Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Could Mike Johnson, the New House Speaker, Undermine the 2024 Election?

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      The Louisiana Republican played a pivotal role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But his elevation to the top post in the House does not give him special powers in the certification process if he tries again.Ever since Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana assumed office on Wednesday, a question has been on Democrats’ minds: Could the elevation of Mr. Johnson, who worked in league with former President Donald J. Trump in trying to undermine the 2020 election results, allow him to succeed in 2024 where he failed the last time?The speakership, which is second in line to the presidency, comes with broad powers over the functioning of the House. And Mr. Johnson, a constitutional lawyer whose stature in his party has grown with his election to the top post, could try again to interfere. But there are several reasons that Mr. Johnson’s new job alone would not allow him special powers to overturn the will of the voters unilaterally.Here’s how it works.The vice president, not the speaker, presides over Congress’s counting of electoral votes.When Mr. Trump was attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, his pressure campaign focused on his own vice president, Mike Pence, who was presiding over the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, to count the electoral votes. Mr. Trump encouraged Mr. Pence to throw out legitimate votes in favor of false slates of electors, a move Mr. Pence said was unconstitutional.Vice President Kamala Harris is in line to preside over the joint session on Jan. 6, 2025, when Congress will meet in a joint session to certify the results of the 2024 election. The speaker has no special role in the proceedings.Johnson may not even be speaker by then.Mr. Johnson, 51, just became speaker, but his term will expire before Jan. 6, 2025.Should Democrats prevail in the House in the 2024 election — an outcome many analysts see as a strong possibility — a Democrat would take over control of the chamber, likely the current minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York.Should Republicans hold the House, Mr. Johnson would need to win another leadership election among his party. Given how raucous the Republican conference has been in recent months, that’s not a sure thing either.The Electoral Count Reform Act has tightened safeguards.In the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s attempt to cling to power, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, passed a reform bill to try to ensure no similar plan could be carried out in the future.The new law makes clear that a vice president’s role in counting electoral votes is “solely ministerial,” with no power to reject electors. It also requires that one-fifth of both the House and Senate sign on before any objection to state’s electors can be heard. The law also limits the grounds for objections.Republicans who defend Mr. Johnson’s actions related to the 2020 election note that Democrats have objected to certain states’ electors during previous congressional certifications. But they have never done so as part of an organized campaign directed by their candidate, with false slates of electors being put forward and a violent mob assembled at the Capitol demanding that the election results be reversed. Mr. Johnson could still attempt to undermine the election.While Mr. Johnson cannot unilaterally overturn the 2024 election, he could attempt other extreme steps to try to interfere with certification.For example, Mr. Johnson could use the power of his bully pulpit and his status as a party leader to organize Republican lawsuits or pressure state boards of elections to throw out legitimate votes. He could attempt to refuse to seat new Democratic members of the House.“His main power would be as party leader,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, who served on the House Jan. 6 committee.Mr. Johnson also could demand that Republicans in Congress vote as a bloc on Jan. 6, 2025, against certifying election results. But he would need 20 percent of both chambers to agree to object, and then a majority of both chambers to vote to sustain the objection.Should that occur, the presidential election could fall to a contingent election of the House, in which state delegations would decide who became the next president. Such a scenario — in which the House selected a president who had lost at the ballot box — would almost certainly end up in the courts.Those who have studied the reforms to the Electoral Count Act see it as highly unlikely that Mr. Johnson could lead enough Republicans in both chambers against the will of the voters.“The election deniers are far from having 51 votes in the United States Senate, and that’s not going to change for many, many years,” said Norman L. Eisen, who was a special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee and testified on the need for reform legislation. “Fortunately, the Electoral Count Reform Act has closed off many of the avenues that would be available to mischief makers. But given his history, we will have to be on our guard.” More

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      Mike Johnson’s Speakership Reveals GOP’s Trump Loyalty Test

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      The developments on Capitol Hill highlighted the extent to which one of the greatest sins inside the Republican Party is to have certified Joseph R. Biden’s victory.Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana had just survived a closed-door vote to end a tumultuous period of paralysis without a House speaker on Tuesday night and was celebrating with smiling and exhausted Republican colleagues.“Democracy is messy sometimes,” he said, “but it is our system.”But moments later, Mr. Johnson was confronted at a news conference about his own past role in American democracy, when he worked in alliance with former President Donald J. Trump to block the certification of the 2020 election.Boos rang out at the reporter’s inquiry. Mr. Johnson closed his eyes and shook his head. “Shut up! Shut up!” one congresswoman shouted. “Next question,” Mr. Johnson said. Only hours earlier, the speakership bid of another candidate, Tom Emmer, the majority whip, had been felled amid a lobbying blitz from Mr. Trump himself. Among Mr. Emmer’s apparent apostasies: certifying President Biden’s election. His tenure as speaker designate lasted only four hours.Then, on Wednesday, when Representative Pete Aguilar, a Democrat, chastised Mr. Johnson for leading efforts to reject the Electoral College votes on the House floor in 2020, one Republican lawmaker shouted back, “Damn right!”The back-to-back-to-back developments on Capitol Hill underscored not only the extent to which loyalty to Mr. Trump has become a prerequisite to taking power in today’s Republican Party, but also how — two and half years after a riot that left the Capitol covered with blood and broken glass — the greater sin inside the G.O.P. is to have stood with the voters that day and certified the election of Joseph R. Biden.“Bottom line is the Trump wing of the House is dominant and has been dominant for some time,” said former Representative Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania. Mr. Dent called Mr. Johnson “affable” and “bright” but said the political takeaway was clear: “A member of the Trump populist wing is now speaker.”Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a Trump ally who filed the motion that took down former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, beamed, “This is what victory feels like,” celebrating Mr. Johnson’s rise on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on Wednesday before the official floor vote. Mr. Gaetz called him “MAGA Mike Johnson” — the same moniker that the Biden campaign used hours later.At a New York courthouse, where he and his company are on trial for financial fraud, Mr. Trump himself praised Mr. Johnson. “I think he’s going to be a fantastic speaker,” the former president said Wednesday.The internal politics of House Republicans do not revolve solely around Mr. Trump. The former president had publicly backed Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio for speaker earlier this month, only to see him blockaded by a more moderate faction in the conference.But the end of the three-week paralysis shows that the party remains yoked to the former president’s election denialism, with Mr. Johnson’s selection by his Republican colleagues coming on the same day that one of Mr. Trump’s former lawyers tearfully pleaded guilty in a Georgia racketeering case related to Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these postelection challenges,” said Jenna Ellis, a once-combative Trump attorney who is now cooperating with Mr. Trump’s prosecutors. Prosecutors struck deals with two other Trump figures, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, in the last week.It was a different story on Capitol Hill.With Mr. Trump dominating polls in the 2024 presidential primary — and even his top rivals staying relatively silent on his election fraud falsehoods — the party appears content to look past the fact that many of the party’s most prominent election deniers lost in key swing states such as Arizona and Pennsylvania in the 2022 midterm elections.For many Republicans, the primary victories that preceded those defeats are as politically significant. Last year, Mr. Trump sought to methodically cleanse the party of his critics, especially those who had voted to impeach him after the Jan. 6 riot. He mostly succeeded: Only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach him survived.In contrast, Mr. Johnson served on Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team. And before that he recruited House Republicans to sign onto a legal brief to object to the outcome of the 2020 election. When that failed, he had played a key role in articulating a rationale for Republican lawmakers to oppose certification of the 2020 results on the floor. His guidance did not directly echo Mr. Trump’s wild allegations and was narrower in scope, but it led to the same final vote.“We know now it’s too high of a hurdle to be directly criticized by Donald Trump” and still become speaker, said Kevin Sheridan, a veteran Republican strategist. Referring to Mr. Johnson, he added, “He seems to have found the right temperature for the porridge so far.”But Jenna Lowenstein, executive director of Informing Democracy, a nonprofit devoted to vote counting and election certification, said she was “very concerned” about Mr. Johnson’s ascent.“As a member of the House, Johnson was willing to use the powers of his office to try to obstruct a fair election and interfere with certification,” she said. “And we have to assume he would do the same with the broader powers of the speakership.”Mr. Johnson has served as vice chairman of the Republican conference and was previously the chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee. He is initially expected to be a more policy-minded leader than Mr. McCarthy, who was best known for his backslapping personality. Mr. McCarthy also objected to certifying the election and visited Mr. Trump in Mar-a-Lago only weeks after the attack on the Capitol, in a trip that was widely seen to restore some legitimacy to the former president.An evangelical Christian, Mr. Johnson has vocally opposed abortion and gay marriage. (During the roll call vote in which he was elected as speaker, Representative Angie Craig, Democrat of Minnesota, pointedly declared, “Happy wedding anniversary to my wife!” to Democratic applause.) Democrats were quick to highlight some of his hard-line stances.Elected to the House in 2016, the same year that Mr. Trump won the presidency, Mr. Johnson, a former constitutional law attorney, will have the least years of House experience of any speaker in many decades. But he is representative of the wave of House Republicans who have served in Washington only since the party was reshaped by Mr. Trump — and who are now a majority of the conference.“If you don’t have a coup on your résumé,” Charlie Sykes, the Trump-tired editor in chief of The Bulwark, wrote in a column about the speakership fight, “don’t bother to apply.” More

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      La retórica de Donald Trump se ha vuelto más amenazadora. Se puede hacer algo

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      La vida de Donald Trump ha sido una clase magistral de evasión de consecuencias.Seis de sus empresas han sido declaradas en bancarrota, pero él sigue siendo aclamado como un visionario de los negocios. Se ha casado tres veces, pero sigue siendo amado por los evangélicos. Ha pasado por dos juicios políticos, pero sigue siendo uno de los principales candidatos a la presidencia de Estados Unidos. Durante años, los críticos de Trump han creído que llegaría un momento de rendición de cuentas, a consecuencia, por ejemplo, de alguna pesquisa de Bob Woodward o una investigación Robert Mueller. Pero luego llegaba la decepción.Ahora Trump pasa por otro momento de aparente peligro al empezar a enfrentarse a sus acusadores en procedimientos judiciales, penales y civiles. Aún faltan meses para que se conozcan los veredictos de estos casos, pero él está reaccionando con la aparente confianza de que las consecuencias de sus acciones, como siempre, no lo perjudicarán. Pero es igual de importante preguntarse cómo afectará a otros la respuesta de Trump a su último aprieto, especialmente a quienes ahora son objetivo de su indignación.En las últimas semanas, los jueces del caso de fraude civil de Trump en Nueva York y de su proceso penal en Washington han emitido órdenes de silencio limitadas que le prohíben intentar intimidar a testigos y otros participantes en los juicios. (El viernes, Trump fue multado por violar una de esas órdenes). Si Trump las acata —algo que no es seguro—, las directivas no prohíben la gran variedad de amenazas y ataques que Trump ha hecho y da señales de que seguirá haciendo. El discurso actual del expresidente es una amenaza inminente para sus objetivos y quienes los rodean.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please More

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      The Apotheosis of Jim Jordan Is a Sight to Behold

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      No problem in the American system at this moment is as acute and disruptive as the one posed by the Republican Party.Yes, of course, there are any number of structural problems facing American politics.Our system of elections — first-past-the-post voting, the Electoral College, single-member districts and partisan gerrymandering — feeds into and amplifies our partisan and ideological polarization. Our system of federalism and dual sovereignty between state and national government allows for laboratories of autocracy as much as testing grounds for democracy. Our counter-majoritarian institutions and supermajority rules stymie democratic majorities and turn stability into stasis, putting terrible stress on our entire political system.But it’s hard to deal with any of those, or even just live with them, when one of our two major parties is on a downward spiral of dysfunction, with each version of itself more chaotic and deviant than the last.For years, it has been evident that the Republican Party can’t govern. When Donald Trump was in office, it was revealing to see the extent to which Republican majorities in Congress struggled to write and pass any legislation of consequence. To wit, after an unsuccessful herculean lift trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and a successful effort to cut taxes (the lowest hanging fruit on the conservative menu), congressional Republicans essentially stopped legislating until they were dislodged from control of the House in the 2018 midterms.What’s become clear of late, in the midst of the chaos that has left the House without a speaker at a particularly fraught moment in foreign and domestic affairs, is that Republicans are as unable to organize themselves as they are incapable of leading the affairs of state.The worst of the problem of the Republican Party, however, is evident in the rise of Jim Jordan and the ascendance of the insurrection wing of the party, with only modest opposition from supposedly more reasonable Republican lawmakers.Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, for example, has a reputation for being reasonable. He is staunchly conservative, but his feet are mostly planted in reality.Crenshaw has been publicly critical of the most disruptive and intransigent members of the House Republican conference, especially those in the House Freedom Caucus, and even wrote an essay in The Wall Street Journal condemning the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. A small gesture, all things considered, but still more than most of his colleagues could manage.Crenshaw seems like the kind of Republican who would oppose Jordan’s bid to be speaker of the House. Jordan, first elected to the House in 2006, is a far-right ideologue and conspiracy theorist whose most notable accomplishment in office was helping to organize his fellow ideologues and conspiracy theorists into the House Freedom Caucus in 2015. Jordan, who represents the Fourth District of Ohio, was one of Trump’s leading supporters in the months leading up to and following the 2020 presidential election, accusing Democrats, repeatedly, of trying to steal the election.“Jim Jordan was deeply involved in Donald Trump’s antidemocratic efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Thomas Joscelyn, one of the authors of the final report from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, told CNN last week. “Jordan also helped organize congressional opposition to counting Biden’s certified electoral votes. None of Jordan’s efforts were rooted in legitimate objections. He simply sought to keep Donald Trump in power, contrary to the will of the American people.”Crenshaw’s stated contempt for exactly the kind of rhetoric and behavior exemplified by Jordan has not, however, stopped the Texas Republican from backing his colleague from Ohio for speaker of the House. In an interview on Sunday with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Crenshaw claimed that Jordan had “become part of the solution, not part of the problem” with regard to the chaos among House Republicans and dismissed Jordan’s contempt for the law and attempt to overturn the presidential election as non-issues. “If I held that grudge, I wouldn’t have friends in the conference,” Crenshaw said. “I was on an island there.”Crenshaw isn’t the only supposedly reasonable Republican member of Congress willing to look past the fact that the leading candidate for speaker of the House was an active participant in a scheme to subvert the Constitution and install a defeated president in office for a second term.“Even some of the Republicans who have vowed, publicly and privately, to fight him at every turn are beginning to get weak knees about supporting him, fearing that collective will is dwindling as their numbers decrease,” Politico reports. Jordan’s allies have also expressed their view that the opposition to his bid for speaker will melt away as the actual vote on the floor comes near.Once again, Republicans are confronted with a deeply transgressive figure with open contempt for the institutions of American democracy, flawed as they may be. Once again, Republicans swear they’ll resist his ascent. Once again, Republicans cave, more fearful of losing a primary — or coming in for criticism from conservative media — than they are of virtually anything else.And each time they cave, these more moderate or mainstream Republicans make the situation a little worse, for themselves and for the country. Kevin McCarthy bowed to expediency and pressure when he voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the House of Representatives. He did the same when he empowered the most gleeful insurrectionists in his attempt to gain the speaker’s gavel. Now he’s out, and Jim Jordan is on the rise.If he wins, Jordan may not last in the position. The kind of speaker who must twist arms and make threats using conservative media to win the job is, in the modern House, not the kind of speaker who survives long beyond the next election cycle, even if his party holds its majority.Who will replace Jim Jordan if and when he falls? It could well be someone worse. And it will probably be someone worse, because there is nothing happening inside the Republican Party right now that can keep it from falling even farther into the abyss.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 Plot Trump Lost

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      When was the last time you listened to Donald Trump for longer than 30 seconds? Longer than a clip sailing by in a tweet or a TikTok or packaged on the evening news? Lovers and haters alike seem filled to the brim with information about this man, unable to take in any more or alter their view of him.If you haven’t lately, he talks about the 2020 election a lot, still, but in ways that are a little different from before.Onstage, sometimes he refers to it with a certain subversive lightness, like another thing he’s not supposed to repeat but does, like a punchline. “You speak up a little bit about the election — ‘He’s an insurrectionist,’” he said in Waterloo, Iowa, this month, to laughs.But sometimes the 2020 election as Mr. Trump describes it sounds like a crisis he cannot move beyond. “Had the election not … turned out the way it did — I’ll try to be nice,” he began in Iowa. “Had it not turned out the way it did — you know when I say that, I mean,” he said, then with more emphasis, “had the election not been rigged.”What if, what if. He was in an open-air warehouse on a windy, 51-degree Saturday and would return to the hypothetical again that day — had the election not been rigged, if the election hadn’t been rigged. The enthused crowd sat; eight Secret Service agents stood, flanking an elevated Mr. Trump and staring off into crisscrossing directions under an arched ceiling. The overall effect of the event — standing security detail, a big American flag against a cinder-block wall, “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys playing and at least eight people in T-shirts with the Trump mug shot on them — was like a concentrate of a Trump rally. We’ve been doing this so long as a country, he and we have become more abstract, operating in shorthand and fragments of the past.Onstage, he seamlessly moved between prepared text to talking about whatever was on his mind, then back in disorienting intimations, suggestions, asides and loops. “Household incomes rose by a record $6,000 a year under Trump, right? I love that mug shot. I love that beautiful woman right there with the mug shot,” he said at another event that afternoon, in a hotel convention center in Cedar Rapids.He’ll talk about how the day he stopped calling Hillary Clinton “crooked” was a good one for her, she celebrated that night, now he calls her beautiful, because she’s a great beauty — then with no variation or substantive transition beyond the word “but,” he goes back to prepared stuff about how the 30-year mortgage rate recently hit a 23-year high. A long riff about what prosecutors aren’t doing to the radical left, straight back into “but we delivered record increases in real family income.”Amid these digressions and jokes and tales about negotiations with foreign leaders, he’ll bring back a menacing clarity of voice so that each precise word about the indictments against him is all you can hear or think: “People realize that they’re fake and phony and they’re political.”As he used to say, he once had a nice life, which he gave up for this. But Mr. Trump said it the other night in West Palm Beach with the added dimension that “instead, I sit it in courtrooms.” He talks about how all the cases against him are connected and how they’re really after you, the voter, and he’s just standing in the way — though each time he said this in Iowa, his heart didn’t seem quite in it.He brings a lot more emotion to tracing everything going wrong in the world back to: What if they hadn’t rigged the election? Then, in the dream sequences that pepper Mr. Trump’s speeches, there would be no inflation, no war in Ukraine, no bad Afghanistan withdrawal. Forget what we’ll do now or what we should have done then.The broad themes Mr. Trump is working with right now are that Mr. Biden picked economic policies that are crazy and because the Afghanistan withdrawal was so bad, the world has fallen apart — but with 2020 always lurking nearby. “All these things wouldn’t have happened if the election weren’t rigged,” he said in Cedar Rapids. “If the election weren’t rigged, you wouldn’t have Ukraine, you wouldn’t have had any of it. It’s so sad what they’ve done. There’s plenty of evidence. It’s all there. You know it.” In Florida last week, he added one to the mix: Hamas would never have attacked Israel. “You’re in a different world,” he said in West Palm Beach, “and it’s getting worse.”Being assigned to one of the juries in these pending Trump cases would change someone’s life — a dividing line between the past and future. “Don’t use your real names with each other,” the judge told jurors at the beginning of E. Jean Carroll’s defamation trial. “My advice to you is not to identify yourselves, not now and not for a long time,” he told them on the last day.“When I would get in my car, I was like, ‘I just left that, and I have to just go do my job now?’” one member of the Fulton County special grand jury told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I just know things that are hard to know.’”If people seem to be unable to take in more information about Mr. Trump and if the election is shaping up to be a familiar repeat, the year ahead will not be. He views the world as one of perception, to be worked over and over again until it bends. To serve as a juror in this random selected position of authority, tasked with assessing what happened, for it to be your responsibility to step outside yourself and whatever you think about Mr. Trump and make decisions about him and the law is a weight that only a few dozen people will know. The rest of us will be outside in the chaos of perception, trying to make sense of it.And he’ll be inside and outside, perhaps still revisiting the decisive moment of his defeat and linking it with anything that’s gone wrong. “We would have had a deal with Iran. We would have had no inflation. Russia would have never ever in a million years gone into Ukraine,” he said in Waterloo. His sense of what if, what if, can draw a listener back further, to think about how much “what if” still shapes politics.The entire Republican Party has, for nearly a decade now, operated on a dream sequence of the possibility of passive collapse. What if he just went away? When Joe Biden ran in 2020, his campaign looked to correct the decisive mistake of the past: Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016. That was not, Mr. Biden often suggested, who we were. The implicit promise was the restoration of morality and normality. What if the 2020 election could be a reset?It’s easy to follow all these dream sequences into another: What if Mr. Trump could just return to New York, had never run for president, were no longer talking in loops? What if the country didn’t have to live through a remix of the 2020 election or change people’s lives by putting them on juries or live in the unknown we have not yet really reckoned with of what it will be like to live through the trials of our former president?This election seems like the one before only on the surface. Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden and the rest of us keep getting older; everything and everyone seems a little fried. Eight years in, there’s nothing that weird about seeing people wearing T-shirts with his mug shot staring back at him while a Backstreet Boys song from 1999 plays, the entire Republican field sounding like echoes of Mr. Trump as he talks about Mrs. Clinton, moving in and out of the present and back in time sonically.Mr. Trump remembers what things used to be like. “A normal politician gets indicted, and we’ve seen it hundreds of times over the years,” he said in Iowa, though he’s done versions of this elsewhere, too.He described that guy’s approach after getting “the pink slip” and dropped his voice into a washed monotone. “‘Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to announce that I am going home to my family. I will fight, I will fight, fight, fight for the rest of my life.’”“Do you understand? This is standard,” he said. “With me, it’s different.”Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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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      Quinn Mitchell, Known for His Pointed Questions of Candidates, Ejected From GOP Event

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      Quinn Mitchell, an aspiring journalist from New Hampshire, was escorted out of a G.O.P. candidate summit on Friday, though he was later allowed to return.It was the type of tough question a Republican presidential candidate might get on a Sunday morning talk show, only the person asking it was 15: Quinn Mitchell wanted to know if Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida believed that former President Donald J. Trump had violated the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021.Video of the uncomfortable exchange at a June 27 town hall in Hollis, N.H., for Mr. DeSantis, who dodged the question, ricocheted online. So did the pair’s next encounter at a July 4 parade in Merrimack, N.H., where a video showed Quinn, an aspiring journalist, being shooed away by a handler for the Florida governor.But the teenager said he was not prepared for what happened on Friday, when he was briefly ejected by police officers from the First in the Nation Leadership Summit, a candidate showcase organized by the New Hampshire Republican Party. The two-day event in Nashua, N.H., featured Mr. DeSantis and most of the G.O.P. field, but not Mr. Trump.“They said, ‘We know who you are,’” Quinn, who has his own political blog and podcast, said in a phone interview on Saturday from his home in Walpole, N.H., referring to the organizers of the summit.Quinn, who received a guest credential for the summit from the state’s G.O.P., said a person associated with the event had told him that he had a history of being disruptive and had accused him of being a tracker, a type of political operative who records rival candidates.The next thing he knew, Quinn said, he was being led to a private room and was then ushered out of the Sheraton Nashua hotel by local police officers. His ejection was first reported by The Boston Globe.Jimmy Thompson, a spokesman for the New Hampshire Republican Party, said in a text message on Saturday that the teen’s removal had been a mistake.“During the course of the two-day event, an overzealous volunteer mistakenly made the decision to have Quinn removed from the event, thinking he was a Democrat tracker,” Mr. Thompson wrote. “Once the incident came to our staff’s attention, NHGOP let him back into the event, where he was free to enjoy the rest of the summit.”Quinn met Vivek Ramaswamy at a Republican event in Newport, N.H., last month. Mr. DeSantis isn’t the only candidate who has faced his direct questions.Sophie Park for The New York TimesA spokesman for the DeSantis campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.A public information officer for the Nashua Police Department also did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.According to his website, Quinn has attended more than 80 presidential campaign events since he was 10, taking advantage of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation status in the nominating process to pose questions to candidates.He said he wanted to hear former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey speak on Friday, along with the businessman Perry Johnson, a long-shot candidate.At a town hall featuring Mr. Christie in April, Quinn had asked another pointed question: Would Hillary Clinton have been better than Mr. Trump as president?Mr. Christie, the former president’s loudest critic in the G.O.P. field, answered that he still would have chosen Mr. Trump in the 2016 election, describing the contest as “the biggest hold-your-nose-and-vote choice” the American people ever had.About two months later, it was Mr. DeSantis’s turn to field a question from Quinn, this one about Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6.“Are you in high school? said Mr. DeSantis, who has faced criticism as a candidate for not being fluid when interacting with voters and journalists, a dynamic that has made for some awkward exchanges on the campaign trail.The Florida governor pivoted, arguing that if the 2024 election focused on “relitigating things that happened two, three years ago, we’re going to lose.”Quinn said that it did not seem like a coincidence that he was kicked out of the event on Friday before Mr. DeSantis’s remarks, which he had planned to skip.“They know the story between me and DeSantis,” he said.By the time he was allowed to return to the event, Quinn said he was able to catch Mr. DeSantis’s remarks. But when the governor opened it up for a question, Quinn left.“OK, one quick question, what do you got?” Mr. DeSantis asked an audience member.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      From the Fringe to the Center of the G.O.P., Jordan Remains a Hard-Liner

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      Once a tormentor of the Republican Party’s speakers, the Ohio congressman and unapologetic right-wing pugilist has become a potential speaker himself.As a co-founder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, once antagonized his party’s leadership so mercilessly that former Speaker John A. Boehner, whom he helped chase from his position, branded him a “legislative terrorist.”Less than a decade later, Mr. Jordan — a fast-talking Republican often seen sans jacket, known for his hard-line stances and aggressive tactics — is now one of two leading candidates to claim the very speakership whose occupants he once tormented.Mr. Jordan’s journey from the fringe of Republican politics to its epicenter on Capitol Hill is a testament to how sharply his party has veered to the right in recent years, and how thoroughly it has adopted his pugilistic style.Those forces played a pivotal role in the downfall of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy last week, though Mr. Jordan, once a thorn in his side, had since allied himself with Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican. Now, the same dynamics have placed Mr. Jordan in contention for the post that is second in line to the presidency, a notion that is mind-blowing to many establishment Republicans who have tracked his career.“That notion that he could go from ‘legislative terrorist’ to speaker of the House is just insane,” said Mike Ricci, a former aide to both Mr. Boehner and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin. “Jordan is an outsider, but he’s very much done the work of an insider to get to this moment. Keeping that balance is what will determine whether he will win, and what kind of speaker he will be.”The race between Mr. Jordan, a populist who questions federal law enforcement and America’s funding of overseas wars, and Representative Steve Scalise, a staunch conservative and the No. 2 House Republican from Louisiana, continued to heat up on Friday. Both men worked the phones relentlessly seeking support, including making calls with freshman lawmakers, the Congressional Western Caucus and the Main Street Caucus, a group of business-oriented Republicans.On Friday, as they were vying for support, a bloc of Republicans were quietly requesting a change to party rules that would raise the vote threshold for nominating a candidate for speaker, which would make it more difficult for Mr. Scalise to prevail.While Mr. Scalise is amassing dozens of commitments of support, so is Mr. Jordan, which could lead to a bitter and potentially prolonged battle when Republicans meet behind closed doors next week to choose their nominee — or spill into public disarray on the House floor.Mr. Jordan’s rise in Congress to a position where he can credibly challenge Mr. Scalise, who has served in leadership for years, stems from a number of important alliances he has formed over the years. His strongest base of power is his colleagues in the House Freedom Caucus, many of whom consider him a mentor. He has built a solid relationship with Mr. McCarthy, for whom Mr. Jordan proved a reliable supporter and important validator on the right. And he has forged close ties with former President Donald J. Trump, perhaps his most important ally.In a Republican House that has defined itself in large part by its determination to protect Mr. Trump and attack President Biden, Mr. Jordan has been a leader of both efforts. He leads a special subcommittee on the “weaponization of government” against conservatives. He has started investigations into federal and state prosecutors who indicted Mr. Trump, and he is a co-leader of the impeachment inquiry into Mr. Biden that Mr. McCarthy formally announced last month as he worked to appease the right and cling to his post.Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Jordan for the top House job early on Friday, ending speculation, however unrealistic, that the former president might seek the job himself. (A speaker is not required to be an elected lawmaker.)“Congressman Jim Jordan has been a STAR long before making his very successful journey to Washington, D.C.,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social. “He will be a GREAT Speaker of the House, & has my Complete & Total Endorsement!”Mr. Trump’s endorsement could help Mr. Jordan garner support from his other fellow House Republicans, among whom Mr. Trump is popular. But it is not expected to seal a victory.Representative Warren Davidson, an Ohio Republican who is the whip of the House Freedom Caucus and a supporter of Mr. Jordan, said Mr. Trump’s endorsement was a “positive” for Mr. Jordan because “Trump is widely viewed as the leader of our party.”But, he said, some more mainstream Republicans aren’t thrilled about aligning themselves with Mr. Trump.“There are some folks in moderate districts that are like, ‘Well, that might actually complicate things for me,’” Mr. Davidson said.Mr. Jordan helped undermine faith in the 2020 presidential election results as Mr. Trump spread the lie that the election had been stolen through widespread fraud. Mr. Jordan strategized with Mr. Trump about how to use Congress’s official count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, to reject the results, voting to object even after a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol. His candidacy for speaker has drawn a stark warning from former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who was the No. 3 Republican and vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee, who said that if he prevailed, “there would no longer be any possible way to argue that a group of elected Republicans could be counted on to defend the Constitution.”In a speech at the University of Minnesota this week, Ms. Cheney told the audience that “Jim Jordan was involved, was part of the conspiracy in which Donald Trump was engaged as he attempted to overturn the election.”Mr. Jordan has defended his actions in challenging the results of the 2020 election, saying he had a “duty” to object given the way some states changed voting procedures during the coronavirus pandemic.His quick rise in the Republican ranks was nearly derailed in 2018, when a sexual abuse scandal in Ohio State University’s athletics program came to light, leading to accusations that Mr. Jordan, who had been an assistant wrestling coach at the time, knew about the abuse and did nothing. Mr. Jordan has said that he was not aware of any wrongdoing.On Capitol Hill, Mr. Jordan initially worked to build some relationships with Democrats early in his career. He and Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, once teamed up on bipartisan legislation to protect press freedom. He counts former Representative Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio who is now running Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign, as a friend. Even as Mr. Jordan and Representative Elijah Cummings, the Maryland Democrat who died in 2019, sparred over investigations of Mr. Trump, the two men occasionally found common ground on other Oversight Committee issues.But as Mr. Jordan formed an alliance with Mr. Trump and then became one of his most vocal defenders on Capitol Hill, his relationships with Democrats disintegrated. When Mr. Raskin introduced his press freedom bill this year, Mr. Jordan was no longer listed as a sponsor.Representative Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, said that Mr. Jordan’s true power lay in the love he commands from base voters, built up through years of defending Mr. Trump and advocating conservative policies on Fox News and in combative congressional hearings. Mr. Jordan is known to fly to districts around the country to help raise money for candidates who are aligned with the House Freedom Caucus — and even for Republicans who are not.Mr. Banks suggested that Mr. Jordan’s credibility with the right would make it easier for the party to unify behind any spending deal he were to cut with Democrats and the White House should he become speaker. Such a deal would be a tall order. Mr. Jordan voted last week against a measure to avoid a government shutdown — an agreement with Democrats that ultimately drove Mr. McCarthy from the speakership.“Jim Jordan is a trusted conservative; he’s well-respected by the base of the Republican Party,” Mr. Banks said. “So when we get to some of these tough spending fights and Speaker Jim Jordan is negotiating with the White House and the Senate, that’s going to help Republicans rally behind him and get to a place where they can vote for those deals.”“This is a different Republican Party today than what it was a decade ago,” he added. “And the Republican Party today is a lot more like Jim Jordan. It’s more of a fighting Republican Party.” More