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      Republicans Wanted a Special Counsel Investigation of Hunter Biden. Now Many Oppose It.

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      Although some G.O.P. lawmakers see the appointment of David C. Weiss as a vindication of their strategy, others criticize the now-scuttled plea deal he struck with Mr. Biden.Congressional Republicans have for months repeatedly written to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland demanding he appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, the president’s son, over his business dealings.Some even demanded that a specific man be named to lead the inquiry: David C. Weiss, the Trump-appointed Delaware U.S. attorney who has long investigated the case.But on Friday, after Mr. Garland elevated Mr. Weiss to special counsel status, Republicans in Congress reacted publicly not with triumph, but with outrage. “David Weiss can’t be trusted and this is just a new way to whitewash the Biden family’s corruption,” Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.The reaction was a notable political development, one that underscored both how Mr. Weiss, a Republican, has fallen in conservative circles, and how deeply it has become ingrained in the G.O.P. to oppose the Justice Department at every turn.“The reality is this appointment is meant to distract from, and slow down, our investigations,” said Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri and chairman of Ways and Means, one of three congressional committees looking into the Biden family’s finances.But in interviews, away from social media and television appearances, the reaction of many Republicans to Mr. Weiss’s appointment was more nuanced. Privately, some in the G.O.P. were chalking up the development as a victory.The party had worked for years to elevate the Hunter Biden case — which Democrats have long dismissed as a partisan obsession of the right — to a scandal equivalent to those dogging former President Donald J. Trump, who has faced two impeachment trials, two special counsel investigations and three indictments totaling 78 felony counts against him. Those indictments include charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and willfully retaining national defense information after he left office.By contrast, Hunter Biden has thus far been accused of two misdemeanor crimes stemming from his failure to pay taxes on more than $1.5 million in income related to his overseas business deals, and one felony count of illegally possessing a firearm while being a drug user.After leaving his job as a lobbyist while his father was running to become vice president more than a decade ago, Hunter Biden, a Yale-educated lawyer, and partners entered into a series of international business relationships, often with firms seeking influence and access within the United States. Mr. Biden was paid handsomely, even as he descended into drug addiction, and Republicans have accused him and his family of corruption. But they have not produced evidence that any of the overseas money went to President Biden or that the president influenced U.S. policy to benefit his son’s business partners.“This appointment is meant to distract from, and slow down, our investigations,” said Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which is looking into the Biden family’s finances.Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven as they objected to Mr. Weiss, some Republicans said the appointment appeared to be an acknowledgment that the allegations they had made deserved a serious investigation. It promised to keep Hunter Biden’s misdeeds in the news — and in the courts — for longer than Democrats would like as the 2024 presidential election heats up. And it ensured that in the minds of some voters the names Trump and Biden would both be linked to scandal, even if Republicans have not proved any wrongdoing by the current president.In an interview with Newsmax, a top Trump adviser, Jason Miller, appeared to echo both sentiments, and foreshadowed coming attacks.Mr. Miller said the appointment of Mr. Weiss “stinks” and accused the prosecutor of sitting on his hands for years. But, he added, ”I do want to make sure that my Republican brethren” don’t ”lose sight of the big prize here.”He described the appointment of a special counsel as “a direct acknowledgment that Hunter Biden did something wrong,” and he recalled President Biden saying in a 2020 debate with Mr. Trump that he had not done anything wrong.Since Mr. Weiss announced a proposed plea deal in June with Mr. Biden — an agreement that would have allowed him to avoid jail time on tax and gun charges but has since fallen apart — Republicans in Congress have sharply criticized the government, accusing the Justice Department of leniency with the president’s son as they conduct their own investigations in an effort to tie his overseas business dealings to the president. House Republicans have also brought forth two I.R.S. agents who worked on Mr. Weiss’s investigation and claimed there had been political interference.One allegation made by the I.R.S. agents was that Mr. Weiss had sought to bring charges against Hunter Biden in Washington and California but had been rebuffed by prosecutors in those jurisdictions who declined to partner with him. The order appointing Mr. Weiss to special counsel authorizes him to bring charges in any jurisdiction.Alyssa DaCunha, a co-chair of the congressional investigations practice at the law firm WilmerHale, said she believed House Republicans’ investigations and their criticisms of the proposed plea deal had “caught the attention” of the Justice Department.“There’s a real need to make sure that whatever charging decisions are made are very, very well supported and the department can really stand behind them,” Ms. DaCunha said. “It seems like this will extend the life of the investigation, and so there are lots of ways in which this is going to complicate the narrative for Democrats moving forward and give the Republicans lots of leverage.”Some House Republicans close to Mr. Trump acknowledged they were pleased with the announcement of the special counsel. For Mr. Trump, in particular, it provided him with the investigation he has long desired to be able to depict the Biden family as corrupt, even as Hunter Biden’s alleged crimes are significantly less severe than the charges Mr. Trump is facing.Mr. Trump’s statement did not suggest that he viewed the appointment of a special counsel as a bad development, merely that it had come late, something his advisers also argued in private.Hunter Biden’s plea deal on tax and gun charges fell apart in court last month.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesMike Pence, the former vice president who is now running against Mr. Trump, was among the few well-known Republicans to openly praise Mr. Weiss’s appointment.But other Republicans were worried the development could be used to block their investigations. Mr. Weiss had pledged to testify on Capitol Hill this fall, but those Republicans predicted he could now cite the special counsel investigation to refuse to do so.The announcement also gives President Biden and Mr. Garland some political cover against Republican accusations that Mr. Trump is a victim of a two-tier system of justice, placing the investigation outside the normal workings of the Justice Department. It could also undercut Republican arguments that an impeachment inquiry of the president is necessary.“In the near term, it gives Republicans the ability to say it legitimizes what they’ve been looking into and it helps give more momentum to their different oversight activities,” said Michael Ricci, a former top communications official to two Republican House speakers and a current fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service. “But in the longer term, the White House will absolutely use this as an argument against any kind of rush into impeachment.”Several Republicans said their respect for Mr. Weiss had declined after he entered into the plea deal with Hunter Biden.Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who had once called for Mr. Weiss to be made special counsel, said he no longer stands by that belief. “Given the underhanded plea deal negotiated by the U.S. attorney from President Biden’s home state, it’s clear Mr. Weiss isn’t the right person for the job,” Mr. Grassley said.Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, had once called for Mr. Weiss to be made special counsel but said the plea deal changed his mind. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesBut Democrat-aligned groups saw something else in the Republicans’ about-face: disingenuousness.“House Republicans’ opposition to Trump appointee David Weiss’s appointment as special counsel is nothing more than another political stunt,” said Kyle Herrig, the director of the Congressional Integrity Project, an advocacy group that defends President Biden from congressional investigations. “After months of calling for this, their dismay makes clear that they will stop at nothing to weaponize Congress to interfere with an ongoing investigation and harm Joe Biden.” More

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      Are the Elite Anti-Trumpers the ‘Bad Guys’?

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      Readers react to David Brooks’s suggestion that the elite are partly to blame for Trumpism.To the Editor:Re “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?,” by David Brooks (column, Aug. 4):I am sick and tired of people like Mr. Brooks telling me that I am the problem or the “bad guy” because I am educated (and no, I was not educated at an Ivy League school, and neither of my parents finished high school) to justify the fact that 35 percent of the population are fervent supporters of Donald Trump, no matter what he says or does.Moreover, Mr. Trump is also part of the elite, but his supporters simply ignore this. This is not because he identifies with them in any way (as a golden-haired billionaire living in a mansion), but because Fox, Newsmax, and other right-wing TV and radio media outlets, right-wing militias and Trump puppet politicians in Congress essentially brainwashed them with their daily dose of propaganda about how the “left wing socialists and communists,” “elites,” the “woke,” etc., are all conspiring to take their country and only Donald Trump can stop them.In my opinion, this is the biggest problem, Mr. Brooks, not educated Americans who as you correctly state are “are earnest, kind and public spirited.”So, let’s not beat ourselves up because the other side has been completely brainwashed, does not accept facts, scientific and otherwise, is obsessed with conspiracies and lives in a right-wing echo chamber.Michael HadjiargyrouCenterport, N.Y.To the Editor:While I grew up in a small Midwestern town in a middle-class family, education has offered me a satisfying life with a secure retirement. Many of my classmates who chose a more blue-collar life path have endured more struggles, starting with military service in Vietnam. I am quite confident that many of them today support Donald Trump, at least partly for the reasons that David Brooks suggests.Mr. Brooks’s column was a brilliant, moving description of the unspoken arrogance of many of us who are left-leaning. I believe that some sincere humility and understanding with regard to the concerns of many who feel left behind would go a long way to healing some of our divisions. Thanks to Mr. Brooks for his insight.David MahanSebring, Fla.To the Editor:Fine: I’ll accept David Brooks’s plea that we not blame the logic-defying viability of Donald Trump on the wrongheadedness of tens of millions of Americans. I get the class resentment. I share the rage against excessive political correctness and the feeling that immigration is unchecked and overwhelming. I see his point that the elite stoke these resentments by voicing our support for the nonelite while spending most of our energy and resources protecting our own class privilege.But let’s not gloss over the main factor here: Mr. Trump is the latest version of a leader who is little more than a self-obsessed expert at exploiting and inflaming the fear and resentments of the masses to benefit his own power and ego. Such a leader cares nothing about those who harbor these resentments, and certainly does not share the same fears.On a more practical note, those who resent wokeism are shooting themselves in the foot by supporting someone who so many Americans, elite and otherwise, would vote for over their proverbial dead bodies.Brian SmithDayton, OhioTo the Editor:The irony behind the case that David Brooks makes for Donald Trump’s support is that this support is based entirely on words (primarily offensive) and not actions. What did Mr. Trump do as president to help his supporters and make their lives better?His major accomplishment was the tax reform enacted in 2017, which heavily favored the rich and elites (including himself). His supporters love the way he attacks his “enemies” and anyone who disagrees with him and feel he speaks for them. The lack of actual benefits they have enjoyed seems not to matter.Ellen S. HirschNew YorkTo the Editor:Donald Trump, as loathsome as he is, has done one significant service for this country. He has made clear the great social divide that David Brooks describes in his excellent column. Now, how to fix it?As a former naval officer and Vietnam veteran, I would suggest universal national service, with almost no exemptions. Being forced to live with, eat with, work with people from all over the country would teach all of us to be more tolerant. This would not just be military service; it would include working in national parks, teaching in underserved schools, and many other forms of service to the nation.The only thing standing in the way is a timid Congress. Is there anyone in Congress brave enough to take this on?Jeffrey CallahanClevelandTo the Editor:David Brooks makes a familiar and not unreasonable argument about how the fear, resentment and sense of alienation that fuel the cult of Trumpism proceed from economic and cultural realities for which liberal elites are, in large part, responsible.When Mr. Brooks asks, however, whether anti-Trumpers should consider whether they are the “bad guys,” he embarks on an analysis that completely excludes millions of people like me who find Donald Trump and Trumpism appalling, without being “elite” at all.I was raised in a row home in northeast Philly by a single mom who was a cop. My dad was a union construction worker. I’ve been a musician and a bartender for most of my adult life. In short, I’m hardly part of the elite class that Mr. Brooks seems to equate with the anti-Trump movement, and yet I’m passionately anti-Trump!Maybe this particular piece simply wasn’t aimed at people like me, and that’s fine. But all too often I see this oversimplified, false duality that leaves out all the decent working-class people who have themselves been hurt by neoliberal policies and narratives, and yet would never channel their frustration into an odious movement like Trumpism. When we condemn Mr. Trump and his followers, we do so with a clean conscience.James A. LeponeTelford, Pa.To the Editor:David Brooks identifies the privileges enjoyed by the highly educated class and the resentment of the less educated class that might cause them to be ardent supporters of Donald Trump. Mr. Brooks concludes with a warning that history is the graveyard of classes with preferred caste privileges.What he fails to consider is that in the United States his identified “upper” class encourages, both by words and action, members of the “lower” class to join it. Nothing would make those with college or graduate degrees happier than if every capable child joined their class. This differs very much from any true caste system.Jack SternSetauket, N.Y.To the Editor:David Brooks’s column gave me a new perspective regarding why people support this obvious con man named Donald Trump. Although Mr. Brooks makes excellent points regarding the anger that people feel, is it not the Democrats who advocate and pass legislation regarding the minimum wage, infrastructure, child care, education, the environment, middle-class tax relief, financial assistance with community colleges and technical schools, etc., all for the benefit of working- and middle-class Americans?Mr. Trump and the current crop of Republicans have done nothing to help these people. In light of this, isn’t propaganda from Mr. Trump and his followers, as well as the cynical right-wing media, also to blame for this misplaced anger and anti-democratic sentiment?We’re not the bad guys. Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch are.Phillip L. RosenVenice Beach, Calif.To the Editor:David Brooks does an excellent job of setting up a straw man to bring down. Most liberals aren’t part of the “elite,” no matter how many right-wingers parrot that lie.Exit polls from 2020 found that Joe Biden outpaced Donald Trump significantly among voters making less than $100,000 a year, while Mr. Trump did better among those making $100,000 or more. Mr. Trump is no friend to the working class, and polls like these give me confidence that a majority of the working class recognizes this. And any member of the working class who supports him or today’s extreme-right Republican Party is going against their own best interests.It’s liberals and Democrats (usually but not always the same) who support policies to empower workers and reduce economic inequality, and the other side doesn’t give a damn. Liberals are not the elite and are not the enemy of the working class.Trudy RingBend, Ore. More

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      Trump and DeSantis Appear at the Iowa State Fair in a Rare Candidate Convergence

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      Former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida will arrive at the Iowa State Fair on Saturday, a convergence of the two leading Republican presidential candidates that will highlight the busiest day of state politicking amid farm animals, corn dogs and oversize lemonades.The fair is a throwback to an earlier era of politics more dominated by in-person interactions than cable news appearances, featuring a mix of speechifying and politicians flipping pork chops, and it is drawing most of the 2024 field.Mr. Trump, who famously brought a helicopter to the fair in 2015 and gave children rides during his first primary campaign, is flying to Iowa for a single day of campaigning. In an effort to poke his leading rival, he is bringing along a host of prominent Florida Republicans who have endorsed him over Mr. DeSantis.Mr. DeSantis, who replaced his campaign manager earlier in the week, is focused on turning around his political fortunes in Iowa. He has spent two full days campaigning in the state ahead of the fair and ticking off visits to more of Iowa’s 99 counties, all of which he has pledged to visit.In fact, while recording a podcast in downtown Des Moines, Mr. DeSantis predicted on Thursday that he would complete that feat by October, a timeline that suggests a particularly aggressive next two months of events in the state.On Friday, a number of lower-polling candidates fanned out across the fairgrounds, including former Vice President Mike Pence, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Perry Johnson, Larry Elder and Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami, all seeking attention from potential Iowa caucusgoers.“This is amazing — I feel like I’m at Disneyworld,” Mr. Suarez, who is likely to miss the first debate later this month, said in a chat with Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, who invited every candidate to a friendly Q. and A. session she is billing as “fair-side chats.”Almost everyone accepted the invitation, with the notable exception of Mr. Trump. He has criticized Ms. Reynolds for her plans to stay neutral in the primary and tried to take credit for her election.Mr. DeSantis has sought to take advantage of Mr. Trump’s comments about Ms. Reynolds, with his allies and advisers arguing that Mr. Trump has provided an opening by demeaning the popular Republican governor.On Friday, Mr. DeSantis scored the formal endorsement of a prominent conservative radio host in the state, Steve Deace, who has been open about his hope that the party won’t nominate Mr. Trump again.While Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump are not expected to cross paths on Saturday, it is not clear when they will next be in the same location. Mr. Trump has vacillated about attending the first debate of the primary — less than two weeks away — suggesting that he does not need to, given his polling lead. He has also said that he won’t sign the required loyalty pledge.“You have to earn this nomination, and you have to show up,” Mr. DeSantis said on the “Ruthless” podcast on Thursday. “You have to debate. You’ve got to be willing to answer questions. You’ve got to be willing to defend your record, and you’ve got to articulate a vision for the future.” More

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      Collapse of Hunter Biden Plea Deal Could Be a Liability for the President

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      The collapse of a plea deal and the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden mean the president could face political fallout for months to come.They thought it was over, that they could put it in the rearview mirror. All that Hunter Biden had to do was show up in a courtroom, answer a few questions, sign some paperwork and that would be it. Not that the Republicans would let it go, but any real danger would be past.Except that it did not work out that way. The criminal investigation that President Biden’s advisers believed was all but done has instead been given new life with the collapse of the plea agreement and the appointment of a special counsel who now might bring the president’s son to trial.What had been a painful but relatively contained political scandal that animated mainly partisans on the right could now extend for months just as the president is gearing up for his re-election campaign. This time, the questions about Hunter Biden’s conduct may be harder for the White House to dismiss as politically motivated. They may even break out of the conservative echo chamber to the general public, which has largely not paid much attention until now.It remained unclear whether Hunter Biden faces criminal exposure beyond the tax and gun charges lodged against him by David C. Weiss, the prosecutor first appointed in 2018 to investigate him by President Donald J. Trump’s attorney general. It may be that Attorney General Merrick B. Garland’s decision to designate Mr. Weiss a special counsel with more independence to run the inquiry means that there is still more potential legal peril stemming from Hunter Biden’s business dealings with foreign firms.Yet it may amount to less than meets the eye in the long run. Mr. Weiss’s announcement abandoning the plea agreement he originally reached with Hunter Biden on the tax and gun charges means he could take the case to trial in states other than Delaware, where he is U.S. attorney and has jurisdiction. Some analysts speculated that requesting special counsel status may be about empowering him to prosecute out of state.“Friday’s announcement feels more like a technicality allowing Weiss to bring charges outside of Delaware now that the talks between sides have broken down,” said Anthony Coley, who until recently served as the Justice Department’s director of public affairs under Mr. Garland. “It will have limited practical impact.”Even if so, a trial by a jury of Hunter Biden’s peers would be a spectacle that could prove distracting and embarrassing for the White House while providing more fodder to the president’s Republicans. The president’s advisers were frustrated as a result and resigned to months of additional torment, even if they were not alarmed by the prospect of a wider investigation.“After five years of probing Hunter’s dealings, it seems unlikely that Weiss will discover much that is new,” said David Axelrod, who was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama. “On the other hand, anything that draws more attention to Hunter’s case and extends the story into the campaign year is certainly unwelcome news for the president’s team.”As it happened, Mr. Garland’s appointment of Mr. Weiss as special counsel did not solve part of the problem it was meant to address. A special counsel designation is intended to insulate an investigation from politics, but the attorney general’s decision still drew fire from Republicans who derided the choice of Mr. Weiss because he had signed off on the original plea agreement, which they had described as a “sweetheart deal.”Never mind that Mr. Weiss was a Trump administration appointee whom the Biden administration kept on to show that it was not attempting to tilt the case in favor of the president’s son. Since Mr. Trump and his allies did not like the apparent outcome of the investigation, some have painted Mr. Weiss as a lackey of the Biden administration and have showcased whistle-blowers who said the prosecutor had been hamstrung even though he insisted he was not.“This move by Attorney General Garland is part of the Justice Department’s efforts to attempt a Biden family cover-up,” said Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee who has led congressional investigations into the president’s son.Such attacks also serve the purpose of discrediting Mr. Weiss in advance if in the end he does not confirm their unsubstantiated charges of corruption against the Biden family. Testimony and news accounts have indicated that Hunter Biden traded on his name to make money and a former business partner has said that his father was aware. But no evidence has emerged that the president personally profited from or used his power to benefit his son’s business interests.Still, other Republicans said the party should welcome the appointment of Mr. Weiss as special counsel. There would be no need for one if there was nothing to investigate, they argued, and it was Mr. Biden’s own attorney general now saying there was a need.“It shows that there is more than just smoke,” said Douglas Heye, a longtime Republican strategist. “It makes it impossible to define this now as simply a House Republican or MAGA thing. This has to be covered differently now. And as we’ve learned from other special counsel investigations, where a special counsel starts is not necessarily where it ends up.”For the White House, the attorney general’s Friday afternoon announcement was an unpleasant surprise, a head-snapping reversal from just seven weeks ago, when the president’s team thought it had turned a corner with Hunter Biden’s agreement with Mr. Weiss to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and accept a diversion program to dismiss an unlawful gun possession charge.The Biden camp was deeply relieved that five years of investigation had added up to nothing more serious. The president made a point of inviting his son, who has struggled with a crack cocaine addiction, to a high-profile state dinner two days later in what was taken as a spike-the-ball moment declaring victory over the family’s pursuers. The fact that Mr. Garland was also at the state dinner, hanging out just across an outdoor tent from the man his department was prosecuting, left even some Democrats feeling uncomfortable.But any sense of relief was premature. When Hunter Biden showed up at the Federal District Court in Wilmington, Del., on July 26 to finalize the plea deal, it all unraveled under questioning from a judge in just a few hours. At the heart of the matter was a disagreement over what the agreement meant. Hunter Biden and his lawyers thought it ended the investigation, while prosecutors made clear it did not.The Hunter Biden legal team wants certainty that a guilty plea would end the matter, given that Mr. Trump has vowed to prosecute him if elected president. But as Mr. Weiss revealed on Friday, subsequent negotiations intended to iron out the disconnect have reached an impasse, making a trial all but certain to be the next step and making it easier for Republicans trying to shift attention from Mr. Trump’s three indictments.They are, of course, hardly comparable cases. Hunter Biden was never president and never will be president, and even the most damning evidence against him does not equate to trying to overturn a democratic election in order to hold onto power. But it has been a useful strategy for Republicans to complain about what they call a “two-tier justice system.”Three-quarters of Republicans believe the president’s son got preferential treatment in the plea deal, compared with 33 percent of Democrats, according to a poll by Reuters and Ipsos in June. But most voters indicated that they thought Mr. Biden was “being a good father by supporting his son,” and only 26 percent said they were less likely to vote for him as a result of Hunter’s legal troubles.The president’s strategists have argued that Republican attacks on Hunter Biden did not work in the 2020 election when Mr. Biden beat Mr. Trump or in the 2022 midterm elections when Democrats did better than anticipated. Nor, they added, has the issue resonated with voters who will be important to the president’s re-election in 2024, meaning independents and disappointed Democrats.That is an assumption that in the months to come will be put on trial, in effect, at the same time as the president’s son. More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy Has a Gimmick That Republicans Are Sure to Love

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      Vivek Ramaswamy is a 38-year-old investor and former pharmaceutical executive who wants to be the Republican nominee for president. He’s not ahead by any means, but he’s doing better than you might expect. If Donald Trump dominates the field and Ron DeSantis is the far runner-up, then Ramaswamy is the candidate poised to rise if the Florida governor falls further behind.Ramaswamy is “anti-woke,” condemns Juneteenth as a “useless” holiday and says that “diversity is not our strength.” He thinks climate activism is a “cult” and wants to send the military to the border with Mexico. He wants to unravel the so-called deep state, thinks the Trump indictments are politically motivated and won’t say whether, if he were in Mike Pence’s shoes, he would have refused the former president’s demand to overturn the 2020 election results.In other words, he’s preoccupied by most of the same concerns as his rivals. But he does have one gimmick that DeSantis and Trump don’t: “We are a constitutional republic. We need to revive civic duty among young Americans,” Ramaswamy said on the platform X, formerly known as Twitter. “That’s why I’m announcing my support for a constitutional amendment to raise the voting age from 18 to 25, but to still allow 18-year-olds to vote if they either pass the same civics test required of immigrants to become naturalized citizens, or else to perform 6 months of military or first responder service.”Ramaswamy has elaborated in interviews on his call to raise the voting age for most young people. “I think we have a loss of civic pride in our country. I think people, young people included, do not value a country that they simply inherit,” he told NPR. “I think we value a country that we have a stake in building. And I think that asking a young person, asking any citizen, to know something about the country before voting, I think is a perfectly reasonable condition.”Demanding a de facto literacy test for most young Americans to vote is not actually a “perfectly reasonable condition.” It is a direct assault on the basic democratic rights of millions of citizens.To begin, there’s the fundamental fact that no aspect of political equality hinges on the ability to memorize trivia. What’s more, you do not need a formal education of any sort to embrace the duties of citizenship or to understand yourself as a political actor with a right to self-government. You do not even need one to understand your political interests and to work, individually or with others, to pursue them through our democratic institutions.To think otherwise is to believe that Americans, from the yeoman farmers of the early Republic to the freedmen of the Reconstruction South to the urban industrial workers of the early 20th century, have never been equipped to govern themselves.There’s also the practical fact that most new requirements for voting in the United States are — in intent and purpose — new restrictions on voting.For example, these days we take the secret ballot for granted as the only rational way to conduct an election. Of course the state should produce uniform, standard ballots for all elections. Of course we should vote in private. But for much of the 19th century before the introduction of the secret ballot — also known as the “Australian” ballot — American voters obtained their ballots from their political parties. “Since the ballots generally contained only the names of an individual party’s candidates, literacy was not required,” notes the historian Alexander Keyssar in “The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States.” “All that a man had to do was drop a ballot in a box.”With a single, standardized ballot — cast in private without the assistance of a friend or relative or party representative — voters had to read to participate. That was the point. As one contemporaneous observer, George Gunton, an economist and social reformer, declared, “so obvious is the evil of ignorant voting that more stringent naturalization laws are being demanded, because too many of our foreign-born citizens vote ignorantly. It is to remedy this that the Australian ballot system has been adopted in so many states.” Its purpose, he continued, was “to eliminate the ignorant, illiterate voters.”We similarly take voter registration for granted — of course we should confirm our intention to vote with municipal authorities ahead of time. But that, too, was introduced to limit and restrict the electorate. “Beginning in the 1830s,” writes Keyssar, “the idea of registration became more popular, particularly among Whigs, who believed that ineligible transients and foreigners were casting their votes for the Democratic Party.” Sixty years later, Southern Democrats used highly discretionary registration laws to remove as many Republican-voting Blacks from the electorate as possible.“The key disfranchising features of the Southern registration laws were the amount of discretion granted to the registrars, the specificity of the information required of the registrant, the times and places set for registration, and the requirement that a voter bring his registration certificate to the polling place,” explained the political scientist J. Morgan Kousser in “The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910.” “Registration laws were most efficiently used — as in South Carolina, Louisiana and North Carolina — to cut the electorate immediately before a referendum on constitutional disfranchisement.”We also can’t forget the actual literacy tests, introduced at the turn of the 20th century, that were designed to keep as many immigrants, Black Americans and laboring people from the polls as possible. The point was to limit, as much as possible, the political power of groups that might challenge the interests of those in power, from industrial barons in the North to large landowners in the South.Ramaswamy says that the goal of his proposal is to encourage civic pride and inculcate a deeper attachment to the country among the youngest American adults. But there are ways to do both without creating new obstacles to voting. There’s also no evidence or indication that a mandatory civics test would achieve the goal in question. When you consider, as well, the extent to which there are older adults — even elderly adults — who could use a little civic pride themselves, it appears that Ramaswamy’s proposal has less to do with fostering national cohesion and more to do with the Republican Party’s unenviable dilemma with young people.Democrats win most younger voters across all racial and ethnic groups. In the 2022 midterm elections, according to the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of voters under 30 backed Democrats compared with 31 percent for Republicans. And soon, young people will represent a majority of potential voters in the country.Rather than try to appeal to or persuade this bloc, Ramaswamy’s proposal is to remove a vast majority from the electorate altogether.To be clear, this isn’t a serious plan. The American public is so polarized along partisan and ideological lines as to make the Constitution effectively unamendable. Ramaswamy’s call to raise the voting age is a novelty policy for a novelty candidate. And yet it tells us something about the Republican electorate, and thus the Republican Party, that the eye-catching gimmick of an ambitious politician is a plan to disenfranchise millions of American voters.In many ways, big and small, the Republican Party has turned against the bedrock “republican principles” of majority rule and popular sovereignty. We see it in a governor removing a duly-elected official because he disagrees with the views she represents, a state legislature gerrymandering itself into a permanent majority regardless of where the votes fall, an entire state Republican Party trying (and failing) to change the rules of constitutional amendment to keep the voters from affirming their rights and a former president who would rather end the American experiment in democracy than accept defeat at the ballot box.Ramaswamy is playing the same song. There’s almost no one in the Republican Party, at this point, who isn’t.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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      How Are Iowa Democrats? ‘I Can’t Even Describe to You How Bad It Is.’

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      Not long ago, Iowa was the center of the Democratic political universe.In 2019, two dozen presidential candidates roamed the Iowa State Fair to grill pork chops and admire the famed butter cow as they vied for the state’s caucusgoers. Some Democrats still saw the state’s rightward jolt in 2016 as temporary, believing that their flipping of two congressional seats in 2018 had reaffirmed Iowa’s purple status. Days before the 2020 general election, Joseph R. Biden Jr. campaigned in Des Moines.Now, as Republican presidential candidates flock to the fair, Iowa Democrats are at their lowest point in decades.“It is so bad,” said Claire Celsi, a Democratic state senator from West Des Moines. “I can’t even describe to you how bad it is.”Ms. Celsi and others described themselves as exhausted by repeated defeats at the ballot box, an inability to slow Republicans at the State Capitol and the loss to South Carolina of the first-in-the-nation status in Democratic presidential contests. Deep in the minority, Democrats in the State Legislature have squabbled among themselves, ousting their party’s State Senate leader in June after a dispute over personnel.In interviews this week, Iowa Democrats said the state now stood as a warning sign for what happens when their party falls out of touch with voters who once made up key parts of its electoral coalition.“There’s no question that Democrats are at a low point in Iowa,” said former Representative Dave Loebsack, whose eastern Iowa seat, which he had held for 14 years, flipped to a Republican when he chose not to seek re-election in 2020. “It’s difficult even to recruit people to run when we’re so far down.”Iowa’s transition to a deep-red state has taken place with remarkable speed. Democrats controlled the State Senate as recently as 2016. In 2018, Democrats won three of the state’s four congressional seats and three of the six statewide offices. But after the party’s bungling of its 2020 presidential caucuses, President Donald J. Trump cruised to victory in Iowa that November.Claire Celsi, a Democratic state senator from West Des Moines, said simply of the situation for Iowa Democrats, “It is so bad.”Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThe midterm elections last year were a Democratic blood bath in Iowa, even though the party had over-performed in much of the rest of the country.The underfunded, little-known Democratic nominee for governor lost by 19 percentage points to Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, and carried only four of the state’s 99 counties. Republicans took all four congressional seats for the first time in 50 years, enacted a gun rights amendment in the State Constitution, ousted two of the three Democrats in statewide office and took supermajority control of both chambers of the Legislature.The three congressional seats Democrats held as recently as 2020 are still winnable, Democrats say, but the party doesn’t have 2024 candidates for any of them so far.“We should have candidates out there thinking, ‘If I get a few breaks, I can win,’” said Pete D’Alessandro, a senior aide to Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns in Iowa. “That we don’t is a direct reflection of having an incompetent party for the last couple of years.”Democrats, including Mr. D’Alessandro, express optimism about the party’s new chairwoman, Rita Hart, who has sought to empower county-level leaders. Ms. Hart, who in 2020 lost the congressional race for Mr. Loebsack’s seat by six votes, said Iowa Democrats would have to fight for a focus on local issues.Ms. Hart took over the party in January, after a period in which Iowa Democrats had four leaders in less than two years. She has sought to instill some continuity while reorienting the party’s priorities away from the presidential cycle and toward local needs.“The way the media has changed, the way people have gotten their information, we have not shifted to understanding that we’ve got to talk to our fellow Iowans,” she said. “I’m very convinced that we’ve got to empower our county parties to do just that.”The struggles of Iowa Democrats reflect the broader migration of white, rural voters to Republicans, a long-term trend that has accelerated during Mr. Trump’s political career. Iowa has just two big cities, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, and two college towns that state Democrats can still count on winning.Interviews with two dozen Democrats in the state suggest that the party has suffered from a confluence of problems, including diminished campaigning during the coronavirus pandemic; Mr. Trump’s appeal to the white, rural voters who dominate state politics; and weak messaging in the 2022 elections.Democrats have faced numerous setbacks this year, including Republicans’ passage of a six-week abortion ban — which has been temporarily halted by a court order — and a new program that allocates state money toward private school vouchers.“It’s just been so exhausting and frustrating to continue to take losses,” said Sarah Trone Garriott, a Democratic state senator who was the party’s rare bright spot last year when she flipped a suburban Des Moines district to beat the Republican president of the chamber.She added, “If I had known everything that I was getting into, I don’t think I would have run in the first place, because it’s just been really hard, but I see so much opportunity in Iowa.”Losing the first presidential contest after the state party had suffered international ridicule for the 2020 caucuses fiasco forced what several Democrats described as a long-overdue reckoning. No longer can the party rely on a periodic influx of fund-raising and attention. Internal discussions now center on how to act more like successful red-state Democrats elsewhere, nominating moderate candidates who can attract independent voters who have been tilting more conservative with each election.“I’m hopeful that now our attention is on getting people elected and getting Democrats to turn out the vote rather than a national entity that overtakes everything,” said J.D. Scholten, a state representative from Sioux City who in 2018 nearly defeated Representative Steve King, a hard-right Republican with a history of racist remarks.Mr. Scholten, who spent years playing professional baseball in several countries, will not attend the State Fair because he’s pitching for a team in the Netherlands this summer. Ms. Celsi said she wouldn’t go because it is “Kim Reynolds’s show.” And Mr. Loebsack said he was staying home because the country music acts at the fair’s amphitheater did not appeal to him and his wife.Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, a Republican, holding an interview at the State Fair. She easily won re-election last year.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIt’s clear that Iowa Democrats have a long way to go.Republicans, with a hammerlock on the state’s politics, dominate fund-raising and media attention — and that was before the G.O.P. presidential candidates made themselves regulars at local fund-raisers and other political events.That has left Democrats doing a lot of finger-pointing and soul-searching about what has gone wrong, whether they have hit rock bottom yet and how to maneuver their way back to political relevance.“The Iowa Democratic Party didn’t prepare for the transition to understanding and using social media,” said Jack Hatch, a longtime state legislator who was the Democratic nominee for governor in 2014. “Some individual campaigns understood, but not the party. As a result, we had one message for all campaigns, which weakened all our campaigns. One message doesn’t work in Iowa.” More

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      What Is the Iowa State Fair and Why Does It Matter?

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      The Iowa State Fair is one of the most famous stops in a presidential campaign, known for delivering the kind of memorable moments that can define a candidacy.The fair, which attracts about a million people over ten days, amounts to a political obstacle course for candidates, who must woo voters in unscripted interactions, flip a pork chop for the cameras, deliver their stump speeches in a public forum and — most treacherously of all — eat fair food while avoiding unflattering photographs. It all happens before the hundreds of thousands of Iowa voters visiting the fair, throngs of reporters and banks of televisions cameras.And it can easily go very wrong.In 1987, Joe Biden lifted passages of a speech by British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock without attribution, adding to questions of plagiarism that ultimately lead to his early withdrawal from the race.In 2004, John Kerry, one of the country’s richest lawmakers who had been struggling to show he connected with regular voters, ordered a strawberry smoothie — a choice that had his aides scrambling to find a corn dog.And in 2012, Mitt Romney responded to a heckler with the line, “Corporations are people, my friend.” The comment came to be a shorthand for Democratic attacks that he sided with business over American workers.These kinds of moments can create narratives that become cemented in the public perceptions of the candidates — even when the facts may be slightly off. In 2007, Senator Fred Thompson, who ran for the Republican nomination, traveled the fair in a golf cart and, allegedly, $500 Gucci loafers. Years later, Mr. Thompson insisted that he did not own the shoes.This year, all the major Republican presidential candidates, except former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, are expected to attend. The biggest showdown is expected to be on Saturday, when both former President Donald Trump and his major rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, will be circulating through the fairgrounds.Mr. DeSantis will participate in a conversation with Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa. Mr. Trump is skipping the organized events to attend with an entourage of endorsers not from Iowa but Florida — a dig at Mr. DeSantis. It’s the kind of unconventional approach Mr. Trump has taken to the event in the past. In 2015, he caused a media frenzy when he landed his helicopter near the fairgrounds and offered rides to children. More

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      Trump Says He Won’t Sign Loyalty Pledge Required for G.O.P. Debate

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      The Republican National Committee has demanded that 2024 contenders pledge to support the eventual nominee in order to debate. The former president is refusing.Former President Donald J. Trump said on Wednesday that he was unwilling to meet one of the requirements to participate in the first Republican presidential debate, refusing to sign a pledge to support the eventual nominee.“I wouldn’t sign the pledge,” he said in an interview with the conservative outlet Newsmax. “Why would I sign a pledge? There are people on there that I wouldn’t have.”The decision would seem to rule out the possibility of him being at the debate on Aug. 23, yet he also said that he would announce next week whether he planned to take part.Asked for comment on Thursday, the Republican National Committee, which sets the rules, referred to past interviews in which its chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, has defended the pledge and said the committee will hold everyone to it.“The rules aren’t changing,” she said on CNN last month. “We’ve been very vocal with them.”In the Newsmax interview, Mr. Trump said, “I can name three or four people that I wouldn’t support for president,” without naming them. “So right there, there’s a problem right there.”Mr. Trump also said in the interview that he wasn’t convinced it was worth it for him to debate given how far ahead he is in the primary. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed him leading the field by an enormous margin, more than 35 percentage points ahead of his nearest competitor, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.“Why would you do that when you’re leading by so much?” he asked.Some other Republicans criticized Mr. Trump on Thursday for his refusal to commit to supporting a nominee other than himself. “Every Republican running for President would be better than Joe Biden,” Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia said on Twitter. “Any candidate who does not commit to supporting the eventual nominee is putting themselves ahead of the future of our country.”Mr. Trump’s vacillation over the pledge is not new; he objected to signing the same loyalty pledge during his first campaign eight years ago. He ultimately did, but then took it back.That history underscores that the pledge is, in practice, unenforceable. Party leaders can refuse to let a candidate debate for not signing, but they can’t force someone who does sign to actually support another nominee next year.One of Mr. Trump’s opponents, former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, has said that he will sign the pledge, but that he would not support Mr. Trump if he is the eventual nominee: “I’m going to take the pledge just as seriously as Donald Trump took it in 2016,” he told CNN.Another opponent, former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, has suggested that — if he otherwise qualifies for the debate, which he hasn’t yet — he would sign based on the far-from-safe assumption that Mr. Trump won’t be the nominee and Mr. Hutchinson won’t actually be tested. More