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      JD Vance queda bajo el foco por críticas a los ‘momentos más débiles’ de Simone Biles

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      Mientras muchos aplaudían a la campeona olímpica por haber priorizado su salud mental en 2021, el hoy candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia dijo en ese momento que los medios celebraban la debilidad.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El senador JD Vance, de Ohio, candidato republicano a la vicepresidencia, está siendo objeto de un nuevo escrutinio debido a declaraciones que hizo en el pasado, afirmando que la gimnasta estadounidense Simone Biles, quien el jueves ganó otra medalla de oro en los Juegos Olímpicos, había mostrado debilidad al retirarse de la edición anterior del evento por un problema de salud mental.Durante una aparición en Fox News en 2021, Vance cuestionó que Biles estuviera recibiendo elogios por haber salido de la competición en los Juegos de Tokio.“Creo que el hecho de que intentemos alabar a las personas, no por sus momentos de fortaleza, no por sus momentos de heroísmo, sino por sus momentos más débiles, hace que nuestra sociedad, digamos, terapéutica, se vea muy mal”, dijo Vance, quien en ese momento se postulaba para el Senado.Ahora que tanto Vance como Biles se encuentran de nuevo bajo los reflectores, los demócratas estaban ansiosos por destacar estos comentarios. Aida Ross, vocera del Comité Nacional Demócrata, afirmó el jueves que Vance no estaba “en posición de hablar de los ‘momentos más débiles’ de nadie”.“Mientras el resto del país celebra la actuación del equipo femenino de gimnasia de EE. UU. en los Juegos Olímpicos, JD Vance se enfrenta a su momento más débil en medio de un lanzamiento lleno de tropiezos que lo ha hecho el candidato a vicepresidente más impopular en décadas”, dijo.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Washington Prepares for the ‘Super Bowl of Tax’

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      Even with control of the White House and Congress up in the air, lawmakers and lobbyists are gearing up for a big debate next year over expiring measures in former President Donald Trump’s tax law.President Biden’s decision not to seek re-election is upending expectations about who will control Washington next year. But there is one thing lawmakers and lobbyists are certain of: A tax fight is coming.Across the nation’s capital, preparations are quietly starting for what some are calling the “Super Bowl of tax.” On Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats are holding strategy and education sessions. Lobbyists are pressing their case to lawmakers and preparing multimillion-dollar publicity campaigns to defend tax breaks for corporations. Think tanks are churning out research assailing or lauding elements of the byzantine tax code.On the line is the future of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which a Republican Congress passed and former President Donald J. Trump signed into law in 2017.To avoid blowing too large of a hole in the federal budget at the time, Republicans scheduled many of the tax cuts to expire after 2025. That deadline has created a rare opportunity to reshape federal tax policy next year, and lawmakers in each party intend to be ready to wield whatever power voters give them in November.“We’re studying and preparing,” said Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, who as the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee has been holding meetings and gathering ideas about next year. “It’s preseason.”Many of the expiring tax measures are ones that benefit middle-class Americans, including a larger standard deduction, lower marginal income tax rates and a more generous child tax credit. Republicans chose to let those tax cuts expire — while making other measures like a lower 21 percent corporate rate permanent — in a bet that Democrats would eventually vote to protect them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How the Kids Online Safety Act Was Dragged Into a Political War

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      The Senate was set to pass the Kids Online Safety Act on Tuesday, but the legislation faces an uphill battle in the House because of censorship concerns.Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union sent 300 high school students to Capitol Hill to lobby against the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill meant to protect children online.The teenagers told the staffs of 85 lawmakers that the legislation could censor important conversations, particularly among marginalized groups like L.G.B.T.Q. communities.“We live on the internet, and we are afraid that important information we’ve accessed all our lives will no longer be available,” said Anjali Verma, a 17-year-old rising high school senior from Bucks County, Pa., who was part of the student lobbying campaign. “Regardless of your political perspective, this looks like a censorship bill.”The effort was one of many escalations in recent months by those who oppose the bill. In June, a progressive nonprofit, Fight for the Future, organized students to write hundreds of letters to urge lawmakers to scrap it. Conservative groups like Patriot Voices, founded by the former Republican senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, are also protesting with an online petition.What was supposed to be a simple piece of legislation to protect children online has been dragged into a heated political war. At the heart of the battle are concerns about how the bill could affect free speech on culturally divisive issues, which both sides of the spectrum worry could be weaponized under the guise of child safety. Liberals worry about censorship of transgender care, while conservatives are concerned about the same with anti-abortion efforts. The tech industry has also latched onto the same First Amendment arguments to oppose the bill.The controversy stems from the specific terms of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA. The legislation would require social media platforms and other sites to limit features that can heighten cyberbullying, harassment and the glorification of self-harm. The bill would also require tech companies to turn on the highest privacy and safety settings for users under 17 and let them opt out of some features that have been shown to lead to compulsive use.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Embattled Democrats Express New Hope With Harris at Top of Ticket

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      Incumbents who had feared President Biden would drag them down to defeat say the electoral environment has improved rapidly since he left the race.Senator Martin Heinrich, a two-term Democrat from New Mexico, was not on anyone’s watch list of incumbents facing serious re-election trouble given the reliable partisan tilt of his state, which has not voted for a Republican for Senate since 2002 or a Republican presidential candidate since 2004.But in the weeks after President Biden turned in a disastrous debate performance against Donald J. Trump last month, Mr. Heinrich was among the Democrats privately panicking. Polls showed New Mexico slipping into an expanding universe of potentially winnable states for the former president — foretelling an electoral disaster for Mr. Biden and trouble in the senator’s own re-election race.So Mr. Biden’s decision last weekend to exit the race took a weight off the shoulders of Mr. Heinrich and other Democratic incumbents, who now describe a sense of hope and momentum overtaking the doom and gloom that had permeated their party since late June.“It just feels like a completely different world than a week ago,” said Mr. Heinrich, who is facing a challenge from Nella Domenici, the daughter of the state’s last Republican senator, Pete Domenici, a popular figure and household name in New Mexico. “Across the board — engagement, social media, anecdotal — everything feels different. I feel better about the broad momentum.”Mr. Biden’s withdrawal is still fresh, polling is only beginning to come in and Democrats still face significant challenges in holding their thin Senate majority and gaining control of the House.But lawmakers who just days ago were bracing for what they feared would be a November wipeout say the ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the ticket has stabilized races and given Democrats a fighting chance. Instead of running from awkward questions about Mr. Biden’s age, mental acuity and fitness, Democrats are hoping to benefit from a surge of grass-roots support for Ms. Harris.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Who Will Replace Bob Menendez in the Senate?

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      Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey announced that he would resign in August. Gov. Philip D. Murphy will choose someone to serve the remainder of his term.Democrats have spent months engrossed by the slow-motion downfall of Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey. But no sooner had he announced his resignation on Tuesday than their focus jumped to another question: Who would serve out his Senate term?Party leaders had already been swapping names for weeks. Among them are a trio of prominent Black women; New Jersey’s first lady; and Representative Andy Kim, the Democratic nominee in November’s general election to replace Mr. Menendez on a more permanent basis.The decision will fall to Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat in his second term, and advisers said he was winnowing his own list.Here is what we know so far:Menendez will vacate his seat in AugustMr. Menendez, 70, has been under intense pressure to resign since a Manhattan jury convicted him last week on all counts in a sweeping bribery scheme involving Egyptian intelligence, bars of gold and a Qatari sheikh.On Tuesday, Mr. Menendez relented rather than face a possible vote to expel him from the Senate. He told Mr. Murphy in a letter that he would resign effective Aug. 20, giving the governor about a month to line up a replacement.Whoever Mr. Murphy selects will serve until Mr. Menendez’s current term, his third, expires on Jan. 3.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tester of Montana Becomes 2d Democratic Senator to Call on Biden to Step Aside

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      Senator Jon Tester of Montana called on President Biden to drop his campaign for re-election on Thursday night, becoming the second sitting Democratic senator to publicly join the effort to push Mr. Biden out of the race. “I have worked with President Biden when it has made Montana stronger, and I’ve never been afraid to stand up to him when he is wrong,” Mr. Tester, a vulnerable incumbent whose opponent has sought to tie him tightly to Mr. Biden, said in a statement. “And while I appreciate his commitment to public service and our country, I believe President Biden should not seek re-election to another term.”Mr. Tester’s Washington office said he was also endorsing an open process to select the nominee at the Democratic National Convention, rather than throwing his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris.Mr. Tester is locked in a tight re-election race of his own, and he needs all the distance from Mr. Biden he can get in his deep-red state. Even before Mr. Biden’s poor debate performance last month put the spotlight back on his age and mental acuity, Mr. Tester had kept him at arm’s length while working to appear bipartisan and appeal to moderate and Republican voters. Mr. Tester is just the second Democratic senator to call on Mr. Biden to quit, though a group of House Democrats have done so and other senators have been said to be pushing Mr. Biden to the exits behind the scenes.Last month, when Mr. Tester debated Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL and businessman who is his Republican rival for the Senate seat, he criticized the Biden administration’s energy policies and its approach toward immigration. “The bottom line is: He doesn’t listen to me enough,” Mr. Tester said of Mr. Biden. “He needs to.”But Mr. Sheehy has hammered at Mr. Tester, tying him to Mr. Biden and accusing him of being “the deciding vote for Biden’s America-Last agenda.” One of his recent advertisements played a clip of Mr. Tester vouching for Mr. Biden’s mental competency: “He’s absolutely 100 percent with it,” Mr. Tester says. Polls of the Montana Senate contest have shown a close race, with Mr. Sheehy often narrowly ahead.Mr. Sheehy immediately slammed Mr. Tester’s statement on Thursday night, which was reported by a local Montana news outlet moments before the senator released it publicly.“Is Jon Tester finally admitting he lied when he told us Biden is 100% with it?! And does this mean he’s endorsing his former colleague Kamala Harris??” Mr. Sheehy wrote on X. “Two-Faced Tester is desperately trying to distance himself from the train wreck he’s enabled and forced on Montanans.” More

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      America’s Gerontocracy Problem Goes Beyond the President

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      Whether or not Joe Biden persists in his run for president, America’s gerontocratic crisis will keep on worsening. But high-profile symptoms like Mr. Biden’s difficulties provide an opportunity to confront the issue — a social form of sclerosis that will persist unless and until more power is transferred from the wrinkled to the rest.Gerontocracy transcends government as a full-scale social phenomenon, in which older people accumulate power of different kinds, and then retain it.This form of power is both old and new. The term “gerontocracy” was popularized a century ago by the Scottish anthropologist J.G. Frazer to refer to a very early form of government, in which power reposed in councils of elders. Since premodern societies valued the past over the future, and the ancestral over the innovative, it was only natural to allocate authority to those with cumulative experience and nearer the realm of the honored dead.When the Constitution imposed an age minimum of 30 (and no maximum) on the Senate, that restriction alone excluded roughly three-quarters of the white population from serving. This set up the distant possibility of our present, in which Mr. Biden could become one of the youngest senators ever when he took his seat at age 30, while Dianne Feinstein (age 90), Robert Byrd (92) and Strom Thurmond (100) all either died in office or just months after retirement.The Supreme Court is also an outpost of elder rule. The Constitution gives federal judges life tenure, so it is entirely up to them when they finally depart, alive or dead. And it is not surprising when they die in the midst of opining on the law: Ruth Bader Ginsburg at 87, William Rehnquist at 80 and Antonin Scalia at 79. At least five federal judges have passed 100 years of age while on the bench.The Supreme Court was quasi-gerontocratic from the start, like the Senate, only more so. The popular and professional ideology of the judicial role emphasizes even more the association of age with wisdom. And the Supreme Court’s oracular purposes, priestly trappings and mystical rituals make it resemble, more than any other American political institution, gerontocratic clubs like the Roman Catholic Church’s College of Cardinals.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term

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      Now is the summer of Republican content.The G.O.P. is confident and unified. Donald Trump has held a consistent and widening lead over President Biden in all the battleground states. Never Trumpers have been exiled, purged or converted. The Supreme Court has eased many of Trump’s legal travails while his felony convictions in New York seem to have inflicted only minimal political damage — if they didn’t actually help him.Best of all for Republicans, a diminished Joe Biden seems determined to stay in the race, leading a dispirited and divided party that thinks of its presumptive nominee as one might think of a colonoscopy: an unpleasant reminder of age. Even if Biden can be cajoled into quitting, his likeliest replacement is Vice President Kamala Harris, whose 37 percent approval rating is just around that of her boss. Do Democrats really think they can run on her non-handling of the border crisis, her reputation for managerial incompetence or her verbal gaffes?In short, Republicans have good reason to think they’ll be back in the White House next January. Only then will the regrets set in.Three in particular: First, Trump won’t slay the left; instead, he will re-energize and radicalize it. Second, Trump will be a down-ballot loser, leading to divided and paralyzed government. Third, Trump’s second-term personnel won’t be like the ones in his first. Instead, he will appoint his Trumpiest people and pursue his Trumpiest instincts. The results won’t be ones old-school Republicans want or expect.Begin with the left.Talk to most conservatives and even a few liberals, and they’ll tell you that Peak Woke — that is, the worst excesses of far-left activism and cancel culture — happened around 2020. In fact, Peak Woke, from the campus witch hunts to “abolish the police” and the “mostly peaceful” protests in cities like Portland, Ore., and Minneapolis that followed George Floyd’s murder, really coincided with the entirety of Trump’s presidency, then abated after Biden’s election.That’s no accident. What used to be called political correctness has been with us for a long time. But it grew to a fever pitch under Trump, most of all because he was precisely the kind of bigoted vulgarian and aspiring strongman that liberals always feared might come to power, and which they felt duty bound to “resist.” With his every tweet, Trump’s presidency felt like a diesel engine blowing black soot in the face of the country. That’s also surely how Trump wanted it, since it delighted his base, goaded his critics and left everyone else in a kind of blind stupor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More