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Texas Special Runoff Election Results: Sixth Congressional District – The New York Times
Elections|Texas Special Runoff Election Results: Sixth Congressional Districthttps://nyti.ms/2UVk2lN More
Mr. Ellzey, a state representative, was victorious in a runoff against Susan Wright, whose husband, Ron Wright, represented the Sixth Congressional District before he died of Covid-19.AUSTIN, Texas — The widow of a Texas congressman who died early this year of Covid-19 lost to a freshman state representative on Tuesday in a special runoff election between Republicans seeking to fill the vacant House seat.State Representative Jake Ellzey, who narrowly missed capturing the Republican nomination for the seat in 2018, defeated Susan Wright, whose husband, Ron Wright, died in February about two weeks after testing positive for the coronavirus. The Associated Press called the race after Mr. Ellzey had obtained 52.9 percent of the vote with 90 percent of precincts reporting.“Jake will be a strong and effective leader for the people of North Texas and he will fight tirelessly for their values in Washington,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement.In May, Ms. Wright and Mr. Ellzey had each captured far below the 50 percent majority needed to avoid a runoff in a 23-way contest for the state’s Sixth Congressional District, which represents three counties just south of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan region.In the end, the runoff election, which drew far fewer voters than the primary contest, was less about two ideologically similar candidates and more about how much sway former President Donald J. Trump would have in getting people to cast ballots for Ms. Wright, whom he endorsed before the primary.In a duel of former Republican leaders, Rick Perry, the state’s former governor and a cabinet member of Mr. Trump’s administration, threw his weight behind Mr. Ellzey, who like Mr. Perry is a former military pilot.The contest between Ms. Wright and Mr. Ellzey, who overtook a Democratic candidate by 347 votes to secure a slot in the runoff, disappointed Democrats, who had hoped to tap a reservoir of shifting demographics and Hispanic and African American growth in a district where Mr. Trump won by only three percentage points in November.Susan Wright greeted voters last week outside an early voting site in Arlington, Texas.Elias Valverde II/The Dallas Morning News, via Associated PressMr. Ellzey, 51, a Navy veteran, is in the middle of his first term in the Texas House of Representatives. Ms. Wright, 58, is a longtime Republican activist who pledged to continue her husband’s legacy on a host of conservative priorities, including abortion, guns and immigration.Both candidates supported the Republican-backed voter overhaul legislation in Texas, a measure that prompted Democrats to leave the state to block a vote just days into a special session. Now Mr. Ellzey will join the second-largest congressional delegation — 23 Republicans and 13 Democrats — in the U.S. House behind California.The so-called Trump Factor was the biggest subplot in Tuesday’s contest, with Ms. Wright and her supporters hoping the endorsement would propel her to victory. The former president retains an immense hold on Texas Republicans, and he carried the district by 12 points in 2016 before losing ground in the region to Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year.Ms. Wright, who entered the contest two weeks after her husband’s death, had prominently displayed the former president’s endorsement throughout her campaign and introduced Mr. Trump at a virtual election-eve rally on Monday night.The Club for Growth, a conservative fiscal organization that supported Mr. Trump in 2020, has also aligned with Ms. Wright, spending $1.2 million to fund ads and mailings attacking Mr. Ellzey’s legislative record and his conservative credentials, prompting fierce rebuttals.Although the two candidates share similar views on most of the base issues, the Club for Growth attacks injected a harsh tenor into the race, becoming an issue themselves. Mr. Perry, the former governor, described them as “junk” and “absolute trash” and demanded that Ms. Wright disavow the claims, which she refused to do.Joe Barton, who represented the district in Congress for more than three decades, said the tone of the Club for Growth ads was a factor in his decision to endorse Mr. Ellzey, though he was friends with the Wrights.Heading into Tuesday’s race, Mr. Ellzey had raised $1.7 million, far more than the $740,000 raised by Ms. Wright, according to news media reports. More
Trump pint glasses. Trump T-shirts. Trump memberships. Six months after the former president left office, his party’s fund-raising success depends heavily on his vaunted name.Even in defeat, nothing sells in the Republican Party quite like Donald J. Trump.The Republican National Committee has been dangling a “Trump Life Membership” to entice small contributors to give online. The party’s Senate campaign arm has been hawking an “Official Trump Majority Membership.” And the committee devoted to winning back the House has been touting Mr. Trump’s nearly every public utterance, talking up a nonexistent Trump social media network and urging donations to “retake Trump’s Majority.”Six months after Mr. Trump left office, the key to online fund-raising success for the Republican Party in 2021 can largely be summed up in the three words it used to identify the sender of a recent email solicitation: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”The fund-raising language of party committees is among the most finely tuned messaging in politics, with every word designed to motivate more people to give more money online. And all that testing has yielded Trump-themed gimmicks and giveaways including Trump pint glasses, Trump-signed pictures, Trump event tickets and Trump T-shirts — just from the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the month of July.“The Republican Party has never had small-dollar fund-raising at this scale before Donald Trump,” said Brad Parscale, who was Mr. Trump’s first campaign manager in 2020 and is still an adviser, “and they probably never will at this scale after Donald Trump.”The strategy is clearly paying financial dividends, as three main G.O.P. federal committees raised a combined $134.8 million from direct individual contributions in the first six months of 2021, nearly matching the $136.2 million raised by the equivalent Democratic committees, federal records show.But the endless invocations of the former president underscore not only his enduring appeal to online Republican activists and donors — the base of the party’s base and its financial engine — but also the unlikelihood that the G.O.P. apparatus wants to, or even can, meaningfully break from him for the foreseeable future.The stark reliance on Mr. Trump’s name to spur small donations amounts to a tangible expression of the party’s inescapable dependency on him — one that risks preventing a reckoning over the losses the G.O.P. suffered in the last four years, including Mr. Trump’s own, which he has denied by clinging to false theories of election fraud.In July, the Trump-themed gimmicks and giveaways included pint glasses, signed pictures, event tickets and T-shirts.National Republican Senatorial CommitteeRepublican strategists said the party’s messaging and the influx of money reflect Mr. Trump’s continued hold on the hearts and wallets of the grass-roots, despite the party losing the House, the Senate and the White House in his single term.“The governing class of the Republican Party would just as well see him move on,” said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist and former top political adviser for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It’s been ‘enough is enough.’ But he still keeps a firm grip on the grass-roots.”With Democrats in full control of Washington, some Republicans are hoping their party can rally chiefly against President Biden and the Democrats in the 2022 midterms. Yet Mr. Biden’s name has been as absent from the G.O.P. pleas for cash as Mr. Trump has been pervasive, a warning sign that Republicans are struggling to stir the kind of impassioned opposition to him that they had once generated to former President Barack Obama, and that Democrats had uniting their party against Mr. Trump four years ago.Since May 1, the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm has invoked Mr. Biden’s name in the sender line on its emails just four times; Mr. Trump’s name has appeared there 185 times.The Republican National Committee treated Mr. Trump’s June 14 birthday almost like a national holiday, sending out no less than 19 emails about it, starting more than five weeks in advance. The House campaign arm joined in, too: “Why haven’t you signed Trump’s Bday Card?!” read one text message. “We’ve texted 6x & it’s only 5 days away!”The heavy use of Mr. Trump’s name has at times been a source of friction with the former president, who has begun ramping up fund-raising for his own political action committee, called Save America. As a businessman, Mr. Trump spent years leveraging and licensing his name for cash, slapping it on buildings and products, and he and some of his advisers have been irked by the exploitation of his image by party committees that do not always align with his political interests.In March, his lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to the three main Republican committees demanding they stop using his name and likeness. But back-channel discussions defused the situation as party officials insisted they had every right to refer to him but promised not to use his signature without permission. Still, some party committees continue to push the limits by wording messages to appear as though they are coming from Mr. Trump.Current and past party operatives said Mr. Trump’s name simply raises the most money. Every click and contribution is carefully cataloged, and committees can compare how much is raised using different messages and messengers. Those with Mr. Trump’s name simply outperform, operatives said.“President Trump and his policies remain a major driver for small-dollar donors,” said Michael McAdams, communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee.During one stretch in June, roughly 90 percent of that committee’s fund-raising texts mentioned Mr. Trump. Some solicitations have appealed to supporters’ love of Mr. Trump; others have tapped into their fear of disappointing him.At one point this spring, the committee warned donors against opting out of recurring monthly contributions through a prechecked box: “If you UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR.”Fund-raising text messages from the National Republican Congressional CommitteeIn a late 2020 memo, WinRed, the party’s main online donation-processing platform, said that donation pages that mentioned the word “Trump” reaped, on average, twice as many donors as pages that did not. WinRed still gives Mr. Trump top billing on its home page, featuring him above the actual party committees. Mr. Trump also continues to be featured prominently in many Democratic fund-raising pitches.While former presidents do typically maintain a following among the grass-roots — Mr. Obama is still featured on the donation pages of some Democratic Party groups — Mr. Trump is uniquely omnipresent in the Republican digital ecosystem.Tim Cameron, a Republican digital strategist, said one reason is that much of the Republican online donating infrastructure sprang up during the Trump era — after years of neglect and being outraised by the Democrats. “It’s how these lists were built,” he said.Hogan Gidley, who worked as an adviser to Mr. Trump at the White House, said the party — which still is populated by vestiges of a Trump-skeptical establishment that sees his incendiary approach to politics as a poor fit for swing districts and states — risks backlash and anger if it uses the Trump brand to bankroll causes and candidates not aligned with the pro-Trump movement.“This is where the party is,” Mr. Gidley said. “You can ride that wave or you can try to swim against it but the wave is going to win.”Mr. Trump and the party are sometimes directly at odds.The party’s Senate campaign arm, for instance, is supporting the re-election of Senator Lisa Murkowski, the Alaska Republican who voted to convict Mr. Trump of impeachable offenses. Mr. Trump is supporting her challenger, Kelly Tshibaka. Mr. Trump has also regularly attacked Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, including in a speech to party donors this spring, calling him a “stone cold loser.”Mr. McConnell has ignored the slights. The online store of the party committee charged with returning Mr. McConnell to the majority currently has 21 of 23 items for sale featuring Mr. Trump’s name or face; zero feature Mr. McConnell. Mr. Trump has regularly attacked Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe party’s Senate committee has also hired Gary Coby, the architect of Mr. Trump’s 2020 digital operation who continues to work with Mr. Trump, as a fund-raising consultant, according to people familiar with the matter.Mr. Trump has begun ramping up his fund-raising operation, sending regular texts and emails that effectively compete with the party apparatus. Mr. Trump’s PAC is back advertising on Facebook, too, even as the platform has banned Mr. Trump from posting there himself.Of the all party organizations, the Republican National Committee has perhaps the trickiest line to toe because it is charged with neutrally overseeing the 2024 presidential nomination process, whether or not Mr. Trump runs.The R.N.C. worked in tandem with the Trump re-election campaign last year, raising hundreds of millions of dollars through shared accounts. A New York Times investigation in April showed how the Trump operation had used prechecked recurring donation boxes to lure unwitting donors into giving again and again — resulting in a wave of fraud complaints and demands for refunds.It turns out that some donations-on-autopilot continued all the way through June 2021, when party officials stopped processing donations to their shared account, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee. That account raised $2.6 million in June almost entirely through recurring donations, according to a person familiar with the matter, of which 75 percent was earmarked for Mr. Trump’s PAC and 25 percent to the R.N.C.But though those donations were stopped, the Trump messaging has continued, with the party hawking “Back to Back Trump Voter” shirts in recent days — yours “FREE” with a $50 donation.“He’s so good for small-dollar fund-raising,” said Liz Mair, a Republican strategist who has been critical of Mr. Trump in the past. “The party cannot financially afford to separate.” More
Am I too panicked about the future of American democracy?My colleague Ross Douthat thinks so. He points to research suggesting that voter ID laws and absentee voting have modest effects on elections and the reality that Republican state officials already have tremendous power to alter election outcomes — powers they did not use in the aftermath of 2020 and show few signs of preparing to use now.[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]So I invited Ross on the show to hash it out: Am I too alarmed, or is he too chill? We also talk about his trio of recent columns trying to find a middle ground in the fight over how America understands, and teaches, its own history, as well as how his medical struggles with treatment-resistant Lyme disease have shaped how he’s understood and covered the coronavirus.You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.(A full transcript of the episode is available here.)The New York Times“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin. More
Her shift reflects how rank-and-file Republicans — even those who may disagree with him — have decided it is too perilous to openly challenge former President Donald J. Trump.MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. — Representative Nancy Mace had just delivered the kind of red-meat remarks that would ordinarily thrill the Republican voters in attendance here on a recent sweltering evening, casually comparing liberal Democrats to terrorists — the “Hamas squad,” she called them — and railing against their “socialist” spending plans.But asked to give an assessment of her congresswoman, Mara Brockbank, a former leader of the Charleston County Republican Party who previously endorsed Ms. Mace, was less than enthusiastic.“I didn’t like that she back-stabbed Trump,” Ms. Brockbank said. “We have to realize that she got in because of Trump. Even if you do have something against your leaders, keep them to yourself.”Ms. Brockbank was referring to Ms. Mace’s first weeks in office immediately after the Jan. 6 riot, as the stench of tear gas lingered in the halls of the Capitol and some top Republicans were quietly weighing a break with President Donald J. Trump. Ms. Mace, a freshman congresswoman, placed herself at the forefront of a group of Republicans denouncing Mr. Trump’s lies of a stolen election that had fueled the assault and appeared to be establishing herself as a compelling new voice urging her party to change its ways.But these days, as Republicans in Congress have made it clear that they have no intention of turning against Mr. Trump, Ms. Mace has quietly backpedaled into the party’s fold. Having once given more than a dozen interviews in a single day to condemn Mr. Trump’s corrosive influence on the party, Ms. Mace now studiously avoids the subject, rarely if ever mentioning his name and saying it is time for Republicans to “stop fighting with each other in public.”After setting herself apart from her party during her first week in office by opposing its effort to overturn President Biden’s victory, Ms. Mace has swung back into line. She joined the vast majority of Republicans in voting to oust Representative Liz Cheney from leadership for denouncing Mr. Trump and his election lies. She also voted against forming an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the Capitol riot.And rather than continuing to challenge party orthodoxy, Ms. Mace has leaned in to the most combative Republican talking points, castigating Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top health official who is a favorite boogeyman of the right, accusing Democrats of forcing critical race theory on children, and publicly feuding with progressives.Her pivot helps explain why the Republican Party’s embrace of Mr. Trump and his brand of politics is more absolute than ever. It is not only the small but vocal group of hard-right loyalists of the former president who are driving the alliance, but also the scores of rank-and-file Republicans — even those who may disagree with him, as Ms. Mace has — who have decided it is too perilous to openly challenge him.“She’s a little bit like a new sailor; she tried to get her sea legs, but she’s also looking out over the horizon, and what she saw was a storm coming in from the right,” said Chip Felkel, a veteran Republican strategist in South Carolina. “So she immediately started paddling in another direction. The problem is, is that everything you say and do, there’s a record of it.”Ms. Mace declined through a spokeswoman to be made available for an interview, but said in a statement that “you can be conservative and you can be a Republican and be pissed off and vocal about what happened on Jan. 6.” (Ms. Mace’s most recent statements regarding the Capitol attack have been explanations of why she opposed commissions to investigate it.)“You can agree with Donald Trump’s policies and be pissed off about what happened on Jan. 6,” Ms. Mace said. “You can think Pelosi is putting on a sideshow with the Jan. 6 commission and still be pissed off about Jan. 6. These things are not mutually exclusive.”Ms. Mace is facing a particularly difficult political dynamic in her swing district centered in Charleston, which she won narrowly last year when she defeated Joe Cunningham, a Democrat. Her immediate problem is regaining the trust of the rock-ribbed conservatives who make up her base. It is all the more pressing because political observers expect Republicans to try to redraw Ms. Mace’s district to become more conservative, and possible primary challengers still have a year to decide whether to throw their hats in the ring.Her predicament bubbled below the surface on a recent evening here at a pork-themed “End Washington Waste” reception overlooking the Charleston Harbor and the docked Yorktown, a decommissioned Navy aircraft carrier. Voters signed the hocks of a paper pig urging Democrats to cut extraneous spending from the infrastructure bill and exchanged printed-out “Biden bucks” for cocktails, as some reflected on Ms. Mace’s balancing act.Ms. Mace campaigning in Mount Pleasant, S.C., in November. She is facing a difficult political dynamic in her swing district centered in Charleston.Mic Smith/FR2 AP, via Associated PressFrancis and Clea Sherman, a married couple who braved the 90-degree heat to attend, praised her for being “unafraid to speak out” and “tackling tough issues.”“We absolutely think that is the most horrifying thing — not to ever happen, but certainly one of them,” Ms. Sherman said of the Capitol breach, quickly adding that she was just as outraged by racial justice protests around the country that had grown violent. “All those riots that went along in all those cities — they’ve got to stop.”Mr. Sherman, a Korean War veteran, nodded along. “It was a shame it had to happen,” he said of the Jan. 6 assault, adding that he used to “get very upset” with some of Mr. Trump’s remarks.But the former president had been effective, he said. “In my whole life I’ve never been able to see someone accomplish so much,” Mr. Sherman added, citing low unemployment rates and a strong economy. “The bottom line was, did he get the job done?”Penny Ford, a Mount Pleasant resident who attended the event with her husband, Jim Ford, gave a more grudging assessment, explaining that they had winced at Ms. Mace’s comments about the former president. Still, she said, the congresswoman was “the best we have at the moment.”Ms. Ford said they would prefer to be represented by someone like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio — a staunch Trump loyalist who helped plan the challenge to Mr. Biden’s election in the House — or Senator Ted Cruz of Texas — who led the effort to invalidate it in the Senate — and said they would consider voting against Ms. Mace next year “if I had a choice for someone else.”The first woman to graduate from the Citadel, Ms. Mace based her winning 2020 campaign on her up-from-the-bootstraps biography, detailing her journey from scrappy Waffle House waitress to statehouse representative. She bested Mr. Cunningham, who had been the first Democrat to hold the seat in nearly four decades, by just over a percentage point.On the campaign trail, Ms. Mace walked a careful line, balancing her libertarian streak with a more pragmatic approach, playing up a history of “speaking up against members” of her own party and “reaching across the aisle.”And in the days after the Jan. 6 attack, she was unsparing in her language. What was necessary, Ms. Mace said then, was nothing short of a comprehensive rebuilding of the party. It was a time for Republicans to be honest with their voters, she said: “Regardless of the political consequences, I’m going to tell the truth.”She could not stay silent, Ms. Mace insisted.“This is a moment in history, a turning point where because of my passion for our country, for our Constitution, for the future of my children — I don’t have that option anymore,” she said in an interview the day after the attack. “I can pick up the mantle and try to lead us out of this crisis, or I can sit idly by and watch our country go to waste. And I refuse to do the latter.”Ms. Mace in 1997, during her freshman year at the Citadel, where she became the first woman to graduate two years later.Paula Illingworth/Associated PressLess than a week later, her tone abruptly changed. After joining Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, in a bipartisan request to provide congressional staff aides with more resources to cope with the “trauma” of the Jan. 6 attack, she criticized her colleague for recounting how she feared that rioters had broken into her office building.“No insurrectionists stormed our hallway,” Ms. Mace wrote on Twitter, touching off a heated back-and-forth.She then fund-raised off the feud, arguing that “the actions of the out-of-control mob who forced their way into the Capitol” were “terrifying” and “immediately condemned by the left and right,” but that “the left,” particularly Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, had “run wild because they will never let a crisis go to waste.”More recently, when she voted against the formation of the proposed bipartisan Jan. 6 inquiry, Ms. Mace called the endeavor a “partisan, duplicate effort by Speaker Pelosi to divide our nation.”And after initially refusing to tell reporters whether she voted to oust Ms. Cheney, of Wyoming, from her No. 3 leadership post, Ms. Mace’s team issued a statement affirming that she had, saying that Republicans “should be working together and not against one another during some of the most serious socialist challenges our nation has ever faced.”Ms. Mace has, in some ways, retained her independent streak. She verbally slapped down Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, for comparing mask mandates to Nazism. And she has continued to work across the aisle with Democrats on issues like presidential war powers and cybersecurity.Her still-frequent appearances on television, though — now mostly on a variety of Fox News shows, as well as the conservative networks OAN and Newsmax — tend to stick to some of the party’s most well-tread political messages. In a recent interview on Fox News, she asserted that strident liberals had seized control of the Democratic Party.“They’re in charge,” she said, “which is why we’re seeing what we thought would be a moderate administration take a sharp left turn all of a sudden.” More
To write three books in four years about Donald Trump has been an immersion into his obsessions and fixations. This is why I know the obvious: Donald Trump will run for president again.This spring, in another of his compulsive bids for attention — indifferent to whether it is good or bad — he hosted me at Mar-a-Lago, even after I had written two unflattering books about him (one whose publication he tried to stop), for an interview and dinner. After dinner, I asked about his plans for a presidential library, the traditional retirement project and fund-raising scheme of ex-presidents. There was a flash of confusion on his uniquely readable face, and then anger, aroused, I figured, by the implication of what I seemed to be saying — that his time in office was past.“No way, no way,” he snarled, “no way.”It is an existential predicament: He can’t be Donald Trump without a claim on the presidency. He can’t hold the attention and devotion of the Republican Party if he is not both once and future king — and why would he ever give that up? Indeed, it seemed to be that I was strategically seated in the lobby of Mar-a-Lago when I arrived precisely so I could overhear the efforts by a Republican delegation to court and grovel before Mr. Trump and to observe his dismissive dominance over them.More than a bit of his subsequent conversation with me was about his contempt for any Republican who might be less than absolute in his or her devotion to him — after all, he had the power to make or break the people who have since disappointed him (like Senator Mitch McConnell and Justice Brett Kavanaugh). He seemed not so much paranoid about challenges to him but warlike, savoring his future retributions.He repeatedly returns to his grudge against his once obsequious vice president with relish; Mike Pence has become more public about his own political ambitions. In his telling, it is Mr. Pence whose actions confirmed “the steal,” by his refusal to overturn the electoral vote count, over which he presided in January in the Senate. I believe he will run again just to stop the men who, in his view, helped take the presidency from him from trying to get it for themselves. The reports that reach him of the West Wing and members of his administration who refuse to subscribe to the idea of “the steal” only feeds his fury and determination to punish all doubters — “some very weak people who have worked for me but won’t in the future,” as he told me.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has become another frequent subject at Mr. Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., golf club, where the former president is spending the summer away from the Florida heat. Many members of Trumpworld believe Mr. DeSantis, who came in second to Mr. Trump in a CPAC straw poll this month, might, unbelievably, run for the 2024 nomination even if Mr. Trump runs. The idea that Mr. DeSantis, who Mr. Trump believes he “made” by his endorsement, might not accept his dependence on and obligation to Mr. Trump would be a personal affront that must be met. Mr. Trump pointedly blew off the governor’s request that he postpone a Florida rally in the aftermath of the Surfside building collapse. Clear message: The governor is not the boss of him. (Mr. DeSantis has denied making this request.)The continued career of Mr. McConnell, to whom Mr. Trump has not spoken since vilifying him with a heap of obscenity after Mr. McConnell acknowledged Joe Biden’s victory, is unfinished business. (Trump aides believe the two are likely to never speak again.)Mr. Trump believes that Mr. McConnell retained his Senate seat in 2020 only because of his support. The war against Mr. McConnell is a war about who controls the Republican Party — if it’s Mr. Trump’s party, it can’t be Mr. McConnell’s. If candidates win because of his endorsements, thereby making Mr. Trump himself the ultimate winner, and inevitable front-runner, then it’s surely his party. Mr. Trump, whose political muscle helped oust some Republican enemies from office in 2018, is confident about evicting Mr. McConnell once back in power. (I doubt he pays attention to the fact that Mr. McConnell was re-elected to a six-year term and has a reasonable chance of becoming the Senate majority leader again.)Many Democrats believe that the legal pursuit of the former president’s family business in New York, and other cases, including the investigation of his attempt to overturn election results in Georgia, might seriously impede his political future. But in Mr. Trump’s logic, this will run the opposite way: Running for president is the best way to directly challenge the prosecutors.Mr. Trump also believes he has a magic bullet. In his telling, the Republicans almost took back the House in 2020 because of his “telerallies,” telephone conference calls in congressional districts that attracted in some instances tens of thousands of callers. Who has that draw? he asked me, nearly smacking his lips. In 2022, with his draw, the Republicans, he is certain, will retake the House with his chosen slate of candidates. And indeed, this actually might be true.But perhaps most important, there is his classic hucksterism, and his synoptic U.S.P. — unique selling proposition. In 2016 it was “the wall.” For 2022 and 2024 he will have another proposition available: “the steal,” a rallying cry of rage and simplicity.For Democrats, who see him exiled to Mar-a-Lago, stripped of his key social media platforms and facing determined prosecutors, his future seems risible if not pathetic. But this is Donald Trump, always ready to strike back harder than he has been struck, to blame anyone but himself, to silence any doubts with the sound of his own voice, to take what he believes is his and, most of all, to seize all available attention. Sound the alarm.Michael Wolff (@MichaelWolffNYC) is a journalist and the author, most recently, of “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency.”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
A powerful legislator, he became chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in 2005 but faced scrutiny from the Justice Department for his ties to a lobbyist.Jerry Lewis, a powerful House Republican whose largess to his district in California established him as a master of the earmark but led to an investigation of his actions by the Justice Department, died on July 15 at his home in Redlands, Calif. He was 86.His son Dan confirmed the death but said he did not know the cause.Mr. Lewis was elected in 1978 and served 17 terms in the House. A conservative who preferred working with Democrats to confrontational politics, he was a major fund-raiser for Republican candidates; his party’s third-ranking member, as conference chairman; and, briefly, chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.“He represented a style of politics that no longer dominates the party,” John H. Pitney Jr., an aide of Mr. Lewis’s in the mid-1980s who is now a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College in California, said by phone. “He was very much an ally of Bob Michel” — the former House minority leader from Maryland — “and never a favorite of the Gingrich faction, which took him down from the chairmanship of the House Republican Conference” in 1992. (Newt Gingrich, then the House minority whip and later the speaker, supported the successful candidacy of Dick Armey of Texas over Mr. Lewis.)Mr. Lewis was best known for sending enormous sums of money back to his district through the use of earmarks, provisions in congressional spending bills that direct funds to a specific recipient. He sent tens of millions of dollars to educational, medical and research institutions, military installations, a dam on the Santa Ana River, extensive tree clearing in the San Bernardino National Forest and other projects in his Southern California district.In 2005, when he became chairman of the Appropriations Committee — after six years as chairman of its defense subcommittee — he told The Press-Enterprise of Riverside about his ambition for his district.“My goal as chairman is not just to create a huge funnel to San Bernardino and Riverside counties,” he said. “But I have a feeling we will in California manage to get our share.”But in 2006, the Justice Department began an investigation into whether Mr. Lewis had improperly steered millions of dollars in earmarks to clients of a lobbyist, Bill Lowery, a former Republican congressman from California and an old friend. Some of the clients donated to Mr. Lewis’s re-election campaign.Subpoenas were issued seeking details about how communities and businesses in Mr. Lewis’s district chose to hire Mr. Lowery’s firm, how much they paid, and the nature of communications between the firm and Mr. Lewis.Four years later, the Justice Department dropped the investigation.Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group that had been critical of Mr. Lewis’s ties to Mr. Lowery, condemned the Justice Department’s decision.“Exactly what will a politician have to do for the Department of Justice to sit up and take notice?” Melanie Sloan, then the group’s executive director, said in an interview with The Associated Press.Looking back on the investigation in 2012, shortly before he retired from the House, Mr. Lewis told the Southern California public radio station KPCC, “It’ll always be there, and the reality is that we have attempted to be a positive impact in public service.”Charles Jeremy Lewis was born on Oct. 21, 1934, in Seattle and moved with his family to San Bernardino, Calif., as a child. His father, Edward, was a civil engineer who worked on the construction of New Deal projects. His mother, Ruth, was a homemaker.After studying veterinary science at the University of California, Berkeley, he transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received a bachelor’s degree in political science. After working in the insurance business, Mr. Lewis served on the San Bernardino Board of Education and then was elected to the California State Assembly. He served there for a decade. During his tenure, he pushed for voter approval to make a reporter shield law — to protect the confidentiality of sources — an amendment to the state constitution and wrote legislation that established an air pollution control agency in Southern California.Once elected to the House, he was named to the Appropriations Committee in his second term and became chairman of the subcommittee that funds the Department of Veterans Affairs, NASA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Four years later he took over the defense subcommittee. His two years as Appropriations Committee chairman ended in 2007, after Democrats won the House majority.In addition to his son Dan, Mr. Lewis is survived by his wife, Arlene (Willis) Lewis; a daughter, Jenifer Engler; two other sons, Jerry Jr., and Jeff; a stepdaughter, Julie Willis Leon; two stepsons, Jimmy and Marty Willis; six grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and two brothers, Ray and John. His marriage to Sally Lord ended in divorce.Having the same name as a famous comedian was something that trailed Mr. Lewis throughout his career. “He had a good sense of humor” about it, Dan Lewis said. He recalled his father campaigning at a parade in Apple Valley, Calif., where people were eager to see the funnyman, not the lawmaker. The crowd might have been disappointed, he said, but the congressman “wasn’t annoyed.” More
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was barring them from a committee scrutinizing the attack based on Democrats’ concerns about their “statements made and actions taken” around the assault.WASHINGTON — The two House Republicans Speaker Nancy Pelosi barred from a select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol are both staunch defenders of former President Donald J. Trump who backed his efforts to invalidate the election and have opposed investigating the assault on Congress.Ms. Pelosi said she had decided to disqualify Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana because of widespread Democratic dismay about “statements made and actions taken by these members.”Her decision enraged Republican leaders, who announced that they would boycott the investigation altogether. But Democrats insisted that the pair’s support for the election lies that fueled the deadly attack and their subsequent statements downplaying the violence that occurred that day were disqualifying.Here is a roundup of what they have said.‘No way’ Trump should concede, Jordan said as he helped plan the challenge to Biden’s victory.Mr. Jordan said in December that there was “no way” Mr. Trump should concede the election, even after the Electoral College certified Mr. Biden’s victory.“No. No way, no way, no way” Mr. Trump should concede, he told CNN in December, adding: “We should still try to figure out exactly what took place here. And as I said, that includes, I think, debates on the House floor — potentially on Jan. 6.”Later that month, he participated in a meeting at the White House, where Republican lawmakers discussed plans with Mr. Trump’s team to use the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to challenge the election outcome.‘There was something wrong with this election’: Jordan continued to suggest Biden’s victory was illegitimate.“Americans instinctively know there was something wrong with this election,” Mr. Jordan said, arguing for invalidating electoral votes for Mr. Biden on Jan. 6. “During the campaign, Vice President Biden would do an event and he’d get 50 people at the event. President Trump at just one rally gets 50,000 people.”‘Democrats created this environment’: Jordan compared the riot to racial justice protests.Mr. Jordan has repeatedly sought to equate the attack on the Capitol to unrest around last summer’s racial justice protests, and accused Democrats of hypocritically trying to punish Mr. Trump for the riot while refusing to condemn left-wing violence. He signaled that he would use the Jan. 6 investigation to push that narrative.“I think it’s important to point out that Democrats created this environment, sort of normalizing rioting, normalizing looting, normalizing anarchy, in the summer of 2020, and I think that’s an important piece of information to look into,” Mr. Jordan said this week.He also said the select committee was a politically motivated effort to harm Mr. Trump, calling it “impeachment Round 3.”Banks questioned the ‘legality’ of some votes cast in the 2020 election.Mr. Banks, the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, took a more reserved approach when discussing Mr. Trump’s election fraud claims, telling constituents he had questions “about the legality of some votes cast in the 2020 election” while steering clear of some of the former president’s more fantastical claims.But like Mr. Jordan, he supported a Texas lawsuit seeking to toss out key Biden victories and voted to overturn the results in Congress.Banks claimed the select committee was created ‘to malign conservatives.’Mr. Banks released a statement after he was chosen to serve as the top Republican on the panel that seemingly referred to the violent rioters as patriotic Americans expressing their political views. He said he would use the committee to turn the spotlight back on Democrats, scrutinizing why the Capitol was not better prepared for the attack, as well as unrelated “political riots” last summer during the national wave of protest against systemic racism.“Make no mistake, Nancy Pelosi created this committee solely to malign conservatives and to justify the left’s authoritarian agenda,” Mr. Banks said. “I will not allow this committee to be turned into a forum for condemning millions of Americans because of their political beliefs.” More
