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      Kemp and Perdue Debate, Looking Back at 2020 and Ahead to Abrams

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      Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and his Republican primary opponent, former Senator David Perdue, bickered over the previous election — and over who would be more likely to defeat Stacey Abrams in November. ATLANTA — Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and former Senator David Perdue, a former ally who is challenging him in the Republican primary next month, met in an explosive first debate on Sunday night that was marked by a lengthy rehashing of the 2020 election’s outcome and testy attacks each other’s veracity.During the hourlong exchange, the candidates sparred over their conservative bona fides, a handful of policy issues popular on the right and who would ultimately be the stronger candidate against Stacey Abrams in November.Mr. Perdue, who was defeated in a runoff last year by Jon Ossoff, a Democrat, repeatedly echoed former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election had been “stolen and rigged” against the two of them, though multiple ballot recounts confirmed they had lost fair and square. Mr. Perdue, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump to challenge Mr. Kemp in the May 24 primary, assailed Mr. Kemp for refusing to call a special Georgia legislative session to try to overturn the election’s results.Mr. Perdue insisted he would still be a sitting United States senator if Mr. Kemp hadn’t “caved.”But when Mr. Perdue claimed that he had repeatedly asked Mr. Kemp to call such a special session, the governor pushed back forcefully, reminding voters of the many days he and his family had spent on Mr. Perdue’s campaign bus, trying in vain to help him win a second term. “Folks, he never asked me,” Mr. Kemp said. And when Mr. Perdue repeatedly accused the governor of lying, Mr. Kemp challenged him to produce witnesses to back up his claims.Each man portrayed the other unfavorably in light of 2020: Mr. Perdue said Mr. Kemp had betrayed Republican voters by failing to overturn the election, and Mr. Kemp pointed to Mr. Perdue’s loss to Mr. Ossoff as proof that he is too weak to defeat Ms. Abrams, the Democrat who narrowly lost to Mr. Kemp in 2018 and is making a second run for governor this year.Ms. Abrams’s candidacy loomed large over the entire evening, as both men underlined the danger they said she posed to Georgia if she wound up in the governor’s mansion. While Mr. Kemp holds a double-digit lead over Mr. Perdue in several polls, Mr. Perdue sought to remind voters of Mr. Kemp’s 1.4-percentage-point victory margin in 2018.“He barely beat Stacey Abrams in ’18, when I helped him secure President Trump’s endorsement, which he still today doesn’t think helped him at all,” Mr. Perdue said. The slugfest never let up, as a focus on Georgia policy issues in the debate’s second half-hour devolved into a fight over who was more authentically conservative, each candidate seeking to outflank the other from the right on education, public safety and jobs. Mr. Kemp doubled down on his support for a bill that prohibits teaching of “divisive concepts” on race and history, saying that Republicans in the state “passed this piece of legislation to make sure that our kids are not going to be indoctrinated in our schools,” and that curriculums should focus on “the facts, not somebody’s ideology.”But Mr. Perdue accused Mr. Kemp of abrogating his responsibility to protect students, parents and teachers alike. “They need to make sure that the woke mob’s not taking over the schools, and you’ve left them high and dry,” he said, asserting that the Atlanta schools were “teaching kids that voter ID is racist.”Answering a question about Latino voters, Mr. Perdue criticized Mr. Kemp’s record on immigration, recalling a 2018 campaign ad in which Mr. Kemp promised to use his own pickup truck to “round up illegals.” “Governor, what happened? Your pickup break down?” Mr. Perdue asked.Mr. Kemp said that the Covid-19 pandemic had intervened, saying that “picking up” people would only have helped spread infection in the state — and then reminded voters, for the umpteenth time, of Mr. Perdue’s defeat last year.“The fact is, if you hadn’t lost your race to Jon Ossoff, we wouldn’t have lost control of the Senate, and we wouldn’t have the disaster that we have in Washington right now,” Mr. Kemp said.A few clear-cut policy rifts did come into view over Georgia-specific issues.The two took opposite views of a new factory to produce electric trucks that is being built by Rivian Automotive in the state. Mr. Kemp exalted the project for the thousands of jobs it is expected to create, while Mr. Perdue cited an investment by the Democratic megadonor George Soros to dismiss Rivian as a “woke company,” saying that the project would redirect Georgians’ tax dollars into Mr. Soros’s pocket.Mr. Perdue attacked Mr. Kemp from several angles over rising crime in Atlanta, saying the governor had shrunk the size of the Georgia State Patrol and faulting him for failing to get behind an effort by some residents of Atlanta’s wealthy Buckhead neighborhood, alarmed about the surge in violent crime, to secede from the city. He accused the governor of staying out of the fray over the Buckhead secession movement for the sake of the “big company cronies downtown that are his big donors, that are desperate to not let that happen.”Mr. Kemp said he had raised troopers’ salaries, enhanced their training, created a crime suppression unit and deployed more troopers in metro Atlanta. And he pointed to his signing this month of a law allowing Georgians to carry concealed firearms without a permit.That was another way of fighting crime, he said.“The bad people already have the guns,” Mr. Kemp said. “We’re trying to give law-abiding citizens the ability to protect themselves, their family and their property.”Right to the end, both candidates were on message, and the message was largely a dim view of each other.In his closing, Mr. Perdue called Mr. Kemp a “weak governor trying to cover up a bad record.”Mr. Kemp, in his own summation, said Mr. Perdue was attacking his record in office “because he has none of his own, which is why he didn’t win his Senate race.” More

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      Boss Trump, ‘the Sorest Loser of All Time’

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      More from our inbox:Does Our Patent System Need to Be Reformed?Former President Donald J. Trump took the stage at a Save America rally in Michigan earlier this month.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “The Mar-a-Lago Machine: Trump as a Modern-Day Party Boss” (front page, April 18):This disturbing and prescient article makes for painful reading. Everything that the hopeful pundits of 2020 predicted — that Donald Trump would fade away after his defeat, that he would run out of money, that his legal troubles would overwhelm him, that he would be exposed as a cheap, huckstering demagogue — has proved wrong.Instead he has emerged stronger than ever, with his legal troubles melting away, money pouring in and vast numbers of Americans fervently supporting him.Since 2020, those same hopeful pundits have been predicting that Mr. Trump won’t run in 2024 and that other Republicans somehow have a chance. But of course he will; why wouldn’t he? And when he does, he will be hard to beat.There is a kind of awful inevitability about Mr. Trump and his gang of Mar-a-Lago sycophants. It will be a dark day for our country if he once again becomes president.Tim ShawCambridge, Mass.To the Editor:“Trump’s Allies Keep Up Fight to Nullify Vote” (front page, April 19) is disturbing. But this never-ending effort to reverse the 2020 election keeps reminding everyone that Donald Trump is a loser — the sorest loser of all time.And one thing we know that Donald Trump detests is a loser.So as the months go by and turn into years, as the court cases and investigations proceed, Mr. Trump continues to remind us he is a loser. No matter how much he and his friends try, while defying facts, logic and the law, no matter how many tantrums he throws or lies he tells, he not only reminds us he’s a loser. He also reminds himself.Rick BeardsleyBoca Raton, Fla.Does Our Patent System Need to Be Reformed? Illustration by Rebecca Chew/The New York Times; photographs by Yevgen Romanenko, moi/amanaimagesRF, Westend61 and Marie Hickman, via Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Save America’s Patent System” (editorial, Sunday Review, April 17):I commend The Times’s editorial board for making a compelling case for reform of our patent system. I have an incurable cancer. The drugs keeping me alive — which carry a list price of more than $900,000 annually — will one day stop working, so I care deeply about innovation and new drug development. But drugs don’t work if people can’t afford them.When a drug company makes a truly inventive discovery, it should be rewarded with a patent and receive a fair return. But the drug industry would have you believe that every patent granted is an indicator of innovative achievement. That couldn’t be further from the truth.In fact, the industry’s anti-competitive practices actually inhibit innovation. Neither new patents nor new drugs necessarily equal real innovation. Worse, in too many cases manufacturers are gaming America’s patent system to prevent competition and block affordable generic and biosimilar drugs from coming to market.We can — and should — bring down monopoly prices by empowering Medicare to negotiate, but we must also reform our patent system to address the drivers that lead to unjustified monopolies in the first place.David MitchellBethesda, Md.The writer is the founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs Now.To the Editor:America’s biopharmaceutical research companies support solutions that will lower health care costs, while some of the policies outlined in the editorial would simply harm patients.Biopharmaceutical innovation is difficult and risky, with only 12 percent of medicines in the pipeline entering clinical trials ever achieving F.D.A. approval. Patents play an essential role in encouraging innovation by helping fuel the investments that result in new treatments and cures.Patents do not establish a monopoly on treating a condition. Instead, they propel progress. A new patent on a product provides protection only for the invention it protects — it does not provide additional exclusivity for underlying products. Contrary to the editorial board’s assertion, the Patent and Trademark Office is not issuing sham patents.Drugmakers should continue researching ways their medicines can help tackle different diseases, treat new patient populations, like children, and make lifesaving treatments, like chemotherapy, more tolerable for patients. Progress is a good thing, and it should be encouraged, not punished.The Restoring the America Invents Act would benefit big patent infringers, like many big technology companies, and make the legal landscape more uncertain for researchers focused on bringing forward new medical advances for patients.Anne McDonald PritchettWashingtonThe writer is senior vice president, policy, research and membership, for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.To the Editor:It shouldn’t be controversial to expect patented inventions to be new and useful, but it is. That’s because a handful of big companies treat the Patent Office like an A.T.M.: a reliable source of cash for the cost of a small fee. Because the Patent Office depends on those fees, it treats companies applying for protection like customers to be served instead of applicants to be evaluated. What about members of the public who depend on patented technology to earn a living, get an education, or access medical care? We get ignored.The editorial board is absolutely right: The patent system needs to change. But those who benefit from it most will fight tooth and nail to protect it. We need the new director of the Patent Office to prioritize the public’s interest and the patent system’s purpose — promoting scientific and technological progress — no matter how loud the cries of private companies accustomed to five-star service.Alex MossSouth Pasadena, Calif.The writer is executive director of the Public Interest Patent Law Institute.To the Editor:Your editorial wrongly targets our innovative insulin drug, Glargine, as an example of using patents to create a monopoly, ignoring that it has had biosimilar competition since 2016. Focusing on the patents for our delivery device is misleading because they have not prevented the development and sale of biosimilar Glargine products, let alone those with other non-infringing delivery methods.To make its case, the editorial board tied patents to the cost of medicine, which too many Americans struggle to afford. But Sanofi offers a comprehensive insulin safety net, giving uninsured patients ready access to free and low-cost insulin, while commercially insured patients all qualify for co-payment assistance that lowers out-of-pocket costs for most patients to $10 or less. And every Sanofi insulin is included in a Medicare program that caps costs for seniors.We are wary of imperiling a patent system that has put the U.S. first in biomedical innovation and generic drug penetration. We believe that the board would benefit readers by telling the complete story.Adam GluckWashingtonThe writer is senior vice president and head of U.S. corporate affairs at Sanofi. More

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      The Tennessee Law Making School Board Culture Wars Even Worse

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      FRANKLIN, Tenn. — “What happens when a child sounds out the word ‘lesbian’ and turns to their teacher and asks, ‘What is a lesbian?’”Trisha Lucente, the mom of a local kindergartner, has come before the Williamson County school board to voice her distress over the district’s continued use of Epic, a digital library app containing more than 40,000 children’s books and videos. Ms. Lucente and like-minded parents have complained about several titles that they consider inappropriate. Anything touching on race, gender or sexuality can set off alarms in conservative circles here. (A book on sea horses came under fire recently. The fact that male sea horses get pregnant was seen as promoting the idea of gender fluidity.)In response, the school system temporarily shut down access to the library to conduct a review — prompting an outcry from supporters of the app — then reinstated it while allowing parents to opt out their kids.Ms. Lucente finds the compromise unacceptable. What happens when a child who has been opted out overhears the lesbian question, she demands. “What position does that put our teachers in? What are they supposed to say to that?” The Epic situation, she contends, is just another example of how the board and administration are dividing the community and “failing our children and our teachers.”Ms. Lucente is not the only one with strong feelings on the matter. Multiple parents and teachers at the meeting rise to praise Epic. One teenager, a junior at Franklin High School, asserts that “censorship is stupid” and scolds adults who would “shield” students from learning about racism, antisemitism and other uncomfortable aspects of history and humanity.Welcome to Williamson County, a hot spot in the ongoing culture war engulfing America’s public schools. An affluent, highly educated, politically conservative enclave just south of Nashville, Williamson has seen its share of school-related drama over the years. In 2015, for instance, conservatives here were fired up about a seventh-grade social studies unit that some viewed as Islamic indoctrination.The trauma of the Covid pandemic has driven tensions to a new level. Last August, the district drew national attention after a mob of parents, protesting the board’s vote to impose a temporary mask mandate, turned feral. One pro-mask dad was swarmed, cursed at and threatened as he made his way from the meeting back to his car. “You can leave freely, but we will find you!” a protester raged in a video that went viral.The district has since sought to curtail the hostilities. The 25 residents who signed up to speak at this month’s meeting were allowed precisely one minute each, with a timer keeping everyone on track. Officials warned at the outset that disruptive speakers would have their remarks terminated and that those who felt unsafe could have a sheriff’s deputy escort them to their vehicles.Williamson County is obviously not the only community dealing with such frictions. School boards across the nation are being dragged onto the front lines of partisan battles. Vaccination requirements, diversity and inclusion efforts, books that make certain people feel icky — these issues and more have prompted ugly, overheated confrontations, some of them violent. Outside groups are fanning the flames, as are cynical politicians looking to juice their careers. (See: DeSantis, Ron, governor of Florida.) The day-to-day concerns of running a school district (boring stuff like budgeting and approving contracts for vendors) are increasingly being overshadowed by partisan agendas.Many people would look at the spiraling circus and think: This is bad. Low-level, nonpartisan school boards are not where these radioactive political issues should be hashed out. Someone should find a way to reduce the heat on these public servants.Instead, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature went the other way: passing a law last fall that allows for partisan school board elections, setting up a system that not only codifies the existing toxicity but also promises to exacerbate it. So much for putting students first.The overwhelming majority of school board races around the country are nonpartisan. This was the case in Tennessee until Republican lawmakers, during an emergency session called to deal with Covid-related issues, rammed through legislation permitting county parties to hold primary elections to select school board nominees, who can then list their party affiliations on the general election ballots. It was a controversial move, and the opposition included state Democrats, droves of educators and school board officials and even some Republicans.The law’s supporters insist that partisan contests will give voters a clearer sense of school board candidates and their values and, more broadly, that they will increase involvement and public interest in what are typically low-profile races.Critics of the new system counter that the law will change the fundamental nature of the position — and not in a good way. Among their biggest fears: To win their party’s primaries, candidates will need to focus more on hot-button issues that appeal to base voters, leading to more and fiercer culture clashes. Campaigns will require more money and more partisan brawling, discouraging many people from running. Those who skip the primaries and run in general elections as independents will be at a disadvantage. (America’s two-party system is not kind to independent candidates at any political level.) And as time goes on, the pool of people who choose to run will be composed less of civic-minded parents than of partisan warriors and careerist politicians.Not all of the county parties opted to hold school board primaries this cycle, and many voters are likely not yet aware of the change. But even at this early stage, there are signs that the new law’s supporters and its detractors are both right.Pretty much everyone plugged into this drama acknowledges that the newly partisan contests have increased interest and participation in school board races.Jim Garrett is the chair of the Davidson County Republican Party, which is holding primaries for its candidates running for the Metropolitan Nashville school board. Nashville is among Tennessee’s bluer regions, where Democrats have an electoral edge. Even so, with the new system, he says, more Republicans are running, and they are raising more money. “It looks like the cost of a campaign is going to be about double what it used to be,” he estimates.The local G.O.P. is also investing more in these races. For the first time, Davidson Republicans are arranging training sessions for school board candidates. These races weren’t a focus in previous elections, says Mr. Garrett. “They are a focus now.”There hasn’t yet been special training on the Democratic side. But the county party is happy to connect candidates to campaign vendors and other resources, says its chairwoman, Tara Houston. The party has also tasked a special committee to come up with a platform outlining its basic values on public education, which Democratic school board hopefuls will be expected to support.In Williamson County, where having a D next to one’s name is a scarlet letter of sorts, most of the primary action has been on the Republican side. In multiple districts, more conventional conservatives are facing off against contenders from the party’s Trumpier wing. Outside groups have lined up behind their champions, providing financial and other support. The most prominent of these is Williamson Families, a political action committee dedicated to protecting the county’s “conservative roots” and “Judeo-Christian values.” The PAC is led by Robin Steenman, who also heads the local branch of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit based in Florida that champions parental rights and “liberty-minded” leaders nationwide. Williamson Families has endorsed a slate of superconservatives — after weeding out the RINOs, of course.Multiple parents and teachers in Williamson complain that, as predicted, some of the campaigns and contenders seem focused less on concrete education issues than on culture-war talking points. One middle-school teacher vents to me that some candidates are bragging about their love of Donald Trump and decrying the decline of traditional families and the godlessness of today’s youth.Meagan Gillis, whose two young daughters attend county schools, says the whole situation has turned to “chaos.” She points to a social media post by a conservative candidate promoting the child furries myth: the wacky online claim that teachers are being forced to cater to students who identify as cats, to the point of putting litter boxes in classrooms and meowing at the children. “I’m like, are you kidding me?” Ms. Gillis marvels. Things are getting so absurd, she says, that her family is seriously considering moving out of the area.Similar concerns and complaints can be heard from other corners of the state. Virginia Babb has loved her time on the Knox County school board and was planning to run for re-election — until the shift to partisan races. Now she will step down at the end of her term rather than get sucked into the slime. She initially ran for the board as “a very involved parent” without strong partisan leanings, she tells me, noting: “I don’t like either party. They are too much controlled by their extremes.”So down the partisan rabbit hole Tennessee school boards are being nudged — with other states possibly to follow. Missouri, Arizona, Florida and South Carolina are among the states where lawmakers toyed less successfully with similar legislation this year. Some bills made it farther than others, and the idea is likely to keep popping up. The conservative American Enterprise Institute favors listing school board candidates’ party affiliations on ballots. A collection of conservative leaders has been exploring other ways to bring school board races more into line with other types of elections, according to Politico.All of which would indeed most likely earn school board campaigns more attention and resources and make candidates easier to ideologically sort. But at what cost to America’s children?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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      Marjorie Taylor Greene Denies ‘Insurrectionist’ Charge in Court

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      In an extraordinary administrative law hearing, the Georgia representative was forced to defend her actions surrounding the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.WASHINGTON — Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, on Friday repeated false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election as she defended her actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, in an extraordinary hearing that asked whether she should be labeled an “insurrectionist” and barred from office under the Constitution.While under oath at an administrative law hearing in Atlanta, Ms. Greene insisted that “a tremendous amount of fraudulent activity” had robbed former President Donald J. Trump of his re-election, an assertion that has been soundly refuted by multiple courts, Republican-led recounts and Mr. Trump’s own attorney general, William P. Barr.But despite her exhortations on social media to “#FightForTrump,” she said she had possessed no knowledge that protesters intended to invade the Capitol on Jan. 6, or disrupt the congressional joint session called to count the electoral votes and confirm Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. She said she did not recall meeting with any of the instigators.And Ms. Greene said neither she nor members of her staff had offered anyone tours of the Capitol complex before Jan. 6, 2021, nor had they provided anyone with a map of the complex, refuting tales of a conspiracy promoted by some Democrats that she had helped the rioters plan their attack.“I was asking people to come for a peaceful march, which is what everyone is entitled to do under their First Amendment,” Ms. Greene testified. “I was not asking them to actively engage in violence.”The contentious hearing unfolded after a group of constituents from her Northwest Georgia district, supported by liberal lawyers, filed suit to block Ms. Greene, a vigorously right-wing lawmaker, from appearing on the ballot for re-election. They charged that she had exhorted rioters to take up arms to block the certification of Mr. Biden’s election, and helped organize the assembly behind the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, that turned into a violent mob.The legal case appeared to be on shaky ground as the administrative law judge, Charles R. Beaudrot, repeatedly sided with Ms. Greene’s lawyer, the prominent conservative election attorney James Bopp Jr., who maintained that much of the questioning violated his client’s right of free speech. Judge Beaudrot will make a recommendation on whether to bar Ms. Greene from the ballot, but the final decision will fall to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — the same official who resisted pressure from Mr. Trump to change the presidential election results in the state, and who faces a Trump-backed challenger, Representative Jody Hice, in the coming Republican primary.But the proceeding afforded lawyers pressing the case against Ms. Greene to maintain their pressure and keep attention on her role on Jan. 6, and compel her to answer for it. The proceedings were broadcast on C-SPAN, live-streamed on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook and revealed a House Republican that was often peevish and sometimes on the defensive.“This is a solemn occasion,” Ron Fein, the lead lawyer bringing the case against Ms. Greene with the group Free Speech for People, told Judge Beaudrot. “This is not politics. This is not theater. This is a serious case that the voters who we represent have brought in order to offer proof that their United States representative seeking re-election, Marjorie Taylor Greene, having taken the oath to support the Constitution, then broke that oath and engaged in insurrection.”Mr. Bopp dismissed the case as precisely the opposite, asserting that the law was on the side of his client, who, far from engaging in insurrection, had been a victim during the riot — scared, confused, and fearing for her life as Mr. Trump’s supporters swarmed through the Capitol, where she was present just to do her job.He maintained that the entire Free Speech for People effort was designed to deny Georgia voters their rights, because the plaintiffs could not defeat Ms. Greene at the ballot box.“This is not a candidate debate. This is not a place for political hyperbole. This is not a place for political smear. It’s a court of law,” Mr. Bopp said.At the heart of the case against Ms. Greene is the plaintiffs’ claim that the congresswoman is disqualified from seeking re-election because her support of the rioters who attacked the Capitol made her an “insurrectionist” under the Constitution, and therefore barred her under the little-known third section of the 14th Amendment, which was adopted during the Reconstruction years to punish members of the Confederacy.That section declares that “no person shall” hold “any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath” to “support the Constitution,” had then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”Similar cases have suffered setbacks in North Carolina, where a federal judge blocked a challenge against Representative Madison Cawthorn, another far-right Republican, and in Arizona, where the Superior Court in Maricopa County ruled on Thursday that it did not have the authority to block the re-elections of two other conservative Republicans, Representatives Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, and the candidacy for secretary of state of a state representative, Mark Finchem.A separate effort is pending against Republicans, including Senator Ron Johnson, in Wisconsin.But so far, only the case against Ms. Greene has been allowed to proceed. And on Friday, she was forced to answer questions under oath.Ms. Greene denied calling Speaker Nancy Pelosi a “traitor to her country,” though the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Andrew Celli, produced a quotation from her saying just that. She also said she never advocated violence against her political opponents, though her personal Twitter account “liked” a post that advocated “a bullet to the head of Nancy Pelosi.” She said she did “not recall” advocating that Mr. Trump impose martial law.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 5Signs of progress. More

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      N.Y. House Districts Illegally Favor Democrats, Appeals Court Rules

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      A divided five-judge panel found that Democrats engaged in gerrymandering in creating new district maps. The case is expected to head to New York’s highest court.A New York appeals court ruled on Thursday that new congressional districts drawn by Democrats violated the state’s ban on partisan gerrymandering, partially upholding a lower-court ruling that would block the state from using the lines in this year’s critical midterm elections.A divided five-judge panel in Rochester said Democratic legislative leaders had drawn the new House map “to discourage competition and favor Democrats,” knowingly ignoring the will of voters who recently approved a constitutional amendment outlawing the practice.“We are satisfied that petitioners established beyond a reasonable doubt that the Legislature acted with partisan intent,” a three-judge majority wrote in its opinion. Two judges dissented.Gov. Kathy Hochul and top legislative leaders are expected to immediately appeal the decision to the state’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals. The judges there, all of whom were appointed by Democratic governors, have indicated they could render a final verdict as soon as next week.The outcome in New York will have significant implications in the broader fight for control of the House of Representatives. National Democratic leaders are counting on the maps their party drew in New York to help offset gains by Republicans.Without them, Democrats are at risk of emerging from this year’s redistricting cycle having been bested by Republicans for the second consecutive decade. Republican gains were on track to grow further after Florida lawmakers this week approved a map drawn by Gov. Ron DeSantis that would create four new Republican-friendly seats.The ruling was the second consecutive setback for New York’s Democratic mapmakers, and this time it came in an appellate court that was viewed as generally friendly to the party.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.“Like other state courts around the country, New York courts aren’t finding the question of whether a map is a partisan gerrymander a particularly hard one to decide,” said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It’s very hard to defend a map like New York’s, and ultimately if it quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.”Still, Mr. Li added, Thursday’s decision was only the second of three acts in New York’s redistricting legal drama.On Thursday, the judges from the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court ordered the Democrat-led Legislature to promptly redraft the map by April 30 or leave the task to a court-appointed neutral expert. The judges were largely silent on another key question at stake: whether some of the primaries scheduled for June should be postponed until August to accommodate new districts.The congressional lines in question, adopted by Democratic supermajorities in the Legislature in February, would give Democrats a clear advantage in 22 of the state’s 26 congressional districts by shifting voters favorable to their party into redrawn seats on Long Island and Staten Island and in Central New York, and packing Republicans in a smaller number of districts. Republicans currently hold eight districts on a map that was drawn by a court-appointed special master in 2012.State leaders did emerge with some good news from the latest ruling. The panel rejected more sweeping parts of the decision by the lower-court judge, Patrick F. McAllister of Steuben County, that held that lawmakers lacked the authority to draw any maps at all after New York’s newly created redistricting commission failed to agree on a plan for the state.As a result, the appeals court ruling reinstated State Senate and Assembly maps that Justice McAllister had thrown out.Mike Murphy, a spokesman for Senate Democrats, said they were “pleased” that the appeals court had validated the Legislature’s right to draw the maps this year, and predicted the higher court would reinstate the congressional maps as well.“We always knew this case would end at the Court of Appeals and look forward to being heard on our appeal to uphold the congressional map as well,” he said.John Faso, a spokesman for the Republican-backed voters challenging the maps, said that they would file their own appeal to try to strike the state legislative maps. But he called Thursday’s decision a “great victory.”The broader legal dispute turns on two interlocking questions: whether the mapmaking process properly adhered to procedures laid out in a 2014 amendment to the State Constitution, and whether the maps themselves violated an accompanying ban on drawing districts for partisan gain.The procedural changes made in 2014 were designed to remove the line-drawing process from the hands of politicians by creating an outside commission to solicit public input and forge a bipartisan proposal for House, State Senate and Assembly districts. If the commission had reached agreement, the Legislature’s role would have been to ratify the maps.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      Democrats Fear for Democracy. Why Aren’t They Running on It in 2022?

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      Republicans are far more energized about the issues of elections and voting, powered by a former president and many base voters who believe the 2020 contest was illegitimate.One party is running on democracy and elections in 2022, and it’s not the Democrats.Despite a broad consensus on the left that the country’s most revered institutions are in trouble, with President Biden and other leaders warning gravely that protecting voting rights and fair elections is of paramount importance, the vast majority of Democratic candidates are veering away from those issues on the campaign trail.Instead, they are focusing on bread-and-butter economic topics like inflation and gas prices. Continuing to win elections must come first, the thinking goes — and polls and focus groups show that the issue of voting rights is far down the list of voters’ most urgent concerns.“You cannot buy a lot of groceries with voting rights,” said Trey Martinez Fischer, a Texas state representative who organized Democrats’ flight from the state in July in a failed effort to block a Republican election bill. “Last summer there was nothing more important than voting rights, but the universe has shifted, and it’s become a conversation about our economy and inflation and the cost of goods.”But as that conversation has shifted, Democrats have largely ceded the political turf on the structure of American democracy to Republicans. Riding a lasting wave of anger over the 2020 election, many G.O.P. candidates have put what they call “election integrity” front and center, even as they attack Mr. Biden and Democrats over the rising cost of living.Many Republican candidates have falsely argued in debates, social media posts and TV ads that the 2020 race was stolen from former President Donald J. Trump, views that are shared by large numbers of the party’s voters. Mr. Trump’s allies have continued to try to decertify the 2020 results, and he has made questioning the last election a litmus test for winning his endorsement, which is coveted in Republican primaries.“It’s critical that we keep the heat on in terms of exposing what was a stolen election,” Peter Navarro, a former top White House adviser to Mr. Trump, said on Steve Bannon’s podcast last month.There is no evidence of meaningful fraud in the 2020 election, a finding consistent from the initial days after the vote through an array of reviews in the nearly 18 months since. Republicans ranging from William P. Barr, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, to state officials from Wisconsin to Wyoming have acknowledged that Mr. Biden was the rightful winner.The parties’ wide gap in energy on elections and voting — which comes during a midterm year when Republicans are ascendant — worries some Democrats, especially Black Democrats who have been dismayed by the party’s inability to pass federal voting protections while in power.“If people don’t see that Democrats are defending our right to vote, then people may not be enthused about coming out to vote,” said Angela Lang, the executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities in Milwaukee.Partly in response to their base and to Mr. Trump, Republican state lawmakers have pressed vigorously to remake the country’s election systems, passing 34 laws restricting voting access in 19 states last year.Republican candidates are promising more: Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama, who is up for re-election, is running an ad saying the election was stolen and highlighting voting restrictions she signed into law. Her leading challenger, Lindy Blanchard, has attacked Ms. Ivey for at one point saying Mr. Biden won fairly.“The Republican base and all Republicans care about not just voter integrity but voter security,” said Corry Bliss, an adviser to several Republican candidates. “If you need identification to buy NyQuil, you should need identification to vote in our elections.”“You cannot buy a lot of groceries with voting rights,” said Trey Martinez Fischer, a Texas state representative who organized Democrats’ flight from the state in July in a failed effort to block a Republican election bill.Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York TimesOn the Democratic side, a small handful of candidates running for office at any level of government have run television ads pledging to work to expand voting rights, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm.In both parties, candidates are following their voters.Democrats have told pollsters, focus groups and organizers knocking on their doors that they are most worried about inflation. Despite macroeconomic data that Democrats paint as rosy, Americans broadly do not feel good about the economy. That includes Republicans, but they are also impassioned about electoral issues: Polls show that nearly three-quarters believe Mr. Biden’s victory was illegitimate.Incumbent Democrats and the White House are trying to make a case that Mr. Biden is overseeing a drop in the unemployment rate accompanied by an increase in wages, a difficult strategy since inflation overshadows both of those trends and Democrats are the party in charge. An NBC poll last month found that voters were far more likely to blame Mr. Biden for inflation than for the pandemic or corporate price increases.Representative Pete Aguilar of California, who serves both on the Jan. 6 Committee and in the House Democratic leadership, said that while “we hope that everybody starts with the base level of, ‘protect democracy, support a peaceful transfer of power,’” he and other party leaders wanted candidates “talking about issues that matter, and that is economic.”Some Democrats have tried to make voting rights a leading issue in the United States. When the Texas legislators fled Austin for Washington last summer, they tried shaming Senate Democrats into passing a sweeping federal expansion of voting rights. In January, as Mr. Biden pushed for the same goal, he gave a soaring speech in Atlanta comparing today’s Republicans to George Wallace and Bull Connor, villains of the civil rights era.Neither effort worked.Now voting rights has virtually disappeared as a top issue for both voters and candidates. In an AARP poll of likely voters aged 50 and older that was released this month, voting rights was ninth on a list of the most important issues facing the country, just behind immigration and ahead of racism. Katie Hobbs, who as Arizona’s secretary of state defended President Biden’s 2020 victory in her state, said voters and fellow Democrats were tired of talking about voting rights.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesThe party’s highest-profile defenders of voting rights are also training their attention elsewhere. Stacey Abrams, the leading Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia, is focusing far less on voting rights than she once did in her speeches, eschewing her flagship issue to spend more time addressing topics like Medicaid expansion and aid to small businesses. And in Arizona, Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state who defended Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory there, said voters and fellow Democrats would rather talk about anything else.“The Democratic lawmakers I talk to are tired of this fight,” Ms. Hobbs said. “They’re focused on addressing real issues that affect people’s daily lives rather than relitigating the 2020 election.”Democratic strategists are also advising their clients to move on from talking about expanding voting rights.“Democrats have to choose between a legislative agenda that advances voting rights with the need to educate communities of color about the new laws in their states,” said Dan Sena, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who represents a host of clients running for House seats.Few Democrats have aired television ads pledging to expand voting access since the Senate effort faltered in January. Two Democratic congresswomen in Georgia who are facing off in a primary, Representatives Lucy McBath and Carolyn Bourdeaux, are both on the air highlighting their support for the failed federal voting legislation.The candidate making the most concrete promises of expanding voting access is Neville Blakemore, who is running to be the clerk of Jefferson County, Ky., which includes Louisville.Understand the Battle Over U.S. Voting RightsCard 1 of 6Why are voting rights an issue now? More

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      McConnell and McCarthy’s Jan. 6 Fury at Trump Faded by February

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      In the days after the attack, Representative Kevin McCarthy planned to tell Mr. Trump to resign. Senator Mitch McConnell told allies impeachment was warranted. But their fury faded fast.In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building, the two top Republicans in Congress, Representative Kevin McCarthy and Senator Mitch McConnell, told associates they believed President Trump was responsible for inciting the deadly riot and vowed to drive him from politics. Mr. McCarthy went so far as to say he would push Mr. Trump to resign immediately: “I’ve had it with this guy,” he told a group of Republican leaders.But within weeks both men backed off an all-out fight with Mr. Trump because they feared retribution from him and his political movement. Their drive to act faded fast as it became clear it would mean difficult votes that would put them at odds with most of their colleagues.“I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference,” Mr. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, told a friend.The confidential expressions of outrage from Mr. McCarthy and Mr. McConnell, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the immense gulf between what Republican leaders say privately about Mr. Trump and their public deference to a man whose hold on the party has gone virtually unchallenged for half a decade.The leaders’ swift retreat in January 2021 represented a capitulation at a moment of extraordinary political weakness for Mr. Trump — perhaps the last and best chance for mainstream Republicans to reclaim control of their party from a leader who had stoked an insurrection against American democracy itself.This account of the private discussions among Republican leaders in the days after the Jan. 6 attack is adapted from a new book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future,” which draws on hundreds of interviews with lawmakers and officials, and contemporaneous records of pivotal moments in the 2020 presidential campaign.Mr. McConnell’s office declined to comment. Mark Bednar, a spokesman for Mr. McCarthy, denied that the Republican leader told colleagues he would push Mr. Trump to leave office. “McCarthy never said he’d call Trump to say he should resign,” Mr. Bednar said.Representative Kevin McCarthy in the Capitol two weeks after the riot.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesNo one embodies the stark accommodation to Mr. Trump more than Mr. McCarthy, a 57-year-old Californian who has long had his sights set on becoming speaker of the House. In public after Jan. 6, Mr. McCarthy issued a careful rebuke of Mr. Trump, saying that he “bears responsibility” for the mob that tried to stop Congress from officially certifying the president’s loss. But he declined to condemn him in sterner language.In private, Mr. McCarthy went much further.On a phone call with several other top House Republicans on Jan. 8, Mr. McCarthy said Mr. Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 had been “atrocious and totally wrong.” He faulted the president for “inciting people” to attack the Capitol, saying that Mr. Trump’s remarks at a rally on the National Mall that day were “not right by any shape or any form.”During that conversation, Mr. McCarthy inquired about the mechanism for invoking the 25th Amendment — the process whereby the vice president and members of the cabinet can remove a president from office — before concluding that was not a viable option. Mr. McCarthy, who was among those who objected to the election results, was uncertain and indecisive, fretting that the Democratic drive to impeach Mr. Trump would “put more fuel on the fire” of the country’s divisions.But Mr. McCarthy’s resolve seemed to harden as the gravity of the attack — and the potential political fallout for his party — sank in. Two members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet had quit their posts after the attack and several moderate Republican governors had called for the president’s resignation. Video clips of the riot kept surfacing online, making the raw brutality of the attack ever more vivid in the public mind.The mob breaking into the Capitol.Win McNamee/Getty ImagesOn Jan. 10, Mr. McCarthy spoke again with the leadership team and this time he had a plan in mind.The Democrats were driving hard at an impeachment resolution, Mr. McCarthy said, and they would have the votes to pass it. Now he planned to call Mr. Trump and tell him it was time for him to go.“What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it,” he told the group.Mr. McCarthy said he would tell Mr. Trump of the impeachment resolution: “I think this will pass, and it would be my recommendation you should resign.”He acknowledged it was unlikely Mr. Trump would follow that suggestion.Mr. McCarthy spent the four years of Mr. Trump’s presidency as one of the White House’s most obedient supporters in Congress. Since Mr. Trump’s defeat, Mr. McCarthy has appeased far-right members of the House, some of whom are close to the former president. Mr. McCarthy may need their support to become speaker, a vote that could come as soon as next year if the G.O.P. claims the House in November.Representative Kevin McCarthy with Mr. Trump in Bakersfield, Calif., in 2020.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut in a brief window after the storming of the Capitol, Mr. McCarthy contemplated a total break with Mr. Trump and his most extreme supporters.During the same Jan. 10 conversation when he said he would call on Mr. Trump to resign, Mr. McCarthy told other G.O.P. leaders he wished the big tech companies would strip some Republican lawmakers of their social media accounts, as Twitter and Facebook had done with Mr. Trump. Members such as Lauren Boebert of Colorado had done so much to stoke paranoia about the 2020 election and made offensive comments online about the Capitol attack.“We can’t put up with that,” Mr. McCarthy said, adding, “Can’t they take their Twitter accounts away, too?”Mr. McCarthy “never said that particular members should be removed from Twitter,” Mr. Bednar said.Other Republican leaders in the House agreed with Mr. McCarthy that the president’s behavior deserved swift punishment. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the second-ranking House Republican, said on one call that it was time for the G.O.P. to contemplate a “post-Trump Republican House,” while Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the head of the party’s House campaign committee, suggested censuring Mr. Trump.Yet none of the men followed through on their tough talk in those private conversations.In the following days, Mr. McCarthy heard from some Republican lawmakers who advised against confronting Mr. Trump. In one group conversation, Representative Bill Johnson of Ohio cautioned that conservative voters back home “go ballistic” in response to criticism of Mr. Trump, demanding that Republicans instead train their denunciations on Democrats, such as Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden.“I’m just telling you that that’s the kind of thing that we’re dealing with, with our base,” Mr. Johnson said.When only 10 House Republicans joined with Democrats to support impeaching Mr. Trump on Jan. 13, the message to Mr. McCarthy was clear.By the end of the month, he was pursuing a rapprochement with Mr. Trump, visiting him at Mar-a-Lago and posing for a photograph. (“I didn’t know they were going to take a picture,” Mr. McCarthy said, somewhat apologetically, to one frustrated lawmaker.)Mr. McCarthy has never repeated his denunciations of Mr. Trump, instead offering a tortured claim that the real responsibility for Jan. 6 lies with security officials and Democratic legislative leaders for inadequately defending the Capitol complex.Senator Mitch McConnell, left, with Senator Patrick Leahy after it was announced that Mr. Leahy would preside over Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIn the Senate, Mr. McConnell’s reversal was no less revealing. Late on the night of Jan. 6, Mr. McConnell predicted to associates that his party would soon break sharply with Mr. Trump and his acolytes; the Republican leader even asked a reporter in the Capitol for information about whether the cabinet might really pursue the 25th Amendment.Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 5Signs of progress. More

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      Florida Senate Passes Congressional Map Giving G.O.P. a Big Edge

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      The map, proposed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, would most likely add four Republican districts while eliminating three held by Democrats.Florida Republicans are poised to adopt one of the nation’s most aggressive congressional maps, pressing forward with a proposal from Gov. Ron DeSantis that would most likely add four congressional districts for the party while eliminating three held by Democrats.The map, which the Florida Senate approved by a party-line vote of 24 to 15 on Wednesday during a special session of the Legislature, was put forward by Mr. DeSantis after he vetoed a version approved in March by state legislators that would have added two Republican seats and subtracted one from the Democrats.The new proposal would create 20 seats that favor Republicans and just eight that tilt toward Democrats, meaning that the G.O.P. would be likely to hold 71 percent of the seats. Former President Donald J. Trump carried Florida in 2020 with 51.2 percent of the vote.The Florida map would erase some of the gains Democrats have made in this year’s national redistricting process. The 2022 map had been poised to be balanced between the two major parties for the first time in generations, with a nearly equal number of House districts that are expected to lean Democratic and Republican for the first time in more than 50 years.The map would also serve as a high-profile, if possibly temporary, victory for Mr. DeSantis, who has emerged as one of the Republican Party’s leading figures and has not ruled out challenging Mr. Trump for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. The Florida House is expected to pass the map on Thursday, and Mr. DeSantis is certain to sign it.“I think they are good maps that will be able to be upheld,” said Joe Gruters, a Florida state senator who is the chairman of the state Republican Party.If it is adopted into law, the Florida map would face legal challenges from Democrats, who clashed with Republicans on Tuesday over whether the proposal violated the state’s Constitution and the Voting Rights Act’s prohibition on racial gerrymandering.What to Know About RedistrictingRedistricting, Explained: Here are some answers to your most pressing questions about the process that is reshaping American politics.Understand Gerrymandering: Can you gerrymander your party to power? Try to draw your own districts in this imaginary state.Analysis: For years, the congressional map favored Republicans over Democrats. But in 2022, the map is poised to be surprisingly fair.Killing Competition: The number of competitive districts is dropping, as both parties use redistricting to draw themselves into safe seats.“It does appear to be politically motivated, and it does not take seriously the hard-working Black people in the state,” said Rosalind Osgood, a state senator from Broward County in South Florida.Adam Kincaid, the executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the party’s main mapmaking organization, said that the proposed map complied with the state Constitution “while remaining faithful to the U.S. Constitution and the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.”Some Democrats predicted that the DeSantis map would ultimately not pass legal muster — though any successful challenge would probably not arrive in time for the November elections. In addition to the Florida dispute, Democrats are locked in a court battle over a political gerrymander of their own in New York, where a judge last month invalidated Democratic-drawn maps.The Florida map would end the congressional career of Representative Al Lawson, a Black Democrat from Jacksonville, by carving up a district that stretches across North Florida to combine Black neighborhoods in Jacksonville and Tallahassee.It would also eliminate an Orlando district held by Representative Val Demings, a Democrat, and pack Black voters from two districts in Tampa and St. Petersburg into one, creating a second district certain to be won by a Republican. Ms. Demings is vacating her seat to challenge Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican.If the new map becomes law, Representative Val Demings’s congressional district in Orlando would be eliminated. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesMr. Lawson’s district has been held by a Black Democrat since 1993, when former Representative Corrine Brown first took office.Mr. DeSantis’s map-drawer, Alex Kelly, said at a Florida Senate committee hearing on Tuesday that he could not draw a compact majority-Black district based in Jacksonville.“I determined that was not possible to check all those boxes,” he said.But Democrats argued that the map represented an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.“Governor DeSantis is bullying the Legislature into drawing Republicans an illegitimate and illegal partisan advantage in the congressional map, and he’s doing it at the expense of Black voters in Florida,” Kelly Burton, the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said in an interview. “This blatant gerrymander will not go unchallenged.”Democrats’ objections to the DeSantis map focused in part on a state constitutional amendment enacted by Florida voters in 2010 that set new standards for the redistricting process by requiring compact districts that did not favor one political party. A state court ordered Florida’s entire congressional map to be redrawn before the 2016 elections.How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More