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      The Republican Party Has Devolved Into a Racket

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      This is the Republican Party today. In the House, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, trying to corral a fractious majority, has ordered an impeachment inquiry into President Biden over his son’s financial entanglements, even as elements in his caucus push to shut down the government unless there are drastic cuts in spending. In the Senate, Mitt Romney announced his plan to retire, having declared to his biographer that “a very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”In Wisconsin and North Carolina, G.O.P. legislators push the envelope of hardball tactics to remove or disempower Democrats in other branches of government. And in the presidential campaign, Republican contenders struggle to make the case for a non-Trump candidacy without antagonizing Donald Trump’s many supporters, and often avoid major spheres of public policy.Together these depict a party that is preoccupied with antics that crash into the guardrails of American political life and conspicuously lacks a coherent, forward-looking vision for governing. A modern political party has devolved into a racket.The country needs a right-of-center party. But today, as the G.O.P. has lost a collective commitment to solving the nation’s problems and become purposeless, the line separating party politics from political conspiracy has frayed. Mr. Trump, in this way, is the product more than the author of that collective party failure.The Georgia election case against Mr. Trump and 18 others makes for a particularly powerful X-ray of the party. The sheer array and specific identities of those indicted in the case highlights how easily a conspiracist approach to political life, unconstrained by a party now incapable of policing boundaries or channeling passions into a larger purpose beyond raw hardball, can justify and compel illicit machinations.The defendants in the Georgia case represent every major component of what scholars term a modern “party network”: formal party organizations at the state and local level (like the former Georgia party chairman David Shafer), informal activist and interest groups (like John Eastman of the Claremont Institute) and candidate-centered operations (like Harrison Floyd of Black Voices for Trump).Beyond those indicted, the broader party work of evasion and deflection contributes to the conspiracy. The posture’s stock-in-trade is an “anti-anti” discourse, which focuses on excoriating foes rather than making explicit defenses of behavior or positive arguments about plans for the country. As Senator Romney described the dynamic among his colleagues, “These guys have got to justify their silence, at least to themselves.” A conservative media ecosystem, including Fox News, helps enable a politics of performative antics and profits handsomely from it.The Trump-focused personalism that has defined Republican politics since 2015 is more a symptom than the cause of the party’s pathology. Indeed, the combined conspiracy of insider electoral malfeasance and outsider “anti-anti” attacks says less about how spellbound the party is by Mr. Trump than about how aimless it has become beyond the struggle for power and the demonization of its enemies.Conspiracism has a long provenance on the American right, reaching back to McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. So does a ruthlessly mercenary view of political parties. A speaker at the second Conservative Political Action Conference in 1975 deemed parties “no more than instruments, temporary and disposable.” Such activists soon occupied the party’s commanding heights.Along with that activism came the constriction of the party’s vision for the public good. Starting in the 1970s, Republicans won elections by marrying a regressive economic agenda with us-versus-them populist appeals. At moments like the “Reagan revolution,” Jack Kemp’s work to broaden conservatism’s appeal to more working-class voters or George W. Bush and Karl Rove’s ambition to build an enduring Republican majority around an “opportunity society,” the party’s collective effort could take on a confident and expansive cast.But the programmatic side of the party, under the leadership of figures like Paul Ryan (a Kemp protégé), came eventually to alienate even the party’s own base with an unpopular agenda more and more tailored to the affluent.By 2016, as a demagogue unleashed a hostile takeover of a hollowed and delegitimized party, the conspiracism and the transactional view of political institutions had fully joined. Conspiracism brought about active conspiracy.But conspiracy and party have an even longer history, one that stretches back to the frenzied and unbounded politics of the early Republic. In the 1790s, the emergent parties of Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans fell into personalized strife, but possessed neither the legitimacy nor the machinery to channel and stabilize the conflict. The organizers of new party activity on both sides were, to a one, avowedly antiparty politicians, and so they conceived of their efforts as a temporary expediency — emergency measures necessary to combat the nefarious conspiracies threatening to undermine the Constitution.In an era in which personal reputation was still inextricable from conflict over public matters, politicians refused to accept their opponents as legitimate, let alone as constituting a loyal opposition.For example, the vitriol and paranoia that attended the election of 1800, pitting the incumbent John Adams against Thomas Jefferson, underscored the danger that a politics unfettered by strong parties poses to the Republic. The election featured not merely epic bouts of mudslinging but credible threats of collective violence and secession from both sides.The construction of mass political parties in subsequent generations — organizations with huge electoral bases and institutions like nominating conventions for party decision-making — channeled individual ambition into collective public purposes. At times, to be sure, as when Democratic pioneers of the mass party of the 19th century aimed for a cross-sectional politics that would sideline the divisive slavery question, the stability achieved through party politics actually suppressed conflict necessary to providing genuine political alternatives.But with mass parties came a shared understanding that the erosion of collective party principle could threaten a reversion to the 18th century’s politics-as-cabal. As the early political scientist Francis Lieber put it in 1839, “all parties are exposed to the danger of passing over into factions, which, if carried still farther, may become conspiracies.”The Republican Party of the 21st century has succumbed to that danger, and so revived something of the brittle and unstable quality of politics in the Republic’s early years. This leaves the Republic itself, now as then, vulnerable.Parties organize political conflict — what the political theorists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum term “the discipline of regulated rivalry” — but they also offer projects with visions, however blinkered and partial, for how societies should handle their challenges and build their futures.Without that commitment to solve problems, the tendencies to conspiracism and ultimately conspiracy prove harder to resist. Barring the sort of fundamental course correction that typically comes only from the defeats of many political actors in multiple elections, those tendencies inside the Republican Party will endure long after, and regardless of how, Mr. Trump departs from the scene.This is not to impugn every Republican. As confirmed by both the federal and Georgia election-related indictments, many Republican officials, like the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, resisted intense pressure to interfere with the election and did their duty. And for all their defenses of Mr. Trump against his several indictments, his Republican presidential rivals have generally shied away from taking the critical step of saying they would have acted differently from Mike Pence when the Electoral College votes were counted at the Capitol on Jan. 6.But these responsible individual actions simply cannot substitute for a conspicuously missing party project.Might that project emerge from Republican governors? Lacking the option of substituting antics for governance, they have forged viable approaches in power. Indeed, many of the country’s most popular governors are Republicans.But our polarized political system is also a nationalized one, where state-level success as a problem solver too often obstructs rather than clears a path to national influence within the Republican Party. And we have no illusions that behavior dangerous to democracy will lead to long-lasting punishment at the polls.To see the personalism around Mr. Trump in the context of the entire party is to see past the breathless statements about his magnetic appeal and to observe a party more bent on destroying its enemies than on the tough work of solving hard problems.As long as that remains so, the impulse to conspiracy will remain, and democracy will depend on keeping it in check.Sam Rosenfeld, an associate professor of political science at Colgate, and Daniel Schlozman, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, are the authors of the forthcoming “The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.”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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      Why Does the Republican Field All Sound the Same?

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      There’s a late-summer-fade quality to the Republican primary contest, as if the candidates are passively sliding into the inevitability of a Biden-Trump rematch.Donald Trump and a variety of other people see the animating factor here as the indictments against him. “We need one more indictment to close out this election,” Mr. Trump joked last month. This is also the prism through which the other candidates get discussed: that they don’t criticize Mr. Trump much, especially over his indictments.But there’s a bigger and more claustrophobic reality to the fading quality of Ron DeSantis and all these other Republicans: It’s as if they constructed their identities as Trump alternatives and ended up all the same.Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote this summer that Mr. DeSantis can sound generic next to Vivek Ramaswamy: They talk the same way about China and TikTok, about how they will use military force against the cartels in Mexico (even though this really sounds as if we will be going to war with Mexico), about the F.B.I.Two weeks before Mr. Wallace-Wells was in Iowa watching Mr. Ramaswamy make Mr. DeSantis sound generic, I heard Mr. DeSantis and Senator Tim Scott use a similar metaphor about the border — houses, which are being broken into — in events 18 hours apart. If we don’t control the border, it might not be our country, Mr. Scott said. We will repel the intrusion with force, Mr. DeSantis said. We will finish the wall, they said.“That’s why you see these things like weaponization of agencies, because nobody’s held them accountable,” Mr. DeSantis said. “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired watching the weaponization of the D.O.J. against their political opponents, against pro-life activists,” Mr. Scott said. On Day 1, Mr. DeSantis said, we’ll have a new F.B.I. director. The first three things we have to do, Mr. Scott said, are fire Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray. “You’re going to have housecleaning at the Department of Justice,” Mr. DeSantis said. “We should actually eliminate every single political appointee in all the Department of Justice,” said Mr. Scott, who wants to “purge” the politicization of the department for the benefit of all Americans. They walked off the stage to the same song (Darius Rucker’s cover of “Wagon Wheel”).It can be hard to remember what made Mr. Trump distinct eight years ago, because it has become the texture of our lives. The 1980s tabloid dimension of his language — weeping mothers, blood and carnage, rot and disease in institutions, brutal action — crushed the antiseptic piety and euphemisms of the post-Bush Republican Party. The lurid, fallen vision of American life that implicitly casts critics as naïve chumps or in on the corruption is the one we still occupy.Now they all sound kind of like that. Politicians’ impulse to shorthand and flatten major policies and controversies is eternal, but it’s not just that they use similar words. The way these politicians talk takes the old, once-novel Trump themes, aggressive energy and promises and packages them into indoctrination and the administrative state.At the event in July where Mr. DeSantis sounded so like Mr. Scott did the evening before, he was midway through a period that the campaign had signaled would be a reset. At first, speaking to a midday crowd in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis ventured onto different ground, talking about economic concerns, the cost of things, debt. But he ended up talking about woke ideology, the administrative state, Disney and all the rest. If you spend a few days in New Hampshire, seeing Mr. Ramaswamy here and Mr. DeSantis there, or the full field at something like Iowa’s Lincoln Dinner, you can imagine nearly the entire Republican presidential field, hands joined, heads turning at once and saying with one voice, “End the weaponization of the Justice Department.”This dynamic might be on display in its purest form on the subject of voting and elections, in the way what Mr. Trump cares about flows through the base and becomes the starting premise of what the other candidates talk about. Mr. DeSantis runs a state with well-regarded early voting and ballot-counting practices — one where Mr. Trump won twice, along with a bunch of down-ballot Republicans. He transformed widespread voter fraud, an (illusory) concern of Mr. Trump’s, into a unit that would address (rare) instances of voter fraud and arrested a handful of people, some of whom have said they had no reason to believe they couldn’t vote, to prove the point that he takes Mr. Trump’s fake concerns seriously.Practically every candidacy right now is about Mr. Trump: The protest candidates exist to oppose Mr. Trump; the alternatives basically seem constructed in the negative (Trump but nice, Trump but we’ve got to win the suburbs again, Trump but competent) and grown inside the Trump concerns lab. Here and there, the candidates talk about health care, education costs, the economic changes with artificial intelligence or anything that might be kitchen table — things that exist beyond Mr. Trump’s reach — but it’s amazing how little some of this stuff is emphasized beyond inflation and energy costs.During the August debate, the Fox News moderators put something Nikki Haley said — that trans kids playing girls’ sports is “the women’s issue of our time” — to a few candidates. When they asked Ms. Haley, she barely registered her own line and led with, in what seems to be her real voice: “There’s a lot of crazy, woke things happening in schools, but we’ve got to get these kids reading. If a child can’t read by third grade, they’re four times less likely to graduate high school.” She can oscillate a bit, in and out of past and present iterations of the G.O.P., but as David Weigel wrote this spring, she accepts the premise of the Trump era: “I am very aware of a deep state,” she told a voter who asked about her plans to dismantle it this spring. “It’s not just in D.C.; it’s in every one of our states.”And none of them are winning! It might be the indictments that have firmed up Mr. Trump’s support, but the inescapable sameness of the candidates, especially when they should sound and seem different, is real.The idea some conservatives had for Mr. DeSantis — including Mr. DeSantis — was that he would be a singular figure, uniting the people attracted to the statist aggression of Mr. Trump and the people looking to move beyond Mr. Trump. Fundamentally, this depended on the idea that Mr. DeSantis is distinct from Mr. Trump, which seems like a misunderstanding. His appeal for certain kinds of conservatives, particularly donors, depended then on a subtle trust that he would not go too far and could shift into some other plane of political operation.But they were never distinct figures; Mr. DeSantis’s rise in the party as a competent aggressor exists because of the Trump era and the things that Mr. Trump is and isn’t. He makes happen what Mr. Trump talks about. And, like all the others who have defined themselves by being an alternative to an individual who is still always present, he has ended up talking about the same things and sounding the same as most of the others. Mr. Trump created the air that everyone now breathes.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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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      Lauren Boebert Apologizes for Vaping in a Denver Theater

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      The Colorado congresswoman previously denied vaping during the performance, but could be seen doing so on surveillance video.Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado was kicked out of a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” in Denver after causing a disturbance.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesRepresentative Lauren Boebert, a hard-right Republican rabble-rouser from Colorado, apologized on Friday night for her behavior at a recent performance of the family-friendly musical “Beetlejuice” in Denver, after surveillance video revealed her vaping and behaving disruptively in the theater.Ms. Boebert, 36, previously denied reports that she had been vaping. A pregnant woman seated behind her asked her to stop before she was ejected for “causing a disturbance” at the show, according to The Denver Post.“The past few days have been difficult and humbling, and I’m truly sorry for the unwanted attention my Sunday evening in Denver has brought to the community,” Ms. Boebert said in a statement Friday night. “While none of my actions or words as a private citizen that night were intended to be malicious or meant to cause harm, the reality is they did and I regret that.”Ms. Boebert, who can be seen on the video touching and carrying on with her date while sitting in the middle of a crowded theater, blamed what she called her “public and difficult divorce” for her behavior and said, “I simply fell short of my values on Sunday.”Ms. Boebert, a mother of four boys who likes to show off pictures of her new grandchild to colleagues in Congress, said she “genuinely did not recall vaping that evening” when she told her campaign to issue a statement denying she had done so. She said she would have to work hard to earn back trust from voters in her district.It may be a heavy lift for Ms. Boebert, who won re-election in 2022 by just 546 votes.If her too-close-for-comfort re-election campaign was a message that Colorado voters didn’t like her brand of disruptive politics, she hasn’t appeared to have received it. Since January, she has often acted in ways many Republicans view as detrimental to keeping control of the House in 2024 and to her keeping her seat.In June, Ms. Boebert tried to force a vote on articles of impeachment against President Biden, claiming his immigration policies constituted high crimes and misdemeanors. Some of her colleagues called the move “crazy,” and it was eventually shunted off to committees for further study.Ms. Boebert distinguished herself during the fraught speaker’s race in January as one of the most committed holdouts against Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, milking the moment for maximum Fox News exposure. In the House, she has cultivated an abrasive public persona, sometimes heckling her Democratic colleagues in the halls of the Capitol and largely ignoring reporters’ questions, except to loudly proclaim at times, “I love President Trump!”The behavior has also earned a cult following on the right. Ms. Boebert, who often wears five-inch Lucite heels and skintight dresses, has a national base of fans who enjoy her disruptive antics and extreme rhetoric.On the House floor, Ms. Boebert has railed against drag performances for children and claimed the left was “grooming” children by exposing them to “obscene content.” More

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      What to Keep in Mind About Mitt Romney

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      Reading the recent excerpt from McKay Coppins’s forthcoming biography of Mitt Romney of Utah, I was struck by the depth of the senator’s contempt and disdain for much of the Republican Party, including many of his colleagues in the Senate.He condemned their vanity, their venality, their cowardice. “Every time he publicly criticized Trump, it seemed,” Coppins writes, describing Romney’s account, “some Republican senator would smarmily sidle up to him in private and express solidarity.” Romney made note of the “rank cynicism” of his Republican colleagues and their almost total refusal to stand up for anything that might harm their future electoral prospects. He saved his harshest words, however, for those Republican senators who would do or say anything for political power and influence.What bothered Romney most about Hawley and his cohort was the oily disingenuousness. “They know better!” he told me. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” They were too smart, Romney believed, to actually think that Trump had won the 2020 election. Hawley and Cruz “were making a calculation,” Romney told me, “that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”As for the latest crop of Republicans, Romney had this to say: “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J.D. Vance.”Reading all this, which is surprisingly harsh and unsparing for someone who is still an active participant in American political life, I wonder how much of it is Romney’s sublimated criticism of himself.On the occasion of Romney’s retirement, which he announced this week, there have been a number of odes, retrospectives and more or less hagiographic assessments of his political career, each colored by his genuinely admirable opposition to Donald Trump. Romney was, after all, the first senator in American history to ever vote to remove a president of his own party from office.But Romney also played a significant role in giving Trump mainstream political credibility when he enthusiastically accepted the reality television star’s endorsement in the 2012 Republican presidential primary. And beyond Trump, Romney — in both of his campaigns for president — eagerly and enthusiastically pandered to the right-wing rage and resentment that eventually found its champion in Trump. This was the Romney who promised to “double Guantánamo” in 2007 and urged “self-deportation” in 2012. It was the Romney who cracked, to a cheering crowd, that “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate” and the Romney who did a great deal to appeal to the most viciously right-wing figures in his party.Romney was, not unlike the colleagues he criticizes, willing to say whatever it took to win power, even if it meant smearing nearly half the country as essentially unproductive and opening the door to some of the most corrosive forces in American political life.It is interesting that Romney has such tough words for his colleagues. But speaking as an observer of his career, it seems to me that there are tough words that Romney ought to have for himself. And if he isn’t willing to go that far in public, he should at least do more than leave the scene with a parting jab at the former president.If nothing else changes, then next November, one of two men, Joe Biden or Donald Trump, will be on the way to a second term in the White House. For his role in creating this mess, I think the least Romney could do is to say, to the country, exactly who he thinks should prevail.What I WroteMy Friday column was on Mitt Romney’s comments about his party’s hostility to the Constitution and what that might mean.Americans like to imagine that the story of the United States is the story of ever greater alignment between our Constitution and our democratic values — the “more perfect union” of the Constitution’s preamble. But the unfortunate truth, as we’re beginning to see with the authoritarian turn in the Republican Party, is that our constitutional system doesn’t necessarily need democracy, as we understand it, to actually work.Now ReadingRepresentatives Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib on “Cop City” in Atlanta and the silencing of dissent for The Nation.Lynn Hunt on the revolutions of 1848 in Europe for The New York Review of Books.Julian Borger on the 50th anniversary of the Chilean coup for The Guardian.Kathryn Joyce on the right-wing’s parallel economy for The New Republic.A two-hour analysis of the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for those of you who are interested in that kind of thing.Photo of the WeekI was in Montreal for a little bit over the summer and I’m just beginning to go through my photos from the trip. Here is a quick snapshot of a street performer and the crowd around him.Now Eating: Pearl Couscous With Creamy Feta and ChickpeasI made this for dinner this week and it was a hit with the whole family. It also helped me use up the abundance of cherry tomatoes we have from our garden, which is a big plus. As always, I went heavy on the herbs. I also served this with a tzatziki sauce and some tinned fish (smoked tuna) that I had in the pantry. The whole meal was filling and nutritious, and felt reasonably virtuous. Recipe comes from New York Times Cooking.Ingredients1 pint grape tomatoes, halved¼ cup sliced scallions2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for drizzling1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar, plus more for serving2 fat garlic cloves, finely grated or minced1½ teaspoons kosher salt, plus more as needed½ teaspoon black pepper, plus more for serving3 oregano, rosemary or sage sprigs2 cups vegetable stock or water⅓ cup chopped cilantro, dill or parsley, plus more for serving½ teaspoon finely grated lemon zest (from ½ lemon)¾ teaspoon ground cumin8 ounces pearl couscous (1½ cups)1 (15-ounce) can chickpeas, drained and rinsed1 cup feta, crumbled (about 4 ounces)⅓ cup freshly grated Parmesan (1½ ounces)DirectionsHeat oven to 450 degrees. In a 9-inch baking dish, cake pan or gratin dish, toss together tomatoes, scallions, 2 tablespoons oil, 1 tablespoon vinegar, garlic, ½ teaspoon salt, pepper and oregano sprigs. Roast until tomatoes are tender, about 15 minutes.While tomatoes roast, heat the stock until it boils, then stir in remaining 1 teaspoon salt, adding more to taste. (You want a well-seasoned broth here to flavor the couscous.) Stir in cilantro, lemon zest and cumin.Remove tomatoes from oven and fold in couscous, chickpeas and hot stock mixture. Cover pan tightly with foil, and return to oven for 20 minutes.Remove foil and fold in about ¾ of the feta (save the rest for garnish) and Parmesan. Bake uncovered until feta starts to melt, another 5 minutes.To serve, pull out and discard herb sprigs if you like, and spoon couscous into bowls. Top with remaining feta, lots more herbs, pepper and a drizzle of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. More

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      Biden Administration Aims to Trump-Proof the Federal Work Force

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      If Donald Trump wins a second term, he and his allies want to revive a plan to allow a president to fire civil service workers who are supposed to be hired on merit. The Biden administration is trying to thwart it.When President Biden took office, he swiftly canceled an executive order his predecessor Donald J. Trump had issued that could have enabled Mr. Trump to fire tens of thousands of federal workers and replace them with loyalists. But Democrats never succeeded in enacting legislation to strengthen protections for the civil service system as a matter of law.Now, with Mr. Trump seemingly poised to win the G.O.P. nomination again, the Biden administration is instead trying to effectively Trump-proof the civil service with a new regulation.On Friday, the White House proposed a new rule that would make it more onerous to reinstate Mr. Trump’s old executive order if Mr. Trump or a like-minded Republican wins the 2024 election.But Trump allies who would most likely have senior roles in any second Trump administration shrugged off the proposed Biden rule, saying they could simply use the same rule-making process to roll back the new regulation and then proceed. Legal experts agreed.The proposed rule addresses the move Mr. Trump tried to make late in his presidency by issuing an executive order known in shorthand as Schedule F. It would have empowered his administration to effectively transform many career federal employees — who are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired — into political appointees who can be hired and fired at will.Career civil servants include professional staff across the government who stay on when the presidency changes hands. They vary widely, including law enforcement officers and technical experts at agencies that Congress created to make rules aimed at ensuring the air and water are clean and food, drugs and consumer products are safe.Mr. Trump and senior advisers on his team came to believe that career officials who raised objections to their policies on legal or practical grounds — including some of their disputed immigration plans — were deliberately sabotaging their agenda. Portraying federal employees as unaccountable bureaucrats, the Trump team has argued that removing job protections for those who have any influence over policymaking is justified because it is too difficult to fire them.Critics saw the move as a throwback to the corrupt 19th-century patronage system, when all federal jobs were partisan spoils rather than based on merit. Congress ended that system with a series of civil-service laws dating back to the Pendleton Act of 1883. Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, described Schedule F as “the most profound undermining of the civil service in our lifetimes.”The legality of Schedule F was never tested because Mr. Biden revoked the order before any federal workers were reclassified. But Mr. Trump has vowed to reinstate it if he returns to office in 2025 — and his motivations, now, are openly vengeful. He has boasted that he will purge a federal bureaucracy that he has disparaged as a “deep state” filled by “villains” like globalists, Marxists and a “sick political class that hates our country.”President Biden’s administration introduced a rule on Friday to strengthen protections for the civil service system.Al Drago for The New York TimesThe proposed new rule was unveiled by the White House’s Office of Personnel Management in a lengthy filing for the Federal Register on Friday. It would allow workers to keep their existing job protections, such as a right to appeal any firing or reassignment, even if their positions were reclassified. It would also tighten the definition of what types of positions can be exempted from civil service job protections, limiting it to non-career political appointees who are expected to turn over when a presidency ends.The regulatory proposal argued that maintaining protections for career civil servants enhances the functioning of American democracy because such federal workers have institutional memory, subject matter expertise and technical knowledge “that incoming political appointees may lack.” They should be free to disagree with their leaders — short of defying lawful orders — without fear of reprisal, the proposed rule states.The public will now have 60 days to comment on the proposed rule, but the Biden administration expects to complete it by early 2024.A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not respond to an email seeking comment on Mr. Biden’s effort.Biden officials and people supportive of their plan are projecting optimism about the significance of the new regulation to bolster protections for the civil service. Among them is Rob Shriver, the deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management, essentially the government’s human resources department.“Our proposed regulation is strong and based in law and has a strong rationale,” Mr. Shriver said. “Anyone who wants to explore a change in policy would have work to do,” he added. “They’d have to go through the same administrative rule-making process and make sure that their policy is grounded in the law.”Mr. Trump’s allies have been aware of the proposed rule since the spring, when the Biden administration cited it on a government website as part of its 2023 regulatory agenda. Trump allies say they don’t expect it to do much more than delay by a number of months their renewal of Schedule F if Mr. Trump wins back the presidency.James Sherk, the former Trump administration official who came up with the idea for Schedule F, defended the order and said that reimposing it would not be difficult despite the new rule.“The Biden administration can, if they want, make removing intransigent or poorly performing senior bureaucrats harder on themselves,” said Mr. Sherk, who now works at the America First Policy Institute, a think tank stocked heavily with former Trump officials. “The next administration can just as easily rescind those restrictions. With regards to reissuing Schedule F, this proposed rule would be a speed bump, but nothing more.”Another fervent supporter of Schedule F is Russell T. Vought, the president of the Center for Renewing America, a think tank with close ties to the former president. In the Trump administration, Mr. Vought had been the director of the Office of Management and Budget. He proposed reassigning nearly 90 percent of his agency’s staff as Schedule F employees, making them vulnerable to being summarily fired if he deemed them obstructive to the president’s agenda.That threat was never acted upon — Mr. Trump issued the Schedule F order in October 2020, shortly before losing re-election — but Biden administration officials say that career civil servants are still living with the hangover from what nearly happened and are anxious about the prospect of Schedule F returning.Russell T. Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, is a fervent supporter of Schedule F.Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesJason Miller, a senior official in Mr. Biden’s Office of Management and Budget who has worked on the new rule, said in an interview that Mr. Trump’s Schedule F order “exposed the fragility of the existing system — the system that has been in place for 140 years to ensure we have a dedicated nonpartisan civil service.”Mr. Miller said the impact of Schedule F “is still felt to this day.” He added, “We have carried that with us. It is not just here in O.M.B. It is across federal agencies.”Mr. Vought, however, said Schedule F was about removing poor performers, and characterized the proposed regulation as little impediment to reviving the idea.“This expected move by the Biden administration to forestall accountability within the bureaucracy against poor performers merely reinforces what we already knew — Schedule F rests on a sound legal foundation, is going to succeed spectacularly and the only chance to stop it is to install procedural roadblocks,” he said.Even if Mr. Trump unexpectedly loses the Republican nomination, there’s a good chance that whomever defeats him will also plan to dismantle the administrative state. Schedule F has swiftly become doctrine across a large swath of the G.O.P., and two of Mr. Trump’s leading rivals are indicating they want to go even further than he does.“On bureaucracy, you know, we’re going to have all these deep-state people, you know, we’re going to start slitting throats on Day 1 and be ready to go,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at an event in New Hampshire in July.On Wednesday, the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy outlined an even more radical plan than Mr. Trump’s for dismantling much of the government. Mr. Ramaswamy said he would shut down multiple federal agencies and fire 75 percent of the federal work force, although both the legal and practical substance undergirding his attention-seeking proposal appeared thin.“I would not view the efforts to protect the integrity of the professional civil service as just antidotes to Trump,” said Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which has jurisdiction over the federal civil service. “I see them as authoritarianism repellents, generally.”Schedule F has swiftly become doctrine across a large swath of the G.O.P. and Vivek Ramaswamy intends to take it further.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesDemocrats had initially tried to change federal law to prevent any return of Schedule F, but opposition by Republicans — where Senate rules allow a minority of 40 lawmakers to block most legislation — thwarted the effort.When the House was still controlled by Democrats in the first two years of Mr. Biden’s presidency, it attached a measure strengthening protections for the merit-based civil service system as an amendment to a “must-pass” annual defense bill in 2022. But Republican opposition kept it off the Senate version and then forced Democrats to drop it when the two versions were reconciled.Democrats used their control of the House in Mr. Biden’s first two years to pass proposed reforms in response to the ways in which Mr. Trump’s presidency flouted norms. Other ideas Democrats proposed included making it harder for a president to offer or bestow pardons in situations that raise suspicion of corruption, to refuse to respond to oversight subpoenas and to take outside payments while in office.The House passed a bill that combined those and other ideas in December 2021. But Republicans almost uniformly opposed such measures, portraying them as partisan attacks on Mr. Trump, and the Senate’s filibuster rule meant they had the power to block them from becoming law. And Mr. Biden did not make enacting post-Trump reforms a bully-pulpit focus.Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that seeks to make government more effective, has been working with the Biden administration on this and other proposals to bolster the civil service. He said he understands the vulnerability of the new proposed rule to being overturned, but he said it would make reimposing Schedule F even more vulnerable to legal challenges than it was when Mr. Trump first issued the order.Other Democrats, who fear the return of Mr. Trump and Schedule F, view the Biden effort less enthusiastically.“While the Biden administration’s forthcoming regulation is a good first step to protect the federal civil service from politicization, I’ve consistently said this demands a legislative fix,” said Representative Gerald E. Connolly, who along with Senator Tim Kaine — both Democrats of Virginia — has led congressional efforts to prevent a return of Schedule F.“The Biden administration must make this a top legislative priority,” Mr. Connolly added. “That is the only thing that is going to stop Trump’s crusade to remake the civil service in his image.” More

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      Republicans Don’t Mind the Constitution. It’s Democracy They Don’t Like.

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      “A very large portion of my party,” Senator Mitt Romney of Utah tells McKay Coppins of The Atlantic, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”Romney doesn’t elaborate further in the article, and Coppins, who spoke to him in depth and at length, beginning in 2021, for a forthcoming biography, does not speculate on what exactly Romney meant with this assessment of his co-partisans.If Romney was using “the Constitution” as a rhetorical stand-in for “American democracy,” then he’s obviously right. Faced with a conflict between partisan loyalty and ideological ambition on one hand and basic principles of self-government and political equality on the other, much of the Republican Party has jettisoned any commitment to America’s democratic values in favor of narrow self-interest.The most glaring instance of this, of course, is Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which was backed by prominent figures in the Republican Party, humored by much of the Republican establishment and affirmed, in the wake of an insurrectionary attack on the Capitol by supporters of the former president, by a large number of House and Senate Republican lawmakers who voted to question the results.Other examples of the Republican Party’s contempt for democratic principles include the efforts of Republican-led state legislatures to write political majorities out of legislative representation with extreme partisan gerrymanders; the efforts of those same legislatures to raise new barriers to voting in order to disadvantage their political opponents; and the embrace of exotic legal claims, like the “independent state legislature theory,” meant to justify outright power grabs.In just the past few months, we’ve seen Tennessee Republicans expel rival lawmakers from the State Legislature for violating decorum by showing their support for an anti-gun protest on the chamber floor, Florida Republicans suspend a duly elected official from office because of a policy disagreement, Ohio Republicans try to limit the ability of Ohio voters to amend the State Constitution by majority vote, Wisconsin Republicans float the possibility that they might try to nullify the election of a State Supreme Court justice who disagrees with their agenda and Alabama Republicans fight for their wholly imaginary right to discriminate against Black voters in the state by denying them the opportunity to elect another representative to Congress.It is very clear that given the power and the opportunity, a large portion of Republican lawmakers would turn the state against their political opponents: to disenfranchise them, to diminish their electoral influence, to limit or even neuter the ability of their representatives to exercise their political authority.So again, to the extent that “the Constitution” stands in for “American democracy,” Romney is right to say that much of his party just doesn’t believe in it. But if Romney means the literal Constitution itself — the actual words on the page — then his assessment of his fellow Republicans isn’t as straightforward as it seems.At times, Republicans seem fixated on the Constitution. When pushed to defend America’s democratic institutions, they respond that the Constitution established “a republic, not a democracy.” When pushed to defend the claim that state legislatures have plenary authority over the structure of federal congressional elections and the selection of presidential electors, Republicans jump to a literal reading of the relevant parts of Article I and Article II to try to disarm critics. When asked to consider gun regulation, Republicans home in on specific words in the Second Amendment — “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” — to dismiss calls for reform.Trump tried to subvert American democracy, yes, but his attempt rested on the mechanisms of the Electoral College, which is to say, relied on a fairly literal reading of the Constitution. Both he and his allies took seriously the fact that our Constitution doesn’t require anything like a majority of the people to choose a president. Attacks on representation and personal freedom — the hyper-gerrymandering of legislatures to preserve and perpetuate minority rule and the attempts to limit or restrict the bodily autonomy of women and other Americans — have operated within the lines drawn by the Constitution, unimpeded or even facilitated by its rules for structuring our political system.Republicans, in other words, do seem to believe in the Constitution, but only insofar as it can be wielded as a weapon against American democracy — that is, the larger set of ideas, intuitions, expectations and values that shape and define political life in the United States as much as particular rules and institutions.Because it splits sovereignty between national and subnational units, because it guarantees some political rights and not others, because it was designed in a moment of some reaction against burgeoning democratic forces, the Constitution is a surprisingly malleable document, when it comes to the shaping of American political life. At different points in time, political systems of various levels of participation and popular legitimacy (or lack thereof) have existed, comfortably, under its roof.Part of the long fight to expand the scope of American democracy has been an ideological struggle to align the Constitution with values that the constitutional system doesn’t necessarily need to function. To give one example among many, when a Black American like George T. Downing insisted to President Andrew Johnson that “the fathers of the Revolution intended freedom for every American, that they should be protected in their rights as citizens, and be equal before the law,” he was engaged in this struggle.Americans like to imagine that the story of the United States is the story of ever greater alignment between our Constitution and our democratic values — the “more perfect union” of the Constitution’s preamble. But the unfortunate truth, as we’re beginning to see with the authoritarian turn in the Republican Party, is that our constitutional system doesn’t necessarily need democracy, as we understand it, to actually work.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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      He Faces Jan. 6 Trespassing Charges. He Might Become Mayor.

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      Gino DiGiovanni Jr., who was charged with trespassing at the U.S. Capitol, is the presumptive Republican nominee for mayor in a small Connecticut city that voted for President Biden.The final votes have not been tallied. The race has not been called.But initial results from the Republican mayoral primary in Derby, Conn., this week indicate that voters have rejected the city’s three-term incumbent in favor of a man who was charged with trespassing during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.Gino DiGiovanni Jr., a member of the local board of aldermen, beat Mayor Richard Dziekan by just 10 votes — 202 to 192 — which triggered an automatic recount, set for noon on Friday.The rise of Mr. DiGiovanni, 42, has astonished leaders in Connecticut, where 59 percent of voters cast their ballots for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020. Only a handful of Connecticut residents have been charged in connection with the riot.His win is also notable for Derby, an old mill city of just over 12,000 people. The presidential race was close: Mr. Biden beat Donald J. Trump in Derby by four points. So was the 2021 race for mayor: Mr. Dziekan beat his Democratic opponent by just 48 votes.“It’s not like Derby is some town in the Deep South where there’s an overwhelming amount of support for Trump,” said Roy Occhiogrosso, a longtime Democratic operative in Connecticut, adding, “It’s not a hotbed of MAGA activity.”If Mr. DiGiovanni’s win in the Republican primary holds, Mayor Dziekan, 57, intends to appear on the November ballot anyway, as a candidate unaffiliated with a political party. He would also face Joe DiMartino, 57, the Democratic nominee; and Sharlene McEvoy, a 73-year-old retired law professor, another nonaffiliated candidate.Mr. DiGiovanni is among just a handful of elected officials across the country to be charged in connection with the Capitol riot. Bob Duff, the State Senate majority leader in Connecticut, said Mr. DiGiovanni’s rise shows the danger of voters not paying close attention to local elections. “Too many people focus entirely on the federal level,” he said.But the local level is where the fight for democracy matters most, he said. “The system of government gets infiltrated, and then people work their way up. That’s where it rots.”Mr. DiGiovanni, who said he recognizes Mr. Biden as president, said he traveled to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, to hear Mr. Trump’s speech. Then, he said, he followed the crowd. He entered the Capitol through a door that a Capitol Police officer was holding open, took a look around, and left, he said. He saw no violence, he said, and engaged in no violence.“I didn’t go down there to overthrow the government,” he said, adding, “I didn’t know there was going to be a quote-unquote insurrection.”He faces federal misdemeanor trespassing charges but has not yet entered a plea.“I’m not an election denier,” he said, adding, “I’m not this crazy tinfoil-hat conspiracy wack job.”Statewide, Mr. DiGiovanni said, he is now known as a “domestic terrorist.” But locally, he is widely liked. He played and later coached football, and he helped build a local Sept. 11 memorial.“There are people who have given Gino a pass for his role in Jan. 6 because he is a nice guy,” said Jim Gildea, the chair of Derby’s board of education and a longtime figure in city politics.Even Mr. DiGiovanni’s political opponents speak mildly of him and his actions on Jan. 6.“Was his judgment a little off?” said Mayor Dziekan. “I think so. But he’s a great guy.”Mr. DiMartino, the Democrat, said, “I don’t think it was a great move on his part,” adding, “I’m not trying to really bash him.”In fact, Derby leaders said, the primary was less a referendum on Mr. DiGiovanni’s participation on Jan. 6 than on Mayor Dziekan’s record.Earlier this month, state officials put Derby’s finances under strict oversight after an audit found a $1.9 million deficit when the city was projected to have a $1 million surplus. The city does not have a finance director, a main criticism of Mr. Dziekan.“I’m a mayor, but my hands are tied,” he said. “I can only do so much, and sometimes, people are going to get mad at you.”Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog, said that voters’ support of Mr. DiGiovanni reveals a worrying trend: Although only a few politicians were charged in connection with Jan. 6, many play down the violence.“The significance in some ways goes beyond both the size of this particular community in Connecticut,” he said, arguing that acceptance makes it harder for the country to learn from the riot.Connecticut lawmakers considered a bill that would have barred people who participated in an insurrection from holding office. But the legislation died, said Mr. Duff, who co-sponsored it.Mr. DiGiovanni, Mr. Duff said, “was Exhibit A as to why we needed this legislation.” He added, “He should not be anywhere near the levers of government.” More