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      Pence, Diverging From Trump, Says He Was ‘Proud’ to Certify Election

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      In a speech, former Vice President Mike Pence went the furthest he has gone yet in distancing himself from Donald Trump and the Capitol riot. But he still praised the former president and his agenda.Former Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday night made his most forceful attempt yet to separate himself from his former boss, Donald J. Trump, on the issue of certifying the 2020 election results.Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Mr. Pence defended the constitutionally mandated role he played in certifying the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6, when a violent mob of Trump loyalists — some chanting “Hang Mike Pence” — stormed the Capitol while the president did nothing for hours to stop them.“I will always be proud that we did our part on that tragic day to reconvene the Congress and fulfilled our duty under the Constitution and the laws of the United States,” Mr. Pence said, noting that as vice president, he had no constitutional authority to reject or return electoral votes submitted to Congress by the states. “The truth is, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”It was the furthest that Mr. Pence, a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2024, has gone yet in defending his role that day or distancing himself from Mr. Trump, to whom he ingratiated himself during their four years together in office.In the speeches Mr. Pence has delivered since leaving the White House, he has gone out of his way to praise Mr. Trump and his agenda, even reiterating some of the former president’s grievance-fueled messaging that latches onto the country’s culture wars.On Thursday night, Mr. Pence argued that “critical race theory,” a graduate school framework that has found its way into K-12 public education, was effectively “state-sanctioned racism.”And he spent much of his speech reciting what he said were Mr. Trump’s accomplishments on many issues, including free trade, border security and relations with China. “President Trump changed the national consensus on China,” he said.Mr. Pence also compared Mr. Trump to former President Ronald Reagan.“He too disrupted the status quo,” Mr. Pence said. “He challenged the establishment. He invigorated our movement and set a bold new course for America.”But so far, Mr. Pence has only tiptoed around the issue of how to remain the loyal soldier while distancing himself from the events of Jan. 6.Speaking at the Lincoln-Reagan Dinner in Manchester, N.H., this month, Mr. Pence admitted that he and Mr. Trump might never see “see eye to eye” about the Capitol riot, stopping short of criticizing one view over another.On Thursday night, he declined to state firmly that he and Mr. Trump had lost the 2020 election, a reality that the former president has continued to deny.“I understand the disappointment many feel about the last election,” Mr. Pence said. “I can relate. I was on the ballot. But there’s more at stake than our party or our political fortunes in this moment. If we lose faith in the Constitution, we won’t just lose elections — we’ll lose our country.”Whether Mr. Pence will succeed in having it both ways — being viewed as an ally and a critic of Mr. Trump — remains to be seen. Polls show that a majority of Republican voters believe that Mr. Trump won the 2020 election and buy into his baseless claims about voter fraud.Mr. Pence is also testing the patience of a man who still looms over the political landscape and the Republican Party. While Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence have spoken several times since leaving office, Mr. Trump has showed flashes of frustration with his former loyal No. 2.In private and at a Republican National Committee donors event at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s resort in Florida, shortly after a book deal for Mr. Pence was announced, the former president has mocked Mr. Pence for certifying President Biden’s Electoral College victory, according to people familiar with the discussions as well as a detailed description of the remarks that evening. More

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      Michigan Republicans Debunk Voter Fraud Claims in Unsparing Report

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      The report, produced by a G.O.P.-led committee in the State Senate, exposes false claims made about the 2020 election by Trump allies in Michigan and other states.A committee led by Michigan Republicans on Wednesday published an extraordinary debunking of voter fraud claims in the state, delivering a comprehensive rebuke to a litany of accusations about improprieties in the 2020 election and its aftermath.The 55-page report, produced by a Michigan State Senate committee of three Republicans and one Democrat, is a systematic rebuttal to an array of false claims about the election from supporters of former President Donald J. Trump. The authors focus overwhelmingly on Michigan, but they also expose lies perpetuated about the vote-counting process in Georgia.The report is unsparing in its criticism of those who have promoted false theories about the election. It debunks claims from Trump allies including Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow; Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former president’s lawyer; and Mr. Trump himself.Yet while the report eviscerates claims about election fraud, its authors also use the allegations to urge their legislative colleagues to change Michigan’s voting laws to make absentee voting harder and limit the availability of drop boxes for absentee ballots, as Republicans have done in other swing states as they try to limit voting.“This committee found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election,” the authors wrote, before adding: “It is the opinion of this committee that the Legislature has a duty to make statutory improvements to our elections system.”Michigan Republicans, who control the state’s Legislature, have for weeks debated a series of new voting restrictions. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, has said she will veto the legislation, but Michigan law allows citizens to circumvent the governor by collecting 340,047 signatures.Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said on Wednesday that she hoped Republican lawmakers would use the report to “cease their attempts to deceive citizens with misinformation and abandon legislation based on the lies that undermine our democracy.”Here are some of the conclusions from the Michigan report that debunked Trump allies’ claims about the election:Referring to Antrim County in Northern Michigan — where local election officials briefly and inadvertently transposed voting numbers before correcting them, leading to false conspiracy theories about voting machines — the report suggests that Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, a Democrat, should “consider investigating those who have been utilizing misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.” It adds that anyone who promoted the Antrim County theories as the prime evidence of a nationwide conspiracy to steal the election had left “all other statements and actions they make in a position of zero credibility.”The Voter Integrity Project, a right-wing group, has said that 289,866 “illegal votes” were cast in Michigan. The report’s authors called 40 people from the group’s list of supposed voters who received absentee ballots without requesting them and found just two who said they had been sent unrequested ballots. One was on the state’s permanent absentee voter list. The other voted absentee in the 2020 primary election and may have forgotten about checking a box then to request an absentee ballot in the general election.The report found that the chaos that unfolded after Election Day as votes were counted at the TCF Center in Detroit was the fault of Republican operatives who called on supporters to protest the count. “The Wayne County Republican Party and other, independent organizations, ought to issue a repudiation of the actions of certain individuals that created a panic and had untrained and unnumbered persons descend on the TCF Center,” the report states.Claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines in Michigan and other states had been hacked to change results were false, the report said. The committee’s chairman, State Senator Ed McBroom, a Republican, called Georgia officials to investigate claims made by Jovan Pulitzer, who said he had access to manipulate vote counts. Mr. Pulitzer’s testimony “has been demonstrated to be untrue and a complete fabrication,” the report said. “He did not, at any time, have access to data or votes, let alone have the ability to manipulate the counts directly or by the introduction of malicious software to the tabulators. Nor could he spot fraudulent ballots from non-fraudulent ones.”Of Mr. Lindell’s wide-ranging claims of fraud and impropriety in vote-counting systems, the report states that “this narrative is ignorant of multiple levels of the actual election process,” before embarking on a lengthy debunking of his claims.While Mr. Trump claimed that more votes had been cast in Detroit than people who live there, the report found that turnout in the city was under 50 percent of eligible voters and about 37 percent of its population.No ballots were secretly “dumped” at the Detroit vote-counting center. “A widely circulated picture in media and online reports allegedly showed ballots secretly being delivered late at night but, in reality, it was a photo of a WXYZ-TV photographer hauling his equipment,” the report states. More

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      A Bill Destined to Fail May Now Spawn More Plausible Options

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      The For the People Act had little chance of testing the limits of what if anything is still possible in Washington. Oddly, it was so far from passage that it may provide some hope, because so many avenues remain to be pursued.The demise of the For the People Act — the far-reaching voting rights bill that Republicans blocked in the Senate on Tuesday — will come as a crushing blow to progressives and reformers, who have portrayed the law as an essential tool for saving democracy.But it was a flawed bill that had little chance of testing the limits of what if anything is still possible in Washington. Voting rights activists and Democratic lawmakers may even find that the collapse of this law opens up more plausible, if still highly unlikely, paths to reform.The law, known as H.R. 1 or S. 1, was full of hot-button measures — from public financing of elections to national mail voting — that were only tangentially related to safeguarding democracy, and all but ensured its failure in the Senate. Its supporters insisted the law should set the floor for voting rights; in truth, it set the floor at the ceiling, by guaranteeing a level of voting access that would be difficult to surpass.At the same time, reformers did not add provisions to tackle the most insidious and serious threat to democracy: election subversion, where partisan election officials might use their powers to overturn electoral outcomes.Instead, it focused on the serious but less urgent issues that animated reformers at the time the bill was first proposed in 2019: allegations of corruption in the Trump administration, the rise of so-called dark money in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, or the spate of voter identification laws passed in the aftermath of President Barack Obama’s election victories.Even a cursory look at the effort by former President Donald J. Trump to subvert the 2020 election revealed a number of vulnerabilities in the electoral system, from the risk that a partisan election administrator might simply refuse to certify an unfavorable election result to the possibility that a vice president might choose not to count a certified electoral slate. None of those vulnerabilities were addressed.Those concerns have only escalated over the last several months as Republicans have advanced bills that not only imposed new limits on voting, but also afforded the G.O.P. greater control over election administration. The new powers include the ability to strip secretaries of state of some of their authority and remove members of local election boards. The New York Times reported over the weekend how some Democrats on local boards in Georgia, including people of color, were losing their positions.Senate Republicans used the filibuster on Tuesday to block debate on an ambitious Democratic bill aimed at countering a wave of ballot restrictions in G.O.P.-controlled states.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIt’s true that the 2020 election and Mr. Trump’s unprecedented attempt to undermine it revealed the fragility of American democracy in different and more fundamental ways than even the most perspicacious legislator could have anticipated. Originally, the bill was seen as a “political statement,” a progressive “wish list” or a “messaging bill,” not as the basis for a realistic legislative effort.It was not designed to appeal to the moderate Senate Democrats, who progressives nonetheless hoped would eliminate the filibuster even as they insisted on different proposals and a bipartisan approach.Yet oddly, the bill was so far from passage that reformers still have cause for some semblance of hope. Nearly every stone was left unturned.As a result, many other avenues for reform remain to be pursued. None seem likely to be enacted in today’s political climate. All are more plausible than the bill that died in the Senate on Tuesday.One of those avenues emerged in the final days of the push for H.R. 1: a grand bargain, like the one recently suggested by Joe Manchin III, the moderate Democratic senator from West Virginia who provoked outrage among progressives when he said he would oppose the bill in its current form.Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, opposed the voting bill in its current form but proposed several compromises that gained favor with advocates. Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesThe Manchin compromise resembles H.R. 1 in crucial ways. It does not address election subversion any more than H.R. 1 does. And it still seeks sweeping changes to voting, ethics, campaign finance and redistricting law. But it offers Republicans a national voter identification requirement, while relenting on many of the provisions that provoke the most intense Republican opposition.Mr. Manchin’s proposal nonetheless provoked intense Republican opposition. Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri derided it as a “Stacey Abrams” bill. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader from Kentucky, appeared to suggest that no federal election law would earn his support.More generally, it is hard to imagine how Republicans could be enticed to accept stringent limits on gerrymandering, given the lopsided partisan consequences of such a ban.But the strategy behind the Manchin proposal could nonetheless serve as a basis for serious legislative efforts: Democrats can offer Republicans provisions they actually want on voting, like new photo identification requirements, and see what that buys them.The willingness of Ms. Abrams, who leads the Georgia-based voting rights group Fair Fight, to support the Manchin compromise, despite its embrace of voter ID measures — an archetypal voter suppression provision — suggests that there may be room to explore options that might attract support from Republicans and haven’t previously been 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a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Another avenue is a version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would again subject Southern states to obtain federal clearance before making changes to their voting system — a requirement that a 2013 Supreme Court decision gutted.Restoring the preclearance condition is of considerable symbolic significance, but it offers far less to reformers than the Manchin compromise. It does nothing to address the laws that Republicans have enacted this year. It would do little to protect against election subversion. It does not check Republican efforts outside the South. And it relies on the federal court system, which has a more limited view of the Voting Rights Act than reformers would like.But unlike H.R. 1, restoring federal preclearance does have the support of Mr. Manchin and Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska. Mr. Manchin also seemed willing to embrace a variety of largely unspecified changes that might make preclearance somewhat more amenable to the Republicans, including an objective test to determine whether jurisdictions should be subjected to or relieved from preclearance and limits on the power of the attorney general. It remains doubtful that any changes would attract significant Republican support, but it also remains untested.A final avenue is an even narrower bill, comprising only provisions that attract bipartisan support. It remains to be seen whether even a single idea falls into this category. But many of the hypothesized proposals for addressing election subversion might have some chance to find Republican support, like reforms to the rules for counting electoral votes, and funding for election administration.Other potential areas of agreement are a requirement for paper ballots; ballot chain-of-custody requirements; standards for certification of federal elections and establishing voter eligibility; and clarifying whether and when judges or local officials can defy a state legislature.None of these proposals necessarily advantage either political party. All would have a chance to avoid the central, politicized debate over voter suppression and voting rights.Realistically, even the most innocuous proposals would have a challenging path to passage. The window for bipartisan cooperation on these issues may have closed several months ago, as memories of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters were supplanted by politically charged fights over voting rights and voter suppression. Republicans have few incentives to support a bill, even if watered down considerably.Yet all of these new avenues for reformers have something simple in common: They involve an earnest attempt to win 60 votes in the Senate, something that H.R. 1 did not. Many progressives scoff at the idea, but if moderate Democrats can be taken at their word, then reformers never had a choice but to at least try to find Republican support.Voting rights activists on Tuesday called for a new push to ensure voting rights, and Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader from New York, pledged to keep fighting, calling the Senate vote “the starting gun, not the finish line.”Perhaps reformers will surprise themselves and pull off a rare legislative win. More likely, their effort will fail and they can hope that their failure will demonstrate the impossibility of bipartisanship to Senate moderates, perhaps reopening the conversation about eliminating the filibuster.Wherever the effort might end, a more realistic legislative push begins with an earnest effort to write a bill that is more responsive to the current threats to the system and is designed to win enough votes to pass. More

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      Curtis Sliwa Wins Republican Primary for New York Mayor

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      Curtis Sliwa won the Republican primary in the New York mayor’s race on Tuesday, setting up a long-shot challenge in November to the Democratic Party’s eventual nominee.With a significant portion of votes counted, Mr. Sliwa was beating Fernando Mateo by over 40 percentage points, according to The Associated Press.His victory capped a bitter campaign pitting onetime friends and first-time candidates against each other to become the standard-bearer of a party whose political power in New York has waned significantly since it vaulted consecutive mayors, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg, to City Hall for a total of five terms.With public attention on crime and safety increasing amid the city’s efforts to move past the coronavirus pandemic, both Republican candidates this year sought to claim the law-and-order mantle. But Mr. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, a group of self-appointed crime fighters, may have been especially well positioned to capitalize on the circumstances.Juan Pagan, who was in the crowd at Mr. Sliwa’s primary night party at the Empire Steak House in Midtown Manhattan, said the candidate’s background had given him a clear edge in the race.“He’s a hard-core New Yorker,” said Mr. Pagan, a 65-year-old retiree from the Lower East Side, speaking in room festooned with red and white balloons scraping the ceiling beneath a sparkling chandelier. “It’s in his veins, it’s in his blood.”Ayton Eller, wearing a “Refund the Police” T-shirt and a “Trump 2020” yarmulke, echoed that sentiment.“He knows New York inside and out, he’s been to all the diverse neighborhoods, Harlem, the Bronx,” said Mr. Eller, 41, an accountant who lives in Brooklyn’s Flatlands neighborhood.Mr. Giuliani, who endorsed Mr. Sliwa, was also in attendance. He said that Democrats discounted the Republican at their peril.“People underestimate Curtis,” Mr. Giuliani said.A radio host and longtime fixture in the New York media landscape who joined the Republican Party only last year, Mr. Sliwa first gained prominence in the 1980s for his creation of the crime-fighting group, whose members roamed the subway and streets in red berets, offering a sense of safety to some New Yorkers who felt especially jittery at a time when crime was far more rampant in the city than it is now.The group earned its share of headlines, but Mr. Sliwa, a former McDonald’s night manager, later acknowledged that some of them were based on events that had been faked for the publicity.Fernando MateoAndrew Seng for The New York TimesMr. Mateo, a restaurateur with ties to New York’s taxi industry, was born in the Dominican Republic and is a longtime Republican fund-raiser. He gained his own measure of notoriety when it emerged that he had acted as a middleman in fund-raising efforts by Mayor Bill de Blasio that attracted scrutiny from investigators.Republican leaders were divided over which candidate was the best option to vie for leadership of a city where Democrats hold an edge of more than six to one in registered voters. The Manhattan, Queens and Bronx Republican Parties endorsed Mr. Mateo; Mr. Sliwa had the backing of the Staten Island and Brooklyn parties.The Republican nominating contest on Tuesday came as the party has grown increasingly irrelevant in the nation’s large cities, aligning itself firmly with rural, conservative voters since Donald J. Trump’s ascent.Nate Schweber contributed reporting. More

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      She Was Raped: The Enduring Trauma

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      More from our inbox:The Republican Attack on Our DemocracyThe Power of Physical Books  Damon Winter/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “I Am Breaking My Silence About the Baseball Player Who Raped Me,” by Kat O’Brien (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, June 20):Ms. O’Brien’s essay broke my heart. Why should she have to suffer for 18 years because a professional athlete raped her and she (probably completely accurately) believed that she had no recourse?How many more stories like this must we read before managers, executives, owners and players take seriously the fact that they create the culture that allows such behavior to happen? Were their wives, sisters or daughters working in professional sports, would they want them to be vulnerable to such a traumatizing experience?Professional sports, like the military, needs to take a hard look at what their indifference and even encouragement (showing porn films in the clubhouse!) are doing to women, maybe even the women they love.Edie LyckeSan Luis Obispo, Calif.To the Editor:Because Kat O’Brien opened up about her rape and the many ways it has constricted her life over the years, I feel finally able to include myself in the statistic that one in five women experience rape or attempted rape.I was lucky enough to escape the rape because of the intervention of another person. It was terrifying at the time, and I quit my summer job because I no longer felt safe coming home alone from work late at night. I lost weeks of income because of it. But, because I escaped with just a punch, a kick and broken glasses, I never thought of myself in terms of the rape statistics.I am sure that all women at various times in their lives fear for their physical safety when out in public or working at their job. What do we women have to do to get men, who seldom fear for their physical safety, to empathize with what it is like to live with that constant fear?Hazel LutzMinneapolisTo the Editor:Kat O’Brien’s piece on her rape and how it affected her entire life was incredibly powerful and brought me to tears. As a woman who came up in the advertising and publishing world in the ’80s and ’90s, I have my own stories and #MeToo moments that happened over and over again, and I applaud her for finally speaking her truth.I hope that coming out publicly about this horrible, life-changing experience will allow her to continue down the path of recovery.Lauren MichaelsVero Beach, Fla.To the Editor:Kat O’Brien’s disturbing account of being raped by a professional baseball player reminded me of an attempted rape when I was 15. I was tricked into being separated from the group at an after-dark beach party, and once out of sight, a schoolmate began to forcibly remove my clothes. I assured him that if he was trying to prove he was bigger and stronger than me, there was no contest, but he should keep in mind that my dad was the best shot in our county and “he knows where you live.”That jerk couldn’t wait to get back to the group, and I learned that the human brain responds faster to fear than anything else. I hope that other women will learn from my experience and conjure up an uncle in the police force or any other story that would instill fear in their attacker.Margaret CurtisAtlantaTo the Editor:Kat O’Brien describes an all-too-familiar story of violence against women followed by self-blame, shame and symptoms of PTSD. Oftentimes it is hard to seek psychological treatment, fearing that talking about what happened will only exacerbate the emotional pain. I hope that Ms. O’Brien’s courage in making public her victimization will help others reach out to friends and family and, if necessary, to seek psychological support.Larry S. SandbergNew YorkThe writer is a psychoanalyst.To the Editor:How many stories of rape or sexual harassment and their lifelong effects on the victims do we need to hear before we all say “it’s not your fault”? I don’t care if you were friendly. If you smiled. I don’t care if you had a few drinks. I don’t care if you looked sexy. If you wore a skirt that day. It’s not your fault.Joan SolotarNew YorkThe Republican Attack on Our DemocracyTo the Editor:The Republicans’ voter suppression, gerrymandering, reduction of voting places in urban minority areas, and baseless audits and challenges to the 2020 election results in Republican-led states are the greatest threat to our democracy since our country’s founding. And not a word of objection from most Republican leaders.I am reminded of a brief conversation recently with an immigrant repairman from Ukraine who has lived in the United States for many years and has his family here and relatives still in Ukraine. When asked if he fears for Ukraine these days, his response was swift: “No, I fear more for this country.”Ken GoldmanBeverly Hills, Calif.The Power of Physical BooksThe new location will offer new services, including food and drinks from a coffee bar.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “How ‘Hamilton’ Brought a Bookstore Back to Life” (Arts pages, June 7):The laudable actions of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the director Thomas Kail, the producer Jeffrey Seller and the theater owner James Nederlander in saving the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan for future generations of theater lovers, professional and amateur, serves as an affirmation of the immutable fact that being in a room surrounded by physical books is a powerful experience that sometimes magically leads to creative inspiration.So long as humans remain a material species and not a digital one, no number of downloaded texts invisibly stored in a hard drive can ever do the same.M.C. LangChevy Chase, Md. More

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      When It Comes to Big City Elections, Republicans Are in the Wilderness

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      The party’s growing irrelevance in urban and suburban areas comes at a considerable cost, sidelining conservatives in centers of innovation and economic might.When Jerry Sanders finished his second term as mayor of San Diego in 2012, he was the most prominent Republican city executive in the country. A former police chief close to the business community, Mr. Sanders appeared to be a political role model for other would-be Republican mayors, a moderate who worked with the Obama administration on urban policy and endorsed gay marriage at a pivotal moment. More