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      Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Staunch Conservative, Will Run for N.Y. Governor

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      Mr. Zeldin, an avid supporter of former President Donald Trump who voted to overturn the results of November’s election, said that to “save New York, Andrew Cuomo’s gotta go.”Representative Lee Zeldin, a New York Republican and avid supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, declared on Thursday that he was entering the 2022 race for governor of New York, hoping to emerge as his party’s challenger to embattled Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.“The bottom line is this: To save New York, Andrew Cuomo’s gotta go,” Mr. Zeldin, a staunch conservative who represents parts of Long Island, said in a news release.Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, is in the midst of the greatest crisis of his political life, facing investigations and accusations of sexual harassment. Many of the state’s Democratic leaders have asked Mr. Cuomo to resign, and whether he will ultimately run for re-election next year is an open question.But any Republican, especially one closely tied to Mr. Trump, would face an extraordinarily uphill battle running statewide in New York. And there is no doubt about how deeply Mr. Zeldin has embraced Mr. Trump and his politics, including by voting to overturn the results of the November election, a record that would instantly disqualify him in the eyes of many voters should he make it to a general election.Republicans haven’t won a statewide election since 2002, and Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one.But Mr. Zeldin’s candidacy also speaks to Mr. Cuomo’s perceived vulnerability: Republican candidates for governor in New York tend to have less political stature, given the challenges of competing statewide. The congressman has something of a national profile and national donor base in Republican circles. He previewed on Thursday how he would seek to position himself in a heavily Democratic state.“With one-party Democrat rule in New York City and Albany, the light that once shone as a beacon of what America can be has gone dark,” he said.“The New York that was once a magnet for the world’s best and brightest is now forcing its own to leave under the crushing weight of skyrocketing taxes, lost jobs, suffocating regulations, and rising crime resulting from dangerously liberal policies.”In his campaign announcement video, Mr. Zeldin made no mention of Mr. Trump, instead seeking to keep his message focused on quality-of-life concerns and economic matters and lacing into Mr. Cuomo. . It’s a political background that may be important in a Republican primary, but one that would be instantly disqualifying in the eyes of many New Yorkers in a general election, should he reach that point.“He’s a congressman, soldier and family man, fighting to protect our wallets, our safety and our freedoms,” the video says.Mr. Zeldin will be one of at least three declared or potential Republican candidates interested in running for governor who will appear in Albany, N.Y., on April 19 to meet with Republican county chairs to lobby for their support.Others include Rob Astorino, the party’s 2014 nominee for governor, and Andrew Giuliani, the son of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.Mr. Zeldin made his initial announcement on Fox News. More

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      How Brian Kemp Is Rebounding Against Trump’s Wrath

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      After resisting Donald Trump’s demands to overturn Georgia’s election results, Gov. Brian Kemp was an outcast in his own party. Now he’s embraced the state’s new voting bill as a way to rebuild his standing.Three years ago, Brian Kemp was elected governor when Republicans embraced his nearly decade-long quest to restrict voting access in Georgia. Now he has tied his re-election hopes to making voting in the state even harder.After infuriating former President Donald J. Trump by resisting his demands to overturn the state’s election results, Mr. Kemp became an outcast in his own party. He spent weeks fending off a daily barrage of attacks from right-wing media, fellow Republican lawmakers and party officials, and Mr. Trump vowed to retaliate by sending a hard-right loyalist to oppose him in the primary next year.But the sweeping new voting bill Mr. Kemp signed two weeks ago has provided a lifeline to the embattled governor to rebuild his standing among the party’s base. The bill severely curtails the ability to vote in Georgia, particularly for people of color. Mr. Kemp has seized on it as a political opportunity, defending the law as one that expands voting access, condemning those who criticize it and conflating the criticism with so-called cancel culture.It’s an argument he believes may restore him to the good graces of Georgia Republicans after being publicly derided by Mr. Trump, a predicament that has proved fatal to the career aspirations of other ambitious conservatives.Since signing the bill into law on March 25, Mr. Kemp has done roughly 50 interviews, 14 with Fox News, promoting the new restrictions with messaging that aligns with Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the election was rigged against him.“He knows that this is a real opportunity and he can’t blow it, because I don’t think he gets another layup like this again anytime soon,” said Randy Evans, a Georgia lawyer whom Mr. Trump made ambassador to Luxembourg, and is also a close ally of Mr. Kemp.A political ascent would represent an unlikely turnaround for Mr. Kemp, making him the most prominent Republican to find a way to overcome Mr. Trump’s campaign of retribution, and perhaps providing an early test of the former president’s ability to impose his will on the party’s electoral future. Mr. Kemp’s argument is designed to pump adrenaline into the conservative vein, by focusing on two of the most animating topics of the political right: election mechanics and an ominous portrayal of the Democratic left.“They folded like a wet dishrag to the cancel culture,” he said, responding to businesses that publicly objected to the legislation, in an interview on Fox Business on Tuesday. “It is woke in real life, and Americans and Georgians should be scared. I mean, what event are they going to come after next? What value that you have — the way that you live your life — are they coming after next? Are they going to come after your small business?”Mr. Kemp declined an interview request.Whether Mr. Kemp will be able to make amends with Mr. Trump remains unclear. Late Tuesday, the former president signaled how difficult it would be to win him over, releasing a statement slamming Mr. Kemp and Georgia Republicans for not going far enough to restrict voting access in the new law.“Kemp also caved to the radical left-wing woke mob who threatened to call him racist if he got rid of weekend voting,” Mr. Trump said. “Well, he kept it, and they still call him racist!”Mr. Kemp was the subject of right-wing attacks after resisting demands to overturn Georgia’s election results.John Bazemore/Associated PressIf Mr. Trump’s animosity lingers, he has the potential to complicate Mr. Kemp’s re-election effort by endorsing a rival and attacking the governor. Some political allies of Mr. Kemp are trying to broker a truce. Mr. Evans, for instance, is in South Florida this week aiming to engage in a delicate round of diplomacy that would get Mr. Trump on board with Mr. Kemp. He said he’s talking to Mr. Kemp daily but isn’t particularly optimistic.“There are some times,” Mr. Evans said, “when the hate is so deep and so ingrained that there’s nothing, and that’s when you just have to go to divorce. There’s no gift, no diamond, no car, no flowers, no nothing that will ever repair it.”Mr. Trump’s harsh stance notwithstanding, there are many conservatives in the state who remain fixated on the losses by Mr. Trump and the state’s two Republican senators, and are happy to see Mr. Kemp finally joining their fight, no matter how opportunistic it might seem.“I’ve not seen our party in Georgia as united in five and half years,” said Chip Lake, a longtime Republican strategist in the state. “This has allowed people who are angry at Brian Kemp for not doing enough for Donald Trump to get back on board with Brian Kemp.”Not every Republican has signed on. Debbie Dooley, a conservative activist in Georgia, said that the Republican base remembered Mr. Kemp’s denying Mr. Trump’s request to call for a special session to address the presidential election results, and that it remained eager to punish him for what it views as failing to fully investigate claims of fraud.“He is hoping Trump voters forget he was a coward,” she said. “He undermined us at every turn during investigation of election fraud, and now because he is talking tough in regard to M.L.B., Delta and Coke, he thinks we will forgive him. We won’t.”The most recent polling, conducted before Mr. Kemp signed the voting bill, showed that 15 percent to 30 percent of Georgia Republicans disapproved of his time as governor, largely because of his performance during the 2020 election.The new law Mr. Kemp is championing makes it harder to acquire an absentee ballot, creates new restrictions and complications for voting and hands sweeping new power over the electoral process to Republican legislators. It has drawn harsh criticism from local companies like Coca-Cola and Delta, and prompted Major League Baseball to move its All-Star Game out of suburban Atlanta as a form of protest.Mr. Kemp has used the rebukes to fire up the Republican base. He made little effort to calm tensions with some of his state’s most prominent corporate leaders, and said that baseball executives had “caved to fear, political opportunism, and liberal lies” in deciding to relocate the All-Star Game. Through it all, he has positioned himself as a fierce defender of Georgia’s sovereignty, saying, “Georgians will not be bullied.’’Mr. Kemp’s embrace of the voting law appears to have helped his standing among Georgia Republicans. Former Representative Doug Collins, Mr. Trump’s preferred intraparty rival for the governorship, is now leaning toward a 2022 Senate bid instead, according to strategists and activists in the state. The two remaining Republicans weighing a bid are not as well known and would face a tougher time mounting a serious challenge to Mr. Kemp, who has already banked more than $6.3 million for his re-election campaign. He’s now fund-raising off the voting bill, wrapping his re-election website in a plea for funds to help “defend election integrity.”“Activists in my own county who were dead set to finding someone to primary him are saying maybe he does deserve another chance,” said Jason Shepherd, the chairman of the Republican Party in Cobb County, who is running to lead the state party. “It’s going to make people less likely to wade into the race.”Mr. Kemp was first elected in 2018 after receiving President Donald J. Trump’s endorsement in the Republican primary.Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesThe two other lawmakers mulling primary bids are Vernon Jones, the former Democratic state legislator who became a Republican in January, and Burt Jones, a state senator. Both say they are assessing the political landscape and expect to make a decision soon. The two men took different approaches to Mr. Kemp, underscoring how quickly the politics have shifted for the governor.In an email, Vernon Jones said Mr. Kemp’s appeal to the base was “too little, too late,” casting him as profiting off a cause he neglected in November.“Governor Kemp sat back and allowed the legislature to come in and hammer out the new bill, and then in an effort to mislead the public, he chose himself as the poster boy for election reform in Georgia,” he said. Yet Burt Jones praised Mr. Kemp’s management of the moment, admitting that “what has gone on the last week has not hurt him among his base.”Every week that potential challengers deliberate over whether to enter the race gives Mr. Kemp more time to make his case to grass-roots conservatives.“You can’t beat somebody with nobody,” said Mr. Lake, the Republican strategist. “As every day goes by, you’re getting farther and farther away from Donald Trump’s presidency and Brian Kemp gets stronger with the base.”In many ways, Mr. Kemp’s embrace of the legislation signifies a return to the conservative language — and voting issues — that defined his political career. Billing himself as a “politically incorrect conservative,” Mr. Kemp has long been one of the left’s most enduring villains because of his defeat of Stacey Abrams, who was vying in 2018 to become the nation’s first Black female governor.Mr. Kemp, then the secretary of state overseeing Georgia’s elections, stalled 53,000 voter registrations, which were disproportionately from Black voters. Ms. Abrams and her allies argued that Mr. Kemp had used his position to engineer a “stolen” election, a charge he denied.Since then the two have spent years engaged in a contentious argument over voting rights, an issue that rallies their parties’ bases in the state. In an interview with a sports radio program this week, Mr. Kemp accused Ms. Abrams of running the “biggest racket in America right now” with her claims of voter suppression.Democrats say his ardent support of the law and attacks on Ms. Abrams are a cynical effort to bolster his standing among his conservative base while suppressing votes for his general election opponents.“This is all politics,” said Representative Nikema Williams, the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, who replaced the civil rights icon John Lewis in Congress. “Let’s also be clear that a part of that politics is keeping Black and brown people away from the polls so he can continue to win elections in Georgia.” More

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      G.O.P. Group Warns Donors Not to Opt Out of Monthly Donations

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      The National Republican Congressional Committee says to donors who opt out of recurring monthly donations: “We will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR.”The political arm of House Republicans is deploying a prechecked box to enroll donors into repeating monthly donations — and using ominous language to warn them of the consequences if they opt out: “If you UNCHECK this box, we will have to tell Trump you’re a DEFECTOR.”The language appears to be an effort by the National Republican Congressional Committee to increase its volume of recurring donations, which are highly lucrative, while invoking former President Donald J. Trump’s popularity with the conservative base. Those donors who do not proactively uncheck the box will have their credit cards billed or bank accounts deducted for donations every month.The prechecked recurring box on the N.R.C.C.’s WinRed donation pageThe prechecked box is the same tactic and tool that resulted in a surge of refunds and credit card complaints when used by Mr. Trump’s campaign last year, according to an investigation published by The New York Times over the weekend. The Trump operation made the language inside its prechecked boxes increasingly opaque as the election neared. Consumer advocates and user-interface designers said the prechecked boxes were a “dark pattern” intended to deceive Mr. Trump’s supporters.The Trump operation issued more than $122 million in refunds in the 2020 cycle, which was 10.7 percent of what Mr. Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts raised. Refunds increased as the campaign began prechecking the boxes, which at one point withdrew donations every week as well as introduced a “money bomb” that doubled a contribution.After the Times investigation, the R.N.C., the party’s central organization, adjusted the language on its own donation portal, which is linked to in its fund-raising emails and from its home page, to make it clearer that repeat donations would be withdrawn.“Keep this box checked to make this a monthly recurring donation,” says the new language in bold.The box remains prechecked, and the R.N.C. declined to comment on the change.The new disclosure language in the Republican National Committee’s prechecked recurring donation box.Michael McAdams, a spokesman for the N.R.C.C., said the committee “employs the same standards that are accepted and utilized by Democrats and Republicans across the digital fund-raising ecosystem.”The prechecked box is a tool provided by WinRed, the for-profit Republican donation platform founded in 2019. The Democratic platform, ActBlue, also allows some groups to precheck recurring donation boxes, including the political arm of House Democrats, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.The D.C.C.C. noted that it has a pop-up window telling donors who made a recurring donation that they did so immediately after the contribution is processed. “Unlike the N.R.C.C., we use clear language and confirm with our grass-roots supporters that they would like to set up a recurring monthly donation,” said Helen Kalla, a D.C.C.C. spokeswoman.The Bulwark, an anti-Trump conservative news site, first reported a different version of a prechecked box that the N.R.C.C. was using on Wednesday, which said: “Check this box if you want Trump to run again. Uncheck this box if you do NOT stand with Trump.”Political parties and campaigns typically test multiple language options to see which net the most donors. The “DEFECTOR” warning appears on the donation page linked from the N.R.C.C.’s home page.It seems highly unlikely any such list of defectors would ever actually be presented to Mr. Trump. Last month, Mr. Trump sent a cease-and-desist letter to the N.R.C.C. and other Republican Party committees warning them not to use his name or likeness to raise money.The language on the N.R.C.C.’s donation portal appears relatively new, although the prechecked box has been there before, according to records preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.In March, the recurring box read, “Trump said he’ll run for President if we win back the House! If every Patriot makes their donation monthly, Republicans WIN.”Mr. Trump has not said that. More

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      For These Republicans, 2024 Is Just Around the Corner

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      Mike Pence. Mike Pompeo. Rick Scott. They share big ambitions, but one name hovers above them all …Antonio de Luca/The New York TimesPresident Biden told reporters last month that his “plan is to run for re-election,” despite already being the oldest person to have won a presidential election. So, for now at least, the question of who will lead the Democratic ticket in 2024 has been put to rest.On the Republican side, however, certainty is in short supply. It’s beyond early to be talking about the next presidential election (we’re still hardly even ready to talk about the midterms!) — but that’s only if you aren’t planning to run. Some Republican candidates have already made trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, and others are laying plans to go, in what often represents the first step in building out a campaign operation in those early-voting states.And on Wednesday, in a conspicuously forward-looking move, former Vice President Mike Pence announced the formation of a new political organization, Advancing American Freedom, whose advisory board is stacked high with former Trump administration officials and allies. The news came on the same day Simon & Schuster announced that it would publish Pence’s autobiography as part of a two-book deal.The G.O.P. is badly fractured, trying to hold together a dominant base of those loyal to former President Donald Trump and a stubborn minority of pro-decorum, anti-Trump conservatives. Anyone looking to grab the Republican mantle will have to find some way of satisfying both camps — and maybe even expanding upon them.A national poll from Pew Research Center last month found that most Republicans didn’t think the G.O.P. should be accepting of elected officials in the party who openly criticize Trump. But looking at the nation at large, Pew also found that a majority of Americans called Trump either a “poor” or “terrible” president. So it may be tough for Republicans to get very far in a general election if their candidate is seen as too staunch of a Trump loyalist.With all these factors at play, I caught up with our political reporter and Trump guru Maggie Haberman. Here’s what she had to say.Mike Pence on Wednesday announced that he had started the group Advancing American Freedom, with the self-described mission of “promoting traditional conservative values,” advocating “the successful policies of the Trump administration” and opposing Biden’s “expansion of government.” Is this a preliminary move toward a possible 2024 run?It most certainly gives Pence a perch from which to run, and, more significantly, to differentiate himself from Trump to the best of his ability. He has more of a challenge than most of the potential 2024 candidates in presenting himself as a continuation of what Republicans liked about the Trump era, without the parts they didn’t.A stubborn divide remains between the party’s Trump-supporting base and its establishment wing. Pence, for one, has always done his best to skate along that divide. For Republican presidential hopefuls, will there be any room for being even semi-critical of Trump?I think they all have to survive a G.O.P. primary, and the bulk of the Republican base is going to want someone who resembles Trump in some way.There is going to be little room for a Republican to separate from Trump in the primary — barring new circumstances that change Trump’s standing with those voters — and then pivot back in a general election and be viable with swing voters.Pence has also been so, so reluctant to criticize Trump, even after his own life was at risk in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6.A number of other prominent Republicans have recently been laying groundwork in Iowa. (Despite the 2020 Democratic caucus shenanigans, the state is certain to hold an early contest in 2024.) Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, and Senator Rick Scott of Florida just went there, and others are reportedly planning trips. After the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, what clues are you seeing about how the 2024 field will shape up? Does any one figure seem particularly well positioned?It’s so early in the cycle, it’s very hard to say. We don’t know what the world — or the country — will look like closer to 2024, although the midterms will tell us something about the mood of the electorate.Scott is in a bit of a different position than some candidates, having been a governor and now a senator. Scott surprised leaders in his own party by siding with Trump’s objections to the electoral certification, which helps him in a primary but which could be a challenge in other ways.Where does Trump himself stand in all this? He has been relatively quiet since January, his speech at CPAC aside — but he’s still running a political operation out of his residence in Florida. Whether or not he runs again in three years, is it safe to say he will be playing an active role in the race somehow?Remember, Trump keeps telling people he’s running. While most of his own advisers are skeptical that he will do it, it could have a chilling effect on the field for a while. He wants to remain dominant in the party and he is a major factor in down-ballot primaries so far.But that isn’t the only impactful factor in these races. He wants to be relevant; remember that only a narrow majority of Republicans want to see him as the nominee again.Drop us a lineTrump’s Twitter ban: We want to hear from youWe’re nearing the end of three months in which former President Donald Trump has been barred from Twitter and Facebook. This has upset his supporters, of course, but has resulted in a general lowering of the conversational temperature, particularly on Twitter. Our colleague Sarah Lyall is working on an article about the absence of Trump’s voice on social media, and we’d love to hear from readers.We want to know:1. Did you follow (or block) Trump on Twitter?2. How did his tweets make you feel when you saw them on Twitter, or read about them afterward?3. Have you noticed his absence from social media platforms since January? Do you miss his voice, or are you happy not to hear it anymore?Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com and include your name, email address and profession, and you may be included in forthcoming news coverage.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      in Elections

      Andrew Giuliani Considers a Run for N.Y. Governor

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      Mr. Giuliani, 35, has never been elected to public office, and his most prominent government job was as a public liaison assistant and special assistant to the president for the Trump White House.ALBANY, N.Y. — In less than two weeks, at least three potential Republican candidates interested in possibly challenging Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo next year will convene in the state capital to lobby many of the party’s county chairs for their support.All three are known to New York voters: Representative Lee Zeldin of Long Island is one of the state’s staunchest conservative leaders, and was an ardent supporter of former President Donald J. Trump; Rob Astorino was the party’s 2014 nominee for governor.The third is also known, but is far less of a known quantity: Andrew Giuliani.In a brief interview on Wednesday, Mr. Giuliani, 35, confirmed that he was “strongly considering” a run, adding that he planned to make a firm decision “by the end of the month.” State Republican officials confirmed that Mr. Giuliani would be attending the Republican county leaders’ meeting in Albany.Mr. Giuliani would face a steep climb. He has never been elected to public office, and his most prominent government job was as a public liaison assistant and special assistant to the president for the Trump White House.His main selling point would likely be his connection to Mr. Trump and to his father, the former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose reputation in New York and beyond has greatly suffered in recent years.The elder Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, was a central player in a failed legal effort by the former president to overturn the 2020 election. He now faces a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, which has accused him of carrying out “a viral disinformation campaign” to suggest that Dominion, one of the biggest voting machine manufacturers in the country, plotted to flip votes to President Biden.The Giuliani connection to Trump could prove poisonous in New York, where Mr. Trump’s popularity is in the low 30s, where Republicans haven’t won a statewide election since 2002, and where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one.Still, Mr. Giuliani and other potential Republican candidates have had their hopes buoyed by Mr. Cuomo’s swarm of recent scandals, including multiple accusations of sexual harassment against the governor, as well as a federal investigation into his handling of the state’s nursing homes.The sexual harassment allegations made by current and former employees of Mr. Cuomo, as well as accounts by a series of other women who have described uncomfortable interactions with the governor, have led most of the state’s Democratic leaders to call for Mr. Cuomo’s resignation.The allegations against Mr. Cuomo, 63, are also the subject of a pair of investigations, including one overseen by the state attorney general, Letitia James, and a second authorized by the State Assembly.The combination of the controversies has resulted in double-digit declines in Mr. Cuomo’s approval ratings in several polls, with support for a fourth term seeming particularly precarious.Mr. Giuliani’s possible interest in the state’s highest office was first reported by The Washington Examiner.The prospect of a Giuliani vs. Cuomo matchup would likely tantalize New York and national political observers, considering the current relationship between Rudolph Giuliani and Mr. Trump, who often sparred with Mr. Cuomo last year during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.Adding to the intrigue is the decades-long connections between the elder Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat whose father, Mario M. Cuomo, was governor for 12 years.When Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor in 1993, the elder Mr. Cuomo was still governor, and he spoke hopefully of Mr. Giuliani’s ability to help him find compromise with Republicans, who ruled the Senate in Albany.A year later, Mr. Giuliani suffered a humiliating defeat after he endorsed Mario Cuomo’s unsuccessful campaign against fellow Republican George Pataki in the 1994 governor’s race.Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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      Democrats Are Torn Over Working With G.O.P. After Capitol Riot

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      An uneasy détente has emerged between congressional Republicans and Democrats after the Jan. 6 attack, but relationships are badly frayed.WASHINGTON — When a Republican lawmaker approached Representative Veronica Escobar, a Democrat, on the House floor recently with a routine request that she sign on to a resolution he was introducing, she initially refused.Ms. Escobar personally liked the man, a fellow Texan, and she supported his bill. But she held the Republican, who had voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election just hours after rioters stormed the Capitol, partly responsible for the deadly attack and questioned whether she could work with him.Moments after declining, however, Ms. Escobar had second thoughts.“Go ahead and count me in,” Ms. Escobar recalled telling the man, whom she declined to identify in an interview. “But I just want you to know that what you all did — I haven’t gotten past it. And it was wrong, and it was terrible. And it’s not something that I think we should gloss over.”In the immediate aftermath of the assault on the Capitol that left five dead, irate Democrats vowed to punish Republicans for their roles in perpetuating or indulging former President Donald J. Trump’s fiction of a stolen election that motivated the mob that attacked the building. There was talk of cutting off certain Republicans entirely from the legislative process, denying them the basic courtesies and customs that allow the House to function even in polarized times.Democrats introduced a series of measures to censure, investigate and potentially expel members who, in the words of one resolution, “attempted to overturn the results of the election and incited a white supremacist attempted coup.” But the legislation went nowhere and to date no punishment has been levied against any members of Congress for their actions related to Jan. 6.What has unfolded instead has been something of an uneasy détente on Capitol Hill, as Democrats reckon with what they experienced that day and struggle to determine whether they can salvage their relationships with Republicans — some of whom continue to cast doubt on the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory — and whether they even want to try.“I don’t want to permanently close that door,” Ms. Escobar said. “But I can’t walk through it right now.”Republicans have felt the breach as well. Representative Michael Waltz, Republican of Florida, who did not vote to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory but joined a lawsuit challenging the election results, said feelings ran raw after the mob violence at the Capitol.“I had some candid conversations with members that I have a good relationship with. There was a lot of heated emotion,” Mr. Waltz said. Still, he said, “I didn’t experience a freeze.”He recently teamed up with Representative Anthony G. Brown, Democrat of Maryland, to round up 70 Republicans and 70 Democrats for a letter to the Biden administration laying out parameters for an Iran nuclear deal.The dilemma of whether to join such bipartisan efforts is particularly charged for centrist Democrats from conservative-leaning districts, who won office on the promise of working with Republicans but say they find it difficult to accept that some of those same colleagues spread lies that fueled the first invasion of the Capitol since the War of 1812.Adding to the tensions, most Republicans insist that they did nothing wrong, arguing that their push to invalidate the election results was merely an effort to raise concerns about the integrity of the vote. Some have reacted angrily to Democrats’ moves to punish them.Days after Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri, voted to throw out electoral votes for Mr. Biden, an aide to Representative Cindy Axne, Democrat of Iowa, curtly rebuffed a request from his office to discuss writing insurance legislation together.Representative Jason Smith, Republican of Missouri, voted to throw out electoral votes for President Biden.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times“Our office is declining to work with your office at this time, given your boss’s position on the election,” the aide wrote in an email to an aide to Mr. Smith.Mr. Smith later sought to turn the tables on Ms. Axne, posting the email on his official Twitter account after she highlighted her work with Republicans.“That’s odd,” Mr. Smith wrote, appending a screenshot of the exchange. “This is the last message my staff got from you. Are you no longer kicking Republicans off your bills?”A spokesman for Mr. Smith did not respond to a request to elaborate on the incident.Representative Abigail Spanberger, Democrat of Virginia, who was in the House gallery on Jan. 6, said she had taken it upon herself to try to facilitate a reconciliation — or at least an airing out of differences.“It’s been a really challenging time,” she said. “Literally, people were murdered in our workplace. For some people, that is deeply troublesome, and for some people, they want to move on faster than others are ready.”In the days after the attack, the wounds it laid bare seemed almost too deep to heal. As the mob tore closer to lawmakers on Jan. 6, Representative Dean Phillips, a mild-mannered Minnesota Democrat known for fostering bipartisan relationships, shouted at Republicans, “This is because of you!”Afterward, lawmakers nearly came to blows on the House floor and got into heated arguments in the hallways. Some Democrats were so nervous that their Republican colleagues might draw weapons on the floor that House leaders set up metal detectors outside the chamber, drawing loud protests from gun-toting lawmakers in the Republican Party.Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Administration Committee, released a review of Republicans’ incendiary remarks on social media before the attack.Some Democrats, particularly the most progressive lawmakers from safe districts who rarely found occasion to work with Republicans even before the riot, have pressed to penalize the G.O.P. systematically in its aftermath, arguing that there can be no return to normalcy. A spreadsheet of Republicans who voted to overturn the election, outlining how many states’ electoral votes they moved to cast out, has circulated widely among Democratic offices.Lawmakers and their staff members were evacuated from the House chamber on Jan. 6.Andrew Harnik/Associated PressBut there has been little action to truly cut Republicans out of the work of Congress. When Representative Sean Casten of Illinois moved to punish a Republican who had voted to overturn the election results by forcing a recorded vote on his bill to rename a post office — the kind of measure that normally sails through unchallenged — only 15 other Democrats joined Mr. Casten in opposing it. As some rank-and-file Democrats sought to expel the Republican conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia from the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the move was “not a leadership position.” (Leaders did, however, take the unusual step of stripping Ms. Greene of her committee seats.)The reluctance stems, at least in part, from politics. Democrats owe their majority to a group of lawmakers from competitive districts who say their constituents elected them to work with Republicans to get legislation done.“Retreating or closing myself off to any kind of conversations or working with folks on the other side of the aisle — it doesn’t feel like an option for me,” said Representative Sharice Davids, the only Democrat in the Kansas congressional delegation. “Even when it feels hard.”Representative Susan Wild, Democrat of Pennsylvania, was in the House gallery on Jan. 6 and had what she believed was a panic attack as she crouched on the floor and heard the noise from the mob grow closer. But she said in an interview that she had “moved past the election issue,” adding that she was “not one to hold grudges.”“I haven’t talked to a single Republican about that day. Nothing. At all,” said Ms. Wild, who has resumed working with Pennsylvania Republicans on legislation, even though most of them voted to overturn the election. “I don’t want it to get in the way of other things that I want to work on with them. I know that it would, because I would be angry.”Many House Republicans have refrained from discussing the attack, while some have tried to rewrite history and argue that they never claimed the election was “stolen,” despite their objections. One tried to remove mentions of the assault from a resolution honoring the police officers who defended the Capitol that day. Some have continued to deny that Mr. Biden was legitimately elected, while still others have sought to deflect attention from the riot or downplay the factors that drove it.When the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing recently to examine domestic extremism in the military, Representative Pat Fallon, Republican of Texas, complained that the session was “political theater” and a waste of the panel’s time.The chairman, Representative Adam Smith of Washington, tartly replied that the topic deserved discussion, since “20 percent of the people that have been arrested from the Capitol Hill riots had a history of serving in the military.”Representative Rodney Davis of Illinois, the top Republican on the Administration Committee, objected to Ms. Lofgren’s report cataloging his colleagues’ incendiary social media posts. One Democrat, Representative Brad Schneider of Illinois, recently removed a Republican from a bill the two had worked on together for years, in line with his new policy of collaborating only with lawmakers who publicly state that Mr. Biden was legitimately elected.But he said he had drawn some optimism from a blunt conversation with Representative Jody B. Hice, Republican of Georgia, whom he has worked with on environmental issues, about a speech Mr. Hice gave questioning his state’s electoral votes for Mr. Biden.Mr. Hice said in a statement that he was proud that he and Mr. Schneider could “put aside our differences” on “many of the hot-button political debates of the day” to work together.Still, Mr. Schneider said that many other Republicans were still questioning Mr. Biden’s legitimacy — and that some were even continuing to put lawmakers at risk with incendiary remarks.“The fact that there is — how many at this point? — that it’s not an insignificant number who are still trying to have it both ways, makes it harder to get something done in Congress,” he said. More

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      Why Kentucky Just Became the Only Red State to Expand Voting Rights

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      At a time when states with Republican-led legislatures are rushing to restrict ballot access, Kentucky proved the exception to the rule. The reasons are both political and logistical.Jennifer Decker has solid conservative credentials. A first-term Republican state lawmaker in Kentucky who used to work for Senator Rand Paul, she represents a county that voted for Donald J. Trump last year by nearly 30 percentage points.Yet at a time when many of her Republican counterparts around the country are racing to pass stringent new restrictions on voting — fueled in part by Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election — Ms. Decker’s first major bill swerved.It aimed to make it easier for people to vote in the state.Kentucky on Wednesday became the only state in the country with a Republican-controlled legislature to expand voting rights after a bitter presidential election that tested the country’s democratic institutions and elevated ballot access as an animating issue for both parties.In a signing ceremony on Wednesday, Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, hailed the bill as a bipartisan effort that cut against the push in other Republican legislatures to put up barriers to voting.“When much of the country has put in more restrictive laws, Kentucky legislators, Kentucky leaders were able to come together to stand up for democracy and to expand the opportunity for people to vote,” Mr. Beshear said.The law in Kentucky establishes three days of early voting in the state; introduces voting centers that would allow for more in-person balloting options; creates an online portal to register and request ballots; and allows voters to fix problems with absentee ballots, a process known as curing.The reasons that Kentucky Republicans have diverged on voting rights range from the political to the logistical. For one, they had an easier sell: With sweeping new rules allowing the election to be held safely during the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans in Kentucky had one of their best cycles in years, with both Senator Mitch McConnell and Mr. Trump easily winning in the state.And expanding voting access in Kentucky was a low bar to clear; the state had some of the tightest voting laws in the country before 2020, with not a single day of early voting, and strict limits on absentee balloting.The push in Kentucky and other states — including the Democratic-controlled Virginia, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii and Massachusetts — reflects an odd outcome of the pandemic: The most challenging election in nearly a century brought about expansive changes across the country to ease access to the ballot box.“We did things a little bit differently because of Covid, and I just thought that some of that might help us going forward,” Ms. Decker said in an interview. “And election reform should not be partisan. Partisan majorities can change at any time.”Republicans and Democrats alike in Kentucky have overwhelmingly supported and celebrated the bill, heralding it as a welcome bipartisan achievement. But voting rights advocates have been more muted, pointing to the legislation’s relatively limited scope and its mixture of measures, like the introduction of a short early voting period, as well as new restrictions heralded under the banner of election security. They caution that the proposal represents a modest improvement in a state long hostile to voting rights — a fact even conservatives have acknowledged.“Kentucky actually had probably, until this point, the most restrictive laws in the country on voting,” said Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state, who was the leading force behind the bill. “And that’s what we’re trying to change.”Michael Adams, the Republican secretary of state of Kentucky, led the push to pass the voting bill. Jon Cherry for The New York TimesIndeed, even with its newly expanded voting access, Kentucky’s voting rules remain comparatively stricter than those of Georgia, which recently overhauled its electoral system with new restrictions on voting. Even under Georgia’s new law, for example, the state still has no-excuse absentee voting and a much longer earlier voting period than Kentucky.Voting rights experts note that three days of early voting is still a short window compared with other states that offer the process, and that the law does not have a provision for no-excuse absentee voting. It also includes restrictions like the banning of ballot collection, a practice in which one person gathers and drops off multiple voters’ ballots.Nearly all of the country’s current efforts to expand voting access are unfolding in states with Democratic-led legislatures, and they go much further in expanding access to the ballot than Kentucky’s law does.Connecticut is trying to make no-excuse absentee voting permanent after the method worked successfully in last year’s election, and Delaware is working on a constitutional amendment to add no-excuse absentee voting. Hawaii is progressing toward the introduction of automatic voter registration. And Massachusetts is seeking a host of changes, including adding same-day voter registration and extending early voting.“The election in 2020 helps give them confidence that they could act quickly in expanding access and not have to go slowly,” Sylvia Albert, the director of the voting rights group Common Cause, said of these states.She said that Kentucky did not fall into the category of true expansion, because its new law will provide fewer options than the emergency orders of 2020. “This might be a political calculation made by Democrats in the state, so that Republicans don’t go even further in suppressing the vote like other states have,” she said. “But as an election, voter access bill, it is not successful.”While Kentucky’s compromise — expanding voting access while enacting some more restrictive policies in the name of election security — could serve as a model for other Republican-controlled states, it is more likely to be a blip in a year of G.O.P.-led pushes for voting restrictions.Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky at the State Capitol in Frankfort.Ryan C. Hermens/Lexington Herald-Leader, via Associated PressIndeed, it was a unique set of circumstances and an unlikely coalition in Kentucky that led to the state’s first steps in a generation to expand voting access.Fresh off a successful free, fair and safe election conducted with a host of temporary policies during the pandemic, Mr. Adams began the dutiful task of surveying county election administrators about the new rules. He had expected complaints, but instead found strong support for some of the measures, particularly the multiple days of early voting.So Mr. Adams went to the Republican leadership in the Legislature to gauge its interest in adopting some of the policies. After a 2020 election in which Republicans picked up seats in the State Legislature and Mr. McConnell cruised to an easy victory, G.O.P. leaders in Kentucky had a far different political calculus than Republicans in Georgia, who saw their state turn blue for the first time in a generation. They were open, they said, though not necessarily eager to shake things up.“The hard part at first was finding a sponsor,” Mr. Adams said, “because this was seen as so unlikely that no one wanted to be the sponsor.”Enter Mr. Paul. The junior senator from Kentucky, who is up for re-election next year and has repeatedly made false statements about the 2020 election, had reached out to Mr. Adams with some concerns of his own regarding Kentucky election law. But he soon came around to the idea of a compromise effort, expanding some points of access while restricting others.And he had an idea for a sponsor: Ms. Decker, who had been interested in an election overhaul after the high turnout in last year’s vote.“I’ve been a lifelong Republican, I was chairman of the Republican Party in my county for a long time, and I’ve never felt like voter turnout was anything but good,” Ms. Decker said.The bill quickly began gaining momentum in the Legislature. And Democrats, who eyed the effort warily, would soon come on board.“We saw a bill come forward this year, and you’ve got to recognize some political realities of Kentucky,” said Morgan McGarvey, the Democratic minority leader in the State Senate. “This bill does not do everything that I would like to see in an election reform law, but it is definitely a step in the right direction.”For years, Democrats in the State Legislature had worked to expand voting in Kentucky, both by putting forward large, transformative bills that never had a chance of passing, and pared down efforts like simply seeking to keep polls open until 8 p.m. (Kentucky currently closes polls at 6 p.m. on Election Day, the earliest shuttering time in the country along with Indiana’s.) The party was consistently rebuffed by the State Senate, which has been controlled by Republicans since 1999.“No one can argue: This expands voting options in Kentucky,” Mr. McGarvey said. “Every Kentuckian has more choices of when and how to vote than they did before this law. So that’s something we have been fighting for for years, and I’m not going to slow it up.”Republicans have been quick to praise the bill. Mr. Paul said in a statement that he was “proud” of the effort, and that it would ensure “our elections are accurate and accessible.” The Honest Elections Project, a conservative group that has joined legal efforts seeking to roll back voting access, said the bill had found “a balance” on “the need for both access and security.”Joshua Douglas, a professor of election law at the University of Kentucky who was part of a small team of county election officials and other experts who consulted with Mr. Adams on the initial effort, said that “it’s not the bill I would have written by any means.”He added: “But it has a lot of stuff I like and not a ton I hate.” More

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      Boehner Blasts Trump, Saying He ‘Incited That Bloody Insurrection’

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      In his new book, John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker, sharply rebukes the former president for his role in the “mob violence” at the Capitol on Jan. 6.John Boehner, the Republican former House speaker, issues a stinging denunciation in his new book of Donald J. Trump, saying that the former president “incited that bloody insurrection” by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that the Republican Party has been taken over by “whack jobs.”The criticism from Mr. Boehner in his book, “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” represents an extraordinary public rebuke by a former speaker of the House toward a former president from his own party and shows how much the Republican Party has shifted since Mr. Boehner left Congress in 2015. And his remarks came as Mr. Trump has sought to retain his grip on Republican lawmakers’ loyalty from his new political base in South Florida.The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, sharply criticized Mr. Trump at the end of the Senate trial for the former president’s second impeachment, pointing to his role in the Capitol riot. Others, like Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 in the House Republican leadership, have also excoriated him.But Mr. Boehner’s remarks went a step further, serving as a rejection of what the party he once helped lead has morphed into over the last several years. While he has criticized Mr. Trump in the past, it’s his comments about the events of Jan. 6 that have the most resonance.In the book, an excerpt from which was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Boehner writes that Mr. Trump’s “refusal to accept the result of the election not only cost Republicans the Senate but led to mob violence,” adding, “It was painful to watch.”At another point, he writes, “I’ll admit I wasn’t prepared for what came after the election — Trump refusing to accept the results and stoking the flames of conspiracy that turned into violence in the seat of our democracy, the building over which I once presided.”Former President Donald J. Trump speaking at a rally in front of the White House on Jan. 6 shortly before his supporters stormed the Capitol.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesHe adds: “Watching it was scary, and sad. It should have been a wake-up call for a return to Republican sanity.” Nodding to the divisions between the parties in Congress now, he writes, “Whatever they end up doing, or not doing, none of it will compare to one of the lowest points of American democracy that we lived through in January 2021.”Mr. Trump, he goes on, “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.” Mr. Boehner writes, “He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.”In an emailed statement, Jason Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, called Mr. Boehner a “Swamp Creature” and accused him of favoring “Communist China” (The former speaker’s lobbying firm represents the Chinese Embassy in the United States). In a separate email to The Times, Mr. Trump asked of Mr. Boehner, whose love of merlot wine is legendary in Washington: “Was he drinking when he made this statement? Just another RINO who couldn’t do the job!”The former president has continued to make wild and false claims about widespread voter fraud in the election, despite multiple court rulings against him and the certification of President Biden’s victory.Of members of the House and the Senate who supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, Mr. Boehner writes: “Some of the people involved did not surprise me in the least. The legislative terrorism that I’d witnessed as speaker had now encouraged actual terrorism.”Mr. Boehner, whose tenure in the House Republican leadership coincided with the congressional obstruction of the Obama years and who was subsumed by the rise of the Tea Party and House members who were rewarded by conservative media appearances, writes that the G.O.P. must “take back control from the faction that had grown to include everyone from garden-variety whack jobs to insurrectionists.”For now, Mr. Trump has retained support among Republican voters. A slim majority would like to see him as the party’s nominee again if he runs in 2024, something he has told advisers he’s serious about considering. And some House G.O.P. officials are deeply concerned about keeping him on their side in their efforts to retake control in the midterm elections next year. More