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

    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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    A Handy Guide to the Republican Definition of a Crime

    If you think Republicans are still members of the law-and-order party, you haven’t been paying close attention lately. Since the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican definition of a crime has veered sharply from the law books and become extremely selective. For readers confused about the party’s new positions on law and order, here’s a guide to what today’s Republicans consider a crime, and what they do not.Not a crime: Federal crimes.All federal crimes are charged and prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Now that Republicans believe the department has been weaponized into a Democratic Party strike force, particularly against Mr. Trump, its prosecutions can no longer be trusted. “The weaponization of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida recently tweeted.The F.B.I., which investigates many federal crimes, has also become corrupted by the same political forces. “The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation.And because tax crimes are not real crimes, Republicans have fought for years to slash the number of I.R.S. investigators who fight against cheating.Crime: State and local crimes, if they happen in an urban area or in states run by Democrats.“There is a brutal crime wave gripping Democrat-run New York City,” the Republican National Committee wrote last year. “And it’s not just New York. In 2021, violent crime spiked across the country, with 14 major Democrat-run cities setting new record highs for homicide.” (In fact, the crime rate went up in the city during the pandemic, as it did almost everywhere, but it has already begun to recede, and remains far lower than its peak in the 1990s. New York continues to be one of the safest big cities in the United States.)Crime is so bad in many cities, Republican state leaders say, that they have been forced to try to remove local prosecutors who are letting it happen. Some of these moves, however, are entirely political; a New York Times investigation found no connection between the policies of a prosecutor removed by Mr. DeSantis and the local crime rate.Not a crime: Any crime that happens in rural areas or in states run by Republicans.Between 2000 and 2021, the per capita murder rate in states that voted for Donald Trump was 23 percent higher than in states that voted for Joe Biden, according to one major study. The gap is growing, and it is visible even in the rural areas of Trump states.But this didn’t come up when a Trump ally, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, held a hearing in New York in April to blast Manhattan’s prosecutor for being lax on crime, even though rates for all seven major crime categories are higher in Ohio than in New York City. Nor does House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who tweets about Democratic “lawlessness” — talk about the per capita homicide rate in Bakersfield, Calif., which he represents, which has been the highest in California for years and is higher than New York City’s.Crime: What they imagine Hunter Biden did.The Republican fantasy, being actively pursued by the House Oversight Committee, is that Hunter Biden and his father, President Biden, engaged in “influence peddling” by cashing in on the family name through foreign business deals. Republicans have yet to discover a single piece of evidence proving this theory, but they appear to have no doubt it really happened.Not a crime: What Hunter Biden will actually plead guilty to.Specifically: two misdemeanor counts of failing to pay his taxes on time. Because tax crimes are not real crimes to Republicans, the charges are thus proof of a sweetheart deal to let the president’s son off easy, when they would prefer he be charged with bribery and other forms of corruption. Mr. Trump said the plea amounted to a “traffic ticket.” The government also charged Mr. Biden with a handgun-related crime (though it said it would not prosecute this charge); gun-purchasing crimes are also not considered real crimes.Also not a crime: What the Trump family did.There is vast evidence of actual influence-peddling and self-dealing by the Trump family and the Trump Organization during and after Mr. Trump’s presidency, which would seem to violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution and any number of federal ethics guidelines. Just last week The Times published new details of Mr. Trump’s entanglement with the government of Oman, which will bring his company millions of dollars from a Mideast power player even as he runs for re-election.Crime: Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.“Hillary Clinton used a hammer to destroy evidence of a private e-mail server and classified information on that server and was never indicted,” wrote Nancy Mace, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina. In fact, a three-year State Department investigation found that instances of classified information being deliberately transmitted on Mrs. Clinton’s server were a “rare exception,” and determined that “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”Not a crime: Donald Trump’s mishandling of government secrets.The Justice Department has accused Mr. Trump of willfully purloining classified documents from the White House — including top military secrets — and then lying about having them and refusing the government’s demands that they be returned. Nonetheless, former Vice President Mike Pence warned against indicting his old boss because it would be “terribly divisive,” and Mr. McCarthy said “this judgment is wrong by this D.O.J.” because it treats Mr. Trump differently than other officials in the same position. (Except no other official has ever been in the same position, refusing to return classified material that was improperly taken from the White House.)Crime: Any urban disruption that occurred during the protests after George Floyd was killed.Republicans have long claimed that the federal government turned a blind eye to widespread violence during the 2020 protests, and in 2021 five Republican senators accused the Justice Department of an “apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals.” In fact, though the protests were largely peaceful, The Associated Press found that more than 120 defendants around the country pleaded guilty or were convicted of federal crimes related to the protests, including rioting, arson and conspiracy, and that scores received significant prison terms.Not a crime: The invasion of the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Many Republicans are brushing aside the insurrection that occurred when hundreds of people, egged on by Mr. Trump, tried to stop the certification of the 2020 electoral votes. “It was not an insurrection,” said Andrew Clyde, a Republican congressman from Georgia, who said many rioters seemed to be on a “normal tourist visit.” Paul Gosar, a Republican congressman from Arizona, described Jan. 6 defendants as “political prisoners” who were being “persecuted” by federal prosecutors. Mr. Trump said he was inclined to pardon many of the more than 600 people convicted, and Mr. DeSantis said he was open to the possibility of pardoning any Jan. 6 defendant who was the victim of a politicized or weaponized prosecution, including Mr. Trump.Crime against children: Abortion and transgender care.Performing most abortions is now a crime in 14 states, and 20 states have banned or restricted gender-affirming care for transgender minors (though some of those bans have been blocked in court).Not a crime against children: The possession of guns that kill them.The sale or possession of assault weapons, used in so many school shootings, is permitted by federal law, even though the leading cause of death for American children is now firearms-related incidents. Republicans will also not pass a federal law requiring gun owners to store their weapons safely, away from children. It is not a federal crime for unlicensed gun dealers to sell a gun without a background check, which is how millions of guns are sold each year.Any questions? Better not call CrimeStoppers.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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    Republicans Are No Longer Calling This Election Program a ‘Godsend’

    To hear many Republicans tell it, American elections are awash in incompetence and fraud: shady precinct workers, dead people voting, unverifiable mail-in ballots and so on — and that was even before the Jan. 6 insurrection. Virtually all of the stories are exaggerated, misleading or simply false. And genuine voter fraud is extraordinarily rare. Still, Republican officials have for a long time rightly insisted on the importance of election integrity. So why are so many of them rejecting what was, until a few months ago, widely agreed to be the single best program for shoring up that integrity?Over the past 18 months, eight Republican-led states (with more likely to follow) have resigned their membership in the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan data clearinghouse that helps states keep their voter rolls accurate and up-to-date.Before we get into the groundless conspiracy theories that led to this mass exodus, consider the sheer logistical challenge of maintaining voter rolls in a country of more than 330 million people. Americans have a tendency to move, within a state or between states, often forgetting to update their voter registration along the way. Sooner or later, they die. The result is that the rolls of many states are littered with errors: People who are unintentionally registered in more than one place or who remain on the books after they’ve departed a state or this world. In 2012 as many as one in eight voter registrations nationwide was invalid or highly inaccurate, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts, which helped form ERIC that year as part of its data-based approach to public policy debates.Because of our decentralized election system, the responsibility to sort out this mess falls to the states. Federal and state laws require states to maintain accurate voter rolls, but the states have no established way to communicate and coordinate with one another. The existence of searchable voter data itself is relatively new: As recently as 2000, only seven states had computerized statewide voter databases.In short, it’s easy to proclaim that free, fair and well-run elections are the lifeblood of democracy; it’s a lot harder to put that ideal into practice. One early effort, like the Interstate Crosscheck program, failed miserably because of inadequate data analysis and poor security practices. ERIC has succeeded by devoting the time, money and expertise necessary to build a comprehensive, secure and useful database of voter information. That information — drawn from voter rolls, D.M.V. records, Social Security death records and change-of-address data — gets analyzed, matched and compiled into reports that are provided to the states to help them clean up their rolls.The work has paid off: Through April 2023, ERIC has identified nearly 12 million voters who moved across state lines, more than 24 million whose in-state registrations required updates, more than 1 million in-state duplicates and nearly 600,000 dead people who had not been removed from the rolls. In addition, ERIC requires that member states reach out to eligible but unregistered voters, although it is difficult to determine just how many new voters have signed up as a result.ERIC did all of this in a true example of bipartisanship. “It’s a place where red and blue states were able to come together, have this really boring but really effective data system for keeping the right people on the rolls and removing the wrong people from the rolls,” said Danielle Lang, the senior director of the voting-rights program at the Campaign Legal Center.The reviews, especially from Republicans, were glowing. When Florida joined ERIC in 2019, Gov. Ron DeSantis said it was “the right thing to do for our state, as it will ensure our voter rolls are up-to-date and it will increase voter participation in our elections.” This year, Iowa’s Republican secretary of state called ERIC a “godsend”; his counterpart in Ohio said it was “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have.” By 2022, 31 states and the District of Columbia had signed up to pay the organization’s $25,000 membership fee. (States also pay annual dues based on their voting-age population.)Given the level of baseless hysteria surrounding voting, maybe it was too much to expect it all to last. In January 2022, the extreme right-wing website Gateway Pundit published a series of articles accusing ERIC of being “essentially a left-wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll cleanup.” It claimed that the program was funded by George Soros — eternally the dark mastermind of every liberal corruption in the right-wing mind-set — and described one of its founders, David Becker, as a “hard-core leftist.” (Mr. Soros has given money to Pew but not to ERIC, not that it really matters.) Gateway Pundit also strongly suggested, without the slightest proof, that ERIC was somehow connected to Democratic Party databases.None of this should have been too surprising for a website that continually traffics in the most outlandish election conspiracies and is every so often labeled false or “pants on fire” by fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact.But the misinformation worked. One week later, Louisiana dropped out of the program and didn’t give a clear reason.Other states, all Republican-led, began to follow, each with dubious rationales. Some said they didn’t like being required to spend money to reach out to unregistered voters, who they believed (wrongly) are more likely to vote for Democrats. Others cited the Soros conspiracy theory. Florida officials cited undefined “partisan tendencies” and concerns about data security (though ERIC has never had a data breach). The basic theme of all the complaints was distilled in a social-media post by Donald Trump, who claimed in March that ERIC “pumps the rolls” for Democrats.If so, it’s doing a poor job, Mr. Becker pointed out. “I hate to tell Democrats this, but ERIC is not delivering them elections,” he said. “Florida joined just before 2020 and then had the greatest Republican rout in history.”Mr. Becker, who served as a nonvoting member of ERIC’s board until his term expired this year, flagged a deeper flaw in the departing states’ reasoning: They control ERIC, along with the other member states. All the states were fully aware of the terms and costs of the agreement when they joined. If they want to change the way ERIC functions, it’s entirely within their power to offer a proposal and hold a vote, as they have done many times.There is, of course, a far simpler explanation for the Republican desertion of ERIC: politics. Many of the officials who have pulled their states out of ERIC are running for higher office, and that means appealing to the Republican base, which is still addled by the toxic fumes of Mr. Trump’s “stop the steal” movement. (Cleta Mitchell, an election lawyer who was central to Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss, has been a leading advocate of the ERIC exodus.) Under the persistent influence of the former president, most Republican voters have been conditioned to view all electoral outcomes that don’t go their way as de facto illegitimate.Republicans who are not running for higher office, on the other hand, seem to have no trouble defending ERIC. “Making policy choices based on misinformation is the worst,” said Gabe Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, which joined ERIC in 2019 and is happy to stick with it. “We’re already under pressure, but our calculus is what’s best for the voters of Georgia, because that’s our job.”The problem is that, as the only game in town, ERIC works best when more states join. States that have resigned no longer have a good way to analyze or share their voter data, and states that remain will receive less useful reports (and will pay more money) because the pool of participants is smaller. In short, everyone loses.“The very actors who said they care about list maintenance the most are now abandoning the only tool they had available,” said Ms. Lang. “It seems like the goal is to create chaos — to lead to bloated rolls so they can point at them and say, ‘Look at the problem we have,’ even though it’s a problem entirely of their own making.”That would seem to be a paradox, but it turns out it’s the whole point.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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    Republicans Did Something Most People Don’t Like, So They’re Changing the Rules

    When Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, announced her campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in February, she remarked that the Republican Party had “lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.” That, she said, “has to change.”Her fellow Republicans appear to disagree. Across the country, Republican officeholders and activists have abandoned any pretense of trying to win a majority of voters. Last week, for example, Cleta Mitchell — a top Republican lawyer, strategist and fund-raiser — told donors to the Republican National Committee that conservatives had to limit voting on college campuses and tighten rules for voter registration and mail-in ballots. Only then, she said, could Republicans level the playing field for the 2024 presidential election. “The left has manipulated the electoral systems to favor one side — theirs,” she said in her presentation. “Our constitutional Republic’s survival is at stake.”The Republican Party’s hostility to popular government is most apparent on issues where the majority stands sharply opposed to conservative orthodoxy. Rather than try to persuade voters or compromise on legislation, much of the Republican Party has made a conscious decision to insulate itself as much as possible from voters and popular discontent.None of this is new, of course. The first major wave of Republican voter restrictions landed in 2011 after the previous year’s Tea Party-driven election. The Supreme Court unraveled a key section of the Voting Rights Act two years later in Shelby County v. Holder. And it’s been more than 10 years since Republicans in Wisconsin gerrymandered themselves into an almost impenetrable legislative majority.There’s still room for innovation, however, and in the past year Republicans have opened new fronts in the war for minority rule. One element in these campaigns, an aggressive battle to limit the reach of the referendum process, stands out in particular. Wherever possible, Republicans hope to raise the threshold for winning a ballot initiative from a majority to a supermajority or — where such a threshold already exists — add other hurdles to passage. It’s an abrupt change from earlier decades, when Republicans used referendums to build support and enthusiasm among their voters on both social and economic issues.The initiative and referendum processes were envisioned at the start of the 20th century to circumvent an unrepresentative and recalcitrant legislature. And in the year since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, voters have used both to do exactly that. As my newsroom colleagues Kate Zernike and Michael Wines noted on Sunday, “Voters pushed back decisively after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, approving ballot measures that established or upheld abortion rights in all six states where they appeared.”In the face of public opposition to their unpopular views on abortion, Republicans had three choices: make the case to voters that tough abortion restrictions were worthwhile; compromise and bend to public opinion; or change the rules so that their opponents could not protect abortion rights against the will of a legislature that wants to ban the procedure.You know where this is going.Ahead of an effort to enshrine abortion rights into the state Constitution with a ballot measure that would go to voters in a November general election, Ohio Republicans are advancing a ballot measure that would raise the threshold for passing such a measure to 60 percent. If they get their way, the measure could go to voters in an August special election (previously, Ohio Republicans had opposed August special elections). This new rule requiring a supermajority would take only a simple majority to pass.In the wake of successful ballot initiatives to adopt the Medicaid expansion and legalize recreational marijuana, which passed in 2020 and 2022, Missouri Republicans also want to create a new supermajority requirement for ballot measures. One proposal would require 60 percent of the vote; the other two would require a two-thirds vote. Another related proposal would require any ballot initiative to receive a majority of the vote in half of Missouri’s 34 State Senate districts, most of which are sparsely populated. It would create, in essence, an electoral college for ballot initiatives.Republicans in Florida want to raise their state’s threshold for amending the Constitution through ballot initiative from 60 percent of the vote to nearly 67 percent. And after voters in Arkansas rejected a ballot measure to put new restrictions on future ballot measures, Republicans under Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders simply passed the changes into law, using the legislature to do what they could not accomplish with the ballot measure.There is a point to make here about supermajority thresholds for lawmaking, whether it’s in or outside the legislature. The common defense of the supermajority threshold is that it is a tool to build or encourage consensus. But as Alexander Hamilton observed of the Articles of Confederation — which demanded consensus, even unanimity, for the Confederation Congress to take action — “To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision) is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to the lesser.” In other words, a supermajority requirement is more akin to a minority veto than it is a technique for the promotion of consensus.There are times and circumstances where demanding a supermajority makes sense. But the Republican opponents of majority rule for ballot initiatives aren’t thinking about the best way to structure direct lawmaking by the public. They are thinking about the best way to keep voters from stopping their efforts to ban abortion (or legalize marijuana or give health insurance to working people), as if all power belongs to them and not, say, the people.As a unit of governance, the state legislature is both unusually powerful, with broad discretion over large areas of public policy, and unusually open to partisan and ideological capture through luck, timing and open manipulation of the rules. Part of the political story of the past decade (and farther back still) is how the Republican Party and the conservative movement have used these facts to their advantage.With gerrymandering, Republicans in several otherwise competitive states have built a nearly impenetrable wall around their legislative majorities. Through restrictions on the vote, they can keep as many of their opponents from the ballot box as is feasible. With fanciful doctrines like the so-called independent state legislature theory, they could have a pretext for amassing even more power to shape elections — even if the Supreme Court rejects the theory in its strongest form. And if all of this isn’t enough to tilt the playing field, Republicans can, as we see, change the rules of referendums and initiatives to limit direct policymaking by the voters.One of the many self-justifying myths about the counter-majoritarian features of the American political system is that they exist to curtail or prevent the “tyranny of the majority.” Americans today might want to remember something the framers never forgot: Much worse than the tyranny of the many is the tyranny of the few.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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    Is a 6-Week Abortion Ban a Disaster for DeSantis? Two Theories.

    There were plenty of midterm elections where Republicans didn’t seem to pay a price over new abortion restrictions.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Will the abortion issue define him?Eze Amos for The New York TimesAfter the liberal triumph in this month’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race, you probably don’t need much convincing that abortion rights can be a big political winner for Democrats.But after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a law last week banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, it is worth considering another set of races: the elections where Republicans didn’t seem to pay a stiff political price for new abortion restrictions.Surprisingly, Republicans tended to fare just as well in the midterms in the states where abortion was recently banned as they did in the states where abortion remained legal.This is a little perplexing. There isn’t a definitive explanation, but I’ll offer two basic theories. Depending on your preferred answer, Mr. DeSantis’s anti-abortion stance may be an electoral death wish — or abortion simply may not be quite as helpful to Democrats as it seems based on the highest-profile elections, like the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race.Oddly enough, Wisconsin offers a stark example of how abortion may not always help Democrats. Abortion was banned there after the Dobbs decision, but in the midterms Republican candidates for U.S. House still won more votes than Democrats in a state Joe Biden carried in 2020. The Republican senator Ron Johnson won re-election as well. The Democratic governor, Tony Evers, won re-election by three percentage points — a fine performance, but not a Democratic romp.It’s worth noting the unusual circumstances of Wisconsin’s abortion ban. The law banning abortion was originally enacted in 1849 — not by today’s Republicans — and went info effect after Roe v. Wade was overturned, giving the G.O.P. some maneuvering room. The Republican state Legislature argued for adding exceptions; Mr. Johnson pushed for an abortion referendum. Perhaps Republicans in the state just weren’t seen as responsible for the ban.But Wisconsin isn’t alone. A similar story played out in Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri and Georgia. In some of these states, Republican governors enacted bans or other major restrictions that went into effect after the Dobbs decision. In others, Republican bans were blocked by the courts. But in all of them, Republicans nonetheless posted average to above-average midterm results.In fact, there was only one state — West Virginia — where abortion was banned and where Democrats posted well above-average results in House races. Overall, Republican House candidates outran Donald J. Trump by a typical or above average amount (six points or more) in 10 of the 13 states where abortion was banned after Roe.What makes sense of this pattern? Of the two basic possibilities, one would augur well for Democrats; the other would bode better for Mr. DeSantis.Theory No. 1: It’s about demographics.Abortion is relatively unpopular in states where today’s Republicans successfully banned abortion, like Texas or Georgia. These states tend to be relatively religious states in the South. There aren’t many of the secular, white, college-educated liberal Democrats who could bring about a “Roevember” backlash.There seems to be a lot to this theory. Not only does it explain many of the cases in question, but it also fits a broader pattern from last November: Democratic strength in the House vote was somewhat correlated with support for abortion (though big Democratic failures in New York and California stand out as obvious exceptions).But this theory doesn’t quite explain everything. In particular, it doesn’t work outside the South, including in places like Ohio or Wisconsin, where we know the right to abortion is popular. That’s where it’s important to notice my qualifier: where today’s Republicans successfully banned abortion. If demographics are the predominant explanation, then the Republican resilience in the North must be because voters simply didn’t hold them responsible for banning abortion. Democrats could hope Republicans will pay a greater political cost when they unequivocally restrict abortion, like what Mr. DeSantis is doing now in Florida.Theory No. 2: When abortion is the most important issue.This is what I’ll call the salience theory: It takes a special set of circumstances for Democrats to make abortion the most important issue to voters, like a Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate who promises to represent the decisive vote to legalize abortion when an abortion case is pending before the court, or a Michigan referendum that explicitly decides the future of abortion in a state.As with the demographics theory, the salience theory is also consistent with polling and the general story of the 2022 midterms. Only a sliver of voters said abortion was the most important issue, not because abortion rights wasn’t important to them but because there were lots of other genuinely important issues at stake — the economy and inflation, crime, guns, democracy, immigration, and so on. With so many other issues, it makes sense that abortion plays only a marginal role in vote choice unless a distinct set of circumstances focuses the electorate on abortion alone.The salience theory also fits one of the patterns of the election: the highly localized results. There were states where Democrats excelled, like Michigan or Pennsylvania, even as they struggled in California or New York. Where Democrats did well, they had the fodder to focus voters on one of their best issues, like attacking stop-the-steal candidates. Where they struggled, Republicans managed to focus the electorate on an issue like crime (democracy or abortion seemed less important).It’s worth emphasizing that the salience theory doesn’t mean that abortion as an issue didn’t help Democrats in 2022. If Roe hadn’t been overturned, abortion would have been less salient everywhere and perhaps Democrats would have fared a bit worse across the board. But it would mean that Republican support for an abortion ban is not, on its own, sufficient to make abortion the predominant issue and bring stiff political costs to conservatives.While this theory offers better news for Mr. DeSantis, it would nonetheless contain a lesson for Democrats: It seems they would be wise to find creative ways to keep the electorate focused on abortion. State referendums might be one option, much as Republicans put same-sex marriage on the ballot in 2004. A campaign to pass federal abortion legislation might be another path as well. More

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    Republicans Are Forgetting One Crucial Truth About People and Their Bodies

    In the homestretch of the epic Wisconsin Supreme Court race that ended last week with a blowout victory for liberals, voters’ cellphones pinged incessantly with text message ads.“Woke trans activists have their candidate,” one text message said, according to Wisconsin Watch, a local nonprofit news site. “Schools across Wisconsin are stripping away parental rights and trans kids behind parents backs. There’s only one candidate for the Supreme Court who will put an end to this. Vote for Judge Daniel Kelly by April 4 and protect your children from trans madness.”For a judicial race that centered on two big issues the Wisconsin Supreme Court is likely to consider soon, abortion and voting, it might seem odd that these ads in support of the conservative candidate chose to focus on an issue nowhere near the top of the agenda on the court’s upcoming docket.For reasons that are now obvious, conservative groups supporting Kelly largely avoided touting his opposition to abortion. That’s a sure loser, as the G.O.P. is rapidly learning. It probably wouldn’t have been a good idea to run on preserving the right-wing gerrymander that gives conservatives a total lock on Wisconsin’s Legislature and congressional delegation either. So some supporters reached for the wedge issue du jour: transphobia.An article of faith has emerged among hard-right conservatives — and has been worried over by some centrist pundits — that parental concerns about health care and social support for transgender children make for a potent wedge issue. After all, it has all the hallmarks of an effective culture war hot button: It involves strange new social and medical practices and unfamiliar ways of life, and children are sometimes concerned. But it’s not working the way conservatives expected.The end of Roe has reversed the tides of the culture war. The right has now lost it by winning the biggest victory of all. State legislatures across the country are enacting draconian abortion bans that are producing predictably tragic outcomes. Americans don’t have to imagine what the right will do with its power over women’s lives because we see it in every headline about women risking death because a doctor is too scared of running afoul of an anti-abortion law to provide a necessary medical procedure. It has become blindingly obvious what happens when Republicans legislate what Americans do with their sex organs. And voters, understandably, don’t like what they see.For years even before the fall of Roe, conservatives have used hard-edge anti-trans messaging in both red and swing state races, only to come up short. They tried it in North Carolina’s 2016 governor’s race, in the aftermath of a controversial bill requiring people to use the bathroom associated with their sex assigned at birth. The Democrat, Roy Cooper, won despite a hail of anti-trans ads. They tried it against Andy Beshear, the Democratic candidate for governor in deep-red Kentucky in 2019, and failed. In 2022, G.O.P. candidates tried to use L.G.B.T. issues as a wedge in races in swing states from the Midwest to the Sunbelt to New England. The data suggest that opposition to trans rights cannot overcome — or possibly even make a dent in — the advantage that comes to Democrats in swing states for supporting abortion rights. It’s not even close.“Transphobia was, and is, the dog that couldn’t hunt,” wrote the anonymous but eerily prescient polling analyst who writes a Substack newsletter under the name Ettingermentum.Wisconsin was the most recent example of this failure. The American Principles Project, a Virginia organization that is a driving force behind the harsh anti-transgender laws sweeping red states, spent almost $800,000 on ads supporting Kelly in the State Supreme Court race, according to Wisconsin Watch. A video paid for by the organization’s PAC accompanied text messages that described his liberal opponent, Judge Janet Protasiewicz, as “endorsed by all the woke activists that are stripping parents of their rights in Wisconsin schools and forcing transgenderism down our throats,” Wisconsin Watch reported.In one mendacious video advertisement the narrator claims that a 12-year-old was medically transitioned without parental consent. The video shows images of surgical scarring and implies that this child underwent surgery at the behest of school officials. This is absolutely false. The child in question merely changed their name and pronouns.But any hopes that this messaging would drive swing voters seems to have fallen flat. Indeed, the margin of victory in Wisconsin exceeded predictions. Joe Biden won the state by just 20,000 votes in 2020. Protasiewicz won by 200,000.The failure of anti-trans messaging as a wedge issue may seem surprising because the Democratic Party really does seem to have a problem when it comes to parents and schools. Resentment over Democrats’ support for school closures during the pandemic has become a liability for the party among educated suburbanites, as the 2021 governor’s race in Virginia demonstrated.But Republicans seem to be making the grave error of assuming that someone angry about school closures in the fall of 2021 is a potential conscript in their war today against drag queens and trans people. So far there appears to be little appetite among swing-state voters for laws that could — if our worst fears are realized — allow school officials to demand inspections of their child’s genitals before soccer matches and swim meets. Besides, there’s a far more urgent issue when it comes to students’ safety: In a country where child shooting deaths went up 50 percent from 2019 to 2021, who would trust their children to the political party that opposes gun regulation?There is no doubt that attitudes about gender are changing quickly, and changing especially quickly among young people. But it’s hard to draw firm conclusions about how Americans really feel about this. In a Pew poll last June, a large majority of respondents said they favor legal protections for trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces. Other findings suggest unease: 43 percent said gender identity norms were changing too quickly. Majorities support requiring athletes to compete as their sex assigned at birth. Depressingly, 46 percent said they supported criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors.But one finding from that same poll stood out to me: 68 percent of respondents aren’t paying close attention to the trans bills popping up across the country, and three-quarters of self-identified moderates said they weren’t following the issue closely. But that doesn’t mean they are interested in restrictive or repressive laws, much less willing to vote on the basis of support for such policies.Of course, this lack of attention can cut both ways. Voters who aren’t paying attention to the issue are unlikely to be drawn to the polls to vote against a transgender care ban, either. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, presumed to be a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has been able to defy post-Roe gravity and increase his support despite prosecuting an aggressive culture war campaign against queer people. It remains to be seen how this would play out in a presidential election, which would run smack into swing states that have recently rejected in statewide elections both anti-abortion and anti-trans candidates.Democrats — and all Americans — should support the rights of all queer people, not just for electoral advantage but as a matter of principle. There is a clear line from the fight over bodily autonomy in reproductive rights to the fight for access to medical care for trans people. It’s a matter of dignity, too. Trans rights, much like abortion, present a profound challenge to the gender binary, which upholds the world’s oldest and most persistent hierarchy. People who don’t want to or cannot fit within their traditionally prescribed roles — mother, father, woman, man, boy, girl — increasingly have the freedom to live their lives beyond those circumscribed identities.The right has responded to this flowering of freedom with a barrage of repression. In states where Republicans have an ironclad grip on power, they have been incredibly successful. There are hundreds of bills passed or pending that vary in their intrusion on personal liberty but share the goal of giving right-wing politicians the power to control the bodies of citizens through law. On Thursday, this frenzy reached cruel new heights when the attorney general of Missouri issued new emergency rules that put up steep barriers to transgender care, not just for children but also for adults. These barriers could amount to a virtual ban on gender-affirming care for most transgender people in the state.In the face of this onslaught, some centrists seem determined to keep flirting with trans skepticism. It is easy to see why trans issues have become the place for certain centrists to try to perform their moderation — queer people have served this purpose for decades. While other forms of open bigotry became taboo, homophobia and the view that queer people’s rights were a marginal concern has persisted. It has happened before. Bill Clinton heavily courted the gay vote to win the presidency in 1992, only to turn around and sign into law two odious policies: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act. Clinton has since rent his garments over his regrets, but the fact remains that he enshrined discrimination against queer people into federal law.Republicans like to say they are the party of common sense. But what they seem to have forgotten is the commonest sense of all: Most people do not want the government making personal decisions for them. People want to control their own bodies. People want the freedom to decide when and how to form families. Suddenly, after years of pointing fingers at the left for so-called cultural totalitarianism, Republicans have now decisively revealed themselves to be the “jackbooted thugs” wanting details on your teenage daughter’s menstrual cycle. It’s hard to imagine a less appealing message to swing voters than that.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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    The Republican Strategists Who Have Carefully Planned All of This

    Republican leaders are now adopting increasingly autocratic measures, using the police powers of government to impose moralized regulations, turning private citizens into enforcement officers and expelling defiant elected Democrats just as county Republican parties, particularly in western states, are electing militia members, Christian nationalists and QAnon believers to key posts.Here’s one example. Last November, the Republican Party of Clackamas County in Oregon chose a new vice chairman, Daniel Tooze, a Proud Boy from Oregon City, and Rick Riley, head of the county chapter of Take Back America, which denies the results of the 2020 presidential election, as chairman. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that in central Oregon’s Deschutes County, the local Republican Party chose Scott Stuart, “a member of the county chapter of People’s Rights, a nationwide network of militia groups and anti-government activists founded by conservative firebrand Ammon Bundy.”In June 2022, two of my Times colleagues, Patricia Mazzei and Alan Feuer, reported that “at least a half-dozen current and former Proud Boys” had secured seats on the Miami-Dade Republican Executive Committee, including two facing criminal charges for participation in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol:The concerted effort by the Proud Boys to join the leadership of the party — and, in some cases, run for local office — has destabilized and dramatically reshaped the Miami-Dade Republican Party that former Gov. Jeb Bush and others built into a powerhouse nearly four decades ago, transforming it from an archetype of the strait-laced establishment to an organization roiled by internal conflict as it wrestles with forces pulling it to the hard right.“On the right, support for violence is no longer a fringe position,” Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a November 2022 Politico essay, “How Political Violence Went Mainstream on the Right.”Those joining violent political events like the Jan. 6 insurrection, Kleinfeld continued,are more likely to be married middle-aged men with jobs and kids. Those most likely to support violence on the right feel most connected to the Republican Party. This is not a marginal movement: It is people who see violence as a means to defend their values, an extension of their political activity.Democrats are not driving today’s political violence, Kleinfeld argued,but they are at least partly responsible for driving many people into the arms of the far right. Fear is a major cause of violence. As America undergoes immense change, from a fourth industrial revolution to remaking the concept of gender, many Americans are struggling to understand why they feel unmoored, anxious and behind. Snake-oil salesmen like Tucker Carlson offer the racist Great Replacement Theory as an explanation. Rather than provide a better story, the progressive left calls people names if they can’t march to a radically new tune fast enough. No wonder that even people of color moved in 2020 toward a right that offers understanding and a sense of community.At the same time, Republican leaders are showing a growing willingness to disempower both Democratic officials and cities run by Democrats if they defy Republican-endorsed policies on matters as diverse as immigration, abortion and gun control.The expulsion of two Black state representatives by the Republican majority in Tennessee received widespread publicity this past week (one has already been reinstated by local officials and the other may be soon). But their expulsion, as spectacular as it was, is just the most recent development in a pattern of attempts by Republicans to fire or limit the powers of elected Democrats in Florida, Mississippi, Georgia and elsewhere. This includes Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision in August 2022 to suspend Andrew H. Warren, the elected Democratic state attorney of Hillsborough County, who had signed a statement saying he would not prosecute those who seek or provide abortions.In defiance of public opinion, 22 Republican attorneys general and 67 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives filed amicus briefs that called on Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Federal District Court judge in Amarillo, Texas, to invalidate the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, which Kacsmaryk promptly went ahead and did last week. A February Ispos poll found that by a 3 to 1 margin (65-21), American adults agree that “medication abortion should remain legal in the United States,” including a healthy plurality (49-35) of Republicans.Republicans in states across the country are defiantly pushing for the criminalization of abortion — of the procedure, of abortifacient drugs and of those who travel out of state to terminate pregnancy — despite clear evidence, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, that public opinion had shifted in favor of abortion rights.According to research provided to The Times by the Kaiser Family Foundation, states that have abortion bans at various early stages of pregnancy with no exception for rape or incest include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin.An overwhelming majority of Americans of all political persuasions believe there should be exceptions for rape and incest. An October 2022 survey of 21,730 people by the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies found overall support for these exceptions at 86-14; among Democrats at 94-6; among independents at 89-12; and among Republicans at 76-24.At least three states with Republican governors — Florida, Virginia and Texas — have adopted laws or regulations empowering private citizens to enforce restrictive policies governing abortion, sex education or the teaching of critical race theory, in some cases providing bounties for those reporting abortions.Jacob Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of Washington, argues in his 2022 book, “Laboratories Against Democracy”:When it comes to democratic backsliding in the states, the results couldn’t be clearer: over the past two decades, the Republican Party has eroded democracy in states under its control. Republican governments have gerrymandered districts, made it more difficult to vote and restricted civil liberties to a degree unprecedented since the civil rights era. It is not local changes in state-level polarization, competition or demographics driving these major changes in the rules of American democracy. Instead, it is the groups that make up the national coalition of the modern G.O.P. — the very wealthy on the one hand and those motivated by white identity politics and cultural resentment on the other.When I asked him why the Republican Party had moved in this direction over the past generation, Grumbach elaborated in an email, observing that the two major elements of the Republican Party — “extremely wealthy individuals in an era of high economic inequality” and “a voter base motivated by cultural and demographic threat” — have a “hard time winning electoral majorities on the basis of their policy agendas (a high-end tax cut agenda for the elite base and a culturally reactionary agenda for the electoral base), which increases their incentive to tweak the rules of the game to their advantage.”Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School, argued in an email that contemporary cultural conservatism depends on support from declining constituencies — non-college whites (as pollsters put it), evangelical Christians and other ideologues on the right — which places these groups in an increasingly threatened position, especially in the American two-party system.“At a certain point, the arc of history, which bends toward liberalism, means that traditional values among social conservatives lose their hegemonic status,” Norris wrote, which “is eventually reflected in progressive changes in the public policy agenda evident in many postindustrial societies during the late twentieth century, from the spread of reproductive rights, equal pay for women and men, anti-sex discrimination laws, passage of same-sex marriage laws, support for the international rules-based world order based on liberal democracy, free trade, and human rights, and concern about protection against environmental and climate change.”The consequences of this long-term cultural development for the losers, Norris continued, is a buildup of “resentment at the loss of the hegemony of traditional values and identities.” The problem for the Republican Party, she observed, lies in the fact that “by appealing to their shrinking socially conservative base, the Republican Party has been unable to gain a majority of the popular vote in their bid for the White House in eight of the last nine presidential elections.”The reality, Norris wrote, is:Since the early 1980s, on issue after issue, from abortion, secular values, civil rights, racial, homosexual, and gender equality, gun control, cosmopolitanism, and environmentalism, the pool of social conservatives adopting traditional views on these moral and social identity issues has been shrinking in size within the U.S. national electorate, from majority to minority status. They are running down an up escalator.With their backs to the wall, Norris argued, conservatives have capitalized oninstitutional features of U.S. elections that allow Republicans to seek to dismantle checks on executive power — including the extreme decentralization of electoral administration to partisan officials with minimal federal regulation, partisan gerrymandering of districts, overrepresentation of rural states in the U.S. Senate and Electoral College, partisan appointments in the judiciary, primary elections rallying the faithful in the base but excluding the less mobilized moderate independents, the role of money from rich donors in elections and campaigns, and so on and so forth. The Trump presidency exacerbated these developments, but their roots are far deeper and more enduring.Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard, noted in an email “that state policy outcomes are becoming more bimodal” — liberal or conservative, rather than centrist — “than in previous eras” and that the “misalignment between public policy and public opinion is pervasive in modern American politics,” particularly in red states “where public policy is far more extreme and conservative than the public wants.”In theory, the hostility of average voters to extreme issue stances can pressure politicians to move toward the center, Stephanopoulos contended, “but this aligning impact of general elections can be reduced through tactics like gerrymandering, which make it unlikely that even large swings in public opinion will much alter the composition of the legislature.”In addition, in Stephanopoulos’s view, in a highly polarized era, the pressure to moderate in order to win general elections faces growing counter-pressure to take immoderate positions in order to win primaries:There’s little that could persuade many voters to ever support the other side. And while general elections might be aligning, they’re pitted against many misaligning forces: the views of activists and donors, the need to win the primary election to be re-elected, pressure from legislative leadership, politicians’ own often extreme ideologies, and so on. It’s no surprise that the misaligning forces are often stronger.Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, made the argument by email that “Given the clustering of communities along political, cultural, and social lines in the United States presently and the dispersion of powers in American federalism, we should expect our state and local laboratories to yield a wide dispersion of products, especially when they are given more freedom to experiment.”So why don’t all states converge on the national median, as revealed by the polls? Cain asked, and answered that “There are real public opinion differences across states and local communities, especially on hot button social issues.”Ultimately, Cain continued, “If elected officials and judges get too far out of alignment with voters, they will get the message in the form of surprising electoral outcomes, as recently occurred in Wisconsin. Democrats in the seventies and eighties experienced the same on busing, crime and welfare.”Of course, Cain cautioned, “my optimism about this assumes the Republicans do not give up on elections altogether, which is more in doubt than I ever anticipated a decade ago.”Other observers of American politics are more pessimistic. Theda Skocpol, a professor of political science and sociology at Harvard, contends that many of the developments in states controlled by Republicans are a result of careful, long-term planning by conservative strategists, particularly those in the Federalist Society, who are developing tools to build what she calls “minority authoritarianism” within the context of a nominally democratic system of government.Skocpol outlined her thinking in an email:The first-movers who figured out how to configure this new “laboratory of democratic constriction” were legal eagles in the Federalist Society and beyond, because the key structural dynamic in the current G.O.P. gallop toward minority authoritarianism is the mutual interlock between post-2010 Republican control, often supermajority control, of dozens of state legislatures and the Scotus decision in 2019 to allow even the most extreme and bizarre forms of partisan gerrymandering.These organized, richly resourced actors, she wrote,have figured out how to rig the current U.S. system of federalism and divided branches, given generational and geographic realities on the ground, and the in many ways fluky 2016 presidential election gave them what they needed to put the interlock in place. They are stoking and using the fears and resentments of about half or so of the G.O.P. popular base to undo American democracy and enhance their own power and privileges. They are doing it because they can, and they believe in what they are doing. They are America’s G.O.P. Leninists.Skocpol does not pull her punches:This situation, locked in place by a corruptly installed Supreme Court majority and by many rotten-borough judicial districts like the one in Amarillo, means that minority authoritarians, behind a bare facade of “constitutionalism,” can render majority-elected officials, including the president and many governors, officials in name only. The great thing from the minority authoritarian point of view is that those visible chief executives (and urban mayors and district attorneys) can still be blamed for government non-function and societal problems, but they cannot address them with even broadly supported measures (such as simple background checks for having military assault weapons).There are a number of factors that confirm Skocpol’s analysis.First and foremost, the Republican Party’s commitment to democratic values and procedures has been steadily eroding over the past two decades — and the momentum has accelerated. The brakes on extremism are failing, with Donald Trump gaining strength in his bid for renomination and the continuing shift to the right in states like Tennessee and Ohio.Second, in bright-red states, the embrace of far-right positions on such issues as abortion, guns, immigration and election denial is now a requirement rather than a choice for candidates seeking office. At the same time, in purple states like Arizona and Pennsylvania, a hard-right posture may be a liability in the general election, even as it is often mandatory in a primary contest.The 2024 presidential election, if it is close, will test the viability of a mainstay of Republicans’ current anti-democratic strategy: a drive to empower state legislatures to overturn election results. In August 2021, ABC News reported that eight states have enacted legislation shifting power over determining election results to legislatures or partisan boards: Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Kansas, Montana and Kentucky.The ability of state legislatures to determine the winners and losers of elections now hangs on the outcome of a pending Supreme Court case, Moore v. Harper, which will determine the constitutionality of a fringe legal theory promulgated by the right, the so-called independent state legislature doctrine.What’s at stake?In a 2021 essay, “Trump Is Planning a Much More Respectable Coup Next Time,” Richard Hasen, an election expert who is a law professor at U.C.L.A., wrote:A state legislature dominated by Republicans in a state won by Democrats could simply meet and declare that local administrators or courts have deviated from the legislature’s own rules, and therefore the legislature will take matters into its own hands and choose its own slate of electors.Put another way, according to Hasen:The Jan. 6 insurrection, and Trump’s actions trying to change the Electoral College votes in five states, was an attempted coup built on the Big Lie of voter fraud. But the potential coup next time will come in neatly filed legal briefs and arguments quoting Thomas Jefferson and wrapped in ancient precedents and purported constitutional textualism. It will be no less pernicious.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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    The Year’s Biggest Election

    The battle for a state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin.Wisconsin is a microcosm of the country. It is narrowly divided politically, though Democrats have a slight advantage in the popular vote in statewide elections. And, as in Washington, Republicans have structural advantages in the government that give them outsize power.Conservatives have controlled the state’s Supreme Court since 2008, and Republicans have held a hammerlock on the Legislature since 2011, when the party drew itself an impenetrable majority after taking control in a wave election.Tomorrow, Wisconsin will hold an election for a seat on its Supreme Court, and it is no exaggeration to call the race, for a 10-year term, the single most important American election of 2023. It is already the most expensive judicial race in the nation’s history. The candidates and the super PACs supporting them have spent nearly three times as much on this race as in any prior court election.Why is a single state race crucial? Because whichever side prevails will hold a 4-to-3 court majority, and this is the first American election in which the winner will single-handedly determine two big issues: the fate of abortion rights and whether the state has a functional representative democracy. The winner will also set the course for the 2024 presidential election in a state where fewer than 23,000 votes decided four of the last six such races.If the liberal candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, wins, Wisconsin will almost certainly become the first state to allow abortion again after outlawing it with last summer’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. And because Democrats are likely to challenge the makeup of the state’s legislative districts if the court has a liberal majority, the near supermajorities that Republicans enjoy in the State Legislature would also probably not survive until the 2024 election.A victory for the conservative candidate, Daniel Kelly, would mean abortion remains illegal, the gerrymandered maps stay in place, and Wisconsin remains a dysfunctional democracy for the foreseeable future.Janet Protasiewicz and Daniel Kelly.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThe biggest prizeAbortion became illegal in the state last June, when the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, throwing the question to the states. Wisconsin’s near-total ban on abortion — enacted in 1849, a year after statehood and seven decades before women could vote — suddenly became the law again.Protasiewicz (pronounced pro-tuh-SAY-witz) is a judge and former prosecutor from Milwaukee who has so emphasized her support for abortion rights that nobody could be confused about how she’d rule on the 1849 law. In interviews and television advertisements and during the lone general election debate, she has stressed her belief that abortion decisions should be left to women and their doctors, not to state legislators.Kelly, a conservative former state Supreme Court justice who lost a re-election bid in 2020, has the backing of the state’s leading anti-abortion organizations and has repeatedly stressed his opposition to the practice.Protasiewicz has bet that her support for abortion rights will energize Democratic voters and persuade enough independents and moderate Republicans to win. It is a big wager on the continuation of the politics that helped Democrats exceed expectations in last year’s midterm elections.Democracy is on the lineWhen I got my first full-time job in journalism at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2002, Wisconsin was an evenly divided state but one where control regularly switched back and forth between the two parties.That ended after the 2010 Republican wave, when the party took both chambers of the Legislature and Scott Walker was elected governor. The G.O.P. weakened public-sector labor unions and drew itself the most aggressive gerrymander in the country — near supermajority control of both chambers in a 50-50 state. In 2020, Joe Biden won Wisconsin but carried only 37 out of 99 State Assembly districts.Republicans also changed state law to make voting more onerous, enacting a strict voter ID law, while the state’s Supreme Court banned drop boxes for absentee ballots last year. Wisconsin now ranks 47th out of 50 states on how easy it is to vote, according to the 2022 Cost of Voting Index.Protasiewicz calls the Republican-drawn maps “rigged,” has suggested the labor law is unconstitutional and says she agrees with the liberal dissent in last year’s Supreme Court drop box ruling. Kelly says redistricting is a political problem to be solved by legislators — the very people who created it.This race will have real impact on national issues, too.Wisconsin’s Supreme Court was the only one in the country that agreed to hear Donald Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election, eventually rejecting — by a single vote — his attempt to throw out 200,000 ballots in the state’s two big Democratic counties. Kelly, when I interviewed him in February, declined to say whether he agreed with the decision to uphold the 2020 results.The 2024 presidential election in the state may be close enough to be contested in the courts again. New congressional maps could also put up to three Republican-held House seats in play.Tomorrow’s other big election: Chicago’s mayoral runoff race has focused on crime. The election pits a former schools executive, Paul Vallas, who is campaigning largely on a pro-police platform, against Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner who favors solutions that go beyond policing. Here’s what matters in four of the city’s wards.More politics newsDemocrats are using messages about abortion in their campaigns, even when the office they’re running for has little say on the issue.Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas and a Trump critic, announced his bid for the 2024 Republican nomination.The Biden administration blacklisted a spyware firm. But the government signed a secret contract with the company.THE LATEST NEWSTrump’s IndictmentDonald Trump is using his criminal indictment to raise money and promote his 2024 presidential campaign.Trump spent the weekend making plans for his arrest, while officials in New York prepared for potential turmoil.War in UkraineThe Russian authorities said they had detained a woman in the killing of a pro-war blogger in a bombing in St. Petersburg, Russia, yesterday.In a call with his Russian counterpart, Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded the release of the imprisoned American journalist Evan Gershkovich.A Russian children’s rights advocate says she’s rescuing abandoned Ukrainian children. The International Criminal Court accuses her of abducting them.Residents in a Ukrainian city near active combat refuse to leave. The Times rode with the police trying to evacuate them.InternationalSaudi Arabia, Russia and their oil-producing allies said they would cut production, an apparent effort to increase prices.The Israeli government moved forward with a plan to establish a national guard, a political victory for a far-right minister.Sanna Marin, Finland’s prime minister who found international popularity, lost a national election.Pope Francis left the hospital after receiving treatment for bronchitis.Other Big StoriesStorms have resurrected a California lake that was drained.Mark Abramson for The New York Times“This could be the mother of all floods”: California residents are bracing for the melt of this winter’s snowfall.Anti-abortion groups argue abortion pills are dangerous. More than 100 scientific studies have concluded that they are safe.The police found the body of a 2-year-old boy in the jaws of an alligator in Florida after his mother was stabbed to death.OpinionsGail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss Trump’s indictment and the 2024 election.Women’s sports deserve to be mythologized like men’s sports are, Kate Fagan writes.“The Last of Us” is right: In a warming world, fungal infections are a public-health blind spot, Dr. Neil Vora says.MORNING READSSecret to happiness: People in Finland say it’s knowing when you have enough.Looking for love? Move abroad.Metropolitan Diary: Getting his daily steps in. (All 113,772 of them.)Quiz time: Take our latest news quiz and share your score (the average was 8.8).Advice from Wirecutter: The best creamy peanut butter.Lives Lived: Seymour Stein championed acts including the Ramones, Talking Heads and the Pretenders on his label Sire, and helped found the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He died at 80.SPORTS NEWSThe victorious L.S.U. players.Tony Gutierrez/Associated PressN.C.A.A. champions: Louisiana State beat Iowa, 102-85, winning its first national title in women’s basketball, The Athletic writes. “I think we have a lot to be proud of,” an emotional Caitlin Clark, Iowa’s star, said after the game.Colorful and divisive coach: Kim Mulkey, L.S.U.’s coach, wore a tiger-striped pantsuit of pink and gold sequins. But don’t mistake her for any triviality, Jeré Longman writes in The Times. It was Mulkey’s fourth national title as head coach.Chaos on the track: Max Verstappen won the Australian Grand Prix yesterday, but it was not a leisurely competition for the title front-runner, The Athletic’s Madeline Coleman writes.ARTS AND IDEAS Leonard Scheicher and Girley Jazama in “Measures of Men.”Julia Terjung/Studiocanal GmbHHistory on screenModern Germany has frequently grappled with the Holocaust, but it has not paid much attention to its role in the 20th century’s first genocide, when German colonial forces killed many people in what is now Namibia. A movie, “Measures of Men,” aims to change that.The film tells the story of the killings through the eyes of a German anthropologist who becomes complicit in the slaughter. It has been screened for lawmakers in Germany’s Parliament and will be shown in schools too. “Cinema allows us to awaken emotions, and implant images that can let you see events differently,” Lars Kraume, the director, said.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookLinda Xiao for The New York TimesMaqluba is a Palestinian dish made with rice, meat and fried vegetables.TheaterThe Broadway adaptation of “Life of Pi” is rich and inventive.Now Time to PlayThe pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was pocketbook. Here is today’s puzzle.Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Get down (five letters).And here’s today’s Wordle. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.P.S. Wordplay columnist Rachel Fabi’s mom engaged in some lighthearted trolling in the comments section of a recent Times Crossword puzzle.Here’s today’s front page. “The Daily” is about Trump’s indictment.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. More