuals and families.Mr. Biden did not announce thresholds for the checks in his proposal, but in December congressional Democrats proposed $2,000 individual checks that would slowly begin phasing out for those earning more than $75,000 a year — and allow some families earning as much as $430,000 a year to receive smaller payments.On a private caucus call with Senate Democrats and Brian Deese, the director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council, Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia pushed for the party to go forward with a sweeping package that included another round of stimulus checks, arguing that the issue helped Democrats win both of the state’s Senate seats and clinch the majority, according to two people familiar with the comments. Mr. Ossoff declined to comment on the call because it was private.Some moderate lawmakers have also pushed the administration to justify the need for nearly $2 trillion in additional relief, warning that money already approved by Congress in previous rounds of aid — including in the $900 billion package passed in December — has not yet been spent. Some Democrats also fear Mr. Biden would be forced by parliamentary rules to drop his call for a $15-an-hour minimum wage if the bill circumvented the filibuster via the so-called budget reconciliation process, though it is unclear whether Mr. Biden could get the votes for it even if it were, as some Democrats believe, eligible for inclusion.Mr. Biden has said repeatedly that he will work with Republicans to craft a bill that could earn bipartisan support, and moderate Republicans have warned that cutting their party out of the process would undermine Mr. Biden’s calls for unity and jeopardize future attempts at negotiations.But White House officials said on Thursday that Democrats could move quickly without sacrificing bipartisanship.The New WashingtonLive UpdatesUpdated Jan. 28, 2021, 8:32 p.m. ETMatt Gaetz rallied against Liz Cheney in her own state.Representative Jim Jordan, a Trump loyalist, has decided not to run for an open Senate seat.Acting Capitol Police chief calls for permanent fencing and backup forces in wake of assault.“The president wants this to be a bipartisan package, regardless of the mechanisms,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters. “Republicans can still vote for a package, even if it goes through with reconciliation.”Mr. Biden recently called two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Rob Portman of Ohio, who are members of a bipartisan group intent on bridging the gap between the two parties. Ms. Psaki said the president would make more calls to Republicans and Democrats this week.Senator Rob Portman is among the Republican lawmakers whom President Biden called to try to bridge the gap between the two parties.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“He hasn’t called me — he’s calling them and that’s good,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, told reporters. “I’m not being critical at all. But, you know, I think there’s been direct personal outreach by the president to these Republicans in the hopes that we can do this on a bipartisan basis.”But several Republicans, including those in the bipartisan group who have professed a willingness to negotiate a small package, warned that pursuing the reconciliation process and bypassing their conference would hurt relations. (When Republicans controlled both chambers and the White House in 2017, they used the process twice.)“Covid relief presents the best avenue for bipartisanship right out of the gate,” said Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia and a member of the bipartisan group. Ramming a bill through reconciliation, she added, “is a signal to every Republican that your ideas don’t matter, and I think — does that end it? No, but it certainly puts a color on it.”Administration officials have shown little willingness to push a significantly smaller bill than Mr. Biden has proposed. They worry privately that moving a package that includes only the provisions most likely to gain Republican support — the direct checks and money for vaccines — would risk stranding other elements of the plan they call critical for the recovery, like hundreds of billions of dollars in state and local aid.Mr. Deese pushed back on such suggestions during the call with Democrats and in a post on Twitter. “The needs of the American people aren’t partial; we can’t do this piecemeal,” he wrote.Many Democrats say privately that they see little hope of attracting the 10 Republican votes they would need to overcome a filibuster and avoid using the budget reconciliation process to advance the bill unless they significantly scale back Mr. Biden’s ambitions. Haunted by what Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, referred to as the “mistake” of 2009, when the Democratic Party was in control of both chambers and the White House but was “too timid and constrained in its response to the global financial crisis,” top Democrats are pushing to avoid settling for a small package.“If our Republican colleagues decide to oppose this urgent and necessary legislation, we will have to move forward without them,” Mr. Schumer said, adding that he planned to press ahead with a budget resolution as early as next week. The effort is complicated by Democrats’ tenuous grip on power in the Senate, which is split 50-50 but where Vice President Kamala Harris can break ties in her party’s favor. Those numbers give enormous sway to the most conservative members of the Democratic caucus, including Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana. Any one of them could balk at the size of Mr. Biden’s demands and force a smaller package.Mr. Tester hinted at such possibilities on Thursday, in a nomination hearing for Cecilia Rouse, Mr. Biden’s pick to lead the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He raised concerns about federal borrowing and repeatedly pressed Ms. Rouse to commit to “targeted” spending programs to lift the economy.“They need to be targeted,” Ms. Rouse replied. “They need to be smart. They need to be in those areas where we know the economic benefit outweighs the cost.”Administration officials are juggling the rescue package with a broader proposal, which Mr. Biden refers to as a recovery plan, that would spend trillions more on infrastructure improvements, clean energy deployment and a series of other initiatives rooted in Mr. Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda from the presidential campaign. That plan will be financed, all or in part, by tax increases on corporations and high earners. Mr. Biden has promised to detail it publicly next month.Nicholas Fandos More