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      This Is One Republican Strategy That Isn’t Paying Off

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      In 2011, determined to push back the ascendant Democratic coalition that elected America’s first Black president, Republicans capitalized on their control of legislatures and governor’s mansions in 20 states to enact measures designed to suppress minority Democratic voters.Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the presidency in 2008 had provoked fear in Republican ranks that the conservative coalition could no longer maintain its dominance. Getting 52.9 percent of the popular vote, Obama was the first Democratic presidential nominee to break 50 percent in the 32 years since Jimmy Carter won with 50.1 percent, in 1976.Republicans counterattacked, mounting a concerted drive to disenfranchise Democrats, a drive that gained momentum with the June 2013 Supreme Court decision Shelby County v. Holder. The court ruled that Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required states and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to obtain preclearance for any change in election law, procedure or regulation, was unconstitutional.Within hours of the Shelby decision, Republicans announced plans both to enforce laws that had been blocked by the federal government and to pass laws designed to prevent Democrats from casting ballots.Greg Abbott, then the attorney general of Texas, was first out of the gate, immediately declaring that the state would revive a voter identification law that had been barred under Section 5: “With today’s decision, the state’s voter ID law will take effect immediately. Photo identification will now be required when voting in elections in Texas.”In a 2019 report, the liberal Brennan Center for Justice found:Overall, 25 states have put in place new restrictions since 2010 — 15 states have more restrictive voter ID laws in place (including six states with strict photo ID requirements), 12 have laws making it harder for citizens to register (and stay registered), 10 made it more difficult to vote early or absentee, and three took action to make it harder to restore voting rights for people with past criminal convictions.All of which raises the question: How effective has the onslaught of state-level legislation been at raising the odds for Republican candidates?The apparent answer: not very.“Contemporary election reforms that are purported to increase or decrease turnout tend to have negligible effects on election outcomes,” Justin Grimmer and Eitan Hersh, political scientists at Stanford and Tufts, write in their June paper, “How Election Rules Affect Who Wins.”“Contrary to heated political rhetoric,” Grimmer and Hersh write, “election policies have small effects on outcomes because they tend to target small shares of the electorate, have a small effect on turnout, and/or affect voters who are relatively balanced in their partisanship.”How about partisan gerrymandering? Did the Shelby decision open the door to disenfranchising political opponents by allowing Republican legislatures to reduce the number of “minority opportunity” congressional and state legislative districts likely to elect Black or Hispanic Democrats — a process known as retrogression?Again: apparently not.Nicholas Stephanopolous of Harvard Law School, Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California and Christopher Warshaw of George Washington University compared every congressional, State Senate and State House district before and after the lines were redrawn to accommodate population shifts in the 2020 census in their paper “Non-Retrogression Without Law.”“Our primary finding,” they write,is that there was little retrogression in formerly covered states. In sum, the number of minority opportunity districts in these states actually rose slightly. We also show that formerly covered states were largely indistinguishable from formerly uncovered states in terms of retrogression. If anything, states unaffected by Shelby County retrogressed marginally more than did states impacted by the ruling.These two papers raise some intriguing questions.If changes in election laws, especially those affecting voter turnout, have little influence on partisan outcomes, why should the average citizen care about these developments?Conversely, even if the laws have only marginal influence on election outcomes, couldn’t that marginal difference become crucial in very close elections? The contest for attorney general in Arizona in 2022, for example, was won by just over 500 votes out of more than 2.5 million cast.The authors of the two papers cited above, along with other experts in election law, reject out of hand the notion that the often minimal partisan effect of regressive legislation should dampen the continuing effort to make voting easier and more accessible.Richard Hasen, a specialist in election law at U.C.L.A., emailed in response to my inquiry asking for his view of the two papers:Even if it turns out that laws intended to suppress the vote do not have that effect overall and in the aggregate, that would not justify such laws. A state should not have the right to put stumbling blocks in front of eligible voters. Such laws violate the rights and dignity of each voter, and such laws should have to be justified by real, empirically verifiable interests in preserving the integrity of the vote or serving some other key state purpose.Grimmer and Hersh argued in an email that their work should prompt increased public interest in election law:First, there are a lot of reasons legislators, activists, or political parties might want to reform laws that have nothing to do with the change in laws affecting outcomes. For instance, changing laws might improve the functioning of elections and increase trust in the electoral process. We might think some changes to election laws are simply the right thing to do based on our ethical values.In addition, Grimmer and Hersh argue, the minimal effects of changes in the law on election outcomes means that partisans on both sides “will have to win on the merits of their arguments rather than through changing the rules of the game. We think that’s a pretty optimistic story for democratic governance.”Marc Elias, a founding partner of Elias Law Group and a longtime Democratic election lawyer, raised the point that even very small shifts can determine the outcome in extremely close races.Grimmer and Hersh’s reply:In our paper, we concede that on the very rare occasions that an election is decided with a razor thin margin, nearly everything that happened could explain a candidate’s victory — a seasonal flu, a rainstorm, a “hanging chad,” etc. That said, even some of the most hotly contested policies have effects smaller than the margin Mr. Elias quotes from Arizona. For example, in our paper we estimate that the ban on out-of-precinct voting in Arizona only yielded Republicans 177 votes, even though this policy was a major source of dispute in the Brnovich Supreme Court decision. So even if a policy such as that had been implemented in 2022 and everything else remained the same, the Arizona attorney general result would have remained unchanged.In support of their argument, Grimmer and Hersh create a hypothetical case study: “Suppose a state recently held a close election in which 51 percent of voters supported the Democratic candidate and 49 percent of voters supported the Republican candidate.” In response, the Republican legislature enacts a law that “imposes additional requirements to vote” on 4 percent of the electorate containing voters who are 60-40 Democratic. The law will produce a “a 3-percentage point decline in turnout in this group.”If the 51-49 election is run again with this new voter suppression regulation, they continue, “the policy would cause a 0.12 percentage point decline in the overall turnout. And it would cause a 0.011 percentage point decline in the two-party vote share for the Democratic candidate.”The result?50.989 percent of voters would support the Democratic candidate while 49.011 percent of voters would support the Republican candidate. If the state had one million eligible voters, the policy would deter 720 Democratic voters and 480 Republican voters, netting the Republicans a 240-vote shift.Interestingly, if this hypothetical is applied to the Arizona attorney general race I mentioned, the voter suppression law would have changed the Democratic victory into a Republican one by adding a net of 600+ Republican votes.In addition to Hasen, I asked a number of scholars and voting rights proponents to comment on the two papers.There was general agreement, with some caveats, in the case of the Stephanopolous, McGhee and Warshaw paper. The Grimmer-Hersh paper provoked a wider range of reactions.Kevin Morris, a researcher in the democracy program at the Brennan Center, did not fault the Grimmer-Hersh paper, but stressed that “As the authors do not dispute, the impact of partisan outcomes in statewide races is not the only or even primary reason to be concerned about those restrictions.”Grimmer and Hersh are careful to note, Morris continued, that “restrictive voting laws usually disproportionately harm voters of color. Whether or not this has a partisan impact on statewide results, this is a significant harm in and of itself.”Kareem Crayton, senior director for voting and representation at the Brennan Center, argued in an email that the elimination of the preclearance requirements under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act has placed cumbersome and time-consuming burdens on private lawyers bringing voting rights cases.Preclearance, Crayton wrote, required “a submission outlining the state’s intentions, its underlying data, and supporting documentation,” all of which provided “major sources of foundational evidence for any such lawsuit.”The lack of this crucial information, Crayton continued,has meant that Section 2 plaintiffs must gather much of this material through discovery, a litigation tool that involves far more time and resources than when Section 5 was operational. Alabama’s current illegal congressional map has stood for almost a full election cycle, denying Black voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of choice. At least part of this unjust delay is due to the extra time needed to build the factual case showing the Section 2 violation.Guy-Uriel Charles, a law professor at Harvard who directs its Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, argued in an email that “from a democracy perspective,” partisan outcomes are “the wrong way to think about voting rights.”What matters most, in Charles’s view, “is whether voter suppression laws prevent eligible voters — whether those voters are Republicans or Democrats; Black, White, Asian, Native, or Latino; live in the South or the North; poor or rich, college educated or not — from exercising what ought to be a fundamental right.”In addition to Elias, there are others who challenge Grimmer and Hersh’s portrayal of minimal effects on election outcomes resulting from new legislation.Thad Kousser, a political scientist at U.C. San Diego, wrote by email that he sees “two possible caveats to Grimmer and Hersh’s overall message that voter participation reforms have ‘essentially no effect on partisan advantage.’”First, Kousser wrote, “even marginal partisan effects can be consequential in a nail-bitingly close election.” He pointed to an “illustrative example” that Grimmer and Hersh use:a reform that increased turnout by 1.25 percentage points overall — a size similar to the impact of many real-world reforms — would yield a decrease in the Republican candidate’s vote margin of 7,500 votes, out of 487,500 votes cast. Because the authors assume in their example that the state overall is strongly Republican, this would only reduce “the two-party share for the Republican candidate from 78.46 percent to 77.00 percent.” In that example, it would not be large enough to swing the election. But of course, if the state were much more closely contested, those 7,500 votes could change the winner. And if the votes were concentrated in a few legislative districts, they could also play an important role in those outcomes.Second, Kousser wrote:There are some recent reforms that may have significantly larger impacts than those reviewed by Grimmer and Hersh. California’s recent law that shifts most off-cycle local elections onto the same schedule as even-year presidential and gubernatorial elections is proving to have major impacts on the size and composition of the electorates voting for mayors, county supervisors, and school boards.Kousser pointed to a 2022 paper, “Who votes: City election timing and voter composition” — by Zoltan L. Hajnal, Vladimir Kogan and G. Agustin Markarian, political scientists at U.C. San Diego, Ohio State and Loyola University-Chicago — which examined the changed composition of the electorate in California as cities shifted from holding local elections on days separate from federal contests to holding them on the same day, known as “on cycle elections.”When cities shift to on-cycle elections, Hajnal and his two colleagues write, the non-Hispanic white share, previously two-thirds of the vote, “decreases by nearly 10 percentage points” in presidential election years and “by 5.7 points when they are concurrent with midterm elections.”The Latino share increases “from about 18 percent in off-cycle elections to just under 25 percent when these elections are consolidated with presidential contests.” The Asian American “share of the electorate increases by 2.3 percentage points when cities move to the same date as presidential elections,” which may not seem like much “but it’s important to keep in mind that Asian Americans account for only 7.7 percent of the electorate in off-cycle elections, so this represents an increase of 30 percent.”The changed composition of the electorate in on- and off-cycle elections is equally remarkable for young and old voters. The authors found that older voters “account for nearly half of off-cycle voters. But the share of older voters drops almost 22 points in local elections that coincide with presidential elections and 13 points for midterm elections.” The share cast by younger voters, in turn, “almost doubles during presidential elections.”In the case of all these factors — race, ethnicity and age — Hajnal, Kogan and Markarian conclude that “on-cycle elections produce a more representative electorate.”Along similar lines, four political scientists, Michael P. McDonald, Juliana K. Mucci and Daniel A. Smith, all of the University of Florida, and Enrijeta Shino of the University of Alabama, found significant turnout increase in states adopting mail voting.In their June 2023 paper, “Mail Voting and Voter Turnout,” the four write thateven before the 2020 election, we show voter turnout across the states is consistently higher in every general election over the past decade in states with greater shares of overall ballots cast by mail. Drawing on turnout data from the 2012-2020 Current Population Survey and the Cooperative Election Study, we find states with greater usage of mail voting experience higher overall voter turnout.During the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia, between Brian Kemp, the Republican secretary of state, and Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate, Kemp gave voice to the precise anxiety of Republicans generally: that they might be swamped by a growing Democratic electorate.An audio recording leaked from an October 2018 fund-raising event caught Kemp as he was warning his supporters:As we were going into the start of early voting with the literally tens of millions of dollars that they are putting behind the get out and vote efforts for their base, a lot of that was absentee ballot requests that had just an unprecedented number of that, which is something that continues to concern us especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote, which they absolutely can, and mails those ballots in.Kemp went on to win, but two years later, despite the flood of voting restrictions since 2010, turnout in the 2020 presidential election was the highest in 30 years, according to the U.S. census.What this suggests is that the American electorate is determined to exercise the franchise and is resistant to legislated hindrances — more so than many would expect. This does not bode well for a Republican Party that for the moment has applied its money, energy and strategic skill to reducing Democratic turnout and suppressing Democratic votes.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Utah Supreme Court to Hear Arguments Over G.O.P. Map Splitting Salt Lake County

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      The Utah Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether a congressional map drawn to dilute Democratic votes is subject to judicial review, or a political issue beyond its reach.The 550,000 voters in Salt Lake County, Utah’s most populous, handed Joseph R. Biden Jr. an 11-percentage point victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 contest for president. A year later, in November 2021, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature drew a new political map that carved up the county, putting pieces of it in each of the state’s four congressional districts — and ensuring that Republican voters would outnumber Democrats in all of them.On Tuesday, the Utah Supreme Court will consider whether to wade into the increasingly pitched nationwide battle over partisan gerrymanders. The justices will decide whether the state’s courts can hear a lawsuit challenging the House map, or whether partisan maps are a political issue beyond their jurisdiction.The U.S. Supreme Court considered the same question in 2019 and decided that the maps were beyond its purview. But voting rights advocates say Utah’s Constitution offers a stronger case than the federal one for reining in political maps.“There’s a very clear provision in the State Constitution that says all power is inherent in the people, and that they have the right to alter and reform their government,” said Mark Gaber, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington-based advocacy group representing the plaintiffs. He said other relevant provisions in the State Constitution, but absent from the federal Constitution, include guarantees of free elections and the right to vote.State Senator Scott D. Sandall, Republican co-chair of the State Legislature redistricting committee that drew the House map, did not respond to requests for comment for this article.In court filings, legislators said that the State Constitution gave them exclusive authority to draw political maps, and that the plaintiffs were trying to impose “illusory standards of political equality” on the mapmaking process.Though Utah is a conservative state, no one argues that four Republican-dominated districts are inevitable. “If you just draw a very compact circle around the middle of Salt Lake County, you’re going to get a Democratic district,” Mr. Gaber said.Rather, the central issue in the case is whether Republican legislators had a constitutional right to maintain their party’s monopoly on the four seats through a map that was beyond the purview of judges to review.The Utah case could have national implications — not merely for the political balance in the closely divided U.S. House of Representatives but also for the emerging body of legal precedents that influence how courts rule in other states.With the Supreme Court removing the federal courts from deciding partisan gerrymander cases, state courts are becoming a crucial battleground for opponents of skewed maps. Joshua A. Douglas, an expert on state constitution protections for voting at the University of Kentucky, said the growing body of legal precedents in state gerrymandering cases was important because many state constitutions share similar protections for elections and voters, often derived from one another.Courts in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Alaska, New York and, last week, New Mexico have ruled that partisan gerrymanders can be unconstitutional. So have courts in Ohio and North Carolina. However, the Ohio court proved unable to force the Legislature to comply with its rulings, and the North Carolina decision was overturned in April after elections shifted the court’s partisan balance from Democratic to Republican.The Kentucky Supreme Court will hear a challenge to that state’s congressional and legislative maps in September. And a lawsuit contesting an extreme Republican gerrymander of the Wisconsin Legislature is widely expected after an April election gave progressives a majority on the state’s high court.Perhaps the closest analogy to the Utah gerrymander is in Nashville, where the Republican-run state legislature’s latest congressional map divided the city’s onetime Democratic-majority House district among three heavily Republican districts. Democrats have not challenged the map in state courts, presumably because they see little prospect of winning in a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees.In Utah’s case, however, the State Supreme Court’s five justices do not have reputations for bending easily to political winds. They are chosen through a merit-based selection process.The Utah plaintiffs — the state chapter of the League of Women Voters; the advocacy group Mormon Women for Ethical Government and a handful of Utah voters — accuse the State Legislature not just of illegally gerrymandering the state’s congressional map but of ignoring voters’ explicit instructions not to do so.The State Constitution allows voters to enact new laws, and to repeal ones that the Legislature enacted, through ballot initiatives. In 2018, voters narrowly approved a law outlawing maps that were unduly skewed to favor a candidate or party, and allowing voters to enforce that mandate through lawsuits. The Legislature later repealed that law and then drew the congressional map that quartered Salt Lake County. Plaintiffs in the suit argue that the repeal violated a provision in the State Constitution stating that citizens “have the right to alter or reform their government as the public welfare may require.” And they say that the gerrymandered map ignores a host of state constitutional provisions, including guarantees of free speech, free association and equal protection — provisions that they say should be read to prohibit partisan maps.For their part, Republican legislators contend that they had the right to repeal the redistricting law, just as they can any other state law. And they say the plaintiffs’ aim is no different than their own: to tilt the playing field in their favor.Katie Wright, the executive director of Better Boundaries — the grass-roots group that led the successful effort to pass the 2018 redistricting law and is backing the lawsuit — said there is a difference between the two. She noted that the Legislature’s disclosure of its new maps in 2021 sparked an unusually large public outcry that continues even today.“The reason we have these maps is to keep the people who are in power in power,” she said. “Utahns have not given up.” More

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      How Utilities Use Money From Your Bills to Block Clean Energy

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      To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we have to make two big transitions at once: First, we have to generate all of our electricity from clean sources, like wind turbines and solar panels, rather than power plants that run on coal and methane gas. Second, we have to retool nearly everything else that burns oil and gas — like cars, buses and furnaces that heat buildings — to run on that clean electricity.These changes are underway, but their speed and ultimate success depend greatly on one kind of company: the utilities that have monopolies to sell us electricity and gas.But around the country, utility companies are using their outsize political power to slow down the clean energy transition, and they are probably using your money to do it.State regulators are supposed to make sure that customers’ monthly utility bills cover only the cost of delivering electricity or gas and to set limits on how much utilities can profit. But large investor-owned utilities, with legions of lawyers to help them evade scrutiny, bake many of their political costs into rates right alongside their investments in electrical poles and wires. In doing so, they are conscripting their customers into an unknowing army of millions of small-dollar donors to prolong the era of dirty energy.Fortunately, Colorado, Connecticut and Maine passed laws this spring that prohibit utilities from charging customers for their lobbying, public relations spending and dues to political trade associations like the American Gas Association and the Edison Electric Institute. Regulators in Louisiana are considering similar policy changes. Every state in the country should follow those leads.These reforms are crucial because while all corporations in the United States can spend money on politics, in most cases, consumers who don’t approve can take their business elsewhere. Utilities — as regulated monopolies — have the unique ability to force customers to participate.It’s not that utilities aren’t interested in building and profiting from clean energy. Many are doing so, and the Inflation Reduction Act offers utilities extensive tax incentives to increase their investments in wind, solar and batteries. But that does not mean that utilities want others to do the same. They will support a clean energy transition only if it happens exclusively on their terms and at their pace — a stance at odds with the scope and urgency of the herculean task of decarbonizing our electric grid.Most electric utilities view distributed energy — technologies owned by customers that generate electricity in smaller amounts — as a threat to their business. They have tried for years to stop their customers in many states from investing in rooftop solar by rigging rates to make it less economically attractive. They’ve also funded opposition to policies that would speed clean energy.Florida Power & Light spent millions of dollars on political consultants who are accused of engineering a scheme to siphon votes to third-party ghost candidates, according to reporting by The Orlando Sentinel. The ghost candidates never campaigned, but their names appeared on ballots for competitive State Senate seats in an effort to spoil the chances of Democrats who had been critical of the utilities. One of the Democrats had repeatedly introduced legislation supportive of rooftop solar power, which Florida Power & Light has crusaded against for years, including writing legislation in 2021 that would have slowed its growth. “I want you to make his life a living hell,” the utility’s chief executive wrote in an internal email. The legislator lost by fewer than 40 votes. Florida Power & Light has denied wrongdoing in the ghost candidate scandal.Utilities also have also fought to cling to plants powered by fossil fuels as long as possible. In Ohio the utility FirstEnergy concealed $60 million in bribes through a web of dark-money groups to the political organization of the state’s speaker of the House. Before his conviction and sentencing for this instance of racketeering, he helped pass a law that secured a $1.3 billion ratepayer-funded bailout for FirstEnergy’s bankrupt nuclear and coal plants, gutted the state’s renewable energy and energy efficiency standards for utilities and bailed out coal plants owned by other utilities. Audits showed that FirstEnergy used money collected from ratepayers in its scheme.Electric utilities have even opposed policies to hasten the development of desperately needed long-range transmission wires for clean energy, as NextEra Energy, Florida Power & Light’s parent company, spent millions to do in New England, where NextEra generates and sells power from oil and gas.And many utility conglomerates don’t just sell electricity; they also sell methane gas, a serious threat to decarbonization efforts. Many of those gas utilities are fighting tooth and nail against local communities’ efforts to electrify our buildings and using ratepayers’ money to do so. In California, SoCalGas, the nation’s largest gas distribution utility, has been caught illicitly and repeatedly misusing ratepayer money to fight cities’ building electrification plans. In New York the gas utility National Fuel reportedly made its customers pay for advocacy materials directing New Yorkers to oppose pro-electrification policies.The Colorado, Connecticut and Maine laws address these tactics by prohibiting utilities from charging customers for a suite of political activities. Other states and the federal government should go further in two ways:First, they should add mandatory enforcement provisions so that if utilities illegally charge customers for political activities, stiff and automatic fines would kick in.Second, policymakers should, at minimum, require that utilities disclose all political spending. The recently passed state laws won’t stop utilities from spending their profits on politics. The post-Citizens United campaign finance landscape makes it difficult to restrict such expenditures, but it does not protect companies’ ability to spend secretly, which is how utilities like FirstEnergy, Florida Power & Light and SoCalGas have attempted their most noxious influence campaigns.Utilities are too central to the clean energy transition to be allowed to dictate our energy and climate policies based on their profit motives. Limiting their influence gives us the best chance to move quickly and affordably to a safer and cleaner future.David Pomerantz is the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a utility watchdog organization.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      It’s Not America’s Unhappiest Birthday

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      Bret Stephens: Gail, happy almost Independence Day. In the spirit of the holiday: Is America toast?Gail Collins: Well, gee, Bret, happy almost Independence Day back. Hope you’re not planning to celebrate by, um, shooting things off.Bret: Only my mouth. As usual.Gail: Seriously, please elaborate. If you’re thinking of the Supreme Court, I’m happy to join in any hand-wringing. But somehow I suspect you’ve got a different vision of doom.Bret: It won’t surprise you that I’ve been pretty happy with the court’s rulings this term, which I’m sure we’ll get to in a moment. But what I mean is the brokenness of almost every institution I can think of, a thought I’m borrowing from Alana Newhouse, the editor of Tablet magazine. Congress: broken. Public education: broken. The I.R.S.: broken. The Roman Catholic Church: broken. The immigration system: broken. Cities: broken. Civil discourse: broken. Families: broken. Race relations: broken.And the most broken thing of all: public trust. Trust in government, in news media, in police, in the scientific establishment. There’s a ton of scholarly research showing that when societies become low-trust, like in Lebanon or Brazil, they tend to fare poorly.Gail: I know that many very smart people are in the throes of despair, but I just can’t get there. People have been complaining about the schools since the beginning of time — and that’s a good thing; you certainly don’t want to be complacent about education.Bret: Did you know that The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1944 for reporting on how shockingly ignorant American college freshmen were about U.S. history? And them wuz the good ol’ days.Gail: The I.R.S. is broken only to the extent that Republicans in Congress are refusing to supply funding to make the tax system work.Bret: And because the agency runs with the sort of peerless efficiency we generally expect from federal bureaucracies.Gail: And let’s see — as a longtime fallen-away Catholic, I don’t think the church is going to fix itself until we have both women priests and married priests. But it’s not as if it’s more broken now than it was throughout my life.Bret: I defer to you on this one. Just trying to think of the last time I read a story about a Catholic priest that didn’t involve child molestation or an effort by the church hierarchy to cover it up.Gail: The cities: They aren’t broken — most of them just need a whole lot more federal aid for housing and public safety. And gee, federal gun laws that crack down on villains from buying weapons down South and illegally shipping them to gun-control states like New York.I could go on, but I don’t want to monopolize our civil discourse. Are you really so superpessimistic?Bret: It’s easy to get carried away with gloom, and America has a history of bouncing back from bouts of depression and disorder. But I find it really hard to feel any optimism when Donald Trump seems to be cruising to the Republican renomination and Joe Biden is generating excitement among Democrats the way a colonoscopy generates excitement among people turning 50: something your doctor says you must do but only because the potential alternative is lethal.Gail: Oh, gosh, Bret, now whenever I look at Joe Biden, I’m going to think “colonoscopy president.”You know I’m very sorry he decided to run again and put a damper on all the promising younger Democrats who might have been great options to replace him. But still, he’s been a good president. Our problem isn’t really on the Democratic side. The Trump-remodeled Republican Party is one thing I’d put on a list of national disasters.Bret: Don’t forget it’s also an international disaster.Gail: Know you’re as down on Donald as I am. Should we talk Supreme Court? The big decisions — affirmative action, gay rights, student loans. Am I right guessing you agreed with all three?Bret: Well, don’t forget the court striking down the independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper, in which three conservative judges joined with three liberals to uphold the right of state judiciaries to have a say in how state legislatures draw congressional districts and conduct elections. Or the Counterman v. Colorado case, in which four conservative justices joined Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson in a 7-to-2 decision protecting free-speech rights. This may be a conservative court, but it’s not a MAGA court.Gail: Can see the Trump campaign calls …Bret: Regarding the cases you mentioned, I think even the Biden administration knew deep down that its effort to forgive billions in student loans without action from Congress was legally doubtful. And I don’t have to agree with a web designer’s religious beliefs about same-sex marriage to accept that she has a free-speech right not to participate in something she finds morally objectionable.Gail: How would you feel about a wedding dress designer who refused to take business from a mixed-race couple because her own moral beliefs are against Black people being able to marry white people?Bret: Well, obviously I’d find it abhorrent. But this current case is different, because it turned on whether a business owner could be obliged to design a website for a same-sex couple. That’s clearly a matter of speech, not the identity of the customer.Gail: This case comes out of Colorado, which has a very specific state law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Once again our Supremes have made it clear that they’re only going to rule for stuff they like — to hell with details like legality.Bret: I don’t think either of us questions the right of the Supreme Court to overturn any state laws that violate fundamental constitutional rights, even if we don’t like the views of the people claiming those rights. As for the affirmative action case, I think it was one of the best decisions in the court’s history. I know you, um, dissent ….Gail: We had a big argument about that one last week. Having a diverse student body or workplace isn’t just a good goal; it’s critical to building and maintaining a truly free and equal society.Bret: Sure, provided diversity isn’t achieved by giving advantages to some racial groups at the expense of others. In the Harvard and University of North Carolina cases, Asian Americans were put at a significant disadvantage in the admissions process simply on account of their race.Gail: I’m still hopeful business leaders and school administrators will be able to work to the same end by concentrating on other factors — like, say, looking for applicants who have been able to overcome an impoverished upbringing.Bret: We agree on this. And as our colleague David French pointed out in a terrific column last week, Harvard could have long ago redesigned its admissions process to favor students on account of socioeconomic status rather than race and achieved roughly the same kind of diversity without putting race at the center of its admissions calculus.Gail: We’ll see. Still hate the idea that striving to have a student body or work force that’s racially diverse is some kind of mortal sin.Can we talk presidential politics for a minute? Feel kinda guilty for bringing it up, given that the nominating conventions are still more than a year away, but it does continue to fascinate me.Bret: By all means …Gail: I noticed that the proudly middle-middle-class governor Ron DeSantis got $1.25 million for his political memoir. Also that he just signed a bill allowing Florida roads to be built with a radioactive material.Bret: Phosphogypsum, a byproduct of making fertilizer, which is now kept in mountainous stacks across Florida. Used for construction in Europe, Australia and Japan, to no apparent ill effect. As for the memoir, Andrew Cuomo, a former New York governor, got $5.1 million for his book, shortly before he completely disgraced himself. I’d say the Florida governor’s advance is pretty modest, in the scheme of things.Gail: I retreat. For the moment. Anyhow, the DeSantis stories are just silly details in a race when the Republican front-runner keeps getting charged with major crimes. Now, this is supposed to be your flock, Bret. How do you keep focused?Bret: Gail, I read about the Republican Party the way I would about a former friend with whom I was once close but who tragically turned to a life of debauchery and crime in his demented old age.Gail: Is that why you’re feeling so down on everything, from the cities to religion?Bret: Might be. Hard to feel optimistic, politically, when you don’t really have a team to root for. But maybe you’re right and I’m too depressed about America. Still would much prefer to live here than in Britain, with its sky-high inflation. Or France, with its riots. Or Mexico, with its corruption and creeping authoritarianism. Or Canada, with its Justin Trudeau.So I’m back where we started. Happy Fourth of July!The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      In North Carolina, a Voting Rights Clash Ahead of 2024

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      Republicans, whose edge in the state has narrowed in recent years, have gone on offense politically, leading to clashes over voting access and control over elections.A closely watched political fight is developing in North Carolina over voting rights and control of elections, as Democrats aim to recapture a presidential battleground and Republicans look to win back the governor’s office.Much as Georgia, Florida and Texas drew an outpouring of national attention and political cash as Republicans moved to restrict voting in the heated months after the 2020 election, North Carolina is poised for headline-grabbing confrontations over nearly every lever of the electoral apparatus.In the Republican-led legislature, the State House is considering two bills passed by the Senate that would sharply alter how elections are run, adding voting restrictions and effectively neutering the state elections board, which is now controlled by Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat. And in a looming redistricting clash, the newly conservative State Supreme Court has ordered lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional and state legislative maps, which will most likely be far friendlier to Republicans.In North Carolina, every little edge could matter: The state, despite a long string of Republican presidential victories interrupted by Barack Obama’s 2008 triumph, has grown increasingly close. Donald J. Trump squeezed by in 2020 by just over a percentage point, and President Biden’s allies have signaled that they plan to invest in the state in 2024, seeing it as potentially winnable. Mr. Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and other Republican candidates have already held events in North Carolina as they contend for their party’s nomination.“North Carolina is one of the states that have both of the factors that exacerbate this,” said Wendy Weiser, the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, referring to Republican attempts to wield more power over voting and elections. “It is a battleground state and a state that has a history of discrimination in voting.”She added, “It is definitely one of the most critical states to be worried about.”Seismic shifts in North Carolina politics cleared the runway for Republicans to go on offense. They now have veto-proof legislative majorities after a Democratic representative defected to the G.O.P. in April, limiting what Mr. Cooper can halt. And conservatives captured the State Supreme Court in last year’s elections, upending it from a 4-to-3 liberal lean to a 5-to-2 conservative advantage.Republicans gained veto-proof majorities in the North Carolina General Assembly this spring, and last year they won control of the State Supreme Court. Travis Dove for The New York TimesBehind the scenes, a network of right-wing activists and election deniers led by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who played a key role in efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election, has been meeting with North Carolina lawmakers, pushing its priorities and helping shape certain provisions.Across the country, Republicans continue to try to tighten voting laws, arguing that they are needed to protect “election integrity” and pointing to voters’ Trump-fueled worries about election fraud.So far this year, at least 11 states have passed 13 laws adding such restrictions, according to the Brennan Center. That is a slightly slower clip than in 2021, when Republican-led legislatures passed a flurry of voting laws, often in response to election lies spread by Mr. Trump and his supporters.North Carolina has a particularly tortured past on voting rights. Under the Voting Rights Act, parts of the state were forced to obtain federal clearance to change voting laws because of their history of racially discriminatory election rules. More recently, in 2016, a federal court struck down a Republican-led voter identification law, saying it had targeted “African Americans with almost surgical precision.”Republicans have defended the latest measures. State Senator Warren Daniel, one of the primary sponsors of the bill to change voting laws, said on the chamber floor that the measure “increases confidence and transparency in our elections.” He added that certain changes, including a provision requiring that all absentee ballots be received by the time polls close on Election Day, would bring North Carolina in line with many other states.Democrats, however, have denounced the voting proposals, with one state senator, Natasha Marcus, going so far as to call them a “jumbo jet of voter suppression.” During final debate on the bill, she said it “includes a lot of problematic things that are going to dissuade people from voting, throw out ballots, and suppress the votes of certain people in a way that I think is discriminatory and anti-democratic.”A key provision would effectively eliminate same-day voter registration and replace it with a system in which voters would cast provisional ballots, then be required to follow up and verify their identities. Only some forms of identification would be acceptable: Data from the State Board of Elections found that in the four general elections since 2016, over 36 percent of voters who used same-day registration had provided IDs that the new law would not allow.Gov. Roy Cooper at an abortion-rights rally in downtown Raleigh, N.C., in May. Republicans will seek to reclaim the governor’s office next year.Kate Medley for The New York TimesIn 2016, when Republican state lawmakers tried to eliminate same-day registration, a Federal District Court found that it was “indisputable that African American voters disproportionately used” that method of voting. Black voters, the court found, made up 35 percent of same-day registrants in the 2012 election, while representing only 22 percent of the electorate.The new legislation also makes mail voting more complicated, adding a requirement that voters’ signatures be verified and a “two-factor” authentication process that would be unique to North Carolina and has left voting experts confused as to how it would work. As in other states, far more Democrats in North Carolina now vote by mail, with Mr. Trump and his allies instilling a widespread Republican distrust of the practice. In the 2022 midterm elections, more than 157,000 people in the state voted by mail. Forty-five percent were Democrats, and 35 percent were independents.As Republican lawmakers wrote the legislation, they received outside help.Three G.O.P. lawmakers, including Mr. Daniel, met in May with Ms. Mitchell, the Trump-allied lawyer, and Jim Womack, a leader of the North Carolina Election Integrity Teams. That organization is part of a national network of right-wing election activists coordinated in part by Ms. Mitchell, who declined to comment.The two activists pressed the lawmakers on their laundry list of changes to election laws, including measures on same-day registration, absentee ballots and maintenance of voter lists, according to a video in which Mr. Womack summarized the meeting. The video was obtained by Documented, a liberal investigative group, and shared with The New York Times.“Same-day registration, we’re all in agreement, violent agreement, that same-day registration will now be a provisional ballot,” Mr. Womack said in the video of the meeting. “So if you’re going to same-day register, it’s going to give you at least a little bit of time, maybe 7 to 10 days, to have a chance at researching and challenging that voter under the law as opposed to where it is now, where it’s less than 24 hours’ opportunity to do that.”Mr. Daniel declined to answer questions about the role Ms. Mitchell and Mr. Womack played in drafting the bills.Republicans have defended their proposed voting measures, saying that they will increase confidence in elections.Kate Medley for The New York TimesA 2017 law aiming to restructure the state election board was struck down by the State Supreme Court. Now that the court is more conservative, Republicans have resurrected the effort.Currently, Mr. Cooper appoints all five members of the board, but only three can be Democrats. Under the Republican proposal, the board would have eight members, all appointed by state lawmakers — four by Democratic leaders and four by Republican ones.State Senator Paul Newton, the bill’s Republican sponsor, introduced it as a measure “intended to take partisan advantage out of elections administration entirely.”The bill would all but certainly cause deadlock on many major election issues — a prospect that has alarmed election officials and democracy experts.The current election board, after reports of harassment of election officials in 2022, stepped in with rules limiting access for poll watchers, a move that angered conservatives.And there is one big unknown: What would happen if the new election board deadlocked over the certification of an election?That possibility is unaddressed in the bill. Phil Berger, the Republican leader of the State Senate, told The News and Observer that any such deadlock would probably send the matter to the courts, where decisions could depend on the partisan lean of the judge or court in question.“That’s a tell right there,” said Robyn Sanders, a counsel at the Brennan Center. “It seems pretty clear to me that it was deliberately designed so that there would be those kinds of situations.” More

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      Former Ohio Speaker Householder Faces Sentencing in Bribery Scheme

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      Larry L. Householder, former speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, awaits sentencing on Thursday after being convicted of participating in a racketeering conspiracy that resulted in a bailout for two struggling nuclear power plants.It is, federal prosecutors say, perhaps the biggest public corruption scandal in Ohio’s history, a three-year conspiracy in which one of Ohio’s biggest corporations funneled some $60 million to one of the state’s most powerful politicians in exchange for a $1.3 billion bailout.And those investigators say they are only coming to the end of Act I.On Thursday, the former Republican speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives, Larry L. Householder, will be sentenced in federal court in Cincinnati for violating racketeering and bribery laws.The outlines of the charges have been known since his arrest, with four other men, three years ago: FirstEnergy Corporation, a Fortune 500 electric utility based in Akron, funneled the $60 million though various nonprofit entities. In return, Mr. Householder rammed a law through the state legislature that gave the company the bailout for two troubled nuclear power plants. Prosecutors have recommended a sentence of up to 20 years.But, as described early this year in a 26-day trial, the alliance between the utility and Mr. Householder, 64, was far more than a bribery scandal. Among other things, prosecutors and experts say, it was an almost cinematic example of how the dark money that pervades both state and federal politics slithers unseen from donor to beneficiary.It is also a cautionary tale about how state legislatures — second-rung political bodies that are often run by part-time politicians, but increasingly dealing with issues of national importance — are at least as prone to manipulation by special interests as their Washington counterparts.David DeVillers, who oversaw the federal investigation as the U.S. attorney in Cincinnati until early 2021, said in an interview that the gusher of dark money was crucial to the plot and an issue well beyond Ohio.“Any time you have a supermajority, whether it’s Republicans or Democrats, and industries that are based on passing laws like marijuana or sports gambling or energy, it’s a formula for corruption,” he said.In a memorandum on sentencing last week, Mr. Householder’s lawyer, Steven L. Bradley, said that his client had not admitted wrongdoing, and that Mr. Householder genuinely believed that the legislation enacting the bailout “was an important piece of legislation, which is why he advocated and voted for it.” The blare of publicity and the ignominy of conviction, Mr. Bradley wrote, had left Mr. Householder “a broken man.” In an email, Mr. Bradley said he plans to “vigorously pursue an appeal with the hope of winning a new trial.”Mr. Householder, a onetime insurance agent from an impoverished rural county in southeast Ohio, had been House speaker from 2001 to 2004. He left his legislative seat because of term limits and faced a federal corruption investigation after leaving the post then, but was not charged.After returning to the legislature in 2016, Mr. Householder secretly spent millions in 2018 to support Republican candidates for 21 seats in the State House — more than a fifth of the 99 seats — who would back his insurgent campaign to again become House speaker. He spent more millions on a media campaign to push the nuclear bailout law to passage, and then tens of millions on a scorched-earth crusade to undermine a ballot initiative that threatened to undo it.By the time he was arrested in July 2020, Mr. Householder was soliciting secret contributions from others seeking legislative favors — and plotting to change the State Constitution’s term limits clause to extend his tenure by 16 years.At each step, a web of political action committees and dummy nonprofit organizations called 501(c)(4)s, after their place in the federal tax code, ensured that money fueling the schemes could not be traced to Mr. Householder or FirstEnergy.“The scope of the conspiracy was unprecedented,” prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memorandum. “So was the damage it left in its wake, both in terms of its potential financial harm to Ohioans and its erosion of public trust.”In a wiretap disclosed during the trial, a lobbyist charged in the affair, Neil Clark, boasted to undercover F.B.I. agents about his handiwork.“I spent close to $20 million in the last eight weeks, $20 million,” he said. “FirstEnergy got $1.3 billion in subsidies, free payments.”He later added: “So what do they care about putting in $20 million a year for this thing?”FirstEnergy sought a bailout for two nuclear power plants, including this one in North Perry, Ohio.Amy Sancetta/Associated PressFirstEnergy had sought state subsidies for two nuclear power plants on the shore of Lake Erie for years when Mr. Householder returned to the State House in 2016. The company claimed that renewable energy and cheaper fuels had made both plants unprofitable.Mr. Householder left little doubt that he wanted his old job as speaker back. After his 2016 election, FirstEnergy’s chief executive at the time, Chuck Jones, invited him to fly on the company’s private jet to attend the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump.Over several days of socializing at high-end restaurants, prosecutors said, they discussed a deal: Mr. Householder needed money to regain the speaker’s post when its occupant left office in 2018. The company needed a legislative solution to its nuclear power woes.What began with a handshake became a multimillion-dollar political operation, with the money laundered through nonprofit groups allowed by the tax code to conceal donors’ names.“They can give as much or more to the (c)(4) and nobody would ever know,” the lobbyist, Mr. Clark, told Mr. Householder in another wiretapped conversation. “So you don’t have to be afraid.”Chuck Jones in 2015, when he was FirstEnergy’s president and chief executive.Phil Masturzo/Akron Beacon Journal, via Associated PressNeil Clark, a lobbyist, was also charged in the affair.Jonathan Quilter/The Columbus Dispatch, via USA Today NetworkWeeks later, Mr. Householder established a 501(c)(4) called Generation Now. Other nonprofits, both new and old, were rolled into the scheme: a PAC called Hardworking Ohioans, two new nonprofits and many more.Rivers of anonymous money — most, but not all, from FirstEnergy — began to flow. In one typical transaction, Generation Now shunted $1 million of FirstEnergy donations to the newly formed Coalition for Growth and Opportunity, whose only reported officer was a Kentucky lawyer who oversaw other nonprofits. The Coalition for Growth and Opportunity donated $1 million to its separate PAC, which spent it on media campaigns supporting Republicans friendly to Mr. Householder and opposing unfriendly ones.And so it went: At least $3 million spent in 2018 to elect Republicans backing Mr. Householder’s speaker ambitions. Nearly $17 million more in 2019 on a successful media campaign supporting House Bill 6, the legislation bailing out FirstEnergy nuclear plants.Clean energy advocates and the natural gas industry opposed the $1.3 billion measure, which propped up two unrelated coal-fired plants and solar energy projects besides the $1 billion nuclear subsidy. And when they began collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to overturn the bailout, FirstEnergy devoted another $38 million to quash that effort.The money paid for a private detective and bullies to disrupt signature gatherers, as well as a saturation advertising campaign claiming that China was “quietly invading our energy grid” with the help of opponents of the bailout.Backers considered it money well spent. When House Bill 6 became law in July 2019, Mr. Jones, the FirstEnergy chairman, sent a picture of Mount Rushmore to Samuel C. Randazzo, then the chairman of the state Public Utilities Commission. Supplanting the mountain’s four presidents were faces of the two men and executives at FirstEnergy and another utility.Below that, prosecutors said, was an all-capital-letters caption that extolled their political clout with a common sexual vulgarity.Meanwhile, Mr. Householder’s Generation Now nonprofit was already plowing new ground. In a wiretapped conversation in 2018, Mr. Householder said he was “expecting big things in (c)(4) money from payday lenders,” an industry that has lobbied federal and state officials against regulating high-interest loans to the poor.For some, the cost of exposure has been heavy.FirstEnergy fired its top executives. Later, it paid $234 million in fines to federal agencies and surrendered another $115 million in ill-gotten gains after admitting to large-scale fraud.Mr. Clark, the lobbyist, died by suicide in 2021 after publishing a book that alleged a lifetime of dirty deals in state politics.Federal prosecutors say their inquiry is continuing, although they have not said where it might lead.F.B.I. agents removing items from the home of Samuel C. Randazzo, then the Ohio Public Utilities Commission chairman, in 2020.Adam Cairns/The Columbus Dispatch, via Associated PressIn what was, in effect, a plea bargain with federal prosecutors, FirstEnergy confessed that it had given Mr. Randazzo $4.3 million “to further FirstEnergy Corp.’s interests” on nuclear and other issues in 2019, weeks before Gov. Mike DeWine named him to head the state Public Utilities Commission.Mr. Randazzo, who denies wrongdoing, has not been charged.Court filings and related lawsuits have referred to Governor DeWine and Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, who have said they were unaware of the illegal payments. Both supported House Bill 6, and Mr. DeWine benefited from hundreds of thousand of dollars in get-out-the-vote support from FirstEnergy during his 2018 election campaign. The company also donated $75,000 to his daughter’s failed bid for a local elective office.FirstEnergy, meanwhile, faces investigation by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission and shareholder lawsuits.And in the five states where it owns electric utilities, utility commissions are likely to require tens of millions of dollars in refunds to customers, in part involving scandal-related spending.On Wednesday, the company said in a statement that it “has accepted responsibility for its actions related to House Bill 6 and has taken significant steps to put past issues behind us.”“Today we are a different, stronger company with a sound strategy and focused on a bright future,” it added.Mr. DeVillers, the former U.S. attorney, said that nonprofits like those central to the FirstEnergy scandal have been largely ignored by law enforcement. Enforcement of restrictions in the federal tax code on 501(c)(4) groups has been lax.Dave Anderson, the communications director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group that follows the energy industry, said that might now change.“This is a case that really illustrates how they can be used for criminal malfeasance,” he said, referring to nonprofits. Now, he said, lawyers who told clients that 501(c)(4) groups are safe conduits for secret cash may be “holding their breath and thinking, ‘Maybe the convictions will be thrown out.’” More

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      The Supreme Court’s Rejection of a Disputed Legal Theory on Elections

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      More from our inbox:Race and ClassDemand Tax Relief‘Make Reading Fun Again’The German Far Right Should Worry Us AllThe case will have no practical impact in the dispute that gave rise to it, involving North Carolina’s congressional voting map. The state has waged many battles over redistricting.Gerry Broome/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Court Rules State Control of U.S. Voting Has Limits” (front page, June 28):Several high-profile cases were decided by the Supreme Court this month, but only one, Moore v. Harper, had the potential to affect the very lifeblood of our democracy — voting. This election law case considered, in part, a controversial constitutional theory known as the “independent state legislature” doctrine.At issue was whether or not state legislatures had absolute power with no electoral oversight authority by state courts to regulate federal elections. With unchecked power, state legislators in key swing states could have rejected the voters’ slate of electors and appointed their handpicked substitutes.The Supreme Court has an obligation to protect our democracy. By rejecting the dangerous independent state legislature theory, the court safeguarded state-level judiciaries, shielding the will of the voters in the process.Jim PaladinoTampa, Fla.To the Editor:In the 6-to-3 Supreme Court ruling Tuesday in Moore v. Harper, the fact that a supermajority including both Democratic and Republican appointees reaffirmed the American constitutional order is the latest example that the Republican-appointed justices are not in the hip pocket of Donald Trump and the extreme right of the Republican Party.This should provide comfort for those who believe in the separation of powers as prescribed in our Constitution.John A. ViterittiLaurel, N.Y.To the Editor:Adam Liptak writes about the Supreme Court’s ruling that soundly dismissed the “independent state legislature” theory.The article quotes Richard L. Hasen, a U.C.L.A. law professor and leading election law scholar, who said the ruling giving the Supreme Court the ultimate say in federal election disputes was “a bad, but not awful, result.”It seems globally accepted that legal disputes, including election disputes, should be decided by courts, and that in federal democracies, the highest national courts are best suited to have the last word in federal election cases.While it is common for politicians and lawyers worldwide to dismiss international best practices based on the uniqueness of their legal systems, in the U.S., too, only the Supreme Court can ensure consistency across all states and thus protect the integrity of federal elections.Jurij ToplakNew YorkThe writer is a visiting professor at Fordham University School of Law.To the Editor:In your article the Supreme Court justices whose opinions pose a threat to voting rights and democracy are referred to as “conservative.” The justices’ positions are not “conservative,” if conservative refers to those who are committed to preserve traditional institutions, practices and values.I would ask that The Times consider a better word to describe these justices, whose positions on legal issues are heavily influenced by considerations of preserving Republican rule, class structures and Christian ideological dominance.Cindy WeinbaumAtlantaRace and Class Pablo DelcanTo the Editor:Re “Reparations Should Be an End, Not a Beginning,” by John McWhorter (Opinion, June 26):Providing support for those who have been hurt by past discrimination is an important step in alleviating the harm caused by America’s long history of racism.However, including all who are economically disadvantaged in any initiatives, as Professor McWhorter suggests, will broaden support for affirmative action programs while assisting more people who need a hand up.Ignoring this slice of the populace is what has led to simmering resentment in many communities and to the election of Donald Trump in 2016.Rather than pitting groups against one another, we should strive to lift up the fallen, regardless of the origin of people’s suffering.Edwin AndrewsMalden, Mass.Demand Tax ReliefHomeowners 65 or older with income of less than $500,000 could qualify for a property tax cut of as much as $6,500 a year.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Property Taxes Could Be Cut in Half for Older New Jersey Homeowners” (news article, June 22):As a suburban homeowner in Nassau County in New York, I find it reassuring to see neighboring New Jersey working hard to address the problem of high property taxes. It just approved a property tax reduction program for homeowners 65-plus called StayNJ, designed to offset some of the highest property taxes in the country.The people of New York State must demand that their elected officials pass similar relief for their constituents, who also live in a state with high property taxes. We are still suffering from a $10,000 state and local taxes deduction cap on our federal income tax that was passed under former President Donald Trump.Congressional Democrats promised to repeal this as one of their legislative priorities and have failed to keep their promise so far. So it is up to us to demand action from the New York State Legislature.Philip A. Paoli Jr.Seaford, N.Y.‘Make Reading Fun Again’To the Editor:Re “13-Year-Olds in U.S. Record Lowest Test Scores in Decades” (news article, June 22):The latest data is out on reading scores for 13-year-olds in the U.S., and it’s not good. Children’s reading levels are at their lowest in decades.In your article, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics states, “This is a huge-scale challenge that faces the nation.”Indeed, we see this challenge every day in the faces of children in our homes, schools and communities. We are responding by bolstering instruction, tutoring and summer learning, all of which offer reason to hope.But what stood out to me most in this story was that fewer kids report reading for fun, with 31 percent saying they “never or hardly ever” read for fun, compared with 22 percent in 2012.Could reigniting a love for reading and the joy of books be an answer we’re missing to this problem? Imagine every child with an abundant home library, cuddled up with a parent or under the covers reading a book, starting from birth.At a time when our education system is struggling, and life is hard for so many children, let’s make reading fun again!Mary MathewDurham, N.C.The writer is director of advocacy for Book Harvest, which provides books and literacy support to children and families.The German Far Right Should Worry Us AllAn AfD demonstration on energy security and inflation, outside of the Reichstag in Berlin in October.Christoph Soeder/DPA, via Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “As German Worries About Future Rise, Far-Right Party Surges” (news article, June 21):The expanding and emboldened far-right element in Germany is not solely a concern for Germans; it is also troubling for the international community in general and Jews in particular.Extremism fueled by xenophobia and a deep sense of nationalism in a country that carried out the systematic murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust is foreboding and a grave threat to democracy.With global antisemitism increasing at an alarming rate and Nazism experiencing an unsettling resurgence, the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany and the political gains that it has made are a proverbial red flag.When extremism becomes normalized and gains a foothold in the mainstream political arena and people flagrantly fan the flames of fanaticism, we have a societal and moral obligation to sound the alarm.N. Aaron TroodlerBala Cynwyd, Pa. More

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      The Supreme Court Rejects a Once-Fringe Elections Theory

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      Also, the Wagner chief begins exile in Belarus. Here’s the latest at the end of Tuesday.Justices on the country’s highest court rejected a legal theory that would have radically reshaped how elections are conducted by giving state legislatures largely unchecked power to set rules for federal elections and to draw congressional maps warped by partisan gerrymandering. The 6-to-3 decision was cheered by voting rights advocates who feared an undemocratic fallout if the Supreme Court had ruled the other way.“If the theory had been upheld, it would have been chaotic,” my colleague Michael Wines said. “In states like Wisconsin and Ohio, it basically would have allowed legislators to enshrine themselves in power all but permanently. They could’ve done whatever they wanted pertaining to redistricting or, for that matter, ordinary election law.”Proponents of the “independent state legislature” theory argued that — based on a reading of the Constitution’s Elections Clause — no court or organ of state government, like election administrators or independent commissions, could alter a legislature’s actions on federal elections. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing the majority opinion, rejected that position. He said that the Constitution “does not exempt state legislatures from the ordinary constraints imposed by state law.”The case, however, will have no practical impact on the dispute that gave rise to it, involving North Carolina’s congressional voting map. A recent ruling by that state’s Supreme Court authorized the legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, to draw maps as it sees fit, ensuring that the resulting districts will be warped by politics.The Supreme Court will announce its next rulings on Thursday. Some of its biggest cases — on affirmative action, student loans and gay rights — are still awaiting decisions.Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner leader, in the city of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, on Saturday.Alexander Ermochenko/ReutersPrigozhin arrived in BelarusYevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian mercenary leader whose mutiny came to a sudden halt over the weekend, is now in Belarus, the state news media there reported. The Russian authorities also dropped their charges against him and his fighters.It is clear that the Kremlin, which faced its most significant challenge in President Vladimir Putin’s two-decade rule, is making a concerted effort to move on from the mutiny and the questions it raised. But while many of Russia’s friends and partners expressed support for Putin, analysts said that doubts about his strength might linger.William Dorsey, an emergency medical worker, helped a woman with heat exhaustion in Eagle Pass, Texas, yesterday.Kaylee Greenlee Beal/ReutersDangerous heat spreads across the SoutheastMillions of people in Texas and Oklahoma have spent the past several days baking under triple-digit temperatures that are considered dangerous. But as the week goes on, the scorching conditions will extend east, bringing unsafe weather to millions more in parts of Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida.The unusually hot, early summer temperatures are the result of a stubborn “heat dome” of high pressure (akin to a lid on a pot that holds in steam).For more: Check out whether the heat wave will affect you, and read tips for staying safe.A vigil in 2015 for a 17-year-old transgender girl who died by suicide in Ohio.Meg Vogel/The Enquirer, via Associated PressTransgender people may have a higher risk of suicideA landmark study in Denmark has found that transgender people have a significantly higher risk of suicide than other groups. The new report, which analyzed the health and legal records from nearly seven million people over four decades, is the first in the world to examine national suicide data for transgender people.The findings come at a charged political moment in the U.S., as Republican lawmakers enact laws targeting medical care for transgender people. Here is what those laws say.More top newsPolitics: Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are holding dueling events today in New Hampshire.Jeffrey Epstein: A government watchdog confirmed that he died by suicide, but pointed to negligence and mismanagement at the jail that housed him.Legal: An appeals court dismissed the New York attorney general’s civil case against Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter. It also potentially limited the case against the former president and his family business, which is set to go to trial in October.Business: The trucking company Yellow, which received a $700 million pandemic-era loan from the government, may file for bankruptcy protection this summer.Workplace: A new federal law that took effect today requires employers to provide “reasonable accommodations” for pregnant and postpartum workers.Energy: Construction has started off Massachusetts on the first giant wind farm off the U.S. coastline.Health: The U.S. identified — in Florida and Texas — its first cases of local malaria transmission in two decades.Safety: More than 7,500 people were struck and killed by vehicles in 2022, the highest number in more than four decades.Rome: A tourist who scratched his name into a wall of the Colosseum faces up to five years in prison.EVENING WIND DOWNRyan Seacrest in 2019.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesRyan Seacrest will host ‘Wheel of Fortune’Two weeks ago, Pat Sajak announced that he would step down from hosting “Wheel of Fortune” after more than four decades on the job. The show, which has demonstrated remarkable durability even as traditional television viewership has declined, promptly selected its next host.The new man at the wheel will be Ryan Seacrest, the dexterous master of ceremonies who rose to Hollywood fame as the host of “American Idol.” The swift decision by executives at Sony Pictures Television, which produces the show, suggests that they are hoping to avoid the succession fiasco that nearly overwhelmed their other hit game show, “Jeopardy!”The tour group Fat Girls Travel, Too! visits Cartagena, Colombia.Deon TillmanPlus-size travel is getting easierVacation is meant to be relaxing. But for people with bigger bodies, it can be disappointing: Airline seats may be too small, amusement parks impose strict limits, beaches can be intimidating and, if your luggage is lost, finding clothes that fit may be difficult.Now a small but growing market catering to size-inclusive travel, often aimed exclusively at women, is seeking to bring joy, community and reassurance to plus-size travelers.For more: Americans are flocking to Europe this summer. If you’re one of them, here’s what you can expect.Dinner table topicsFame for her shame: Mackenzie Thomas shares diary entries from her adolescent years that make people feel less embarrassed by their past selves.A.I. and TV ads: A string of uncanny videos show what A.I. and advertising have in common: They chew up the cultural subconscious and spit it back at us.All-Star Game: The Yankees could be shut out of the event for only the third time in its history.Home advice: Our Ask Real Estate columnist reflected on a decade of answering your questions.WHAT TO DO TONIGHTLinda Xiao for The New York TimesCook: When another summer tomato sandwich just won’t do, try this BLT pasta instead.Listen: On “Popcast,” our pop music critic talks about Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam” and the queer pop-club canon.Watch: In “Sin La Habana,” an Afro-Cuban dancer tries to bring his girlfriend to Canada through a sham marriage.Read: These three new novels hold the keys to real and imagined kingdoms.Regulate: Why do I wake up right before my alarm?Meditate: Write your name in Chinese calligraphy — over and over. You’ll be surprised by what you learn.Play: Here are today’s Spelling Bee, Wordle and Mini Crossword. For more, find all our games here.ONE LAST THINGDodai StewartNotes from New YorkersNo matter where you go in New York City, you will almost certainly be inundated with signs. Most obvious are the advertisements, directions and commands (Don’t Block the Box). But my colleague Dodai Stewart has taken notice of the more personal notes that are written, posted and stuck around the city. They are New York’s direct messages.“Don’t be so nostalgic,” read one scrawled in marker on the subway platform column. “You’re perfect just the way you are,” read another.In a city that shouts and blares, these little whispers are funny, philosophical, smarmy and mysterious reflections of New York’s never-ending conversation.Have an expressive evening.Thanks for reading. I’ll be back tomorrow. — MatthewSign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.We welcome your feedback. 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