Presidential Election of 2020

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      Election Day Guide: Governor Races, Abortion Access and More

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      Two governorships are at stake in the South, while Ohio voters will decide whether to enshrine the right to an abortion in the state constitution.Election Day is nearly here, and while off-year political races receive a fraction of the attention compared with presidential elections, some of Tuesday’s contests will be intensely watched.At stake are two southern governorships, control of the Virginia General Assembly and abortion access in Ohio. National Democrats and Republicans, seeking to build momentum moving toward next November, will be eyeing those results for signals about 2024.Here are the major contests voters will decide on Tuesday and a key ballot question:Governor of KentuckyGov. Andy Beshear, left, a Democrat, is facing Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s Republican attorney general, in his campaign for re-election as governor.Pool photo by Kentucky Educational TelevisionGov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, is seeking to again defy convention in deep-red Kentucky, a state carried handily by Donald J. Trump in 2020.He is facing Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s attorney general, who was propelled to victory by an early endorsement from Mr. Trump in a competitive Republican primary in May.In 2019, Mr. Cameron became the first Black person to be elected as Kentucky’s attorney general, an office previously held by Mr. Beshear. He drew attention in 2020 when he announced that a grand jury did not indict two Louisville officers who shot Breonna Taylor.In the 2019 governor’s race, Mr. Beshear ousted Matt Bevin, a Trump-backed Republican, by fewer than 6,000 votes. This year, he enters the race with a strong job approval rating. He is seeking to replicate a political feat of his father, Steve Beshear, who was also Kentucky governor and was elected to two terms.Governor of Mississippi Brandon Presley, a public service commissioner who is related to Elvis Presley, wants to be the state’s first Democratic governor in two decades.Emily Kask for The New York TimesGov. Tate Reeves, a Republican in his first term, has some of the lowest job approval numbers of the nation’s governors.Rogelio V. Solis/Associated PressIt has been two decades since Mississippi had a Democrat as governor. Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican in his first term, is seeking to avoid becoming the one who ends that streak.But his job approval numbers are among the lowest of the nation’s governors, which has emboldened his Democratic challenger, Brandon Presley, a public service commissioner with a famous last name: His second cousin, once removed, was Elvis Presley.Mr. Presley has attacked Mr. Reeves over a welfare scandal exposed last year by Mississippi Today, which found that millions in federal funds were misspent. Mr. Reeves, who was the lieutenant governor during the years the scandal unfolded, has denied any wrongdoing, but the issue has been a focal point of the contest.Abortion access in OhioAs states continue to reckon with the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court last year, Ohio has become the latest front in the fight over access to abortion.Reproductive rights advocates succeeded in placing a proposed amendment on the November ballot that would enshrine the right to abortion access into the state constitution. Its supporters have sought to fill the void that was created by the Roe decision.Anti-abortion groups have mounted a sweeping campaign to stop the measure. One effort, a proposal to raise the threshold required for passing a constitutional amendment, was rejected by voters this summer.Virginia legislatureIn just two states won by President Biden in 2020, Republicans have a power monopoly — and in Virginia, they are aiming to secure a third. The others are Georgia and New Hampshire.Democrats narrowly control the Virginia Senate, where all 40 seats are up for grabs in the election. Republicans hold a slim majority in the House of Delegates, which is also being contested.The outcome of the election is being viewed as a potential reflection of the clout of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican with national ambitions.Philadelphia mayorAn open-seat race for mayor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s foremost Democratic bastion, is down to two former City Council members: Cherelle Parker, a Democrat, and David Oh, a Republican.The advantage for Ms. Parker appears to be an overwhelming one in the city, which has not elected a Republican as mayor since 1947.It has also been two decades since Philadelphia, the nation’s sixth most populous city, had a somewhat competitive mayoral race. More

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      Some of the Lawyers Who May Fill a Second Trump Administration

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      Donald Trump’s allies are hoping to install a different species of legal gatekeeper throughout the federal government. Here are some of the potential prospects.Election Day is a year away, but key allies of former President Donald J. Trump are already thinking about staffing a potential administration, including by filling White House and agency legal positions with aggressive and ideologically like-minded lawyers.Trump allies are preparing to populate a new administration with a different breed of lawyer — a departure from the type that stymied part of his first-term agenda and that despite their mainstream conservative credentials are seen as too cautious by people close to the former president. They are seeking lawyers in federal agencies and in the White House committed to his “America First” ideology and willing to use edgy theories to advance his cause.It is too early to say with any certainty whom Mr. Trump would select were he to win a second term starting in 2025. But several conservative nonprofits, staffed by people who are likely to take on senior White House positions if there is a second Trump administration, have been putting together lists of prospects.At Project 2025, a well-funded effort by the Heritage Foundation to prepare personnel and policy for the next conservative administration, John McEntee, one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted aides, is part of a team searching for potential lawyers.A person familiar with the Heritage 2025 project said it was listing multiple options for every position. Some of the names under early and unofficial consideration are:Joseph E. Schmitz as the Pentagon’s top lawyer. A Bush-era Pentagon inspector general, he argued after the 2020 election that the Supreme Court or the vice president, Mike Pence, should intervene to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss.Joseph E. Schmitz in 2004.Jamie-Andrea Yanak/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Supreme Court Weighs When Officials May Block Citizens on Social Media

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      The justices struggled to distinguish private conduct, which is not subject to the First Amendment, from state action, which is.The Supreme Court worked hard in a pair of arguments on Tuesday to find a clear constitutional line separating elected officials’ purely private social media accounts from ones that reflect government actions and are subject to the First Amendment. After three hours, though, it was not clear that a majority of the justices had settled on a clear test.The question in the two cases was when the Constitution limits officials’ ability to block users from their accounts. The answer turned on whether the officials’ use of the accounts amounted to “state action,” which is governed by the First Amendment, or private activity, which is not.That same question had seemed headed to the Supreme Court after the federal appeals court in New York ruled in 2019 that President Donald J. Trump’s Twitter account was a public forum from which he was powerless to exclude people based on their viewpoints.Had the account been private, the court said, Mr. Trump could have blocked whomever he wanted. But since he used the account as a government official, he was subject to the First Amendment.After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election, the Supreme Court vacated the appeals court’s ruling as moot.Justice Elena Kagan said on Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed was in an important sense official and therefore subject to the First Amendment.“I don’t think a citizen would be able to really understand the Trump presidency, if you will, without any access to all the things that the president said on that account,” Justice Kagan said. “It was an important part of how he wielded his authority. And to cut a citizen off from that is to cut a citizen off from part of the way that government works.”Hashim M. Mooppan, a lawyer for two school board officials, said none of that implicated the First Amendment.“President Trump could have done the same thing from Mar-a-Lago or a campaign rally,” Mr. Mooppan said. “If he gave every one of those speeches at his personal residence, it wouldn’t somehow convert his residence into government property.”The cases argued Tuesday were the first of several this term in which the Supreme Court will consider how the First Amendment applies to social media companies. The court will hear arguments next year on both whether states may prohibit large social media companies from removing posts based on the views they express and whether Biden administration officials may contact social media platforms to combat what they say is misinformation.The first case argued Tuesday concerned the Facebook and Twitter accounts of two members of the Poway Unified School District in California, Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff and T.J. Zane. They used the accounts, created during their campaigns, to communicate with their constituents about activities of the school board, invite them to public meetings, ask for comments on the board’s activities and discuss safety issues in the schools.Two parents, Christopher and Kimberly Garnier, frequently posted lengthy and repetitive critical comments, and the officials eventually blocked them. The parents sued, and lower courts ruled in their favor.“When state actors enter that virtual world and invoke their government status to create a forum for such expression, the First Amendment enters with them,” Judge Marsha S. Berzon wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco.Mr. Mooppan said the accounts were personal and were created and maintained without any involvement by the district.Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh pressed Mr. Mooppan on what it would take to make the accounts official and so subject to the First Amendment. “Is announcing rules state action?” the justice asked.Mr. Mooppan said it would be if the announcement was not available elsewhere. He gave a more equivocal answer to a question about notifications of school closures. But he said a general public safety reminder was not state action.Pamela S. Karlan, a lawyer for the parents, said Ms. O’Connor-Ratcliff’s Facebook feed was almost entirely official. “Of the hundreds of posts, I found only three that were truly non-job-related,” Ms. Karlan said, adding, “I defy anyone to look at that and think this wasn’t an official website.”The second case, Lindke v. Freed, No. 22-611, concerned a Facebook account maintained by James R. Freed, the city manager of Port Huron, Mich. He used it to comment on a variety of subjects, some personal and some official. Among the latter were descriptions of the city’s responses to the coronavirus pandemic.The posts prompted critical responses from a resident, Kevin Lindke, whom Mr. Freed eventually blocked. Mr. Lindke sued and lost. Judge Amul R. Thapar, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said Mr. Freed’s Facebook account was personal, meaning that the First Amendment had no role to play.“Freed did not operate his page to fulfill any actual or apparent duty of his office,” Judge Thapar wrote. “And he did not use his governmental authority to maintain it. Thus, he was acting in his personal capacity — and there was no state action.”Justice Kagan told Allon Kedem, a lawyer for Mr. Lindke, that Mr. Freed’s page did not look particularly official.“There are a lot of baby pictures and dog pictures and obviously personal stuff,” she said. “And intermingled with that there is, as you say, communication with constituents about important matters. But it’s hard to look at this page as a whole, unlike the one in the last case, and not think that surely this could not be the official communications channel.” More

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      Jenna Ellis Could Become a Star Witness Against Trump

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      When Jenna Ellis last week became the most recent lawyer to join in an accelerating series of guilty pleas in the Fulton County, Ga., prosecution of Donald Trump and his co-conspirators, she offered a powerful repudiation of the “Big Lie” that could potentially cut the legs out from under Donald Trump’s defense, make her a star witness for prosecutors and a potent weapon against the former president’s political ambitions.Ms. Ellis admitted that the allegations of election fraud she peddled as an advocate for the effort to overturn the 2020 election were false. Two other plea deals, from Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell, have been important, but Ms. Ellis is in a unique position to aid prosecutors in the Georgia case and possibly even the parallel federal one — as well as Mr. Trump’s opponents in the court of public opinion.Ms. Ellis pleaded guilty to a felony count of aiding and abetting the false statements made by co-defendants (including Rudy Giuliani) to the Georgia Senate about supposed voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election. These included that “10,315 or more dead people voted” in Georgia, “at least 96,000 mail-in ballots were counted” erroneously and “2,506 felons voted illegally.”These lies were at the cutting edge of Mr. Trump’s assault on the election. Both the state and federal criminal prosecutions allege that Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators knowingly deployed falsehoods like these in their schemes to overturn the election.Ms. Ellis emerged from her plea hearing as a likely star witness for prosecutors, starting with the one who secured her cooperation, the Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis. Unlike Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell, in pleading guilty Ms. Ellis spoke in detail about her “responsibilities as a lawyer.” Tearing up, she talked about the due diligence that “I did not do but should have done” and her “deep remorse for those failures of mine.” The judge, a tough former prosecutor, thanked her for sharing that and noted how unusual it was for a defendant to do so.Trials are about the evidence and the law. But they are also theater, and the jury is the audience. In this case, the jury is not the only audience — the Georgia trials will be televised, so many Americans will also be tuned in. Ms. Ellis is poised to be a potent weapon against Mr. Trump in the courtroom and on TVs.That is bad news for her former co-defendants — above all, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Trump. Ms. Ellis was most closely associated with Mr. Giuliani, appearing by his side in Georgia and across the country. If her court appearance last week is any indication, she will be a compelling guide to his alleged misconduct. She will also add to what is known about it; she and Mr. Giuliani undoubtedly had many conversations that are not yet public and that will inform the jury. And because Mr. Giuliani was the senior lawyer on the case, her pointed statement that she was misled by attorneys “with many more years of experience” hits him directly.Ms. Ellis’s likely trial testimony will also hit Mr. Trump hard. She has now effectively repudiated his claims that he won the election — an argument that is expected to be a centerpiece of his trial defense. Coming from a formerly outspoken MAGA champion, her disagreement has the potential to resonate with jurors.It also builds on substantial other evidence against the former president, which includes voluminous witness testimony collected by the House Jan. 6 committee indicating that many advisers told him the election was not stolen — and that in private he repeatedly admitted as much.Ms. Ellis’s testimony may also compromise one of Mr. Trump’s main defenses. He has made clear he intends to claim he relied on advice of counsel. But that defense is available only if the lawyers are not part of the alleged crimes. Ms. Ellis’s plea puts her squarely within the conspiracy, as do those of Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell. That will hamper Mr. Trump’s effort to present a reliance-on-counsel defense.In comparing Ms. Ellis to the two other lawyers who pleaded guilty, it is also critical to note that she is promising full cooperation with Ms. Willis. Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell have important contributions to make to the prosecution, but they merely agreed to provide documents, preview their testimony and testify truthfully if called.Ms. Ellis took the additional step of also agreeing “to fully cooperate with prosecutors,” which could include doing interviews with prosecutors, “appearing for evidentiary hearings, and assisting in pretrial matters.”To our knowledge, Ms. Ellis is not yet cooperating with prosecutors in the federal case led by the special counsel Jack Smith, but if she does, she would have a comparative advantage for the prosecution over Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell: They are identified as unindicted co-conspirators in that case and would be more problematic for Mr. Smith to deal with. He may not, for example, be willing to immunize them should they assert their privilege against self-incrimination, since that would hamper prosecuting them. But because he has not named Ms. Ellis among Mr. Trump’s alleged federal co-conspirators, he may feel more free to extend immunity to secure her valuable testimony. (He has reportedly done just that with Mark Meadows, a former Trump White House chief of staff.)Ms. Ellis’s guilty plea may also have political reverberations. It is riveting to see a MAGA champion who helped lead the election assault tearfully admitting she and that effort misled the American people. Her court appearance was live-streamed and repeated in a loop on television and social media.Looking ahead in the Georgia case, the judge just got back the five months that he had set aside for the Chesebro and Powell trial. Even if Mr. Trump manages to postpone appearing before a Georgia jury during that window, the trial of other defendants could begin within it — and certainly during 2024. That means Ms. Ellis and other existing and potential witnesses against Mr. Trump will likely be critical not only in the legal arena, but the political one.With Mr. Trump showing no signs of backing down from his claims of 2020 election fraud and a new election upon us, Ms. Ellis’s plea — like the televised Jan. 6 committee testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, another Trump insider who turned on him with powerful effect — could be a potential turning point in the court of public opinion. When Mr. Trump’s lies are repeated in the future, in whatever venue, expect to see Ms. Ellis often.Norman Eisen was special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. Amy Lee Copeland, a former federal prosecutor, is a criminal defense and appellate lawyer in Savannah, Ga.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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      Mike Pence Drops Out of 2024 Presidential Race

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      The former vice president said he would end his bid in a surprise announcement at a gathering of Jewish Republican donors. “It’s become clear to me that this is not my time,” he said.Former Vice President Mike Pence, who spent four years dutifully serving President Donald J. Trump but refused to carry out Mr. Trump’s demand that he block the 2020 election results, ended his presidential bid on Saturday, with a final appeal for his party to return to conservative principles and resist the “siren song of populism.”The surprise announcement came at the end of his remarks before a crowd of Jewish Republican donors in Las Vegas, and was met with gasps. Mr. Pence had received a standing ovation, opening his speech with a full-throated endorsement of Israel’s military operations in Gaza.Then he pivoted to a more “personal note,” saying that after much prayer and deliberation, he had decided to drop out of the race.“It’s become clear to me that this is not my time,” he told the crowd of 1,500, promising to “never leave the fight for conservative values.”Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations and a crowd favorite, opened her address to the group with praise for Mr. Pence, adding several lines to her prepared remarks.“He’s been a good man of faith. He’s been a good man of service. He has fought for America and he has fought for Israel,” she said. “We all owe him a debt of gratitude.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      Mike Johnson Is a Right-Wing Fever Dream Come to Life

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      Last week, on the eve of his first attempt to become speaker of the House, allies of Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio confidently predicted that his more mainstream and institutionalist opponents would cave rather than resist his ascent.Jordan’s allies were wrong about that particular caving. But they were right that those same moderates and institutionalists would eventually fall in line with the far-right of the House Republican conference because, on Wednesday, they did just that.After three weeks of chaos, the House Republican majority finally chose a speaker. The lucky legislator? Representative Mike Johnson from Louisiana’s Fourth Congressional District. A four-term backbencher with little leadership experience, Johnson was too obscure to have enemies, giving him an easy ride to the top after three previous nominees — Steve Scalise, the House majority leader; Jordan, the first chairman of the House Freedom Caucus; and Tom Emmer, the House majority whip — faltered in the face of opposition. After winning a nearly unanimous vote of the House Republican majority (one member was absent), Johnson became the 56th speaker of the House of Representatives.Mike Johnson is neither a moderate nor an institutionalist. Just the opposite. A protégé of Jordan’s, he comes, as you have doubtless heard, from the far-right, anti-institutionalist wing of the congressional Republican Party. And while he was not a member of the Freedom Caucus, he did lead the Republican Study Committee, a group devoted to the proposition that any dollar spent on social insurance is a dollar too much.When push came to shove, in other words, the supposedly moderate members of the House Republican conference were happy to defer to their most extreme colleagues on substance, if not on style.And what does Johnson believe? He is staunchly against the bodily autonomy of women and transgender people and supports a nationwide ban on abortion and gender-affirming care for trans youth. He is also virulently anti-gay. In a 2003 essay, Johnson defended laws that criminalized homosexual activity between consenting adults. In 2004, he warned that same-sex marriage was a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.” Last year, Johnson introduced legislation that has been compared to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, and he continues to push to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.If Johnson is known for anything, however, it is for his tireless advocacy on behalf of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.Johnson wrote one of the briefs purporting to give a legal justification for throwing out the voting results in several swing states. He advanced the conspiracy theory that Venezuela was somehow involved with the nation’s voting machines. On Jan. 6, 2021, he urged his Republican colleagues to block certification of the election on the grounds that state changes to voting in the face of the pandemic were illegitimate and unconstitutional. When questioned, during his first news conference as speaker, whether he stood by his effort to overturn the 2020 election, he ignored the question, and his fellow Republicans shouted down the reporter who asked it.The new speaker is, in short, an election-denying extremist who believes that his allies have the right to nullify election results so that they can impose their vision of government and society on an unwilling public. He is Jim Jordan in substance but not Jim Jordan in style, which was enough for Republicans to come together to make him leader of the House and second in line to succeed the president of the United States in the case of emergency.The fractious House Republican majority cannot agree on how to fund the government. It cannot agree on whether to fund the government. It cannot agree on the scope of federal spending. It cannot even agree on whether it should do anything to govern the nation. But it can agree, it seems, to hand the reins of power to someone who showed no hesitation when asked to help overturn American democracy.During the summer of 2012, President Barack Obama told supporters that if he won the White House again, it would “break the fever” among Republicans. Instead, after Mitt Romney lost to Obama, the party embraced the worst version of itself and nominated Trump in 2016 and 2020. After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he expressed his hope that this time, with Trump’s departure from power, the Republican fever would finally break. Instead, the Republican Party went even deeper into the hole, hailing the former president’s failed attempt to keep himself in office as another lost cause and defending his leadership again and again.It’s not that the fever won’t break. It’s that there is no fever to break. The far-right extremism and open contempt for democracy that marks much of modern Republicanism is not an aberration. It’s not a spell that might fade with time. It is the Republican Party of 2023 and it will be the Republican Party of 2024. And while Trump may, for either legal or political reasons, eventually leave the scene, there’s no reason to think the Republican Party will revert to a state where the Mike Johnsons are back on the sidelines.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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      Trump’s Lawyers Should Have Known Better

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      At a pivotal moment during one of the Watergate hearings in 1973, President Richard Nixon’s counsel, John Dean, asked a question that still resonates: “How in God’s name could so many lawyers get involved in something like this?”In the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation, the issue posed by Mr. Dean’s bracing question triggered a revolution in the legal profession. With so many lawyers involved in the Watergate criminal scheme, the American Bar Association started requiring law schools to provide ethics instruction or risk losing their accreditation. Exams began testing law students’ knowledge of intricate ethical rules.It wasn’t enough, if the past few weeks are any guide. In Fulton County, Ga., three of former President Donald Trump’s lawyers — Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis — have now pleaded guilty to crimes in service of Mr. Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election and stay in the White House. All three have agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in the sprawling state RICO case against Mr. Trump. Two other Trump lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, still face criminal charges in the Georgia case. They, along with Mr. Chesebro and Ms. Powell, have also been identified as unindicted co-conspirators in the related federal prosecution of Mr. Trump, which will probably benefit from the guilty pleas in Georgia.The charges in the plea agreements vary, but the underlying story is the same: Fifty years after Watergate, the nation is once again confronted with a president who grossly abused the powers of his office, leading to criminal prosecutions. And once again, that abuse relied heavily on the involvement of lawyers. If Mr. Trump’s 2020 racket was “a coup in search of a legal theory,” as one federal judge put it, these lawyers provided the theory, and the phony facts to back it up. In doing so, they severely tarnished their profession.How in God’s name? The question is no less urgent now than in 1973. Lawyers hold immense power within the American system of government, which depends on their expertise, and their integrity, to function. Those who abuse this power pose an even greater threat to the country than some random Capitol rioter, because we count on them not only to draft and execute the laws but to follow them — to lead by example. Everyone should behave ethically, of course, but despite the “Better-Call-Saul” reputation of so many lawyers, there’s nothing wrong with holding the profession to a higher standard.One can view the guilty pleas by the Trump lawyers as evidence that the system is working as it should. They broke the law, they violated their ethical obligations, and now they are facing the music — not only in the courts, but from their chosen profession. Mr. Giuliani’s New York law license was suspended for his “demonstrably false and misleading statements” on Mr. Trump’s behalf; the District of Columbia’s bar association has recommended he lose his license there for good. Ms. Ellis was censured by Colorado state bar officials for violating the rule against “reckless, knowing, or intentional misrepresentations by attorneys,” and may face more severe consequences in light of her guilty plea.Mr. Eastman, a former law-school dean and one of the key legal architects of Mr. Trump’s bonkers plot to stay in office, is in the final days of his California disbarment trial for ethical violations. Officials there have argued that his conduct was “fundamentally dishonest and intended to obstruct the lawful certification” of President Biden’s victory.All of this is to the good. Careers are rightly ruined over such behavior. It is also the exception to the rule. In the real world, lawyers rarely face any consequences for their legal or ethical transgressions.“It’s a club,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal-ethics expert at New York University School of Law who has studied the profession’s opaque and feckless disciplinary system. “The judges who make the decisions are lawyers in robes. They tend to be sympathetic to the other lawyer.”And it’s hard to gloss over the fact that a disturbing number of experienced attorneys, some of whom once held prestigious posts in government and academia, were willing and eager to tell transparent lies and concoct laughable legal arguments to help a con man stay in the White House against the will of the American people.“Part of the reason Trump had to resort to attorneys to attempt the overthrow of the election was because the military was not available to him,” Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. Recalling the notorious Dec. 18, 2020, Oval Office meeting, during which the former president openly contemplated ordering the armed forces to seize voting machines, Mr. Eisen said, “It’s a testament to our military leaders, to our military culture, that that door was closed.”The same cannot be said, alas, for America’s legal culture. It’s easy enough to understand why Mr. Trump, who was mentored by the ruthless mob lawyer Roy Cohn, would seek out lawyers who were willing to do whatever he asked, legality and ethics be damned. The more troubling question is how he was able to find so many takers.The obvious answer is the eternal seduction of money and power. Laurence Tribe, one of the nation’s foremost constitutional scholars, fell back on that explanation for the choices made by Mr. Chesebro, his former student, referring to him as a “moral chameleon” who was engaged in deeply dishonest lawyering.Related to this is the intense pressure to satisfy the demands of powerful clients, even if it means bringing lawsuits so frivolous that they can result in legal sanctions, as many of Mr. Trump’s lawyers have learned the hard way.There is an important caveat here: Many government and private lawyers in 2020, faced with Mr. Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional demands, resisted the temptation and behaved honorably. From the White House counsel’s office to the Justice Department to top law firms, some key attorneys held the line.“What was one of the determinative factors in Trump’s coup failing?” asked Ian Bassin, executive director of the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “Responsible lawyers refused to participate.”That explains why many of the lawyers caught up in Mr. Trump’s outrageous plot were not what you might call the cream of the crop. They were grifters, shysters, hair-dye-leakers, tapped primarily because Mr. Trump had trouble finding more serious people to make his case. And yet there were still those with more respectable backgrounds, like Mr. Chesebro, who chose to sell their honor to a man devoid of it, and who they should have known wasn’t going to pay them anyway. In the end, they were all smeared with the humiliation of having filed meritless, fact-free cases. With one minor exception, federal and state courts rejected every lawsuit brought on behalf of Mr. Trump.To a degree many people didn’t fully realize until the past few years, the functioning of American government depends on honor. “There are no guarantees in a democracy,” Mr. Eisen said. “Our rule of law is a central part of what defines our democratic system. Ultimately it comes down to whether the majority of people will do the right thing.”When it comes to lawyers, the choices of just a few can make all the difference.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The G.O.P. Goes Full-on Extremist

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      There are no moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives.Oh, no doubt some members are privately appalled by the views of Mike Johnson, the new speaker. But what they think in the privacy of their own minds isn’t important. What matters is what they do — and every single one of them went along with the selection of a radical extremist.In fact, Johnson is more extreme than most people, I think even political reporters, fully realize.Much of the reporting on Johnson has, understandably, focused on his role in the efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Let me say, by the way, that the widely used term “election denial” is a euphemism that softens and blurs what we’re really talking about. Trying to keep your party in power after it lost a free and fair election, without a shred of evidence of significant fraud, isn’t just denial; it’s a betrayal of democracy.There has also been considerable coverage of Johnson’s right-wing social views, but I’m not sure how many people grasp the depth of his intolerance. Johnson isn’t just someone who wants to legalize discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. Americans and ban gay marriage; he’s on record as defending the criminalization of gay sex.But Johnson’s extremism, and that of the party that chose him, goes beyond rejecting democracy and trying to turn back the clock on decades of social progress. He has also espoused a startlingly reactionary economic agenda.Until his sudden elevation to speaker, Johnson was a relatively little-known figure. But he did serve for a time as chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group that devises policy proposals. And now that Johnson has become the face of his party, people really should look at the budget proposal the committee released for 2020 under his chairmanship.For if you read that proposal carefully, getting past the often mealy-mouthed language, you realize that it calls for the evisceration of the U.S. social safety net — not just programs for the poor, but also policies that form the bedrock of financial stability for the American middle class.Start with Social Security, where the budget calls for raising the retirement age — already set to rise to 67 — to 69 or 70, with possible further increases as life expectancy rises.On the surface, this might sound plausible. Until Covid produced a huge drop, average U.S. life expectancy at age 65 was steadily rising over time. But there is a huge and growing gap between the number of years affluent Americans can expect to live and life expectancy for lower-income groups, including not just the poor but also much of the working class. So raising the retirement age would fall hard on less fortunate Americans — precisely the people who depend most on Social Security.Then there’s Medicare, for which the budget proposes increasing the eligibility age “so it is aligned with the normal retirement age for Social Security and then indexing this age to life expectancy.” Translation: Raise the Medicare age from 65 to 70, then keep raising it.Wait, there’s more. Most nonelderly Americans receive health insurance through their employers. But this system depends greatly on policies that the study committee proposed eliminating. You see, benefits don’t count as taxable income — but in order to maintain this tax advantage, companies (roughly speaking) must cover all their employees, as opposed to offering benefits only to highly compensated individuals.The committee budget would eliminate this incentive for broad coverage by limiting the tax deduction for employer benefits and offering the same deduction for insurance purchased by individuals. As a result, some employers would probably just give their top earners cash, which they could use to buy expensive individual plans, while dropping coverage for the rest of their workers.Oh, and it goes almost without saying that the budget would impose savage cuts — $3 trillion over a decade — on Medicaid, children’s health coverage and subsidies that help lower-income Americans afford insurance under the Affordable Care Act.How many Americans would lose health insurance under these proposals? Back in 2017 the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Donald Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare would cause 23 million Americans to lose coverage. The Republican Study Committee’s proposals are far more draconian and far-reaching, so the losses would presumably be much bigger.So Mike Johnson is on record advocating policies on retirement, health care and other areas I don’t have space to get into, like food stamps, that would basically end American society as we know it. We would become a vastly crueler and less secure nation, with far more sheer misery.I think it’s safe to say that these proposals would be hugely unpopular — if voters knew about them. But will they?Actually, I’d like to see some focus groups asking what Americans think of Johnson’s policy positions. Here’s my guess, based on previous experience: Many voters will simply refuse to believe that prominent Republicans, let alone the speaker of the House, are really advocating such terrible things.But they are and he is. The G.O.P. has gone full-on extremist, on economic as well as social issues. The question now is whether the American public will notice.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