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      Federal Election Commission Chair Says Trump Has Moved to Fire Her

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      Ellen L. Weintraub, the chairwoman of the Federal Election Commission, said on Thursday that President Trump had moved to fire her.Ms. Weintraub, who has served as a Democratic commissioner on the bipartisan panel since 2002, posted a short letter signed by Mr. Trump on social media that said she was “hereby removed” from the commission effective immediately. She said in an interview that she did not see the president’s move as legally valid, and that she was considering her options on how to respond.“There’s a perfectly legal way for him to replace me,” Ms. Weintraub said on Thursday evening. “But just flat-out firing me, that is not it.”The F.E.C., the nation’s top campaign watchdog agency, is made up of six commissioners, three aligned with Democrats and three with Republicans. That structure has contributed to repeated partisan deadlocks over elections investigations that scrutinize one party or another. Ms. Weintraub’s term as commissioner expired in 2007, but she has continued to serve on the board. The position of chair rotates every year. Ms. Weintraub took up the post again in January.A commissioner is removed only after a replacement is nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and Ms. Weintraub said that the president did not have the power to force her off the commission before that. Mr. Trump did not name a successor to Ms. Weintraub in his letter, and it would take weeks at least for his choice for commissioner to be approved by the Senate.Trevor Potter, a former commissioner and chairman of the commission nominated by President George H.W. Bush, denounced the move to fire Ms. Weintraub in a statement, saying that doing so would violate constitutional separation of powers.“Congress explicitly, and intentionally, created the F.E.C. to be an independent, bipartisan federal agency whose commissioners are confirmed by Congress,” said Mr. Potter, who is now the president of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan campaign watchdog. He added: “As the only agency that regulates the president, Congress intentionally did not grant the president the power to fire F.E.C. commissioners.”The White House did not respond to requests for comment.Ms. Weintraub was the chief architect of a novel strategy to further paralyze the commission in partisan deadlocks in order to compel enforcement of the nation’s election laws through the courts. She previously described it as a last resort after years of enforcement efforts being stymied by the three Republicans on the commission.Ms. Weintraub on Thursday also pointed to her public statements about F.E.C. complaints focused on Mr. Trump’s presidential campaigns as one reason she may have earned the president’s ire.“There have been dozens of complaints filed against the president,” Ms. Weintraub said, noting that the commission has not been able to pursue them because of the 3-to-3 partisan deadlock.She added, “I have pointed that out. I’ve written about this. So I’m not really surprised that I am on their radar.” More

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      Trump Says He Supports an End to Daylight Savings Time

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump said on social media that the time change is “inconvenient” and that the Republican Party would try to put an end to it.President-elect Donald J. Trump called daylight saving time “inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation” in a social media post on Friday and said the Republican Party would try to “eliminate” it, in the latest effort to end the twice-yearly time change.Most states change their time by one hour — in March, when clocks spring forward, and in November, when clocks fall back.Over the years, many elected officials, including Mr. Trump, have expressed support for ending the changes.“Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is OK with me!” Mr. Trump posted on social media in March 2019.He reiterated his support to end the time switches on Friday, posting on X, “The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t!”On social media, there was support for Mr. Trump’s post.Many people called the time changes antiquated. Some noted that daylight saving time would most likely not be eliminated, as his post suggested, but rather would be made permanent, and the time changes would be eliminated.Ending the clock change would require the approval of Congress. There have been many bipartisan efforts to pass such a bill, but all have failed. In 2022, the Senate unanimously passed a bill to make daylight saving time permanent, but it died in the House. An effort to pass a similar bill in 2023 also failed.The idea behind daylight saving time is to move an hour of sunlight from the early morning to the evening, so that people can make more use of daylight.William Willet, an English builder, is credited with popularizing daylight saving time in the early 1900s, when he urged British lawmakers to shift the clocks to benefit the economy. Parliament rejected the proposal in 1909, but then embraced it a few years later under the pressures of World War I.Other countries followed suit in an effort to cut energy costs, including the United States starting in March 1918. But there is no consensus on whether daylight saving time actually does reduce energy use.Small-business owners say that when it stays light after work, people are more likely to go out and spend money. But many Americans consider the time switch a nuisance.Parents say it throws off bedtimes for their children. And no one likes losing an hour of sleep when clocks move forward in March.In 2020, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine called for an end to daylight saving time, saying that the change disrupts the body’s natural clock and can cause health issues. More

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      N.C. Elections Board Rejects G.O.P. Effort to Toss 60,000 Ballots

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      The ruling comes in a dispute over a State Supreme Court race that the Democratic incumbent won by 734 votes.The North Carolina State Board of Elections rejected on Wednesday a Republican bid to throw out more than 60,000 votes in a closely contested election for a State Supreme Court seat that an incumbent Democrat won by 734 votes.Two recounts showed that Associate Justice Allison Riggs, the incumbent, had eked out a slim victory out of some 5.5 million ballots that were cast. The losing judge, Jefferson Griffin, a Republican, argued that the state’s failure to enforce technical aspects of registration and election laws should disqualify scores of thousands of voters, most or all of whom cast otherwise legal ballots.The Democrat-controlled elections board disagreed, in a series of votes that went largely along party lines. Republicans on the board called for further hearings to gather more evidence on the issues.“The idea that someone could have been registered to vote, came to vote and then has their vote discarded is anathema to the democratic system,” the board’s Democratic chairman, Allan Hirsch, said at the meeting.The chairman of the state Republican Party denounced the decision, saying that “the board’s continued efforts to engineer political outcomes for Democrats is shameful.”Judge Griffin, who currently sits on the State Court of Appeals, could appeal the ruling to a State Superior Court, kicking off a legal process that could end at the same State Supreme Court where Justice Riggs sits. Republicans hold a 5-to-2 majority on the court, which has been bitterly divided along partisan lines in recent years.The ruling on Wednesday also rejected attempts by three Republican state legislators to overturn their narrow losses on the same grounds.In a protest against the election results filed last month, Judge Griffin argued that upward of 60,000 voters should be disqualified because the state failed to enact one part of a 2004 law requiring new voters to provide a driver’s license or Social Security number when applying to vote. Voters who failed to list numbers should be ineligible, he said, even if they were unaware of the requirement.His complaint also sought to disqualify overseas voters who failed to submit a photo ID with their ballots in accordance with a new voter ID law. Those overseas voters also were not told of the requirement.Lawyers for Justice Riggs, as well as the state Democratic Party, argued that federal law bars throwing out votes for lack of a driver’s license or Social Security numbers. They also said that state law setting out the rules for overseas votes does not require a photo ID. More

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      Trump Picks Strident Supporter for Civil Rights Post at Justice Dept.

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Monday that he would nominate Harmeet K. Dhillon, a California lawyer who has long championed Mr. Trump in public, in court cases and on social media, to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.In declaring his choice on social media, Mr. Trump said Ms. Dhillon “has stood up consistently to protect our cherished civil liberties.” He praised her legal work targeting social media companies, restrictions on religious gatherings during the pandemic and “corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.”Ms. Dhillon has been a conservative activist so devoted to Mr. Trump that she was willing to attack not only Democrats but also fellow Republicans, including her ultimately unsuccessful challenge last year to the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee at the time.She was also the co-chairwoman in 2020 of a group, Lawyers for Trump, that challenged the results of that year’s presidential election.It is not unusual for Republican administrations to significantly scale back the work in the Civil Rights Division. In Ms. Dhillon, however, Mr. Trump has chosen a lawyer active in the culture wars whose firm specializes in championing the right’s causes.“I’m extremely honored by President Trump’s nomination to assist with our nation’s civil rights agenda,” Ms. Dhillon posted on social media. “It has been my dream to be able to serve our great country, and I am so excited to be part of an incredible team of lawyers led by” Pam Bondi, Mr. Trump’s choice for attorney general.The division, which enforces voting rights laws, investigates police departments and brings charges for violations of people’s civil rights, is spending the final days of the Biden administration finishing as much work as possible on cases involving patterns or practices of police misconduct.Earlier on Monday, the division announced findings highly critical of the police department in Worcester, Mass. Such findings, however, may not amount to much, given that those investigations will soon be handed over to the Trump administration.During the first Trump administration, the Justice Department walked away from several high-profile cases involving misconduct by major city police departments, and lawyers who specialize in such cases have said they expect the second Trump administration to do much the same. More

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      JD Vance, Elon Musk and the Future of America

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      Beneath all the furor around Donald Trump’s appointments — Matt Gaetz down and out, Pete Hegseth down but maybe coming back, the Kash Patel drama waiting the wings — the most important figures in this administration’s orbit have not changed since Election Day: Besides the president himself, the future of Trumpism is still most likely to be shaped and stamped by two men, JD Vance and Elon Musk.Not just because of their talent and achievements, and not just because Vance is the political heir apparent and Musk would be one of the world’s most influential men even if he didn’t have the ear of the president-elect. It’s also because they represent, more clearly than any other appointee, two potent visions for a 21st century right, and their interaction is likely to shape conservatism for the next four years and beyond.Musk is the dynamist, the believer in growth and innovation and exploration as the lodestars of American civilization. His dynamism was not always especially ideological: The Tesla and SpaceX mogul was once a Barack Obama Democrat, happy to support an active and sometimes spendthrift government so long as it spent freely on his projects. But as Musk has moved right, he has adopted a more libertarian pose, insisting on the profound wastefulness of government spending and the tyranny of the administrative state.Vance meanwhile is the populist, committed to protect and uplift those parts of America neglected or left behind in an age of globalization. Along with his support for the Trumpian causes of tariffs and immigration restriction, this worldview has made him more sympathetic than the average Republican senator to certain forms of government investment — from longstanding programs like Social Security to new ideas about industrial policy and family policy.Despite this contrast, the Musk and Vance worldviews overlap in important ways. Musk has moved in a populist direction on immigration, while Vance has been a venture capitalist and clearly has a strong sympathy for parts of the dynamist worldview, especially its critique of the regulatory state. Both men share a farsighted interest in the collapsing birthrate, a heretofore-fringe issue that’s likely to dominate the later parts of the 21st century. And there is modest-but-real convergence between the Muskian “tech” worldview and Vance’s more “neo-trad” style of religious conservatism, based on not just a shared antipathy toward wokeness but also similar views about the intelligibility of the cosmos and the providential place of humankind in history.So you can imagine a scenario, in Trump’s second term and beyond, where these convergences yield a dynamist-populist fusionism — a conservatism that manages to simultaneously aim for the stars and uplift and protect the working class, in which economic growth and technological progress help renew the heartland (as Musk’s own companies have brought jobs and optimism to South Texas) while also preserving our creaking social compact.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump and Harris Campaigns Met to Talk Tactics. It Wasn’t Pretty.

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      Leaders of the Trump and Harris campaigns met this week to talk tactics. It wasn’t pretty.Reader, we wrote you this newsletter in a tense room in Cambridge.The walls were covered in dark-wood paneling. A U-shaped conference table was elegantly draped with maroon tablecloths and decorated with little jars of roses and calla lilies.On one side of the table sat several senior staff members for the Biden-Harris campaign who looked a little bit as if they were undergoing a collective root canal without anesthesia. On the other side sat five leading Trump campaign staff members and allies who looked a little bit as if they were holding the dentist’s drill.After every presidential election, the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School invites campaign strategists for both general-election candidates — as well as key staff members from losing primary campaigns — to unload about what happened. The discussions, which take place on panels moderated by journalists, can get heated, as they did in 2016. Maybe some years the event feels cathartic. This year, though, the big word was flawless.Sheila Nix, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign chief of staff, used it on Thursday as each campaign outlined over dinner what had been its main strategy, saying Ms. Harris “ran a pretty flawless campaign.” And then Chris LaCivita, one of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign managers, lobbed the word back at Team Biden/Harris during one of the panels today.“Flawless execution,” he sarcastically interjected, after Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the chair of the Biden and then the Harris campaign, labored to answer a question about the fateful debate that ended President Biden’s campaign.LaCivita’s interruption got at a central tension in the aftermath of the election, one that has grated on Democrats outside the room and became a target of mockery from the Trump staff members inside it. For a campaign that lost, the Biden-Harris team has been reluctant to admit to specific mistakes — and that pattern continued today. They admitted they had lost, but their diagnosis was more about the mood of the country than tactical errors on their part. The ultimate answer may be a combination of both factors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Here’s What Led to Tennessee’s Ban on Gender-Affirming Care

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      Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s announcement of a new transgender clinic in 2018 did little to draw attention to its practice. The four-paragraph news release amounted to a location, hours and the names of two senior staff members.The spotlight came four years later, when Matt Walsh, a conservative political commentator at The Daily Wire in Nashville, published a series of posts and videos about the clinic. Those posts said that a staff member there had privately characterized gender-affirming medication and surgery as “moneymakers,” and used caustic terms to describe the center’s treatments.The medical center, which is separate from Vanderbilt University, pushed back. In a statement at the time, the center said that the clinic’s mission was to serve a “high-risk population for mental and physical health issues” who “have been consistently underserved by the U.S. health system.”The medical center said that it had not provided care to children younger than 18 without the consent of a parent, and that it would not force any employee who disagreed with the care because of personal or religious beliefs to provide it.Conservatives called for an investigation into the clinic, and Republican leaders spoke at a rally Mr. Walsh organized in Nashville in October 2022 in opposition to gender-affirming care for children. When Tennessee legislators convened in January 2023, lawmakers designated a proposed ban on gender-affirming care as Senate Bill 1. The bill passed over objections from transgender people and most Democrats. More

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      Can Rahm Emanuel Flip the Script Again?

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      There’s a buzz around Rahm Emanuel — the former Bill Clinton adviser, former Illinois congressman, former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, former mayor of Chicago — possibly becoming the next head of the Democratic National Committee. The progressive left despises his pragmatism and liberal centrism. He has a reputation for abrasiveness. And his current job, as ambassador to Japan, has traditionally served as a posting for high-level political has-beens like Walter Mondale and Howard Baker.But he also has a gift for constructing winning coalitions with difficult, unexpected partners.More on that in a moment. When I meet him for breakfast this week at a New York City hotel, what he wants to talk about is a looming crisis in Asia. “What started as two wars in two theaters is now one war in two separate theaters,” he says of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. “We need to ensure that it does not expand into a third theater.”How soon might that happen? I mention 2027, a year that’s often seen as China’s target date for reunification with Taiwan, if necessary by force.“I think it’s actually 2025,” he answers.What Emanuel has in mind are Asia’s other flashpoints, including along the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea, where Russia is “poking” Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, “to do something” and where South Korea’s president briefly declared martial law, and also in the South China Sea, where China and the Philippines are coming to blows over Beijing’s illegal maritime claims. Unlike with Taipei, to which America’s obligations are deliberately ambiguous, with Manila and Seoul our defense commitments are ironclad.That could mean war for the United States on multiple unexpected fronts. Emanuel’s tenure as ambassador was distinguished by his role in engineering two historic rapprochements — last year between Japan and South Korea and this year between Japan and the Philippines — that, along with the AUKUS defense pact with Britain and Australia, form part of a broad diplomatic effort by the Biden administration to contain China.The Chinese, Emanuel says, “have a theory of the case in the Indo-Pacific. We have a theory of the case. Their attempt is to isolate Australia, isolate the Philippines and put all the pressure on that country,” often through abusive trade practices. “Our job is to flip the script and isolate China through their actions.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More