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      Anthony Bouchard Says He Impregnated 14-Year-Old When He Was 18

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      A Wyoming state senator who is challenging Representative Liz Cheney in the 2022 Republican primary acknowledged this week that when he was 18, he had sex with a 14-year-old girl — which is statutory rape in many states — and that she became pregnant.The state senator, Anthony Bouchard, made the disclosure in a Facebook Live video posted on Thursday and in a subsequent interview with The Casper Star-Tribune, saying that the girl gave birth to a son “more than 40 years ago” in Florida and that he married the girl after she turned 15.She died by suicide a few years later, after they had divorced and she had entered another relationship, Mr. Bouchard said.Mr. Bouchard sought to downplay his actions, saying in his video, “She was a little younger than me, so it’s like the Romeo and Juliet story.” But under current Florida law, his actions would be illegal.Because he did not specify the year he impregnated the girl, it is not clear what Florida’s laws were at the time.Mr. Bouchard said he went public with the story after a newspaper reached out to him. In the Star-Tribune interview, he blamed a “political opposition research company” for spreading it.He used his video to highlight his stance against abortion, saying he and the girl had resisted pressure to terminate the pregnancy.There was “a lot of pressure, pressure to abort a baby, I got to tell you,” he said in the 13-minute video. “I wasn’t going to do it, and neither was she. And there was pressure to have her banished from their family. Just pressure. Pressure to go hide somewhere. And the only thing I could see as the right thing to do was to get married and take care of him.”Mr. Bouchard is one of several Republicans who have said they will challenge Ms. Cheney, who was kicked out of her House leadership position this month for criticizing former President Donald J. Trump and saying she would do everything possible to ensure he was not the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2024.Mr. Bouchard was first elected to the State Senate in 2017 to represent the Laramie County area. He is a gun-rights activist who owns a septic system cleaning business with his wife, according to his official biography. More

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      Republicans Oppose Jan.6 Panel With Elections in Mind

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      Republicans see an independent inquiry into the attack on the Capitol as a threat to their push to regain control of the Senate and the House.WASHINGTON — Leading congressional Republicans offer multiple justifications for why they oppose an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, but there is really one overriding reason: They fear it will hurt their party’s image and hinder their attempts to regain power in next year’s midterm elections.Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican, was unusually candid about his party’s predicament, which he said was “weighing on people’s minds” as they contemplated the prospect of an inquiry into the deadliest attack on the Capitol in two centuries.Republicans, he said, wondered “whether or not this can be, in the end, a fair process that fully examines the facts around Jan. 6 in an objective way, and doesn’t become a political weapon in the hands of the Democrats.”Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, as is his style, was much more circumspect. But in a closed-door luncheon this week, Mr. McConnell, the minority leader, warned fellow Republican senators that the proposed panel — the product of a deal between a top Democrat and a top Republican in the House — was not as bipartisan as it appeared. He said he believed that Democrats had partisan motives in moving to set up the commission and would try to extend the investigation into 2022 and the midterm election season, tarnishing Republicans and complicating Mr. McConnell’s drive to return as majority leader.A day later, Mr. McConnell joined Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader, in flat-out opposing the creation of the 10-member commission. Four months after the deadly assault that targeted them and their institution, the two minority leaders in Congress had united against a bipartisan inquiry that would provide a full accounting for the riot.Like Mr. McConnell, Mr. McCarthy is determined to put Republicans in the House majority next year and himself in the speakership, and he regards an investigation into what happened on Jan. 6 as an obstacle in his path.Given that the commission would be likely to delve into the details of Donald J. Trump’s role in stoking the riot with lies about a stolen election — and that of his party in spreading those false claims and seeking to invalidate President Biden’s victory — it stands to reason that any investigation could be damaging to Republicans. The testimony of Mr. McCarthy, who was in contact with Mr. Trump by phone on Jan. 6, would undoubtedly be sought.Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat, archly referred to potential Republican culpability during a House debate on Wednesday, saying the inquiry was needed to get to the bottom of what took place.“Why did that happen?” he asked. “How did it happen? How can we stop it from happening again? What are the resources that we need? And yes, who was responsible? Some, perhaps, are going to vote against this because that’s what they fear.”Capitol Police officers aiming their guns at a barricaded door as rioters tried to enter the House chamber on Jan. 6.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressThe political dynamic was a stark difference from the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, when lawmakers, despite months of disagreement and negotiation, finally came together around the idea of forming an outside inquiry. The independent commission they created has become the gold standard for such efforts, and was heralded for its work in unraveling the origins of the terrorist attacks and making recommendations to prevent a recurrence. Just three House members opposed the formation of that commission on the final vote in November 2002, and the proposal was approved on a voice vote in the Senate.But there was no hope for a similar consensus outcome in the House on Wednesday — and most likely none in the Senate in the future — at a time when many Republicans have been working to deflect any close examination of the riot, and some have tried to downplay or deny its crucial facts.Republican leaders have dug in against the commission even though one of their own members negotiated its details with Democrats, who acceded to their initial demands about its structure. The Jan. 6 proposal was modeled very closely on the Sept. 11 commission. But times have changed, and the Capitol riot has become just another partisan dividing line in a divided capital.Political risks were a very real consideration in 2002 as well. The Bush administration, and particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, quietly hindered the drive to set up the bipartisan commission even as the White House professed to be fully supportive of the effort. President George W. Bush and members of his administration knew that the disclosure of intelligence lapses leading up to Sept. 11 and other aspects of the investigation could be severely damaging, and they were in no rush to back an inquiry that could haunt the president’s re-election in 2004. But the pressure built to the point where Congress was finally able to proceed.Many of the objections being raised now were also aired during the debate surrounding the Sept. 11 commission. Mr. McConnell and others have said that congressional committee inquiries can get the job done while the Justice Department is deep into its own criminal investigations.“It’s not at all clear what new facts or additional investigation yet another commission could lay on top of the existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress,” Mr. McConnell said.But to Democrats and others supporting the commission, that is the point: A bipartisan inquiry could find facts and developments that other, more narrowly focused investigations might miss, and then be able to deliver a more comprehensive picture of what happened on Jan. 6. The Sept. 11 commission went to work after numerous congressional inquiries, including an in-depth, joint House and Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, and there was still plenty of room for the panel to expand on that and other work.Republicans have also raised concerns that the inquiry could complicate the criminal prosecution of those being charged in the assault — a common critique of congressional investigations that parallel criminal inquiries. And they objected that Democrats would appoint the chair of the panel and control the hiring of staff members, suggesting that even with Republicans able to appoint half of the commission members, Democrats would really be in control.“It will be up to the commission to decide how far they want to go,” said Representative John Katko, Republican of New York, who helped negotiate the bipartisan committee agreement.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesRepresentative John Katko of New York, the top Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, who negotiated the agreement with Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, sought to dispel those concerns and others, calling them unwarranted.“The commission creates the rules as a team,” Mr. Katko said. He also dismissed complaints from Republicans that the scope of the panel was too narrow given civil unrest around the nation, including by left-leaning activists, saying there was no reason the commission could not examine such episodes.“It will be up to the commission to decide how far they want to go,” he said.Such assurances are unlikely to move Mr. McConnell and Mr. McCarthy, who have other reasons for opposing the commission. They believe that Democrats have a vested interest in calling attention to the horrors of Jan. 6, and saw the efforts by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to maintain fencing around the Capitol and keep National Guard troops present as ways to remind Americans of the assault by pro-Trump forces. Given all of that, it is not clear whether the proposal can draw the 10 Republicans whose votes would be needed to advance the bill creating the inquiry past a filibuster in the Senate.But 35 Republicans in the House broke from the leadership and supported the commission. They said it was time for others in their party to do the same in the pursuit of truth.“We need the answers, not political rhetoric,” said Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, one of the 35. “That’s what this bipartisan commission can provide for all of us, for our country. Let the truth shine in.” More

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      Supreme Court Case Throws Abortion Into 2022 Election Picture

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      Supporters and opponents of abortion rights say a major ruling just before the midterm elections could upend political calculations for the two parties.WASHINGTON — Within hours of the Supreme Court accepting a case that could lead it to overturn or scale back a landmark abortion rights ruling, Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat facing re-election next year, issued a dire warning to supporters: The fate of Roe v Wade is on the line.“We cannot move backwards,” Mr. Bennet said in a campaign statement. “Colorado was a leader in legalizing abortion — six years before Roe v Wade. I will always fight for reproductive justice and to ensure everyone has safe and legal access to the health care they need.”His declaration was among the first in a quickly intensifying clash over abortion, long a defining issue to many voters but one likely to gain additional prominence as the court weighs the possibility of rolling back the constitutional protections it provided to abortion rights in Roe 48 years ago.Motivated in part by a belief that the Supreme Court will give them new latitude to restrict access, Republican-dominated states continue to adopt strict new legislation, with Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signing into law on Wednesday a prohibition on abortions after as early as six weeks. The law, sure to face legal challenges, is one of more than 60 new state-level restrictions enacted this year, with many more pending.With the Supreme Court ruling likely to come next year — less than six months before midterm elections that will determine control of Congress and the future of President Biden’s agenda — the court’s expanded conservative majority has injected new volatility into an already turbulent political atmosphere, leaving both parties to game out the potential consequences.Republicans had already shown that they intended to take aim at Democrats over social issues, and abortion will only amplify the culture wars.Nearly all agree that the latest fight over Roe, which has been building for years, is certain to have significant political repercussions. Conservative voters are traditionally more energized than liberals about the abortion debate, and for many of them it has been the single issue spurring voter turnout.But Democrats, likely to be on the defensive given their current hold on the White House and Congress, say a ruling broadly restricting abortion rights by a court whose ideological makeup has been altered by three Trump-era appointees could backfire on Republicans and galvanize women.“Outlawing Roe would create a backlash that would have critical unintended consequences for those who would like to repeal it,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire and a leading voice in Congress for abortion rights. “The women of the country would be very upset, particularly young women, that there would be such a deliberate effort to limit women’s access to reproductive choices.”Those on the right, already anticipating a favorable ruling given the conservative tilt of the 6-3 court, say they expect liberals to seize on the issue to try to “scare” voters. But they believe they can make a case for “reasonable” abortion limits.“This is clearly going to invigorate people on both sides of the debate, but this is a winning issue for pro-life candidates,” said Mallory Quigley, a spokeswoman for Susan B. Anthony List, a conservative nonprofit.She said she did not expect conservative voting enthusiasm to ebb if the right triumphed at the Supreme Court, an outcome that would bring to fruition years of emphasis on electing anti-abortion lawmakers at the federal and state levels and working aggressively to confirm conservative judges.“What happened on Monday is evidence that elections have consequences,” Ms. Quigley said, referring to the Supreme Court’s decision to take a case about a Mississippi law that seeks to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy — about two months earlier than Roe and subsequent decisions allow.Anti-abortion activists in the Texas State Capitol in Austin in March.  Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday signed into law one of the country’s most restrictive abortion measures.Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated PressThe Supreme Court action may have political ramifications before next year. The case is likely to be argued weeks before Virginia voters head to the polls in November to elect a new governor in a race often seen as a midterm bellwether. Terry McAuliffe, a former governor and most likely the Democratic nominee, is eager for another political battle over abortion rights, rattling off his record protecting clinics in the state and vetoing legislation that would impose restrictions.“This is going to be a huge motivator,” he said in an interview. “In 2013, I promised women I would be a brick wall to protect their rights. And I will be a brick wall again.”Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, downplayed the potential effect of the court ruling, though he said that as an abortion opponent he welcomed the court taking up the case. But Mr. Scott said he believed voters would be more persuaded by what he described as the Biden administration’s failings on issues such as immigration, the economy, taxes, inflation and more.While the lines have always been starkly drawn on abortion into the pro and anti camps, public opinion has proved more nuanced, with a clear majority backing Roe but majorities also favoring some limits. How the Supreme Court comes down on the fine points of abortion law could determine how the issue plays in the elections.“Considering the decision will likely be made five months ahead of the election, and depending on the decision itself, it’s too early to measure its ultimate impact on the midterms,” said Nathan Gonzales, the editor of the nonpartisan Inside Elections. Mr. Gonazales said it could conceivably energize Republicans but also pay benefits for Democrats — a view shared by others.President Donald J. Trump helped inspire record turnout last year from Democratic voters, who were eager to reject his administration. With Mr. Trump no longer on the ballot, many Democrats say the Supreme Court case could provide crucial midterm motivation, particularly for suburban women in swing districts who were instrumental in Democratic wins last year.Katie Paris, the founder of Red, Wine and Blue, a group focused on organizing suburban female voters for Democrats across the country, said the Supreme Court news immediately touched off alarm on the Facebook groups and other social media channels run by her organization.“When the news came out that this was going to be taken up, it was like, ‘Everybody get ready. This is real,’” she said. “We know what this court could do, and if they do it, the backlash will be severe.”Tresa Undem, a pollster who specializes in surveys on gender issues, said that abortion rights would continue to be an effective cause for Democrats because voters link it to larger concerns about power and control that motivated female voters during the Trump administration.“Democrats and independents have felt a loss of control and power from people at the top,” said Ms. Undem, who has conducted polling for several abortion rights organizations. “Now you have six individuals who are going to make these decisions about your body in this personal area that will affect the rest of your life.”Mr. Bennet said he could not predict the political implications of the court taking on abortion, but he wanted to alert his supporters that something of consequence was at hand.“There are a lot of people who have worked for a long time to overturn Roe v. Wade, and that is what is at stake,” he said. “I think people needed to hear that in the wake of the Supreme Court taking this case from Mississippi.” More

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      Ahead of 2022, House Democrats Aim to Fix Their Polling Problem

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      This time, party leaders hope, they won’t be stunned by Republican voters coming out of the woodwork.Democrats control both houses of Congress — but just barely.Cast your mind back to October 2020, and you might remember expecting things to turn out a bit different. Polls suggested that Democratic House candidates were on track to nearly match their historic margins in the 2018 midterms. But that didn’t happen.For the second presidential cycle in a row, Democrats were stunned by the number of voters who came out in support of Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies down the ballot.This week, the House Democrats’ campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, presented the results of an inquiry into the 2020 election, aimed at understanding what had gone askew for the party — and why, after the corrections that pollsters made in the wake of 2016, surveys were still missing the mark.The report came to two interrelated conclusions, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, the campaign committee chairman, said in a phone interview today. One is that Trump voters are disproportionately likely to refuse to take a poll, a conclusion echoed in other post-mortem reports that have recently been released by private Democratic pollsters. The other is that Mr. Trump’s presence on the ballot appears to have driven up turnout among the Republican base.“In 2020, what we realized is that the polling error really equaled Trump turnout,” Mr. Maloney said. “So in polling, you’ve got this mistake in the assumption about what the electorate will look like.”Because support for Mr. Trump lines up with a relative unwillingness to be polled, survey researchers may think they’ve reached the right share of, say, rural-dwelling, white men without college degrees. But in fact what they’ve reached is often a Democratic-skewing segment of that demographic.In 2018, when polls were relatively accurate, this didn’t factor in as much, presumably because the most anti-institutional and anti-polling voters were also those who were likely to turn out only if Mr. Trump himself was on the ballot.In 2020, Mr. Trump’s popularity with a typically low-turnout base meant that an upsurge in turnout actually helped Republicans more than Democrats — a rare occurrence. “Because low-propensity voters turned out for Trump in much higher numbers than our low-propensity voters turned out for us, it ripples through the data and has a big effect,” Mr. Maloney said.He has been through this process before: In 2017, after Mr. Trump’s upset win over Hillary Clinton, the congressman, then in his third term, led an inquiry into what had gone wrong for the Democrats. That work helped put him in position for his current role as the head of the party’s House campaign arm.This time around, he put together a team including campaign consultants, academics and other Democratic members of Congress, and they assembled what he called “a first-of-its-kind national polling database,” drawing from over 600 polls of House races, as well as voter-file and other local-level data.Last year, because Democrats underestimated the extent to which Mr. Trump’s presence on the ballot would drive up Republican turnout, their strategists mistakenly thought that a number of seats that had flipped blue in the 2018 midterms would remain safe in 2020. Six Democrats who had won for the first time in 2018 lost their 2020 races by less than two percentage points.Mr. Maloney said he was only half-swayed by arguments that ascribed a lot of impact to Republican attacks on the “defund the police” movement and “democratic socialism.” He said that the messenger had been far more important than the message.“What you realize is that it is true that the lies and distortions about socialism and ‘defund’ carried a punch — no argument from me,” Mr. Maloney said.“But I think the power of those lies has been exaggerated when you understand that Trump,” he added, was responsible for turning out “a bunch of people who were going into the voting booth.”In next year’s midterms, he said that Republicans would be running a risk if they were counting on Trump-level engagement from base voters, given that his name wouldn’t be on the ballot.“It leads you to ask: Will this post-Trump toxicity of QAnon and conspiracy theories and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene and the attack on the Capitol — will that message work without Trump’s turnout?” Mr. Maloney said. “The research suggests that they have taken too much comfort in the power of messages that were effective, yes, but that were enormously helped by Trump’s power to turn out voters.”Still, he cautioned against taking comfort in the results of the report, which at the end of the day serves as a reminder of just how out-of-reach an entire swath of the population remains — for mainstream pollsters and Democratic candidates alike.On the tactics front, the report concluded that in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, Democratic spending had been heavily tilted away from grass-roots campaigning and toward TV ads, which mostly ran late in the campaign and ended up doing little to tip things in the party’s favor.Going forward, Mr. Maloney said, he plans to keep the 600-poll database in use. The D.C.C.C. has already been using it in special elections this year to analyze messages for effectiveness.“We think there’s a lot to learn, we’re going to learn as we go, and you’re always building the ship as you’re sailing it,” he said. “In this case it’s important that we apply what we’ve learned to as many contexts as we can.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      How the Storming of the Capitol Became a ‘Normal Tourist Visit’

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      It is no wonder that Republican leaders in the House do not want to convene a truth and reconciliation commission to scrutinize the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The more attention drawn to the events of that day, the more their party has to lose.Immediately after the riot, support for President Donald Trump fell sharply among Republicans, according to surveys conducted by Kevin Arceneaux of Sciences Po Paris and Rory Truex of Princeton.The drop signaled that Republicans would have to pay a price for the Trump-inspired insurrection, the violent spirit of which was captured vividly by Peter Baker and Sabrina Tavernise of The Times:The pure savagery of the mob that rampaged through the Capitol that day was breathtaking, as cataloged by the injuries inflicted on those who tried to guard the nation’s elected lawmakers. One police officer lost an eye, another the tip of his finger. Still another was shocked so many times with a Taser gun that he had a heart attack. They suffered cracked ribs, two smashed spinal disks and multiple concussions. At least 81 members of the Capitol force and 65 members of the Metropolitan Police Department were injured.Republican revulsion toward the riot was, however, short-lived.Arceneaux and Truex, in their paper “Donald Trump and the Lie,” point out that Republican voter identification with Trump had “rebounded to pre-election levels” by Jan. 13. The authors measured identification with Trump by responses to two questions: “When people criticize Donald Trump, it feels like a personal insult,” and “When people praise Donald Trump, it makes me feel good.”The same pattern emerged in the Republican Party’s favorability ratings, which dropped by 13 points between the beginning and the end of January, but gained 11 points back by April, according to NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys.Mitch McConnell himself was outraged. In a Feb. 13 speech on the Senate floor he said:January 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the vice president.Memorably, McConnell went on:There is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day. The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.McConnell’s indignation was also short-lived. Less than two weeks later, on Feb. 25, McConnell told Fox News that if Trump were the nominee in 2024, he would “absolutely” support the former president.Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia nearly matched McConnell’s turn-on-a-dime. As The Washington Post reported on Tuesday,Clyde last week downplayed the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, comparing the mob’s breaching of the building to a “normal tourist visit.” But photos from that day show the congressman, mouth agape, rushing toward the doors to the House gallery and helping barricade them to prevent rioters from entering.McConnell and Clyde’s turnabouts came as no surprise to students of the Senate minority leader or scholars of American politics.Gary Jacobson of the University of California-San Diego wrote in an email that “the public’s reaction to the riot, like everything else these days, is getting assimilated into the existing polarized configuration of political attitudes and opinions.”Jacobson added:Such things as the absurd spectacle (of the vote recount) in Arizona, Trump’s delusory rantings, the antics of the House crackpot caucus, and the downplaying of the riot in the face of what everyone saw on TV, may weigh on the Republican brand, marginally eroding the party’s national stature over time. But never underestimate the power of motivated reasoning, negative partisanship and selective attention to congenial news sources to keep unwelcome realities at bay.Along similar lines, Paul Frymer, a political scientist at Princeton, suggested that voters have developed a form of scandal fatigue:At a certain point, the scandals start to blur together — Democrats have scandals, Republicans have scandals, no one is seemingly above or below such behavior. One of the reason’s President Trump survived all his scandals and shortcomings is because the public had seen so many of these before and has reached the point of a certain amount of immunity to being surprised.While this mass amnesia seem incomprehensible to some, an August 2019 paper, “Tribalism Is Human Nature,” by Cory Jane Clark, executive director the Adversarial Collaboration Research Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and three fellow psychologists, provides fundamental insight into the evanescing impact of Jan. 6 on the electorate and on Republicans in particular:Selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be “tribal,” and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most salient forms of modern coalitional conflict and elicits substantial cognitive biases. Given the common evolutionary history of liberals and conservatives, there is little reason to expect pro-tribe biases to be higher on one side of the political spectrum than the other.The human mind, Clark and her colleagues wrote,was forged by the crucible of coalitional conflict. For many thousands of years, human tribes have competed against each other. Coalitions that were more cooperative and cohesive not only survived but also appropriated land and resources from other coalitions and therefore reproduced more prolifically, thus passing their genes (and their loyalty traits) to later generations. Because coalitional coordination and commitment were crucial to group success, tribes punished and ostracized defectors and rewarded loyal members with status and resources (as they continue to do today).In large-scale contemporary studies, the authors continue,liberals and conservatives showed similar levels of partisan bias, and a number of pro-tribe cognitive tendencies often ascribed to conservatives (e.g., intolerance toward dissimilar others) have been found in similar degrees in liberals. We conclude that tribal bias is a natural and nearly ineradicable feature of human cognition, and that no group — not even one’s own — is immune.Within this framework, there are two crucial reasons that politics is “one of the most fertile grounds for bias,” Clark and her co-authors write:Political contests are highly consequential because they determine how society will allocate coveted resources such as wealth, power, and prestige. Winners gain control of cultural narratives and the mechanisms of government and can use them to benefit their coalition, often at the expense of losers ….We call this the evolutionarily plausible null hypothesis, and recent research has supported it.Clark argues further, in an email, that rising influence of “tribalism” in politics results in part from the growing “clarity and homogeneity of the Democrat and Republican coalitions,” with the result that “people are better able to find their people, sort into their ideological bubbles, find their preferred news sources, identify their preferred political elites and follow them, and signal their political allegiance to fellow group members (and attain friends and status that way).”Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University, adds some detail:My sense is that the move by Republican office holders to muddy the waters over what happened at the Capitol (and Trump’s role instigating the events) likely contributes to the waning of G.O.P. voters’ concerns. We heard a burst of these efforts to rewrite the history this past week during the House oversight hearing, but keep in mind that those efforts came on the heels of earlier efforts to downplay the violence, whitewash Trump’s role, and to cast doubt on the identities of the insurrectionists. No doubt, House G.O.P. leaders’ stalling of Democrats’ effort to create a “9/11 type” commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6 has also helped to diffuse G.O.P. interest and to keep the issue out of the headlines. No bipartisan inquiry, no media spotlight to keep the issue alive.In this context, Kevin McCarthy’s announcement on May 18 that the House Republican leadership opposes the creation of a Jan. 6 commission is of a piece with the ouster of Liz Cheney from her position as chair of the House Republican Conference, according to Binder.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAt the end of the day, Binder continued,We probably shouldn’t be surprised that public criticism of the Jan. 6 events only briefly looked bipartisan in the wake of the violence. G.O.P. elites’ decision to make loyalty to Trump a party litmus test (e.g., booting Rep. Cheney from her leadership post) demands that Republicans downplay and whitewash Trump’s role, the violence that day, and the identity of those who stormed the Capitol. Very little of American political life can escape being viewed in a partisan lens.Alexander G. Theodoridis of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst wrote in an email that “the half-life of Jan. 6 memory has proven remarkably short given the objectively shocking nature of what took place at the Capitol that day.” This results in part from the fact thatthere is now seemingly no limit to the ability of partisans to see the world through thick, nearly opaque red and blue colored lenses. In this case, that has Republicans latching onto a narrative that downplays the severity of the Capitol insurrection, attributes blame everywhere but where it belongs, and endorses the Big Lie that stoked the pro-Trump mob that day.A UMass April 21-23 national survey asked voters to identify the person or group “you hold most responsible for the violence that occurred at the Capitol building.” 45 percent identified Trump, 6 percent the Republican Party and 11 percent white nationalists. The surprising finding was the percentage that blamed the left, broadly construed: 16 percent for the Democratic Party, 4 percent for Joe Biden and 11 percent for “antifa,” for a total of 31 percent.The refusal of Republicans to explore the takeover of the Capitol reflects a form of biased reasoning that is not limited to the right or the left, but may be more dangerous on the right.Ariel Malka, a professor at Yeshiva University and an author of “Who is open to authoritarian governance within western democracies?” agreed in an email that both liberals and conservatives “engage in biased reasoning on the basis of partisanship,” but, he argued, there is still a fundamental difference between left and right:There is convincing evidence that cultural conservatives are reliably more open to authoritarian and democracy-degrading action than cultural liberals within Western democracies, including the United States. Because the Democratic Party is the party of American cultural liberals, I believe it would be far more difficult for a Democratic politician who favors overtly anti-democratic action, like nullifying elections, to have political success.These differences are “transforming the Republican Party into an anti-democratic institution,” according to Malka:What we are seeing in the Republican Party is that mass partisan opinion is making it politically devastating for Republican elites to try to uphold democracy. I think that an underappreciated factor in this is that the Republican Party is the home of cultural conservatives, and cultural conservatives are disproportionately open to authoritarian governance.In the paper, Malka, Yphtach Lelkes, Bert N. Bakker and Eliyahu Spivack, of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Amsterdam and Yeshiva University, ask: “What type of Western citizens would be most inclined to support democracy-degrading actions?”Their answer is twofold.First,Westerners with a broad culturally conservative worldview are especially open to authoritarian governance. For what is likely a variety of reasons, a worldview encompassing traditional sexual morality, religiosity, traditional gender roles, and resistance to multicultural diversity is associated with low or flexible commitment to democracy and amenability to authoritarian alternatives.Second,Westerners who hold a protection-based attitude package — combining a conservative cultural orientation with redistributive and interventionist economic views — are often the most open to authoritarian governance. Notably, it was the English-speaking democracies where this combination of attitudes most consistently predicted openness to authoritarian governance.Julie Wronski of the University of Mississippi replied to my inquiry about Jan. 6 suggesting that Democrats appear to have made a strategic decision against pressing the issue too hard:If voters’ concerns over Jan. 6 are fading, it is because political elites and the media are not making this issue salient. I suspect that Democrats have not made the issue salient recently in order to avoid antagonizing Republicans and exacerbating existing divides. Democrats’ focus seems more on collective action goals related to Covid-19 vaccine rollout and economic infrastructure.Democrats, Wronski continued, appear to have takena pass on the identity-driven zero-sum debate regarding the 2020 election since there is no compromise on this issue — you either believe the truth or you believe the big lie. Once you enter the world of pitting people against each other who believe in different realities of win/lose outcomes, it’s going to be nearly impossible to create bipartisan consensus on sweeping legislative initiatives (like HR1 and infrastructure bills).In a twist, Wronski suggests that it may be to Democrats’ advantage to stay out of the Jan. 6 debate in order to let it fester within Republican ranks:Not all Republican identifiers are strong partisans. Some people may align with the party for specific issue, policy reasons. Their identity is not as tied up in partisanship that an electoral loss becomes a loss to self-identity. This means there are intraparty fractures in the Republican Party regarding the big lie.Republican leaners “seem to be moving away from the party when hearing about intraparty conflict regarding the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s win,” Wronski wrote, citing a May 14 paper by Katherine Clayton, a graduate student in political science at Stanford.Clayton finds thatthose who call themselves “not very strong Republicans” or who consider themselves political independents that lean closer to the Republican Party demonstrate less favorable opinions of their party, reduced perceptions that the Democratic Party poses a threat, and even become more favorable toward the Democratic Party, as a result of exposure to information about conflict within their party.Wronski writes thatthe implication of these results would be for the Democratic Party to do nothing with regards to their messaging of January 6 and let the internal Republican conflict work to their benefit. In a two-party system, voters who do not espouse the big lie and are anti-Trump would eventually align with the Democratic Party.Jeff Greenfield, writing in Politico, takes an opposing position in his May 12 article, “A G.O.P. Civil War? Don’t Bet On It”:It’s getting harder to detect any serious division among rank-and-file Republicans. In Congress, and at the grass roots, the dominance of Donald Trump over the party is more or less total.More significant, Greenfield continued,History is littered with times that critics on the left, and in the pundit class, were positive the Republican Party was setting itself up for defeat by embracing its extremes, only to watch the party comfortably surge into power.Despite Trump’s overt attempt to subvert the election, Greenfield observes, anddespite his feeding the flames that nearly led to a physical assault of the vice president and speaker of the House, the Republican Party has, after a few complaints and speed bumps, firmly rallied behind Trump’s argument that he was robbed of a second term.The challenge facing Democrats goes beyond winning office. They confront an adversary willing to lie about past election outcomes, setting the stage for Republican legislatures to overturn future election returns; an opponent willing to nurture an insurrection if the wrong people win; a political party moving steadily from democracy to authoritarianism; a party that despite its liabilities is more likely than not to regain control of the House and possibly even the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.The advent of Trump Republicans poses an unprecedented strategic quandary for Democrats, a quandary they have not resolved and that may not lend itself to resolution.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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      Arizona Senators Retract Claims of Deleted 2020 Presidential Election Files

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      A political firestorm erupted in Arizona this week after Republican-backed reviewers of the November election in Maricopa County, the state’s largest, suggested that someone had deleted a crucial data file from election equipment that had been subpoenaed as part of the inquiry.The county’s chief official, himself a Republican, called the charge outrageous. Former President Donald J. Trump, who has promoted the lie that the Arizona vote was rigged against him, boasted that the allegation was “devastating” evidence of irregularities.But on Tuesday, a contractor for the Republican-controlled State Senate, which is conducting the review, said the claim had become “a moot point.” The file had been found on a set of four computer drives in the election equipment, the contractor, Ben Cotton, said at a meeting on the review convened by Republican senators.Mr. Cotton’s effort to downplay the brouhaha fit the theme of the livestreamed meeting, in which the senators sought to cast the widely ridiculed review as a civics-lesson effort to improve election administration, not a bid to placate angry Trump supporters who refuse to accept his loss in the state.“I’ve said from the get-go that I’m relatively sure we are not going to find anything of any magnitude that would imply any intentional wrongdoing,” the president of the State Senate, Karen Fann, said at the session. Rather, she said, the review is expected to highlight that “we could do a little better job with the chain of custody” of voting material and other technical aspects of conducting an election.The review has nonetheless acquired a markedly partisan tilt, with senators employing a firm whose chief executive has spread conspiracy theories of an Arizona election stolen from Mr. Trump, and granting One America News and pro-Trump figures broad access to the process.Among the ardent set of believers that Mr. Trump actually won the November election, the notion that the Arizona review will demolish all evidence of President Biden’s victory has become an article of faith.Jack Sellers, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, denounced the review on Monday as “a grift disguised as an audit.” Other Republicans in the county government have urged the State Senate to scrap the inquiry, saying it was an effort to undermine the November election and with it, Arizonans’ faith in democracy.In the meeting on Tuesday, Ms. Fann and another supporter of the review, State Senator Warren Petersen, largely ignored such criticisms, while expressing frustration that county officials had decided not to cooperate with their inquiry.The 70-minute session raised minor questions about the November election, such as a purported mismatch between some ballots that had been damaged at polling places and the duplicate ballots that were used to record those votes. But it made no broad claims of irregularities.Mr. Cotton, the founder of a data security firm in Ashburn, Va., called CyFIR, maintained that the data file at the center of the latest dispute over the audit had indeed been deleted from election equipment hard drives. But he later indicated that he had been unable to find the file because county election officials had not given him instructions to find it.Senator Petersen, seen by many as the prime supporter of the audit, called Mr. Cotton’s discovery of the supposedly deleted file “good news.” More

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      Leaders Position House G.O.P. Against Independent Accounting for Jan. 6 Riot

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      Representative Kevin McCarthy, the top House Republican, said he would oppose the independent commission, and urged the party’s rank and file to do the same.WASHINGTON — Top House Republicans urged their colleagues on Tuesday to oppose bipartisan legislation creating an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, positioning their conference against a full accounting of the deadly riot by a pro-Trump mob.Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, announced his opposition in a lengthy statement on Tuesday morning, and his leadership team followed up later to recommend that lawmakers vote “no” on Wednesday. Together, the actions suggested that the House vote would be a mostly partisan affair, highlighting yet again Republicans’ reluctance to grapple with former President Donald J. Trump’s election lies and their determination to deflect attention from the Capitol assault.Mr. McCarthy had been pushing for any outside investigation to include a look at what he called “political violence” on the left, including by anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter, rather than focus narrowly on the actions of Mr. Trump and his supporters who carried out the riot.“Given the political misdirections that have marred this process, given the now duplicative and potentially counterproductive nature of this effort, and given the speaker’s shortsighted scope that does not examine interrelated forms of political violence in America, I cannot support this legislation,” Mr. McCarthy said in a statement.His opposition raised questions about the fate of the commission in the Senate, where Democrats would need at least 10 Republicans to agree to support its formation. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said he and other Republican senators were undecided and would “listen to the arguments on whether such a commission is needed.”House Republican leaders had initially suggested that they would allow lawmakers to vote however they saw fit, too. But they abruptly reversed course on Tuesday, releasing a “leadership recommendation” urging a “no” vote in an apparent bid to tamp down on the number of members embracing the bill.Mr. Trump himself put out a statement on Tuesday night calling the commission a “Democrat trap.” He urged Republicans to “get much tougher” and to oppose it unless it was expanded to look at “murders, riots, and fire bombings” in cities run by Democrats.“Hopefully, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are listening!” he said.In rejecting the commission, Mr. McCarthy essentially threw one of his key deputies, Representative John Katko of New York, under the bus in favor of shielding Mr. Trump and the party from further scrutiny. Mr. Katko had negotiated the makeup and scope of the commission with his Democratic counterpart on the Homeland Security Committee and enthusiastically endorsed it on Friday.It was all the more striking coming just days after Mr. McCarthy had maneuvered the ouster from leadership of his No. 3, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, because she refused to drop criticisms of Mr. Trump and Republicans who abetted his election falsehoods. Ms. Cheney has said that the commission should have a narrow scope, and that Mr. McCarthy should testify about a phone call with Mr. Trump during the riot.Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, immediately slammed Republican opposition as “cowardice” and released a letter Mr. McCarthy had sent her in February showing that Democrats had incorporated all three of his principal demands for a commission modeled after the one that studied the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.In it, Mr. McCarthy said he wanted to ensure any commission had an even ratio of appointees by Republicans and Democrats, shared subpoena power between the two parties’ appointees and did not include any “findings or other predetermined conclusions” in its organizing documents.Democrats ultimately agreed to all three, but in his statement on Tuesday, Mr. McCarthy said Ms. Pelosi had “refused to negotiate in good faith.”“I presume Trump doesn’t want this to happen,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader. “Enough said.”Mr. Katko predicted a “healthy” number of Republicans would still vote for it.“I can’t state this plainly enough: This is about facts,” Mr. Katko told the House Rules Committee at a hearing on the bill. “It’s not about partisan politics.”But by encouraging Republicans to vote no, Mr. McCarthy positioned the commission as yet another test of loyalty to Mr. Trump, spotlighting a rift within the party between a small minority that is willing to question him and the vast majority that is not.Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, vowed to press the issue with Senate Republicans by quickly bringing the legislation up for a vote in that chamber.“Republicans can let their constituents know: Are they on the side of truth?” Mr. Schumer said. “Or do they want to cover up for the insurrectionists and Donald Trump?”Mr. McCarthy’s biggest complaint was the panel’s narrow focus on the riot itself — carried out by right-wing activists inspired by Mr. Trump — when he said it should take a broader look at political violence on the left, including a shooting by a left-leaning activist who targeted congressional Republicans at a baseball practice four years ago.Some Republicans have gone much further in recent weeks, trying to whitewash the violence on Jan. 6 that left five people dead, injured 140 police officers and endangered lawmakers’ lives along with that of Vice President Mike Pence.In remarks on the House floor on Tuesday, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said a commission was needed to study “all the riots that happened during the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd,” not the attack on the Capitol. She also accused the Justice Department of mistreating those charged in connection with the attack.“While it’s catch and release for domestic terrorists, antifa, B.L.M., the people who breached the Capitol on Jan. 6 are being abused,” she said.Catie Edmondson More

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      Andrew Giuliani to Run for GOP Nomination for NY Governor

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      The son of Rudolph W. Giuliani joins two other candidates in a primary that could demonstrate former President Trump’s continued hold on their party.The field of Republicans vying to challenge Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in next year’s race for governor grew on Tuesday as Andrew Giuliani, the son of the former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, formally unveiled his candidacy.Mr. Giuliani is the third Republican to see an opportunity for the party to seize the governor’s mansion for the first time in nearly two decades, joining Representative Lee Zeldin of Long Island, a staunch conservative, and Rob Astorino, a former county executive of Westchester County and the party’s 2014 nominee for governor.With Mr. Cuomo engulfed in overlapping investigations into accusations of sexual harassment, his handling of nursing homes and the use of state resources for his pandemic memoir, Republicans in New York appeared eager to take on a newly vulnerable governor hobbling into his run for a fourth term.And the entrance of Mr. Giuliani, a former special assistant to President Donald J. Trump, along with Mr. Zeldin, an ardent backer of the former president, suggested that Republican candidates with ties to Mr. Trump may see a distinct advantage, even in deep blue New York.“We need a leader who is going to light the economic furnace in New York and keep our streets safe again,” said Mr. Giuliani in a telephone interview. “Stop the war on police that has been going on. End bail reform.”Mr. Giuliani, in first announcing his candidacy in The New York Post, likened himself to a heavyweight boxer about to enter the ring for a title bout with Mr. Cuomo. “Giuliani vs. Cuomo. Holy smokes. It’s Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier,” he told the paper.But for many New Yorkers, particularly in the city, the image that jumps to mind — one that the 35-year-old Mr. Giuliani has struggled to live down — is of his 7-year-old self fidgeting about the lectern at City Hall as his father gave his inaugural address as mayor in 1994. The moment was satirized by “Saturday Night Live,” with Mr. Giuliani played by the comedian Chris Farley. (Mr. Giuliani said he loves the skit.)In 2017, Mr. Trump hired Mr. Giuliani, a former professional golfer, to work as a special assistant and associate director of the Office of Public Liaison. Since leaving the White House this year, he has been an on-camera contributor for Newsmax Media, the conservative media company. (He left that position to run for governor.)Mr. Giuliani, who only began raising money in recent days, faces a difficult path in the Republican primary.Mr. Zeldin, an outspoken supporter of Mr. Trump, has already raised $2.5 million in campaign cash since announcing his candidacy last month, according to his campaign, and has worked to position himself to gain Mr. Trump’s endorsement.“It’s clear that Congressman Zeldin has the support, momentum and dogged determination to win and restore New York to glory,” said Ian Prior, a campaign spokesman for Mr. Zeldin.Mr. Trump made it clear to Mr. Giuliani when they saw each other at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s estate in Florida, a few weeks ago that he was leaning toward Mr. Zeldin, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion.Mr. Giuliani, in the conversation, suggested that the former president wait until after the next campaign filing, in mid-July, so that Mr. Giuliani could demonstrate his viability, the people said.Mr. Giuliani did not dispute that account. “All I can say is the president has been a friend for a long time and somebody I have been honored to work for,” he said. “I think he is going to be very impressed.”A confident speaker, Mr. Giuliani made a favorable impression on some Republican Party operatives in meetings before county chairs last month. He is scheduled to travel around the state over the next week, according to his campaign. State party officials had hoped to avoid a primary, but with one now all but assured, they appear to have embraced the energy.“Rudy will forever be known as the man who transformed New York City, and Andrew can be the one to do it statewide,” said Nick Langworthy, the party chairman, in a statement. “New York is broken and in need of the type of overhaul that the Giuliani administration ushered in during the 1990s.”How much currency the Giuliani family name holds for New York voters, particularly upstate, is an open question. Rudolph Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor and onetime personal attorney to Mr. Trump, was aggressive in publicly questioning the results of the 2020 election and in the failed effort to overturn the election in court. His work in Ukraine during Mr. Trump’s administration is under federal investigation.And any Republican faces daunting math when trying to run statewide in New York, where Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one and the party’s last statewide win was in 2002, when George Pataki was elected governor.Still, some Republicans see Mr. Cuomo’s troubles as a reason to hope.“When you have Andrew, Lee and Rob all running for governor, it shows how excited New Yorkers are to have Andrew Cuomo on the ballot as a Democrat seeking his fourth term,” said Joseph Borelli, a Republican member of the New York City Council from Staten Island. “Good luck, Governor Cuomo!”Maggie Haberman contributed reporting. More