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      House Republicans Oust a Defiant Liz Cheney for Her Repudiation of Trump’s Election Lies.

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      House Republicans purged Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from their leadership ranks on Wednesday, voting to oust their No. 3 for her refusal to stay quiet about Donald J. Trump’s election lies, in a remarkable takedown of one of their own that reflected the party’s intolerance for dissent and unswerving fealty to the former president.The action came by voice vote during a brief but raucous closed-door meeting in an auditorium on Capitol Hill on Wednesday morning, after Ms. Cheney made a defiant final speech that drew boos from her colleagues.In her parting remarks, Ms. Cheney urged Republicans not to “let the former president drag us backward,” according to a person familiar with the private comments who detailed them on condition of anonymity. Ms. Cheney warned that Republicans were going down a path that would bring their “destruction,” and “possibly the destruction of our country,” the person said, adding that if the party wanted a leader who would “enable and spread his destructive lies,” they should vote to remove her.Republicans did just that, after greeting her speech with boos, according to two people present, speaking on the condition on anonymity to discuss an internal discussion. They ultimately opted not to hold a recorded vote, after Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, said that they should vote by voice to show unity.Emerging from the meeting, Ms. Cheney remained unremorseful, and said she was committed to doing “everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets near the Oval Office.”“We must go forward based on truth,” Ms. Cheney told reporters. “We cannot both embrace the big lie and embrace the Constitution.”The action came the day after Ms. Cheney had delivered a broadside on the House floor against Mr. Trump and the party leaders working to oust her, accusing them of being complicit in undermining the democratic system.Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming said she would not sit quietly as the party abandoned the rule of law.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesIn a scathing speech, Ms. Cheney said that the country was facing a “never seen before” threat of a former president who provoked the Capitol attack on Jan. 6 and who had “resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him.”“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” she said. “I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”Mr. Trump weighed in on Wednesday morning as lawmakers were gathering to force Ms. Cheney out, saying he was looking forward to the ouster of a woman he called “a poor leader, a major Democrat talking point, a warmonger, and a person with absolutely no personality or heart.”Top Republicans have labored to avoid talking about the Capitol riot and have painted Ms. Cheney’s removal as a forward-looking move that would allow them to move past that day.“Each day spent relitigating the past is one day less we have to seize the future,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, wrote in a letter to party members on Monday.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesInstead, the episode has only called attention to the party’s devotion to Mr. Trump, its tolerance for authoritarianism, and internal divisions between more mainstream and conservative factions about how to win back the House in 2022. All of those dynamics threaten to alienate independent and suburban voters, thus undercutting what otherwise appears to be a sterling opportunity for Republicans to reclaim the majority.As a replacement for Ms. Cheney, Republican leaders have united behind Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a onetime moderate whose loyalty to Mr. Trump and backing for his false claims of election fraud have earned her broad support from the party’s rank and file that Ms. Cheney, a lifelong conservative, no longer commands. If Ms. Stefanik is elected this week to replace Ms. Cheney, as expected, the top three House Republican leadership posts will be held by lawmakers who voted not to certify President Biden’s victory in January. In recent days, however, some hard-right Republicans have attacked Ms. Stefanik as insufficiently conservative and suggested the party should consider someone else. More

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      In Liz Cheney vs. Donald Trump, Guess Who Won

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      Liz Cheney and Donald Trump in happier days.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressI asked a Republican who spent time with Representative Liz Cheney last week what her thinking was in speaking out so forcefully, so unyieldingly, against Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, despite knowing that this might cost the three-term congresswoman her political career.“It’s pretty simple,” this person, who requested anonymity in order to speak openly, told me. “She decided she’s going to stay on the right side of her conscience.”“She wasn’t going to lie to stay in leadership,” he added. “If telling the truth was intolerable, she knew she wasn’t going to keep her leadership position.”Ms. Cheney was certainly right about that. Early on Wednesday, House Republicans ousted her from her position as the chairman of the House Republican conference, the No. 3 leadership slot, one her father held in the late 1980s. The next priority of Mr. Trump and MAGA world? To defeat her in a primary in 2022.The takedown of Representative Cheney was not an “inflection point,” as some have called it. It was the opposite — the latest (but it won’t be the last) confirmation that the Republican Party is diseased and dangerous, increasingly subversive and illiberal, caught in the grip of what Ms. Cheney described in The Washington Post as the “anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” Ms. Cheney, unbroken and unbowed, said in a speech on the House floor Tuesday night. “I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.” Her Republican colleagues, cowardly and classless, cleared the chamber as she began her remarks. But they can’t escape her searing indictment.Declaring fealty to a lie has become the single most important test of loyalty in today’s Republican Party. Everyone recognizes this, but from time to time we need to stop to register its true significance.“It’s a real sickness that is infecting the party at every level,” Barbara Comstock, a Republican who represented Virginia’s 10th Congressional District before Mr. Trump’s unpopularity in the suburbs sunk her chances in the 2018 election, told Lisa Lerer of The Times. “We’re just going to say that black is white now.”This should come as a surprise to exactly no one. For more than five years, the Republican Party and its leading media propagandists embraced and championed Mr. Trump’s mendacities, conspiracy theories and sociopathic tendencies. As a result, their brains became rewired, at least metaphorically speaking; the constant accommodation Republicans made to Mr. Trump caused significant cognitive distortions.As a result, they have detached themselves from reality. The expectation that once Mr. Trump left office the Republican Party would become a normal party again was wishful thinking from the beginning. There is no post-Trump fight for the “soul” of the Republican Party. At least for now, that battle has been decided.Liz Cheney understands that only a decisive break with Mr. Trump will stop the continuing moral ruination of the Republican Party. But her break with the former president, while courageous, came too late to change anything. She is trying to rally an army that doesn’t exist.It doesn’t exist for two reasons. The first is that many grass-roots Republicans, having been fed a steady diet of fabrications and disinformation for the last half-decade, are deluded. They believe Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories, in large measure because they want to believe them, and now they are addicted to them. And addictions are hard to break.The latest CNN/SSRS survey found that 70 percent of Republicans believe the false allegation that Joe Biden did not defeat Mr. Trump; a mere 23 percent said Mr. Biden won, despite the Trump administration’s admission that “the November 3 election was the most secure in American history.”These Republicans believe they are truth-tellers and patriots, sentries at freedom’s gate. They are utterly sincere; they are also quite dangerous. They are taking a sledgehammer to pillars of American democracy: confidence in the legitimacy of our elections, the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power.Most Republican members of Congress, on the other hand, don’t believe President Biden was illegitimately elected. Kevin McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham aren’t deceived. They are play acting in ways that are unethical and cynical, but they are not stupid. They’re fully aware that the cancerous lies have metastasized — they each played a crucial role in spreading them, after all — and to refute those lies publicly would put targets on their backs.Many of the most influential figures in Republican politics have decided that breaking with Mr. Trump would so alienate the base of the party that it would make election victories impossible, at least for the foreseeable future. That’s essentially what Senator Graham was saying when he recently went on Fox News and posed this question to his Republican colleagues: “Can we move forward without President Trump? The answer is no.”This means that the new Republican establishment will accede to pretty much anything Mr. Trump demands in order to keep good relations with him. And we know what the former president’s main demand is — insisting he was cheated out of a second term.So we have reached the point where a member of one of the Republican Party’s leading families, a person of unquestioned conservative credentials, is now less popular with the Republican base and more reviled by the House leadership than the onetime QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene, who just before the Jan. 6 insurrection referred to that day as Republicans’ “1776 moment.”Ms. Cheney was stripped of her leadership post because she committed the unpardonable sin in 2021’s Republican Party: She spoke the truth about the legitimacy of the 2020 election results and refused to back down. Whatever she was before, she is a voice of conscience now, reminding her colleagues of their Faustian bargain with their peculiar Mephistopheles, Donald Trump. It enrages them even as it haunts them.Today the Republican Party is less a political party than a political freak show. It is being sustained by insidious lies. And people who love America, starting with conservatives, should say so. Otherwise, if the Republican Party’s downward spiral isn’t reversed, it will descend even further into a frightening world of illusion.Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner), a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations, is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”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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      ‘Ignoring the Lie Emboldens the Liar’

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      Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherToday, Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, is expected to be removed from her leadership position.Her role in the party has increasingly become untenable for many. Ms. Cheney has continued to speak out in the starkest of terms against President Donald Trump’s role in fomenting the Jan. 6 riots and the continued insistence that the 2020 election was stolen.In doing so, she has found herself on a lonely political island.We look at the factors behind her ouster and the new requirements for Republican leadership.On today’s episodeCatie Edmondson, a reporter in The New York Times’s Washington bureau.Representative Liz Cheney’s leadership role is embattled despite her conservative voting record and her status as a member of a Republican dynasty. Erin Schaff/The New York TimesBackground readingIn turning on Ms. Cheney, Republicans have bowed to Mr. Trump’s election lies.The Wyoming congresswoman challenged Republicans to turn away from Trump after Jan. 6. Instead, they turned on her.“History is watching.” Here are five key arguments from Ms. Cheney’s Washington Post opinion essay this month.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.Transcripts of each episode are available by the next workday. You can find them at the top of the page.Catie Edmondson contributed reporting.The Daily is made by Theo Balcomb, Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Annie Brown, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, M.J. Davis Lin, Austin Mitchell, Neena Pathak, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Daniel Guillemette, Hans Buetow, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Bianca Giaever, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Alix Spiegel, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano and Soraya Shockley.Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Mikayla Bouchard, Lauren Jackson, Julia Simon, Mahima Chablani, Nora Keller, Sofia Milan, Desiree Ibekwe, Laura Kim, Erica Futterman and Shreeya Sinha. More

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      In Virginia, a Fight Over the Suburbs in the Governor’s Race

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      Glenn Youngkin, a first-time candidate with vast wealth, will deliver a pro-business message intended to win over suburban voters. Democrats plan to portray him as a Trump devotee.Republican voters’ choice for Virginia governor, a deep-pocketed first-time candidate who plans to run as a business-friendly political outsider, will offer a major test in the post-Trump era of the party’s ability to win back suburban voters who have fled over the past four years.Glenn Youngkin, who won the Republican nomination on Monday night, had walked a line between his party’s Trump-centric base and appeals to business interests in a crowded field, defeating two rivals who more aggressively courted supporters of former President Donald J. Trump.After years of Democratic advances in the state thanks to suburban voters who adamantly rejected anyone linked to the Trump G.O.P., Mr. Youngkin, 54, a former private equity executive, has warned that “we can kiss our business environment away” if Democrats retain power in Richmond.During the nominating fight, he criticized the current governor, Ralph Northam, and his predecessor, Terry McAuliffe, for creating business conditions that cause college-educated residents (read: suburbanites) to move away.But even as Mr. Youngkin tries to focus on kitchen-table issues, Democrats signaled on Tuesday they would aggressively seek to fuse the nominee to Mr. Trump, by reminding voters of hard-line positions he took in fending off six Republican rivals — including on voting rights, Medicaid expansion and culture-war topics like critical race theory.Mr. McAuliffe, the polling leader for the Democratic nomination, said in a statement on Tuesday that Mr. Youngkin “spent his campaign fawning all over Donald Trump,” adding that he would “make it harder to vote” and be “a rubber stamp for the N.R.A.’s dangerous agenda.”Mr. Trump stayed out of the G.O.P. race while the field jockeyed for position, with Mr. Youngkin ultimately emerging as the winner after roughly 30,000 voters cast ranked-choice ballots at 39 locations around the state on Saturday. But the former president jumped in on Tuesday with an endorsement of Mr. Youngkin, although it was primarily an attack on Mr. McAuliffe, a former fund-raiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, who as a private citizen was in business with Chinese investors.“Virginia doesn’t need the Clintons or the Communist Chinese running the state,” Mr. Trump said, “so say no to Terry McAuliffe, and yes to Patriot Glenn Youngkin!”But Mr. Youngkin might consider such effusions unwelcome in a state Mr. Trump lost by 10 percentage points in November. Mr. Youngkin, 54, was raised in Virginia Beach and has lived in Northern Virginia for 25 years. He defeated two rivals who appealed more directly to the Trump-centric base: Pete Snyder, a technology entrepreneur, and State Senator Amanda Chase, a hard-right supporter of the former president who was censured in a bipartisan vote of the state’s General Assembly for referring to the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 as “patriots.”Mr. Youngkin’s appeal to Republicans was at least twofold: He is a political blank slate, with no record in elected office for Democrats to attack. And his private wealth — reportedly more than $200 million after he retired as co-chief executive of the Carlyle Group — will allow him to compete financially against Mr. McAuliffe, a prolific fund-raiser.Mr. McAuliffe raised $36 million for his 2013 election campaign and more than $9.9 million during the past two years, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Mr. Youngkin has already spent $5.5 million of his own money since entering the race in late January.Republicans have not won a statewide election since 2009, and Democratic dominance of the once-purple state accelerated under Mr. Trump, with Democrats taking control of both houses of the General Assembly in 2020 for the first time in a generation.They used their dominance of state government to pass sweeping progressive priorities like more restrictive gun laws and a ban on capital punishment.But the trend is not irreversible, as some election analysts see it. In the pre-Trump era, Mr. McAuliffe won his first governor’s race in 2013 by just 2.5 percentage points against a hard-right conservative, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II. Rural regions of southern and southwest Virginia have grown redder even as the populous northern and central suburbs are bluer. There is a theoretical path to statewide Republican victory for a candidate who rouses rural Trump voters, appeals to suburban independents and benefits from lower overall Democratic turnout without Mr. Trump as a motivator.And Mr. Youngkin has signaled that he would run against the very legislation Democrats have passed, accusing his opponents of pushing Virginia far to the left of most voters’ preferences.Mr. McAuliffe may be the clear polling leader for the Democrats, but he is conspicuous as the lone white candidate in a field with three Black contenders, in a party whose base is heavily African-American.In four years in office, Mr. McAuliffe governed as a pro-business Democrat, and he began his campaign for a second term in December on a pro-education note, pledging to raise teacher pay and offer universal pre-K. (Virginia governors cannot serve two consecutive terms.)Though Mr. Youngkin is not as unrelenting a supporter of Mr. Trump as some of his Republican opponents, he declined the chance at a recent candidates’ forum to distance himself from Mr. Trump’s lies about a rigged 2020 election. Asked about “voter integrity,” he launched into a five-point plan to “restore our trust in our election process.”During the nominating race, he also pledged to restore a state voter identification law and to replace the entire state board of education. He also said he would create the “1776 Project,” an apparent reference to a curriculum of patriotic education proposed by a commission established under Mr. Trump that has been derided by mainstream historians.Last month, Mr. Youngkin said it was “a sad thing” that Virginia had expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, though he acknowledged the clock couldn’t be turned back.As Mr. Youngkin likely spends generously on TV ads to forge a more soft-focus identity as a pro-business outsider, Democrats are sure to try to keep his earlier positions in front of voters.“Make no state mistake about it, we are going to point out every step of the way the right-wing extremism of Glenn Youngkin,” Susan Swecker, chair of the Virginia Democrats, said on Tuesday. More

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      Senate Panel Deadlocks on Voting Rights as Bill Faces Major Obstacles

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      Democrats now face the task of overcoming their own differences on the measure, and deciding whether they will use it as a vehicle to try to curb the filibuster.WASHINGTON — A key Senate committee deadlocked on Tuesday over Democrats’ sweeping proposed elections overhaul, previewing a partisan showdown on the Senate floor in the coming months that could determine the future of voting rights and campaign rules across the country.The tie vote in the Senate Rules Committee — with nine Democrats in favor and nine Republicans opposed — does not prevent Democrats from moving forward with the 800-page legislation, known as the For the People Act. Proponents hailed the vote as an important step toward adopting far-reaching federal changes to blunt the restrictive new voting laws emerging in Republican-led battleground states like Georgia and Florida.But the action confronted Democrats with a set of thorny questions about how to push forward on a bill that they view as a civil rights imperative with sweeping implications for democracy and their party. The bill as written faces near-impossible odds in the evenly divided Senate, where Republicans are expected to block it using a filibuster and at least one Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, remains opposed.With their control in Washington potentially fleeting and Republican states racing ahead with laws to curtail ballot access, Democrats must reach consensus among themselves on the measure, and decide whether to attempt to destroy or significantly alter the Senate’s filibuster rules — which set a 60-vote threshold to overcome any objection to advancing legislation — to salvage its chances of becoming law.“Here in the 21st century, we are witnessing an attempt at the greatest contraction of voting rights since the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of Jim Crow,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said at the session’s outset.He cited a new law in Iowa restricting early and mail-in voting, another in Florida cutting back on the use of drop boxes and making it harder to vote by mail, and one in Georgia, where Democrats have attacked the decision to bar third parties from giving water or snacks to voters waiting in long lines.“These laws carry the stench of oppression, the smell of bigotry,” Mr. Schumer said, telling Republicans they faced a “legacy-defining choice.” “Are you going to stamp it out, or are you going to spread it?”Among other changes, Democrats’ bill would essentially overwrite such changes by setting a nationwide floor on ballot access. Each state would be required to implement 15 days of early voting, no-excuse vote by mail programs like the ones many states expanded during the pandemic and automatic and same-day voter registration. Voting rights would be restored to those who had served prison sentences for felonies, and states would have to accept a workaround neutering voter identification laws that Democrats say can make it harder for minorities to vote.Over eight hours of debate, the clash only served to highlight how vast philosophical differences over elections have come to divide the two parties in the shadow of former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about fraud and theft in the 2020 contest.Republicans gave no indication they were willing to cede any ground to Democrats in a fight that stretches from the Capitol in Washington to state houses across the country. Instead, with Mr. Schumer’s Republican counterpart, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, taking the lead, they argued that Democrats were merely using state laws as a fig leaf to justify an unnecessary and self-serving federal power grab “cooked up at the Democratic National Committee.”“Our democracy is not in crisis, and we’re not going to let one party take over our democracy under the false pretense of saving it,” Mr. McConnell said.He and other Republicans on the committee were careful to sidestep many of Mr. Trump’s outlandish claims of fraud, which have taken deep root in the party, fueling the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol and prompting state lawmakers to adjust their election laws. But in a late-afternoon statement, Mr. Trump, who still towers over the party, made clear the connection between those lies and the push to curb ballot access, calling for every state to adopt restrictive voting laws, including voter-identification requirements, “so we never again have an election rigged and stolen from us.”“The people are demanding real reform!” Mr. Trump wrote.While the Rules Committee vote fulfilled Democrats’ pledge to thoroughly consider the bill before it reached the floor, it left an enormous challenge for Mr. Schumer. Progressive activists are spending millions of dollars to ramp up pressure on Democrats to quickly scrap the filibuster or miss a chance to implement the changes before 2022. The bill already passed the House with only Democratic votes.“What is intense pressure now is only going to grow,” said Eli Zupnick, a former Senate leadership aide and a spokesman for Fix Our Senate, a coalition of liberal groups pushing to eliminate the filibuster. “There is no way out. There is no third option. It is either the filibuster or the For the People Act.”But Mr. Manchin and a small group of others remain uncomfortable both with changing Senate rules and with provisions of the underlying bill, which also includes a public financing system for congressional candidates, far-reaching new ethics requirements for Congress and the White House, an end to gerrymandering congressional districts and dozens of other significant changes.Demonstrators protesting Georgia’s voting legislation in Atlanta in March.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesDemocratic senators plan to meet privately Thursday afternoon to begin deliberations over how to move forward, according to two Democratic officials who discussed the scheduled private session on the condition of anonymity.At least some senators appear ready to make wholesale changes if necessary to win the support of Mr. Manchin and other hesitant Democrats. One of them, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, said the stakes were “existential” if Democrats failed.“If we can’t unify behind it, I think there are going to be some tough decisions to maybe set pieces of it aside,” Mr. Kaine said in an interview.Democrats proposed only modest changes during Thursday’s marathon session in the Rules Committee.Republicans rejected a large package of changes meant to address concerns raised primarily by state elections administrators who have complained that some voting provisions would be expensive or onerous to implement.Republicans also rejected a proposal by Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, to strike down bans, like one included in Georgia’s new law, on providing water to voters stuck in long lines to cast ballots..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media 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(min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}When the time came to offer their own amendments, Republicans were far more ambitious, submitting 150 proposals to kill various pieces of the bill. Ultimately, they demanded votes on only a couple of dozen, many of which forced Democrats to defend positions Republicans believe are politically unpopular.Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, the top Republican on the committee, tried to strip the provision creating a public financing system that would match small donations to congressional candidates with federal funds. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, argued the case against it most vividly, calculating how much each member of the committee might receive in matching funds, including $24 million for himself.Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, the top Republican on the Senate panel considering the measure, tried to strip the bill of a public financing system that would match small donations to congressional candidates with federal funds.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times“Your constituents in every one of your states, I would venture, do not want to give your campaigns or my campaign millions of dollars in federal funds,” he said. “We do not need welfare for politicians.”Democrats pointed out that the public financing would be optional, but defended it as far preferable to the current system, in which politicians largely rely on a small number of wealthy donors and special interests to bankroll their campaigns. The amendment failed.“If people want to pay for their campaigns with big-money donors instead, I guess that’s what they’ll do,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the committee chairwoman.In a sign of the how seriously both parties took the debate, Mr. McConnell, who rarely attends hearings as party leader, remained glued to the dais for much of the day, sparring vigorously with Democrats. He was most animated in opposition to proposed changes to campaign finance laws, reprising his role as the Senate’s pre-eminent champion of undisclosed, unlimited political spending.“Regardless of who has a partisan advantage here — let’s just put that aside — is it the business of the government to supervise political speech, to decide what you can say about an issue that may be in proximity to an election?” he said.Mr. McConnell called unsuccessfully for dropping language that would require super PACs to disclose the identities of their big donors and a proposed restructuring of the Federal Election Commission to make it more partisan.Mr. Ossoff pushed back. Arguing that there was often no difference between the objectives of super PACs and traditional campaigns, he said, “The public should have the right to know who is putting significant resources into influencing the views of the voters.” More

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      Arizona G.O.P. Passes Law to Limit Distribution of Mail Ballots

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      The new law, signed by Gov. Doug Ducey, will remove people from a widely popular early voting list if they do not cast a ballot at least once every two years.PHOENIX — Arizona Republicans passed a law on Tuesday that will sharply limit the distribution of mail ballots through a widely popular early voting list, the latest measure in a conservative push to restrict voting across the country.The legislation will remove voters from the state’s Permanent Early Voting List, which automatically sends some people ballots for each election, if they do not cast a ballot at least once every two years.The vote-by-mail system is widely popular in Arizona, used by Republicans, Democrats and independents. The overwhelming majority of voters in the state cast their ballots by mail, with nearly 90 percent doing so last year amid the coronavirus pandemic, and nearly 75 percent of all voters are on the early voting list. Under the new law, the list will be called the Active Early Voting List.The State Senate voted along party lines to approve the bill, and Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, surprised many observers by signing the legislation just hours later.The bill may be only the first in a series of voting restrictions to be enacted in Arizona; another making its way through the Legislature would require voters on the early voting list to verify their signatures with an additional form of identification.Unlike in other states where Republicans have passed voting restrictions this year, including Florida, Georgia and Texas, the Arizona Legislature did not create a sweeping omnibus bill made up of numerous voting provisions. Republicans in the state are instead introducing individual measures as bills in the Legislature.The new law signed on Tuesday is likely to push an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 voters off the early voting list, which currently has about three million people. Opponents of the bill have said that Latinos, who make up roughly 24 percent of the state’s eligible voters, would make up a significantly larger share of those removed from the early voting list.The G.O.P. voting restrictions being advanced throughout the country come as former President Donald J. Trump continues to perpetuate the lie that he won the election, with many Republican lawmakers citing baseless claims of election fraud, or their voters’ worries about election integrity, as justification for the stricter rules.In Arizona, Republicans who supported the new law argued that it would not stop anyone from voting over all and that it would prevent voter fraud by ensuring no ballots are cast illegally, though there has been no evidence of widespread fraud in the state.“In voting for this bill, it’s about restoring confidence for everyone who casts a ballot, no matter what their party is,” said State Senator Kelly Townsend, a Republican who briefly withheld her support for the bill because she wanted to wait for the completion of a widely disparaged audit ordered by the G.O.P.-controlled Senate. “I have been reassured and convinced it is OK to move forward because we are now looking at other issues that need to be fixed for the 2022 election.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media 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(min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In his letter signing the legislation, Mr. Ducey said that the change would “free up dollars for election officials, ensuring that rather than sending a costly early ballot to a voter who has demonstrated they are not going to use it, resources can be directed to important priorities including voter education and election security measures.”The vote came after an hour of debate on the Senate floor, with Democrats arguing that the bill was the latest in a long line of suppression efforts targeting Black and Latino voters.“Making it harder to vote is voter suppression,” said State Senator Juan Mendez, a Democrat.“Governor Ducey’s decision to sign this bill into law is a terrible blow to democracy,” Emily Kirkland, the executive director of Progress Arizona, a coalition of voting rights organizations and community groups, said in a statement. “It is a conscious effort to put barriers in the way of Arizonans trying to make their voices heard.”For nearly a month, the state has been embroiled in an extraordinary Republican-led audit of 2020 presidential election ballots from Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix. The process could go on for several more weeks or even months.Voting rights activists in Arizona are now likely to put more pressure on Senators Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema, both Democrats, to eliminate the filibuster in the Senate and open a path to passing the party’s federal legislation to protecting access to the ballot. More

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      Why a Lifelong Republican Views Arizona’s Recount as Wrong

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      Bill Gates, an election supervisor in Maricopa County, says the audit of votes in his state is based on the lie of election fraud, and is “tearing at the foundations of our democracy.”For several weeks, Republicans in Arizona have conducted an extraordinary audit into the results of November’s presidential election, drawing scrutiny and widespread criticism for examining ballots without any evidence of fraud, and instead relying on conspiracy theories. The audit is expected to continue for weeks, if not months, prodded on by Republicans in the State Legislature, who have perpetuated former President Donald J. Trump’s falsehood that the election was stolen from him.One of the most outspoken Republican critics of the audit is Bill Gates, who was re-elected as a Maricopa County supervisor in 2020, and along with other supervisors helps oversee the county’s election procedures.Mr. Gates is a lifelong Republican who once worked as an election lawyer for the party. He considers himself a loyal member of the G.O.P. and points to former President Ronald Reagan as an inspiration for his interest in politics. But he is horrified at the partisan audit taking place in his district, saying that the recounts Arizona already conducted had sufficiently validated the results of the election.We spoke to Mr. Gates about the recount, the future of the Republican Party and what he, along with millions of others, calls the “big lie.” The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.I want to ask you straight away: Do you think the audit should be happening?The audits that we conducted — I think that those were sufficient. I appreciate that there’s a certain segment of the population who continues to have concerns about our electoral process and the integrity of the election. I don’t believe that this process, the way that it’s played out, is really going to address those concerns. And also this has turned into a recount, and Arizona law has specific instances for how and when a recount is to occur. And also it’s a recount that’s been outsourced to known partisans. So I think for all those reasons, I don’t think this is a helpful exercise.Having said that, although we’ve been accused of it over and over again, the board of supervisors is not acting to obstruct this exercise. From time to time we have gone to the courts, for example, and we’ve been concerned that people are being asked by the state or actually by the president of the Senate and the Senate judiciary chair to take actions that we thought might have been in violation of state law.What kind of consequences do you think the audit will have?Well, first of all, I think that it’s being conducted by a partisan entity. So that means that a majority of the people probably won’t even acknowledge the findings of it. My fear is that all of this is further tearing at the foundations of our democracy and tearing at people’s faith in our electoral systems. If there were fraud going on, if there was systematic corruption going on, I would be the first to speak out against it. But we have looked at this again and again and again with numerous audits here. These issues have been litigated and relitigated in the courts, both state and federal courts. And there was no basis. And now we’re seeing these conspiracy theories that are being pursued.If people lose faith in the electoral system, then I mean, where we go from there is very scary, right? Either people just disengage, they stop voting, or they cannot redress the government any further. They pursue what — armed rebellion? These are things that I can’t believe are even coming out of my mouth. This is such unchartered territory.I want to ask you about the governor, Doug Ducey. What do you think he can and should be doing right now?Well, I think, you know, for me, he did the most important thing that he needed to do, which was to certify this election. Back in the good old days, that was the sort of ministerial, right? But it was an act of political courage that I give him great credit for. And I think that was the most important thing that he could have done.How do you convince rank-and-file Republicans, and other Republicans in general, that the election was fair and legitimate?People ask me about Pennsylvania, Georgia, and what happened there. And honestly, I’m not going to comment on those elections because I wasn’t involved in those. I don’t know. But when we’re talking about Maricopa County, I can tell them how the election was run. It’s a collaborative effort here in Arizona. That’s how it’s set up. We took part in the election or ran it as elected Republicans. So if there was truly fraudulent results in Maricopa County, — the Republicans on the board of supervisors had to be a part of that. That is quite an accusation, to be either involved in it or look the other way; it makes no sense. And when you consider we were on the ballot as well and we were all re-elected. So that’s another thing to sort of suspend belief and say, “OK, it was just fraud in the presidential race, but not in a Republican state house.”I’ve been a Republican my whole life. I mean, it’s like Liz Cheney: Nobody’s ever questioned her conservative credentials. That’s not what this is about at all. It has become about the big lie. And sadly, I feel like that is now the defining feature of the Republican Party. Whether you believe that the 2020 election results were a big lie.I just want to clarify: Do you think that the national election was fair and legitimate and Biden won?Yes, yes, I do. I’m not aware of any basis for that.So how do you persuade other Republicans to believe the election was legitimate?I think it’s a real challenge because unfortunately so many of our leaders of the party are telling them something else. I’m concerned that at this point, this is something that is going to take a while. It’s so important that we deal with reality and we’ve gotten away from that. We’re not living in our sort of normal human environment. We’ve all gone into these rabbit holes on social media.And so there’s got to be this kind of civic reawakening, a belief in democracy. Trying to appeal to those who see that Donald Trump won the election in 2020, that is probably about the worst way to accomplish that. We all know in midterm elections, the party out of power usually does pretty well. And they do it by putting together a clear message that this is what we would do differently if we were in power right now, whether it’s Republicans or Democrats. And the Republican Party is going to have to pivot pretty quickly to get into that position, because right now it’s all about the 2020 election and we’re six-plus months after that.That sounds pretty far away from where the party is now. What do you think the future holds for the G.O.P., both in Arizona and nationally?I was someone whose political views were very much shaped by Ronald Reagan, who was the president when I was a teenager. Now my personal view is that we can get back to that, the shining city on the hill, this optimistic view of conservatism. I mean, that’s the successful future. It has to be a multiracial party, where we appeal to all people, regardless of their race or ethnicity. And I think there’s very much a hope of that.If we don’t do those things, then I think we’re destined to be a minority party. And by that I mean a party that doesn’t win elections. More