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      Trump Endorses a Loyalist, Jody Hice, for Georgia Secretary of State

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      By supporting a challenger to Georgia’s current secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, the former president signaled that he wants Republicans who opposed his election falsehoods to pay politically.Former President Donald J. Trump on Monday took aim at a Georgia official he considers one of his biggest enemies: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who refused Mr. Trump’s pressure to overturn the state’s election results last year.By endorsing Jody Hice, a Republican congressman, in his bid to unseat Mr. Raffensperger, the former president made his most prominent effort yet to try to punish elected officials who he believes have crossed him. Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, is among the top targets for Mr. Trump, along with the state’s governor, Brian Kemp.Mr. Raffensperger and other Georgia election officials certified President Biden’s victory after conducting several recounts. They have said the results were fair and accurate, dismissing Mr. Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen from him through widespread fraud.In a statement issued shortly after Mr. Hice announced his candidacy for the position on Monday, Mr. Trump praised him as “one of our most outstanding congressmen,” and alluded to his own baseless claims of voter fraud, which he has said deprived him of victory in the state. “Unlike the current Georgia Secretary of State, Jody leads out front with integrity,” Mr. Trump said. “Jody will stop the Fraud and get honesty into our Elections!”The race in Georgia for secretary of state — until the 2020 election a relatively low-profile job across the country — carries outsize implications in the battleground state, with Republicans there working to roll back voting rights and Democrats fighting those efforts.Should Mr. Hice beat Mr. Raffensperger in the Republican primary, his nomination could energize Democrats who are alarmed by the prospect of elections in the state being run by a Trump loyalist. No date for the primary has been set yet.Mr. Hice, who represents Georgia’s 10th Congressional District, stretching south and east from Atlanta, in January condemned the second House impeachment of Mr. Trump as “misguided” and aimed at “scoring cheap political points.” In the weeks after the November election, he supported Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud, including a challenge before the Supreme Court that sought to overturn the results in states Mr. Trump lost.Mr. Hice also served in the House Freedom Caucus with former Representative Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s fourth and last chief of staff. Mr. Meadows was integral in Mr. Trump’s efforts to recruit Mr. Hice, two Republicans briefed on the discussions said.As he seeks to retain control of the Republican Party, Mr. Trump is determined to remain a kingmaker for down-ballot elections, while seeking retribution against those he perceives as having betrayed him.So far, he has endorsed only one other candidate running against someone he feels personally aggrieved by: Max Miller, a former White House aide, who is challenging Representative Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican representing Ohio’s Sixth Congressional District. Mr. Gonzalez was one of 10 House members who voted for Mr. Trump’s impeachment.Mr. Hice’s challenge — against a Trump nemesis in a critical swing state — will be a higher-profile test of Mr. Trump’s political clout among Republicans.The move to back Mr. Hice against the sitting secretary of state is also extraordinary given that Mr. Raffensperger has confirmed his office is investigating Mr. Trump’s attempts to reverse the election results, including a phone call the former president made to him. Mr. Trump is also under investigation by Fulton County prosecutors into whether he and others tried to improperly influence the election.Mr. Raffensperger was on the receiving end of a now-infamous call in early January, in which Mr. Trump pushed baseless claims of widespread election irregularities and asked the secretary of state to “find” enough votes to reverse the win for Mr. Biden.“All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state,” Mr. Trump said during the call.Mr. Raffensperger repeatedly told him his data was wrong. “We have to stand by our numbers,” he said. “We believe our numbers are right.”Mr. Trump, when he had a Twitter feed, repeatedly attacked Mr. Raffensperger for not acceding to his demands.In a statement on Monday afternoon, Mr. Raffensperger was scathing about his future opponent. “Few have done more to cynically undermine faith in our election than Jody Hice,” he said, adding, “Georgia Republicans seeking a candidate who’s accomplished nothing now have one.”Richard Fausset More

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      How Senator Ron Johnson Helps Erode Confidence in Government

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      Pushing false theories on the virus, the vaccine and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Mr. Johnson, the Republican senator from Wisconsin, has absorbed his party’s transformation under Donald Trump.BROOKFIELD, Wis. — Senator Ron Johnson incited widespread outrage when he said recently that he would have been more afraid of the rioters who rampaged the Capitol on Jan. 6 had they been members of Black Lives Matter and antifa.But his revealing and incendiary comment, which quickly prompted accusations of racism, came as no surprise to those who have followed Mr. Johnson’s career in Washington or back home in Wisconsin. He has become the Republican Party’s foremost amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation now that Donald Trump himself is banned from social media and largely avoiding appearances on cable television.Mr. Johnson is an all-access purveyor of misinformation on serious issues such as the pandemic and the legitimacy of American democracy, as well as invoking the etymology of Greenland as a way to downplay the effects of climate change.In recent months, Mr. Johnson has sown doubts about President Biden’s victory, argued that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was not an armed insurrection, promoted discredited Covid-19 treatments, said he saw no need to get the coronavirus vaccine himself and claimed that the United States could have ended the pandemic a year ago with the development of a generic drug if the government had wanted that to happen.Last year, he spent months as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee seeking evidence that Mr. Biden had tried to pressure Ukrainian officials to aid his son Hunter, which an Intelligence Community report released on Monday said was misinformation that was spread by Russia to help Mr. Trump’s re-election.Mr. Johnson has sown doubts about President Biden’s victory, argued that the attack on the Capitol was not an armed insurrection and promoted discredited Covid-19 treatments.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesMr. Johnson has also become the leading Republican proponent of a revisionist effort to deny the motives and violence of the mob that breached the Capitol. At a Senate hearing to examine the events of that day, Mr. Johnson read into the record an account from a far-right website attributing the violence to “agents-provocateurs” and “fake Trump protesters.” On Saturday, he told a conference of conservative political organizers in Wisconsin that “there was no violence on the Senate side, in terms of the chamber.” In fact, Trump supporters stormed the chamber shortly after senators were evacuated.His continuing assault on the truth, often under the guise of simply “asking questions” about established facts, is helping to diminish confidence in American institutions at a perilous moment, when the health and economic well-being of the nation relies heavily on mass vaccinations, and when faith in democracy is shaken by right-wing falsehoods about voting.Republicans are 27 percentage points less likely than Democrats to say they plan to get, or have already received, a vaccine, a Pew Research Center study released this month found. In an interview, Mr. Johnson repeatedly refused to say that vaccines were safe or to encourage people to get them, resorting instead to insinuations — “there’s still so much we don’t know about all of this” — that undermine efforts to defeat the pandemic.The drumbeat of distortions, false theories and lies reminds some Wisconsin Republicans of a figure from the state’s past who also rarely let facts get in the way of his agenda: Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose witch hunt for communists in and out of government in the 1950s ruined lives and bitterly divided the country.“Wisconsin voters love mavericks, they really love mavericks — you go way back to Joe McCarthy,” said Jim Sensenbrenner, a long-serving Republican congressman from the Milwaukee suburbs who retired in January. “They do love people who rattle the cage an awful lot and bring up topics that maybe people don’t want to talk about.”For Democrats, who have never forgotten Mr. Johnson’s defeat of the liberal darling Russ Feingold in 2010, and again in a 2016 rematch, regaining the Senate seat in 2022 is a top priority. Though he has yet to announce whether he would be seeking a third term, Mr. Johnson recently said that the fury that Democrats had directed his way had made him want to stay in the fight. Still, he has raised just $590,000 in the past two years — a paltry sum for an incumbent senator.Mr. Johnson’s most recent provocation came on March 12, when he contrasted Black Lives Matter protesters to the Trump supporters “who love this country” and stormed the Capitol, the carnage resulting in 140 injured police officers and more than 300 arrests by federal authorities. During an interview with a right-wing radio host, Joe Pagliarulo, Mr. Johnson said: “Joe, this will get me in trouble. Had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”Research on the protests against racial injustice over the summer showed that they were largely nonviolent.In the interview with The Times, Mr. Johnson rejected comparisons to McCarthy. And he insisted he had no racist intent in making his argument.Like former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Johnson proved himself remarkably adept at adopting the misinformation that increasingly animated right-wing media. Erin Schaff/The New York Times“I didn’t feel threatened,” he said. “So it’s a true statement. And then people said, ‘Well, why?’ Well, because I’ve been to a lot of Trump rallies. I spend three hours with thousands of Trump supporters. And I think I know them pretty well. I don’t know any Trump supporter who would have done what the rioters did.”On Sunday, Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, denounced Mr. Johnson’s distortion of the events of Jan. 6. “We don’t need to try and explain away or come up with alternative versions,” he said on the NBC program “Meet the Press.” “We all saw what happened.”Mr. Johnson, in the Times interview, also faulted the federal government for what he called its “tunnel vision” pursuit of a Covid-19 vaccine while not more deeply studying treatments such as hydroxychloroquine — the anti-malarial drug promoted by Mr. Trump that the Food and Drug Administration says is not effective against the virus. That strategy, he said, cost “tens of thousands of lives.”Conspiracy theories and a defiant disregard of facts were a fringe but growing element of the Republican Party when Mr. Johnson entered politics in 2010 — notably in the vice-presidential candidacy of Sarah Palin two years earlier. But under Mr. Trump, the fringe became the mainstream. Fact-free assertions by the president, from the size of his inaugural crowd in 2017 to the “big lie” of a stolen election in 2020, required Republican officials to fall in line with his gaslighting or lose the support of the party’s base voters.Mr. Johnson proved himself remarkably adept at adopting the misinformation that increasingly animated Fox News commentators and right-wing talk radio.“Through the years, as the party has morphed into a muscular ignorance, Q-Anon sect, he’s followed along with them,” said Christian Schneider, a former Republican political operative in Wisconsin who embedded with the Johnson campaign in 2010 to write a glowing account for a local conservative magazine. “Now, he’s a perfect example of that type of politics.”Mr. Johnson entered politics as a businessman concerned about federal spending and debt in 2010, defeating the Democratic senator Russ Feingold.Narayan Mahon for The New York TimesMr. Johnson was the chief executive of a plastics company started by his wife’s family when he first ran for the Senate in 2010. He campaigned as a new-to-politics businessman concerned about federal spending and debt, and he spent $9 million of his own money on the race.But there were signs in that first campaign of Mr. Johnson’s predilection for anti-intellectualism. On several occasions, he declared that climate change was not man-made but instead caused by “sun spots” and said excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere “helps the trees grow.” He also offered a false history of Greenland to dismiss the effects of global warming.“You know, there’s a reason Greenland was called Greenland,” Mr. Johnson told WKOW-TV in Madison back then. “It was actually green at one point in time. And it’s been, you know, since, it’s a whole lot whiter now so we’ve experienced climate change throughout geologic time.”In the interview on Thursday, Mr. Johnson was still misinformed about the etymology of Greenland, which got its name from the explorer Erik the Red’s attempt to lure settlers to the ice-covered island.“I could be wrong there, but that’s always been my assumption that, at some point in time, those early explorers saw green,” Mr. Johnson said. “I have no idea.”Just as Mr. Trump would later use Fox News to build a national political persona, Mr. Johnson did so on Wisconsin’s wide network of conservative talk-radio shows. His political rise would not have been possible without support from Charlie Sykes, then an influential radio host in Milwaukee who once read an entire 20-minute speech by Mr. Johnson on the air.Mr. Sykes, who since 2016 has been a harsh critic of Trump-era Republicans, said last week of Mr. Johnson: “I don’t know how he went from being a chamber of commerce guy to somebody who sounds like he reads the Gateway Pundit every day. He’s turned into Joe McCarthy.”This month alone, Mr. Johnson has made at least 15 appearances on 11 different radio shows.Conspiracy theories and a defiant disregard of facts were a fringe but growing element of the Republican Party when Mr. Johnson entered politics in 2010.Morry Gash/Associated PressOn Tuesday he appeared with Vicki McKenna, whose right-wing show is popular with Wisconsin conservatives. She began by attacking public-health guidance on wearing a mask and maintaining social distance, arguing it is a Democratic plot to control Americans. Mr. Johnson agreed with Ms. McKenna and her assessment that public-health experts in the federal government are misleading the country when they promote the coronavirus vaccine.“We’ve closed our minds to all of these other potentially useful and cheap therapies all on the holy grail of a vaccine,” he said. Dr. Fauci, he added, is “not a god.”In the interview, the senator said it was not his responsibility to to use his public prominence to encourage Americans to get vaccinated.“I don’t have all the information to say, ‘Do this,’” Mr. Johnson said.His false theories about the virus and the vaccine are reminiscent of other misinformation that Mr. Johnson has amplified. During a 2014 appearance on Newsmax TV, he warned of Islamic State militants infecting themselves with the Ebola virus and then traveling to the United States. In 2015, he introduced legislation directing the federal government to protect itself against the threat of an electromagnetic pulse, a conspiracy theory that has long lived on the far right of American politics.Last year’s monthslong investigation by Mr. Johnson’s Homeland Security committee into the Bidens and Ukraine concluded with the G.O.P. majority report finding no wrongdoing by the former vice president. An Intelligence Community assessment declassified and released on Monday concluded that Russia had spread misinformation about Hunter Biden to damage his father’s campaign and to help Mr. Trump win re-election.Mr. Johnson, who was not named in the assessment, was adamant that his work was not directly, or unwittingly, influenced by Russians.“Read the report — show me where there’s any Russian disinformation,” he said. “Anybody who thinks I spread disinformation is uninformed because I haven’t.”For weeks after the November election, Mr. Johnson refused to acknowledge Mr. Biden as the winner while echoing Mr. Trump’s false statements about rampant fraud. He convened his committee in December to air baseless claims of fraud and mishandling of ballots, even as dozens of claims of fraud made by the Trump campaign were being tossed out of courts across the country.Mr. Johnson has refused to say that coronavirus vaccines are safe or to encourage people to get them.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesIn a cascade of interviews with friendly conservative outlets, Mr. Johnson has lately portrayed himself as a victim of “the radical left” that is waging a scorched-earth campaign to flip his Senate seat.“The best way to maintain power is to destroy your political opposition, and they’re targeting me,” he told the Oshkosh radio host Bob Burnell on Tuesday. “This is obviously a vulnerable Senate seat in a swing state so they think I’d probably be the target No. 1. And I am target No. 1.”Mr. Johnson’s defenders say he is fighting the liberal media’s attempts to silence him.“I see the same thing happening with Senator Johnson that the media did with Donald Trump,” said Gerard Randall, the chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s African-American Advisory Council. “I know Senator Johnson personally, and I know that he is not a racist.”If Mr. Johnson seeks a third term, the race is likely to be decided in the Milwaukee suburbs, which used to deliver Republican landslides but have moved away from the party since the Trump era.The city of Brookfield, for example, backed Mr. Trump by a margin of just nine percentage points in November, after voting for him by 20 points in 2016 and President George W. Bush by 39 points in 2004.“There was a lot of eye-rolling” about Mr. Johnson’s recent comments about the Capitol siege, said Scott Berg, a conservative who has served as a Brookfield city alderman for 20 years. “If I were in the leadership of the Wisconsin Republican Party, I’d be out shopping for candidates” for the Senate in 2022, he added.Still, in 2016, Mr. Johnson ran 10 percentage points ahead of Mr. Trump in Brookfield. Voters there suggested the suburb might not be drifting from Republicans as fast as some Democrats had hoped.“I’m a Johnson supporter — I voted for him twice — but I think he’s going down a rabbit hole I don’t want any part of,” said John Raschig, a retiree who was leaving a Pick ‘n Save supermarket. “It’s sort of like Trump: I’d vote for him because the other side’s awful, but I’d prefer somebody else.”Trip Gabriel More

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      How a Sham Candidate Helped Flip a Florida Election

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      The candidate and the man who prosecutors say recruited him to play spoiler in a Florida Senate race last year were both arrested this week.MIAMI — The recruitment of the sham candidate began with a Facebook message at around 4 a.m. on May 15, 2020. “Call me,” a Florida legislator turned lobbyist wrote to an old friend. “I have a question for you.”Later that day, former State Senator Frank Artiles, a Republican, asked Alexis Pedro Rodriguez by phone whether he still owned a home in the suburban Miami village of Palmetto Bay. Because in that case, Mr. Artiles wanted something else: to put his friend’s property and last name to use in the upcoming election.The incumbent Democrat, State Senator José Javier Rodríguez, was on the ballot. And Mr. Artiles, a crafty political operator with a dubious reputation, had a plan: to plant his friend as a candidate and siphon off votes that could defeat Senator Rodríguez.The plan worked, setting off one of Florida’s most brazen electoral scandals in years — even by the heady standards of a state that has long been fertile ground for political scammers. What is still uncertain is how broad the scandal is, whether it had touched other races and whether it was part of an organized effort by Republicans or an interest group to sway legislative races.Mr. Rodriguez, a machine-parts dealer who had been struggling financially, agreed to help Mr. Artiles, who promised him $50,000 in return. He switched from Republican to no party affiliation and qualified for the ballot as Alex Rodriguez. He did not disclose that he actually lived far from the district, in Boca Raton, or that the money for his candidacy came from Mr. Artiles.In November, Senator Rodríguez, an effective legislator who had crusaded for Florida to face the climate change crisis, lost to the Republican challenger, Ileana Garcia, by a mere 32 votes out of more than 215,000 that had been cast. Alex Rodriguez had received 6,382 votes and played the spoiler.It was a devastating loss for Florida Democrats in a year of Republican successes in the state. It was also the result of criminal behavior, prosecutors say.On Thursday, Mr. Artiles, 47, and Mr. Rodriguez, 55, turned themselves in for arrest. They were each charged with three third-degree felony charges related to violating campaign finance law, including for conspiracy to make campaign contributions in excess of legal limits, making those excess contributions and false swearing in connection to an election.Mr. Artiles declined to comment to a scrum of reporters who chased him out of jail on Thursday once he posted a $5,000 bond. “This will be decided in the courts, thank you,” he said.His lawyer, Greg Chonillo, said in a statement on Friday that his client, whose home was raided by investigators on Wednesday, had been cooperative with prosecutors “throughout the course of this investigation.”“We will be investigating this matter fully and zealously, representing our client in court against these charges,” Mr. Chonillo said.Mr. Artiles planned to use Alex Rodriguez as a candidate that would siphon votes away from State Senator José Javier Rodríguez, causing him to lose.Steve Cannon/Associated PressThe story of how Mr. Artiles plotted the scheme, according to the arrest documents, is a classic South Florida racket complete with the sale of a nonexistent Range Rover and wads of cash stored in a home safe.But it leaves unanswered the questions of where the money for the scheme came from — the Republican Senate president said the party had nothing to do with it — and whether the funds were tied to secretive dark money that oozed through two other State Senate races last year. Republicans have controlled the state government for more than two decades.On Friday, Democrats called for campaign finance reform — and for the resignation of Ms. Garcia so that a new election could be held. “Her victory is clearly tainted,” said Manny Diaz, chairman of the Florida Democratic Party.Prosecutors said they had found no ties between her and the scheme by Mr. Artiles and Mr. Rodriguez. On Friday, State Senator Wilton Simpson, the state’s Senate president, issued a joint statement with Ms. Garcia saying that they “support the ongoing efforts of law enforcement.”“Senator Garcia has the full support of President Simpson as she continues to serve her constituents,” the statement said.South Florida has an ignominious history of political and electoral shenanigans, both high profile — fraud that was so rampant in a Miami mayoral election in 1997 that a judge threw out the results — and low rent, such as small-time brokers getting caught unlawfully harvesting absentee ballots.In 2012, former Representative David Rivera, a Republican, was involved in a shadow campaign to try to hurt the electoral chances of his Democratic rival, Joe Garcia. The recruited candidate and Mr. Rivera’s ex-girlfriend, who acted as a go-between, wound up in jail. Mr. Rivera, who was never charged, last month was ordered to pay the Federal Election Commission a $456,000 fine.On Thursday, Katherine Fernández Rundle, the state attorney for Miami-Dade County, a Democrat, noted that recruiting a sham candidate to deliberately influence an election was not illegal, unless the candidate was also secretly financed.“Is it an attack on our democracy? Is it a dirty political trick?” she said. “Absolutely.”At the center of the latest scandal is Mr. Artiles (pronounced are-TEE-less), who before his arrest this week was perhaps best known in Tallahassee, the state’s capital, for resigning from the Senate in 2017, after he cursed at and used a racist slur before a group of Black lawmakers. His political committee had spent money on “consultants” who were models from Hooters and Playboy without any campaign experience. He once denied punching a college student at a bar near the Capitol.His involvement in recruiting the sham candidate for the Senate District 37 race last year became public in December, when The Miami Herald reported that Mr. Artiles had boasted about planting Mr. Rodriguez on the ballot to a crowd at an election night party held at an Irish pub in Seminole County. “That is me, that was all me,” The Herald quoted Mr. Artiles as saying, citing an anonymous source who was present.Employees and campaign observers working on a manual recount for Florida’s Senate District 37 election between Ileana Garcia and José Javier Rodríguez, at the Miami-Dade Elections Department in November.David Santiago/Miami Herald, via Associated PressThe furor around Mr. Rodriguez’s suspicious candidacy had begun after Election Day, when the results separating Senator Rodríguez and Ms. Garcia, a founder of the group Latinas for Trump, were so tight that they led to a manual recount.Local reporters in Tallahassee, Orlando and Miami found that Mr. Rodriguez along with two mysterious under-the-radar candidates in two other Senate races, one in the Miami area and one in Seminole County, were all likely plants. (Results in the other races were not close.)Politico Florida tied the three candidates to dark money from two political committees that had sent hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of attack fliers to voters during the campaign. The only donor reported was an entity that listed a UPS box in Atlanta as its mailing address. The committees amended their financial reports after Election Day, changing the source of the money to a different donor, this time in Colorado.Investigators with Miami-Dade County’s public corruption investigations unit began sniffing around on Nov. 11, eight days after the election.“It was suspicious that Rodriguez did not appear to have actively campaigned,” Detective Eutimio Cepero of the Miami Police Department wrote in one of the arrest documents. “Additionally, it was learned that political committees were spending money in support of Rodriguez’s candidacy, even though Rodriguez did not actively campaign.”Investigators found that Mr. Artiles ultimately paid $44,708 to Mr. Rodriguez in violation of the state’s $1,000 campaign contribution limit for legislative races. The payments came in various forms, including payments of $3,000 and then $5,000 that Mr. Artiles had stored in his home safe and recorded in a ledger on his desk as well as $2,400 that Mr. Artiles had wired to Mr. Rodriguez’s landlord.There was much distrust between Mr. Artiles and Mr. Rodriguez, who told investigators he thought Mr. Artiles would not come through with the money he had promised him. At one point, when Mr. Artiles was looking for a used Range Rover to buy his daughter, Mr. Rodriguez concocted a story about finding one in Jacksonville for $10,900. Mr. Artiles paid Mr. Rodriguez for the car, even though it did not exist. (That money was not considered by prosecutors as part of Mr. Artiles’s payments to Mr. Rodriguez for his candidacy.)But where Mr. Artiles got so much cash is still unknown.“Frank Artiles is not a lone wolf,” said William R. Barzee, a lawyer for Mr. Rodriguez. “Over half a million dollars was spent by political operatives working in the shadows to prop up ghost candidates in three separate Senate races, all in one cycle. This was a well-thought-out, calculated and coordinated plan to steal Senate seats throughout Florida.”The “greatest beneficiary of these actions,” Mr. Barzee added, “is the Republican Party of Florida.”Mr. Simpson, the Senate president who ran the Republican Senate campaigns in 2020, has said that he had nothing to do with the effort. “I think we don’t have all the facts,” he told reporters in Tallahassee on Thursday. “We’re learning what you’re learning as you report it.”“I hope this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said former State Representative Juan-Carlos Planas, known as J.C., who was Senator Rodríguez’s lawyer during the recount and who himself once fought a candidate who had been planted against him: his second cousin, who appeared on the Republican primary ballot as Juan E. “J.P.” Planas.Senator Rodríguez, 42, lamented that weak enforcement mechanisms continue to allow questionable candidates to make it on the ballot.“It’s a shame that it has to reach this level of criminality for there to be any kind of consequence, because this is not the first time these types of schemes have been put together,” he said. “But this is the Wild West here in Florida.” More

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      In Restricting Early Voting, the Right Sees a New ‘Center of Gravity’

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      Donald Trump is no longer center stage. But many conservative activists are finding that the best way to raise money and keep voters engaged is to make his biggest fabrication their top priority.For more than a decade, the Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project have pursued cultural and policy priorities from the social conservative playbook, one backing laws to ban abortion once a fetal heartbeat could be detected and the other opposing civil rights protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people. From their shared offices in suburban Virginia, they and their affiliated committees spent more than $20 million on elections last year.But after Donald J. Trump lost his bid for a second term and convinced millions of Americans that nonexistent fraud was to blame, the two groups found that many of their donors were thinking of throwing in the towel. Why, donors argued, should they give any money if Democrats were going to game the system to their advantage, recalled Frank Cannon, the senior strategist for both groups.“‘Before I give you any money for anything at all, tell me how this is going to be solved,’” Mr. Cannon said, summarizing his conversations. He and other conservative activists — many with no background in election law — didn’t take long to come up with an answer, which was to make rolling back access to voting the “center of gravity in the party,” as he put it.Passing new restrictions on voting — in particular, tougher limits on early voting and vote-by-mail — is now at the heart of the right’s strategy to keep donors and voters engaged as Mr. Trump fades from public view and leaves a void in the Republican Party that no other figure or issue has filled. In recent weeks, many of the most prominent and well-organized groups that power the G.O.P.’s vast voter turnout efforts have directed their resources toward a campaign to restrict when and how people can vote, with a focus on the emergency policies that states enacted last year to make casting a ballot during a pandemic easier. The groups believe it could be their best shot at regaining a purchase on power in Washington.Their efforts are intensifying over the objections of some Republicans who say the strategy is cynical and shortsighted, arguing that it further commits their party to legitimizing a lie. It also sends a message, they say, that Republicans think they lost mostly because the other side cheated, which prevents them from grappling honestly with what went wrong and why they might lose again.Some also argue that setting new restrictions on voting could undercut the party just as it was making important gains with Black and Latino voters, who are more likely to be impeded by such laws.“Restricting voting is only a short-term rush. It’s not a strategy for future strength,” said Benjamin Ginsberg, one of the Republican Party’s most prominent election lawyers, who has criticized Mr. Trump and other members of the party for attacking the integrity of the voting process.Former President Donald J. Trump speaking in 2018 at a Susan B. Anthony List gala in Washington.  Many conservative groups have raised money off his baseless claims of election fraud, and supported the Republican push to roll back voting rights.Doug Mills/The New York Times“Look at what it really means,” Mr. Ginsberg added. “A party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”Just as notable as the brand-name conservative groups that are raising money off Mr. Trump’s revisionism — Susan B. Anthony List, the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Council, Tea Party Patriots — are some of the heavy hitters that are sitting this fight out. Americans for Prosperity, the political organization funded by the Koch fortune, is not supporting the efforts to pass more ballot access laws, nor are other groups in the multimillion-dollar Koch political network.The debate over voting laws is also part of the bigger fight over the future of the Republican Party, and whether it should continue being so focused on making Mr. Trump and his hard-core voters happy.For now, many conservative groups are choosing to side with the former president, even at the risk of feeding corrosive falsehoods about the prevalence of voter fraud.It is certainly the more financially secure path and, some say, the one where they will encounter the least resistance. With polls showing that at least two-thirds of Republicans harbor doubts about President Biden’s legitimacy or believe that Mr. Trump somehow won more votes despite receiving seven million fewer than his opponent, Republican consultants said they were following their party.Some expressed a certain resignation about the situation: Mr. Trump created a perception that is now their party’s reality.“I’m not someone who thinks that China hacked the voting machines,” said Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project. But at the same time, he said, “if you’re a conservative organization and you have small-dollar donors, you’re hearing this from everywhere: ‘Well, what’s the point in voting?’”One major focus for conservatives is rolling back the Covid-related changes that states enacted to make absentee voting easier last year. Mr. Schilling said his group’s intention was to “restore lost faith” in the process with policies that don’t allow those emergency procedures to become permanent. The American Principles Project, like other groups on the right, supports making states verify signatures on absentee ballots with signatures they have in their voter databases, and wants ballots sent only to people who request them.Shortly after Election Day, Trump supporters protested the results at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta.Audra Melton for The New York TimesVoters in Georgia who were disillusioned after Mr. Trump’s defeat — many of whom believed his far-fetched and debunked claims of voting by pets, dead people and other irregularities — helped cost Republicans control of the Senate. Georgia Republicans are now pushing a raft of new voting restrictions that Democrats have called political payback under the guise of “election integrity.” Many of the conservative organizations jumping in have a large network of activists in churches and anti-abortion groups across the country.The Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project recently announced a joint “election transparency” campaign and set a fund-raising goal of $5 million. They hired a top conservative activist who is a former Trump administration official to lead it. They have organized conference calls for activists with other social conservative groups across the country, and say they have found participants to be enthusiastic about getting involved even if election law is entirely new to them.The Family Research Council, which advised the Trump administration on policies like ending military eligibility for transgender people and expanding the definition of religious freedom, recently dedicated one of its regular online organizing sessions, the “Pray Vote Stand Townhall,” to encouraging people to lobby their state legislators.Tony Perkins, the group’s president, expressed optimism about the number of voting bills that were moving along and suggested that last year’s election results were tainted. “We’ve got 106 election-related bills that are in 28 states right now,” he said to the audience. “So here’s the good news: There is action taking place to go back and correct what was uncovered in this last election.”Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, suggested that the results of the 2020 election couldn’t be trusted.Mark J. Terrill/Associated PressJoining Mr. Perkins on the stage was Michael P. Farris, the president of the deep-pocketed and powerful Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. He chimed in approvingly: “Let me just say, ‘Amen,’” he said.Also throwing its weight behind the campaign is the influential Heritage Foundation and its political arm, Heritage Action for America, which recently announced that it planned to spend millions of dollars to support voting policies that are popular with conservatives. Those include laws that would require identification for voters and limit the availability of absentee ballots, as well as other policies that Heritage said would “secure and strengthen state election systems.”Several Republican strategists said that while the “stolen” election canard was accepted widely among rank-and-file Republican voters, they were surprised to find how deeply it had taken hold with major donors, who seem the most convinced of its truth and eager to act.Groups that are fighting these attempts to restrict ballot access said that the organizing on the right was so new that its impact had been hard to gauge. Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, said Republican legislatures seemed to understand the power of this issue on their own and didn’t need much persuasion to act.“Are we seeing a lot of new lawsuits, new lobbying, other things on the ground?” he said. “The answer is mostly no. We’re seeing a lot of fund-raising.” Still, the number of groups involved and the salience of the issue was striking, he said.“There’s massive organizational infrastructure behind it,” Mr. Waldman said. “It’s hard to identify too many unifying issues right now in the Republican Party. But this seems to be one of them.”As contentious as some of the past conservative-led campaigns to restrict voting were, this time is even more emotionally and politically charged given how closely associated it is with Mr. Trump and the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol that he incited. Some conservatives said the association with that day complicated what could be relatively uncontroversial changes to regulate how absentee ballots are sent out, collected and counted now that so many more people are likely to request them in the future.“We also took a look at the election results, and we don’t believe that it was stolen. But that doesn’t mean we don’t think there aren’t things that can be improved,” said Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project. The group supports a range of changes: Some would regulate mail-in voting at the margins, like requiring that ballots are mailed out no earlier than three weeks before the election and received by the time polls close on the day of.Others would no doubt be more controversial, like banning the organized, third-party collection of ballots that conservative critics call ballot harvesting.Mr. Snead said it was problematic that the 2020 election and its aftermath had cast a shadow over the entire issue. “There’s definitely a recognition that we don’t want this to be something that is tied to the last election,” he said. But as someone who started his work on election law before Mr. Trump was elected and shares the broader goal of establishing more conditions on voting, he acknowledged that the environment had never been riper.“It has risen to a degree of prominence it probably has never enjoyed,” Mr. Snead said. More

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      House Renews Landmark Domestic Violence Bill, but Obstacles Wait in Senate

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      The House vote was bipartisan, but many Republicans object to new gun restrictions on domestic abusers that could complicate Senate passage.The House moved on Wednesday to renew the Violence Against Women Act, adding firearm restrictions for convicted domestic abusers and other new provisions to a landmark law that has helped combat domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking but expired in 2019.President Biden, who wrote the law into existence as a senator in 1994, has made strengthening it one of his top domestic priorities during his time in office, and Wednesday’s vote was the first significant step toward putting it back into effect after lapsing under President Donald J. Trump. The law’s renewal has taken on added urgency amid alarming increases in domestic violence during the coronavirus pandemic.The House’s 244-to-172 vote was bipartisan, with 29 Republicans joining united Democrats to approve the bill. But substantial conservative opposition to a measure that has enjoyed broad backing from both parties in the past foreshadowed a more difficult path ahead in the Senate, where Democrats control just 50 of the 60 votes necessary for passage.In a statement after the vote, Mr. Biden urged the Senate to “bring a strong bipartisan coalition together” to send him a bill to sign into law as soon as possible.“Growing evidence shows that Covid-19 has only exacerbated the threat of intimate partner violence, creating a pandemic within a pandemic for countless women at risk for abuse,” he said. “This should not be a Democratic or Republican issue — it’s about standing up against the abuse of power and preventing violence.”Much of the House’s proposed update to the Violence Against Women Act, commonly known as VAWA, is noncontroversial. It would build on a patchwork of programs like violence prevention and housing assistance for abuse victims, reaffirm legal protections for victims and their families, and more aggressively target resources to minority communities.In an effort to expand the law’s reach, however, Democrats have also included provisions tightening access to firearms by people convicted of a violent crime or subject to a court order, and expanding protections for gay, bisexual and transgender people. In an attempt to cut into high rates of domestic violence against Native American women, their bill would grant tribal courts new authority to prosecute non-Indians for sex trafficking, sexual violence and stalking.“This bill opens the door of the armor of the federal government and its protection of women who continue to lose their life and men,” said Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas and one of its principal authors. “Yes, it is a culturally sensitive initiative that protects immigrant women, it protects Native Americans, it protects poor women.”But what Democrats characterized as equitable expansions of the law meant to meet the needs of a changing nation have prompted intense backlash among conservative Republicans, who have eagerly jumped into ideological battles with Democrats again and again in recent weeks.In sometimes fiery debate on the House floor on Wednesday, several conservatives accused the majority of using a law meant to protect women as a Trojan horse for a “far-left political agenda” on gun control and gay and transgender rights while holding hostage a clean reauthorization of the bill.“The most egregious provisions of this bill push leftist gender ideology at the expense of important protections for women’s privacy and safety,” said Representative Debbie Lesko, Republican of Arizona, who recounted her own experience with domestic violence. “If this bill is enacted, these shelters under penalty of federal law would be required to take in men and shelter them with women, putting vulnerable women at risk.”Ms. Lesko appeared to be referring to provisions barring groups that receive funds under VAWA from discriminating based on gender identity that were enshrined in law in 2013 and merely reiterated in the new bill. Its proponents say they have caused no widespread safety or privacy issues. One new aspect of the bill would require the Bureau of Prisons to consider the safety of transgender prisoners when giving housing assignments.Republicans were just as angry over the proposed closing of the so-called boyfriend loophole. While existing federal law forbids people convicted of domestic violence against a current or former spouse to buy or own a firearm, the new legislation would extend the prohibition to those convicted of abusing, assaulting or stalking a dating partner, or to those under a court restraining order.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, pushed unsuccessfully for amendments that would allow the government to fund firearm training and self-defense classes for women.“If you want to protect women, make sure women are gun owners and know how to defend themselves,” she said. “That’s the greatest defense for women.”Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, offered an alternative proposal on Wednesday that would have reauthorized the law without changes for a single year to allow time for more bipartisan negotiation. It failed 177 to 249.Democrats and some Republicans did adopt an amendment by Representatives Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, and John Katko, Republican of New York, that appends what would be the first federal law to specifically address “revenge porn.” Forty-five states and the District of Columbia have put their own such laws in place in recent years, but advocates of a federal statute say they are inconsistent.The disagreements were many of the same ones that led the law to expire two years ago. House Democrats first passed a similar version of the bill to the one adopted on Wednesday in 2019 with modest support from across the aisle, but the Republican-controlled Senate declined to take it up for a vote amid an intense lobbying campaign by the N.R.A. to oppose the gun provisions.This time Democrats control the upper chamber and have vowed to hold a vote. Still, they will need at least 10 Republicans to join them to send a bill to Mr. Biden and will have to placate the minority party over many of the contentious new measures in the weeks ahead.Senate Republicans, led by Joni Ernst of Iowa, are preparing their own alternative to try to force compromises. Ms. Ernst, who has spoken about her own experience of sexual assault, told reporters this week that her colleagues objected chiefly to the gun provisions included in the House-passed measure, but she suggested their bill would eliminate other unwanted liberal proposals, too.Mr. Biden, who has called VAWA his “proudest legislative accomplishment,” enthusiastically backed the House bill and has not indicated what, if any, changes he would embrace. He won the presidency last fall in part based on the commanding support of women.The law was considered a watershed when it was written in the early 1990s. It addressed several issues that federal lawmakers had not tackled in a single piece of legislation, including keeping confidential the addresses of abused people and recognizing orders of protection across jurisdictions. Before the law was enacted, a state court order of protection in one state could not be enforced in another state.Though the law authorizing VAWA programs expired, Congress has continued to fund many of them in the meantime.Mr. Biden has already tried to make good on campaign promises to strengthen efforts to prevent domestic violence. His $1.9 trillion stimulus bill allocated $49 million for groups that aid survivors of domestic abuse, as well as housing assistance for people fleeing abuse, sexual violence and human trafficking.Katie Benner More

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      in World Politics

      The Privileged Path in America

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      It is hard to figure out how anything as important as access to COVID-19 vaccines could be left to chance and uncertainty. Welcome to America’s vaccine rollout, where privilege only works some of the time. And some of the privileged just can’t seem to get it to work for them like it almost always has. Very frustrating.

      Equity, in the sense of fairness and impartiality, has never been an American strength. Rather, the nation’s history glorifies those who grab what they can get, even when what they can get is at the expense of others. “Success” itself is prized above a fair and impartial process for achieving it that has equality of opportunity at its core. While there is nothing new about this observation, its application to both the COVID-19 vaccine distribution issues and the more general drive to confront societal inequities that the coronavirus pandemic has dramatized is worthy of discussion.

      Germany’s Handling of the Pandemic: A Model of Incompetence?

      READ MORE

      After failing at every turn to create a national urgency to adopt and implement recognizable public health measures to address the pandemic, and amid a dizzying array of inadequate state and local solutions, it became apparent that most Americans were in it for themselves. This provides the oxygen on which privilege thrives. So, for many, making individual decisions has been freed from any collective moral imperative. The Biden administration, with quiet competence, is trying to use a new national response to the pandemic as a foundation for altering this key impediment to a more equitable society.

      People with resources, a good job, a good computer and good internet access have thrived, while many “essential” workers were left to fend for themselves. The privileged know that “essential” was often just shorthand for interchangeable people required to put themselves at risk, frequently for low pay and no benefits. Humanity wasn’t a big consideration. Worse yet, the privileged didn’t seem too troubled to know that these “essential” workers frequently headed home to a crowded apartment or multi-generational substandard housing, increased health risks and limited access to meaningful health care. The joke was clearly on them.

      Those for whom testing and contact tracing would have been paths to some measure of health security seemed less likely to have access to either, while some of those wanting to take a break in Mexico or Disneyland easily found a test and cleverly avoided the rigors of contact tracing. So the beat goes on. But to what end?

      Three Threads

      While there will be a day when masks, social distancing, testing and maybe even COVID-19 vaccines will no longer be a part of daily life for most of us, it is not clear at all that any real lessons will have been learned about how best to engender the collective will necessary to meet critical national societal needs. There are three threads that seem to be coalescing to ensure that a return to “normal” is a return to a stratified society where the privileged almost always win and the underprivileged most often lose.

      Embed from Getty Images

      First, there is the power of “normal” itself. The people with the most influence want a return to their normal while those with the least influence generally want something better than a return to their normal. This is understandable, but guess which team is going to win unless good government and good people step in to level the playing field.

      Second, to successfully confront inequity, it is essential to understand the impact of inequity and the value that it brings to privilege and the impediments that it brings to those without privilege. Then, those with privilege have to be willing to part with some of it. (Not necessarily a zero-sum game.) For this to occur at the systemic and institutional levels required for enduring change, some awakening will have to occur. There is a small possibility that when some of those with privilege lose anyway, as with the vaccine distribution, it may engender a deeper empathy for those who seem to lose all the time.

      Third, there is the morally bankrupt Republican Party and its shameful indifference to the suffering of even those who still seem to believe there is something there to admire. The Biden administration, Democrats in Congress and progressives everywhere have gone big and actually gotten important things legislatively accomplished to meet the current pandemic crisis. But that effort demonstrated how tenuous a hold any effort to make America better for all actually has on the nation’s essential legislative process. With all that we have gone through as a nation in the last year, you would think that maybe some moral light would have been lit in some recesses where it had not previously penetrated, yet I don’t see much evidence of that.

      A Big Deal

      For now, President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan has been signed into law providing the legislative framework and funding for the critical elements of a national plan to confront the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout. And, perhaps even more significant for the future of the nation, Biden and congressional Democrats have given legislative gravitas to a progressive and activist agenda for confronting economic and social inequality in America. This is a big deal.

      As with every advance in a deeply divided nation, there will be pushback from those who have for decades cratered meaningful attempts at progressive social and economic legislation. Even the obvious inequities driven by pernicious systems and exposed in big bright lights by the pandemic haven’t broken the stranglehold that the pushback machine has on large segments of public thinking.

      In this context, the national response to every drive for racial justice in America’s history is instructive as progressives strive to use the lessons of the pandemic to inform a full and appropriate response to it and to the underlying inequities that helped fuel America’s pandemic response failures. Every time that racism boils its way to the surface, it readily becomes apparent that it is the systemic racism deniers in our midst who rally together to ensure that systemic change is avoided.

      Think of it in these terms: America wallowed in pandemic response failure not because some idiot didn’t wear a mask, but because coronavirus deniers stood in the way of a collective public health response. To alter this formula, Americans have to be separated from the cherished notion that they are all good people at heart. While it is undeniable that there are many good and decent Americans working every day to serve others at some risk to themselves, it is also shockingly obvious how easy it is for individuals to separate themselves from the common good.

      Unexamined privilege is the vehicle that often allows those who separate themselves from the common good to somehow feel good about themselves. Until this dynamic is changed, it will be hard to see how America can change for the better.

      *[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Can Anything End the Voting Wars?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyCan Anything End the Voting Wars?As battles over voting rules burn hotter, the stakes are still lower than both sides seem to think.Opinion ColumnistMarch 16, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin, Photos, via Getty More

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      Stimulus Bill as a Political Weapon? Democrats Are Counting on It.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Biden’s Stimulus PlanBiden’s AddressWhat to Know About the BillBenefits for Middle ClassChild Tax CreditAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyStimulus Bill as a Political Weapon? Democrats Are Counting on It.The $1.9 trillion package is a big bet by the party that it will restore a sense of normalcy by the 2022 elections and that voters will defy history and reward Democrats with more seats in Congress.Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, signed the stimulus bill this week while surrounded by Democratic members of Congress.Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMarch 15, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETWASHINGTON — Triumphant over the signing of their far-reaching $1.9 trillion stimulus package, Democrats are now starting to angle for a major political payoff that would defy history: Picking up House and Senate seats in the 2022 midterm elections, even though the party in power usually loses in the midterms.Democratic leaders are making one of the biggest electoral bets in years — that the stimulus will be so transformational for Americans across party lines and demographic groups that Democrats will be able to wield it as a political weapon next year in elections against Republicans, who voted en masse against the package.Republicans need to gain only one seat in the Senate and just five in the House in 2022 to take back control, a likely result in a normal midterm election, but perhaps a trickier one if voters credit their rivals for a strong American rebound.Yet as Democrats prepare to start selling voters on the package, they remain haunted by what happened in 2010, the last time they were in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress and pursued an ambitious agenda: They lost 63 House seats, and the majority, and were unable to fulfill President Barack Obama’s goals on issues ranging from gun control to immigration.It has become an article of faith in the party that Mr. Obama’s presidency was diminished because his two signature accomplishments, the stimulus bill and the Affordable Care Act, were not expansive enough and their pitch to the public on the benefits of both measures was lacking. By this logic, Democrats began losing elections and the full control of the government, until now, because of their initial compromises with Republicans and insufficient salesmanship.“We didn’t adequately explain what we had done,” President Biden told House Democrats this month about the 2009 Recovery Act. “Barack was so modest, he didn’t want to take, as he said, a ‘victory lap.’”Now they are determined to exorcise those old ghosts by aggressively promoting a measure they believe meets the moment and has broader appeal than the $787 billion bill they trimmed and laced with tax cuts to win a handful of Republican votes in Mr. Obama’s first months in office.Republicans say the Democratic bet is a foolhardy one, both because of how little of the spending is directly related to the coronavirus pandemic and because of fleeting voter attention spans. But Democrats say they intend to run on the bill — and press Republicans over their opposition to it.“This is absolutely something I will campaign on next year,” said Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who may be the most vulnerable incumbent Senate Democrat in the country on the ballot in 2022. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, who heads the Democratic Senate campaign arm, said he would go on “offense” against Republicans who opposed the bill and sketched out their attack: “Every Republican said no in a time of need.”Party lawmakers point out that the measure Mr. Biden signed on Thursday is more popular than the 2009 bill, according to polling; contains more tangible benefits, like the $1,400 direct payments and unemployment benefits; and comes at a time when the pandemic and former President Donald Trump’s continued appetite for big spending have blunted Republican attacks.President Biden will travel the country next week to highlight the passage of the stimulus legislation.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times“People are going to feel it right away, to me that’s the biggest thing,” said Representative Conor Lamb, a Pennsylvania Democrat whose 2018 special election victory presaged the party’s revival. “Politics is confusing, it’s image-based, everyone calls everyone else a liar — but people are going to get the money in their bank accounts.”And, Representative Sara Jacobs of California said, Democrats have “learned the lessons from 2009, we made sure we went back to our districts this weekend to tell people how much help they were going to get from this bill.”Mr. Obama’s aides are quick to note that they did promote their stimulus and the health care law but ran into much more fervent, and unified, opposition on the right as the Tea Party blossomed and portrayed the measures as wasteful and ill-conceived.At the end of last week, with the House’s first extended recess looming at month’s end, Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed House Democrats to seize the moment.Ms. Pelosi’s office sent an email to colleagues, forwarded to The Times, brimming with talking points the speaker hopes they’ll use in town halls and news conferences. “During the upcoming district work period, members are encouraged to give visibility to how the American Rescue Plan meets the needs of their communities: putting vaccines in arms, money in pockets, workers back on the job and children back in the classroom safely,” it said.For their part, White House officials said they would deploy “the whole of government,” as one aide put it, to market the plan, send cabinet officers on the road and focus on different components of the bill each day to highlight its expanse.Democrats’ hopes for avoiding the losses typical in a president’s first midterm election will depend largely on whether Americans feel life is back to normal next year — and whether they credit the party in power for thwarting the disease, despair and dysfunction that characterized the end of Mr. Trump’s term.If voters are to believe the Democrats are delivering on an American rebound, of course, it’s essential the country is roaring back to prepandemic strength in a way it was not at the end of 2009, when unemployment reached 10 percent.“You could be looking at an extraordinary growth spurt in the third and fourth quarters, and that takes you into the year when candidates make their way,” said Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, where much of the bill was crafted.The politics of the legislation, in other words, will be clear enough by this time next year. “If all the sudden you got high inflation and things are hitting the fan, Republicans are going to run on it,” said Representative Filemon Vela, a Texas Democrat. “If things are going well they’re going to run on something else.”For now, Republicans are expressing little appetite to contest a measure that has the support of 70 percent of voters, according to a Pew survey released last week.Part of their challenge stems from Mr. Trump’s aggressive advocacy for $2,000 direct payments in the previous stimulus package late last year, a drumbeat he’s kept up in his political afterlife as he argues Republicans lost the two Georgia Senate runoffs because they did not embrace the proposal.It’s difficult for congressional Republicans to portray one of the main elements of the Democrats’ bill as socialism when the de facto leader of their party is an enthusiastic supporter of wealth redistribution. Moreover, right-wing media outlets have been more focused on culture war issues that are more animating to many conservatives than size-of-government questions.Asked if they would run against the bill next year, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, said, “There’s going to be a lot of things we run against.”Republicans in Congress hope to change the subject to a surge of migrants along the Southern border.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesAt the weekly news conference of House Republican leaders, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming spoke about the stimulus for 45 seconds before changing the subject to the rising number of migrants at the Southern border..css-yoay6m{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;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-k59gj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;width:100%;}.css-1e2usoh{font-family:inherit;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;border-top:1px solid #ccc;padding:10px 0px 10px 0px;background-color:#fff;}.css-1jz6h6z{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;text-align:left;}.css-1t412wb{box-sizing:border-box;margin:8px 15px 0px 15px;cursor:pointer;}.css-hhzar2{-webkit-transition:-webkit-transform ease 0.5s;-webkit-transition:transform ease 0.5s;transition:transform ease 0.5s;}.css-t54hv4{-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-1r2j9qz{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-e1ipqs{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.5rem;padding:0px 30px 0px 0px;}.css-e1ipqs a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-e1ipqs a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1o76pdf{visibility:show;height:100%;padding-bottom:20px;}.css-1sw9s96{visibility:hidden;height:0px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1cz6wm{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;font-family:’nyt-franklin’,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;text-align:left;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1cz6wm{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1cz6wm:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1cz6wm{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}Frequently Asked Questions About the New Stimulus PackageThe stimulus payments would be $1,400 for most recipients. Those who are eligible would also receive an identical payment for each of their children. To qualify for the full $1,400, a single person would need an adjusted gross income of $75,000 or below. For heads of household, adjusted gross income would need to be $112,500 or below, and for married couples filing jointly that number would need to be $150,000 or below. To be eligible for a payment, a person must have a Social Security number. Read more. Buying insurance through the government program known as COBRA would temporarily become a lot cheaper. COBRA, for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, generally lets someone who loses a job buy coverage via the former employer. But it’s expensive: Under normal circumstances, a person may have to pay at least 102 percent of the cost of the premium. Under the relief bill, the government would pay the entire COBRA premium from April 1 through Sept. 30. A person who qualified for new, employer-based health insurance someplace else before Sept. 30 would lose eligibility for the no-cost coverage. And someone who left a job voluntarily would not be eligible, either. Read moreThis credit, which helps working families offset the cost of care for children under 13 and other dependents, would be significantly expanded for a single year. More people would be eligible, and many recipients would get a bigger break. The bill would also make the credit fully refundable, which means you could collect the money as a refund even if your tax bill was zero. “That will be helpful to people at the lower end” of the income scale, said Mark Luscombe, principal federal tax analyst at Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting. Read more.There would be a big one for people who already have debt. You wouldn’t have to pay income taxes on forgiven debt if you qualify for loan forgiveness or cancellation — for example, if you’ve been in an income-driven repayment plan for the requisite number of years, if your school defrauded you or if Congress or the president wipes away $10,000 of debt for large numbers of people. This would be the case for debt forgiven between Jan. 1, 2021, and the end of 2025. Read more.The bill would provide billions of dollars in rental and utility assistance to people who are struggling and in danger of being evicted from their homes. About $27 billion would go toward emergency rental assistance. The vast majority of it would replenish the so-called Coronavirus Relief Fund, created by the CARES Act and distributed through state, local and tribal governments, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. That’s on top of the $25 billion in assistance provided by the relief package passed in December. To receive financial assistance — which could be used for rent, utilities and other housing expenses — households would have to meet several conditions. Household income could not exceed 80 percent of the area median income, at least one household member must be at risk of homelessness or housing instability, and individuals would have to qualify for unemployment benefits or have experienced financial hardship (directly or indirectly) because of the pandemic. Assistance could be provided for up to 18 months, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Lower-income families that have been unemployed for three months or more would be given priority for assistance. Read more.And by the end of the week, Mr. McCarthy announced he and a group of House Republicans would travel to the border on Monday in a bid to highlight the problem there — and change the subject.After spending the campaign vowing to find common ground with Republicans and make Washington work again, Mr. Biden, in his first major act as president, prioritized speed and scale over bipartisanship.He and his top aides believe in legislative momentum, that success begets success and that they’ll be able to push through another pricey bill — this one to build roads, bridges and broadband — because of their early win on Covid-19 relief.“The fact that we could do it without Republicans forces them to the table,” said a senior White House official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the nitty-gritty of lawmaking.Yet to the G.O.P. lawmakers who have signaled a willingness to work with the new administration, Mr. Biden’s determination to push through the stimulus without G.O.P. votes will imperil the rest of his agenda.“What I would be worried about if I were them is what does this do to jeopardize bipartisan cooperation on other things you want to do — you can’t do everything by reconciliation,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, alluding to the parliamentary procedure by which the Senate can approve legislation by a simple majority. “I’ve heard some of our members say that, ‘If you’re going to waste all this money on unrelated matters, I’m really not interested in spending a bunch more money on infrastructure.’”To Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who was one of the Senate Republicans who went to the White House last month pitching a slimmed-down stimulus, it’s downright bizarre to hear Democrats claiming their 2010 difficulties stemmed from not going big.“I would argue it was too big, it was unfocused, it was wasted money,” Ms. Capito said.To Democrats, though, they are avoiding, not repeating, their past mistakes.“The public didn’t know about the Affordable Care Act and the administration was not exactly advertising,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters last week.Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, was just as blunt, singling out the Maine moderate who was wooed by Mr. Obama to ensure bipartisan support for the 2009 Recovery Act but whose appeals for a far-smaller compromise bill were ignored last month.“We made a big mistake in 2009 and ’10, Susan Collins was part of that mistake,” Mr. Schumer said on CNN. “We cut back on the stimulus dramatically and we stayed in recession for five years.”And, he could have noted, his party would not have full control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue for another decade.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More