More stories

  • in

    Donald Trump’s Latest Indictment May Reshape the 2024 Race

    The former president, who faces seven criminal charges for mishandling classified documents, is expected to surrender to authorities next week.“I’m an innocent man,” Donald Trump told his supporters on Thursday night.Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTrump indicted: what to expect next For the second time in two months, Donald Trump will surrender to the authorities to face legal charges, dropping another bomb into the 2024 presidential race. Within minutes, he was fund-raising on the back of the news.The indictment hasn’t yet been unsealed, but some details are known. The former president and front-runner for the Republican nomination faces seven criminal charges that he mishandled classified documents from his time in the White House and obstructed the government’s efforts to reclaim them. He is expected to turn himself in to the authorities on Tuesday.Mr. Trump himself broke the news last night, a sign his inner circle had been bracing for the indictment for weeks.On his Truth Social platform, Mr. Trump called the charges “election interference at the highest level,” adding, “I’m an innocent man.” Mr. Trump’s legal troubles keep piling up. But this indictment holds greater “legal gravity and political peril,” writes The Times’s Peter Baker. It’s not just a first in American history for a former president, but also involves the nation’s secrets.Here’s a recap of the other legal matters he faces:A federal grand jury last month ordered Mr. Trump to pay $5 million to the journalist E. Jean Carroll in a civil case that he sexually abused and then defamed her; Carroll’s legal team has sued Mr. Trump again over subsequent comments he made about her.In April, the New York authorities charged Mr. Trump with falsifying business documents in connection with hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.Mr. Trump is also under investigation in Georgia for possible election tampering in the state; a decision is expected later this summer.Mr. Trump’s Republican challengers came to his defense. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, his nearest rival in the polls, accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the Justice Department to take on a political rival. And Vivek Ramaswamy, the anti-woke financier, said he would pardon Mr. Trump if elected president.Mr. Trump gained in the polls the last time he was charged. It is unclear if the public will be so supportive this time. A Yahoo-YouGov poll showed nearly two-thirds of Americans view the charges of removing classified documents and obstructing the investigation as a serious criminal matter; a similar percentage feel that he should not serve as president if convicted.So far, big-money conservative donors have stayed mum on the latest charges. Many have deserted Mr. Trump after backing him in previous election cycles.HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING The wildfire haze is moving on from the Northeast. Cities including New York and Philadelphia have seen air conditions improve, though the noxious smoke is spreading south and west; the F.A.A. has lifted ground stops at LaGuardia and Newark airports. But scientists confirmed that the El Niño weather phenomenon has started, portending hotter temperatures through next year.China suffers from a lack of inflation. New monthly data shows that producer prices fell 4.6 percent in May, the sharpest year-on-year drop in seven years, while consumer prices rose just 0.2 percent. Though a contrast from Western countries grappling with rapid inflation, the trend suggests China’s faltering economy may soon suffer from deflation.The White House reportedly braces for the death of its student loan forgiveness program. Biden administration officials are privately worrying that the Supreme Court may strike down its proposal, which would eliminate up to $20,000 in education debt per person for millions of Americans, according to The Wall Street Journal. The White House is preparing less legally risky alternatives to help borrowers.G.M. electric vehicles will gain access to Tesla’s charging network. The move, which follows a similar announcement by Ford, will vastly expand charger accessibility for G.M. But some in the industry fear that wider adoption of Tesla’s plugs, which are now likely to become the industry standard, will give Elon Musk’s company even greater power over the E.V. market.The bull market rally is already being testedInvestors shrugged off lousy labor market data and a new round of inflation warnings to push the S&P 500 into bull market territory on Thursday. But that enthusiasm seems to be waning on Friday morning as stock futures suggest markets will open lower.The bear market lasted 248 trading days, the longest such run since 1948. Since its October low, the S&P 500 has gained 20.04 percent, just enough to tip into a bull market. The benchmark index is still roughly 10 percent away from a record high; some market observers say, therefore, that it’s premature to call this a true bull market.Investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence has underpinned this rally. According to Deutsche Bank analysts, the FANG+ Index — a collection of big cap tech stocks, many of which are expanding into A.I. — is up nearly 80 percent since ChatGPT debuted in November.Now to the bad news … A growing number of economists believe that next week’s Consumer Price Index report will show an uptick in core inflation. That could pressure the Fed to raise interest rates further — if not next week, in July.And there are signs of economic weakness. The Labor Department on Thursday reported 261,000 new jobless claims, the highest number since October 2021.Expect a prolonged period of economic uncertainty. That was the message from Mario Draghi, the former Italian prime minister and president of the E.C.B., in a speech on Thursday at M.I.T.The economist, who once famously vowed to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro, has a bearish view of the future. He warned that industrialized economies face a “volatile cocktail” of persistent inflation, high budget deficits, high interest rates and low potential growth as central banks grapple with a climate crisis, the reshoring of supply chains and the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine.Crypto’s protagonists lay out their casesRegulators and crypto executives are making their cases in the court of public opinion after the S.E.C. sued Binance and Coinbase, two of the sector’s biggest exchanges, this week in an intensifying crackdown on the industry.“We’ve seen this story before,” the S.E.C. chairman Gary Gensler said on Thursday at a fintech conference, likening widespread noncompliance in crypto to the era of “hucksters” and fraud a century ago. He rejected claims that digital asset businesses cannot comply with the existing rules or do not realize that they apply: “When crypto asset market participants go on Twitter or TV and say they lacked ‘fair notice’ that their conduct could be illegal, don’t believe it.”Coinbase’s boss says that new regulations are needed. Its C.E.O., Brian Armstrong, addressed the event on Wednesday, saying the rules are opaque and need to be updated. The S.E.C. case is certainly a drag on his company: Moody’s, the ratings agency, downgraded Coinbase on Thursday to negative from stable because of the charges.Binance is regrouping. The company’s American division said on Thursday that it would no longer allow customers to trade in U.S. dollars, after banks stopped working with it. At the same time, the S.E.C. says it is trying to find “alternative means” to serve legal papers to Binance and Changpeng Zhao, the company’s C.E.O., telling a federal court that it was difficult to determine where he was.Who’s judging? The S.E.C.’s case against Coinbase in New York was assigned to District Judge Jennifer Rearden. Her nomination last year angered some Democratic lawmakers because she represented Chevron as a lawyer at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. She’s also handling the government’s appeal of the sale of the failed crypto broker Voyager to Binance’s U.S. arm and put the deal on hold in March. Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the Federal District Court for D.C. is presiding over the Binance case, and is best known for overseeing the criminal proceedings against two Mr. Trump advisers, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Next week, she will hold a hearing on an S.E.C. request to freeze Binance’s assets.“I did not comprehend that ChatGPT could fabricate cases.” — Steven Schwartz, a lawyer who has practiced in New York for 30 years. He told a federal judge that he regrets using the chatbot to write a legal brief that was found to be filled with fake judicial opinions and legal citations.Buzzphrase of the week: “spatial computing” Apple unveiled its first headset for augmented/virtual/mixed reality this week, but none of those words appears in a nine-minute video on its website about the $3,500 Vision Pro goggles. Instead, the company preferred a more obscure term: “spatial computing.”Apple is trying to put its own stamp on the category. When it comes to spatial computing, “no one knows what that is — and that provides Apple the opportunity to define it,” Marcus Collins, the author of “For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do and Who We Want to Be,” told DealBook.Apple has successfully done this in the past. Before the App Store, people didn’t talk about apps; they talked about “software programs.”And the iPhone and AirPods were neither the first mobile phone nor the first earbuds, but they became runaway hits (despite being priced at a premium to the competition). Jim Posner, a communications consultant who has led teams at Twitter and Google, said that the intended audience may be investors and the media rather than consumers. “They are pitching a product to people,” he said. “For the tech press, industry analysts and investors, they’re pitching a concept.”Elsewhere, Mark Zuckerberg gave his thoughts on Apple’s Vision Pro goggles. “I was really curious to see what they’d ship,” the Meta C.E.O. told employees on Thursday, “and it’s a good sign for our own development that they don’t have any magical solutions to the laws of physics that we haven’t already explored.”THE SPEED READ DealsThe agricultural commodities giant Bunge is said to be finalizing a deal to buy Viterra, a grain trader, that could value the combined firm at $30 billion. (Reuters)UBS has secured a government backstop for losses tied to its takeover of Credit Suisse, clearing the last hurdle for combining Switzerland’s top two banks. (FT)Permira is reportedly weighing a sale or public listing for Golden Goose, a footwear brand favored by Taylor Swift, at a $2.7 billion valuation. (Bloomberg)PolicyLouisiana passed a bill that would block online services — including Instagram, TikTok and Fortnite — for children under 18 without their parents’ permission. (NYT)The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against a dog-toy maker whose product closely resembles a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey. (NYT)Best of the restSam Altman of OpenAI, Bob Iger of Disney, Jay Monahan of the PGA Tour, Rupert Murdoch of Fox and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet are all on the guest list for this year’s Allen & Company gathering in Sun Valley, Idaho. (Variety)How Taylor Swift is a godsend for Chicago’s hotel industry. (Bloomberg)“What All the Single Ladies (and Men) Say About the Economy” (NYT)We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com. More

  • in

    Your Friday Briefing: A Major Ukrainian Offensive

    Also, a victory for voting rights in the U.S.Fighting in the Donetsk region this week prompted U.S. authorities to say that the counteroffensive may have begun.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesUkraine mounts a major attack in the southA senior U.S. official said that the Ukrainian assault in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia appeared to be a main thrust of its long-anticipated counteroffensive to retake territory from Russia. The stakes are high for Kyiv and its Western allies.The Ukrainian forces in Zaporizhzhia included German Leopard 2 tanks and U.S. Bradley fighting vehicles, the official said. The attack involved some of the troops the U.S. and other allies of Ukraine had trained and equipped especially for the counteroffensive.Russian military officials said that their forces had withstood the assault and inflicted heavy casualties. The U.S. official confirmed that Ukraine’s Army had suffered casualties in the early fighting. There was no immediate comment from Ukraine, which has said it would remain silent on details.Stakes: If Ukraine fails to break through Russia’s lines, support could shrink — and Kyiv could come under pressure from allies to enter serious negotiations to end or freeze the conflict.Flooding: Russian forces shelled Kherson yesterday, striking near an evacuation point, hours after Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, visited the flood-stricken city. Rescue efforts are continuing after a dam was destroyed.The U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesA victory for U.S. voting rightsIn a surprise move, the Supreme Court ruled that Alabama had diluted the power of Black voters by drawing a congressional voting map with a single district in which they made up a majority.The 5-to-4 decision was a surprise: The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has worked to erode the Voting Rights Act, a federal law that was enacted in 1965 to protect minority voters from racial discrimination.The case started when Alabama’s Legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, redrew the congressional map to take account of the 2020 census. The state has seven districts, and its voting-age population is about 27 percent Black.The decision means that Alabama’s State Legislature will have to draw a second district with a Black majority.Context: The Supreme Court’s recent rightward lurch — seen in decisions on abortion, guns, religion and climate change — has shaken public confidence in its moral authority.For decades, the Najiaying Mosque has been the pride of the Muslim Hui ethnic minority in Nagu.Vivian Wang/The New York TimesChina’s plan to remake mosquesThe mosques in Nagu and Shadian in Yunnan Province in China hold particular importance in the story of Beijing’s relationship with Islam, which has fluctuated between conflict and coexistence.They are among the last major mosques with Arab-style architecture still standing in China after a campaign by the ruling Communist Party to close, demolish or forcibly redesign mosques that has so far been met with limited resistance.But late last month, members of the Muslim Hui ethnic minority in Nagu clashed with the police after the authorities drove construction cranes into that mosque’s courtyard. Officials had said they planned to remove its domes and remake its minarets in a more “Chinese” style. The demolition was paused, but residents think that it’s inevitable.To Hui residents in Nagu, which our correspondent Vivian Wang visited shortly after the protest, the remodeling plan was a precursor to a more sweeping repression of their way of life.THE LATEST NEWSAsia PacificChina has agreed to pay several billion dollars to Cuba to build an electronic eavesdropping center, which could be used to spy on the U.S., The Wall Street Journal reports.A poll has found that Europeans still mostly see China as “a necessary partner,” even as Beijing moves closer to Russia.Around the WorldA haze over the U.S. Capitol yesterday.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesSmoke from raging wildfires in Canada that has plagued the northeastern U.S. is spreading south and west. President Biden and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain met at the White House and pledged to work together to confront challenges posed by A.I., the economy and Ukraine.Prosecutors have told Donald Trump’s lawyers that the former president is the target of an investigation into his handling of classified documents, a sign that he is likely to face charges.Other Big StoriesA Syrian asylum seeker was arrested in France after an attack in a park in which four children and two adults were stabbed.The eurozone fell into a mild recession early this year.The U.S. suspended all food aid to Ethiopia, citing theft of the contributions.The Week in Culture“I’m good at a lot of things, but I’m best at performing.” — Alex Newell of “Shucked”Thea Traff for The New York Times Ahead of the Tony Awards on Sunday, our theater and culture reporters spoke to Jessica Chastain, Wendell Pierce, Ben Platt and other nominees about their craft. Here’s the full list of nominees.Satoshi Kuwata, the Japanese designer and founder of Setchu, won fashion’s most prestigious award for young designers.The job of a museum director is expanding beyond the art: Directors need to confront controversies ranging from looted art to issues of social justice.The fabled Cinecittà Studios in Rome are buzzing with activity again, thanks to modernized facilities and generous tax incentives.A Morning ReadDr. Sandra Hazelip, left, and Eleanor Hamby.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesIt’s never too late to travel with your best friend.Just ask Eleanor Hamby, 81, and Dr. Sandra Hazelip, 82, known by some as “the TikTok traveling grannies.” They went from Antarctica to the Grand Canyon in just 80 days, visiting 18 countries on a budget.Lives lived: Pat Robertson, a Baptist minister and broadcaster who gave Christian conservatives clout in U.S. politics, died at 93.ARTS AND IDEASA gay bar in Singapore.Ore Huiying for The New York TimesL.G.B.T.Q. life in AsiaFor Pride month, we asked our L.G.B.T.Q. readers to share their experiences. Thank you to those who told us about your joys and worries. I’ve lightly edited some responses.A reversal in ChinaJack, 38, moved to Beijing in 2008. At the time, “it felt like things were on the up for queer people.” The nightlife was thriving and activism was moving. “Everyone expected things would continue to get better,” he said. That all changed once Xi Jinping came to power, Jack said. Venues closed. Activists disappeared. Representation dwindled. “People withdrew into apps and the underground,” he wrote.Uncertainty in South KoreaA 16-year-old in Seoul, who didn’t want to share his name, said that there was little representation in the media or arts, and he knows only one other L.G.B.T.Q. person. “I’m a gay student,” he wrote. “I have come out to just a few friends whom I trust; it would be social suicide to come out publicly to everyone.”Muted relief in SingaporeSince Singapore repealed a ban on gay sex, some readers said life felt easier. Tan Jun Lin, 25, said that being gay felt less scary now, both because of the change in the law and because of growing visibility on social media. But he has still had to cut off homophobic friends and hide his sexuality from colleagues.“Pride doesn’t simply mean acceptance,” he wrote. At work, he told some colleagues about his sexuality, but they responded with a “stunned silence that clearly conveyed a concealed homophobia.”Frustration in JapanGaku Hiroshima, 33, lives in Kyoto. He is still aware of prejudice, he said, but in just a few years, he has seen attitudes change.“I feel the arrival of the zeitgeist of ‘making fun of sexuality is not cool,’” Gaku wrote. Kyoto’s City Hall is decorated for Pride, which he said “was clearly impossible a few years ago.”PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookDavid Malosh for The New York Times. Fold grated cheese into ground beef, instead of layering it on top, to make these moist burgers.What to WatchThese 10 movies celebrate New York City.What to Listen toDiscover the beauty of New Orleans jazz.Advice from WirecutterA guide to picking the best camping tent.Now Time to PlayPlay the Mini Crossword, and a clue: Night hallucination (five letters).Here are the Wordle and the Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. I hope you have a lovely weekend! — AmeliaP.S. Gilbert Cruz, our Books editor, spoke with NBC about exciting new titles. He recommends “The Wager,” by David Grann, about an 18th-century shipwreck.“The Daily” is about the race to become the Republican Party’s presidential candidate.We’d like your feedback. You can email us at briefing@nytimes.com. More

  • in

    Supreme Court to Hear Dispute Over ‘Trump Too Small’ Slogan

    In earlier cases, the justices struck down provisions of the trademark law that discriminated based on the speaker’s viewpoint.The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether a California lawyer may trademark the phrase “Trump too small,” a reference to a taunt from Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, during the 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Rubio said Donald J. Trump had “small hands,” adding: “And you know what they say about guys with small hands.”The lawyer, Steve Elster, said in his trademark application that he wanted to convey the message that “some features of President Trump and his policies are diminutive.” He sought to use the phrase on the front of T-shirts with a list of Mr. Trump’s positions on the back. For instance: “Small on civil rights.”A federal law forbids the registration of trademarks “identifying a particular living individual except by his written consent.” Citing that law, the Patent and Trademark Office rejected the application.A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the First Amendment required the office to allow the registration.“The government has no valid publicity interest that could overcome the First Amendment protections afforded to the political criticism embodied in Elster’s mark,” Judge Timothy B. Dyk wrote for the court. “As a result of the president’s status as a public official, and because Elster’s mark communicates his disagreement with and criticism of the then-president’s approach to governance, the government has no interest in disadvantaging Elster’s speech.”The size of Mr. Trump’s hands has long been the subject of commentary. In the 1980s, the satirical magazine Spy tormented Mr. Trump, then a New York City real estate developer, with the recurring epithet “short-fingered vulgarian.”In 2016, during a presidential debate, Mr. Trump addressed Mr. Rubio’s critique.“Look at those hands, are they small hands?” Mr. Trump said, displaying them. “And, he referred to my hands — ‘if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”The Biden administration appealed the Federal Circuit’s ruling to the Supreme Court. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar said Mr. Elster was free to discuss Mr. Trump’s physique and policies but was not entitled to a trademark.The Supreme Court has twice struck down provisions of the trademark law in recent years on First Amendment grounds.In 2019, it rejected a provision barring the registration of “immoral” or “scandalous” trademarks.That case concerned a line of clothing sold under the brand name FUCT. When the case was argued, a government lawyer told the justices that the term was “the equivalent of the past participle form of the paradigmatic profane word in our culture.”Justice Elena Kagan, writing for a six-justice majority, did not dispute that. But she said the law was unconstitutional because it “disfavors certain ideas.”A bedrock principle of First Amendment law, she wrote, is that the government may not draw distinctions based on speakers’ viewpoints.In 2017, a unanimous eight-justice court struck down another provision of the trademarks law, this one forbidding marks that disparage people, living or dead, along with “institutions, beliefs or national symbols.”The decision, Matal v. Tam, concerned an Asian American dance-rock band called The Slants. The court split 4 to 4 in much of its reasoning, but all the justices agreed that the provision at issue in that case violated the Constitution because it took sides based on speakers’ viewpoints.The new case, Vidal v. Elster, No. 22-704, is arguably different, as the provision at issue does not appear to make such distinction. In his Supreme Court brief, Mr. Elster responded that “the statute makes it virtually impossible to register a mark that expresses an opinion about a public figure — including a political message (as here) that is critical of the president of the United States.” More

  • in

    The Supreme Court Has Earned a Little Contempt

    Although the Supreme Court has been deciding cases at a glacial pace this term — and that with an almost comically small docket of only 59 merits cases — the justices have found other ways to keep busy. They have been spinning their ethical lapses (Justice Clarence Thomas), blowing off congressional oversight (Chief Justice John Roberts), giving interviews whining about public criticism (Justice Samuel Alito) and presenting awards to one another (Justice Elena Kagan to Mr. Roberts).In the cases it has decided, the Supreme Court has gutted an important provision of the Clean Water Act and made it easier for private litigants to mount constitutional challenges to an administrative agency’s structure or existence. Opinions still to come threaten to strike down everything from affirmative action in education to student debt relief to the Indian Child Welfare Act.Court observers might be tempted to describe all this as a relatively recent development, a function of the court’s 6-to-3 Republican-appointed supermajority. The University of Michigan law professor Leah Litman has called this the “YOLO court” (for “you only live once”), because of the majority’s apparent sense of liberation in pursuing long-held conservative goals. Mark Lemley of Stanford placed the beginning of the “imperial Supreme Court” in 2020.Mr. Lemley is right to decry the self-aggrandizing nature of the court. But his dating is somewhat off. Judicial self-aggrandizement has been in the works for a lot longer: It has been a hallmark of the John Roberts years.Over roughly the past 15 years, the justices have seized for themselves more and more of the national governing agenda, overriding other decision makers with startling frequency. And they have done so in language that drips with contempt for other governing institutions and in a way that elevates the judicial role above all others.The result has been a judicial power grab.Judges have long portrayed themselves as neutral, apolitical conduits of the law, in contrast to the sordid political branches. This portrayal serves to obscure the institution of the judiciary and to foreground the abstract, disembodied concept of the law. In turn, it serves to empower judges, who present themselves not as one type of political actor but rather as the voice of the majestic principles of the law.But Mr. Roberts’s judiciary has increasingly taken subtext and made it text. Here are three thematic examples out of many.Campaign Finance LawStarting with Citizens United in 2010, the Republican-appointed majority on the court has consistently struck down provisions limiting the influence of money in politics, including provisions that it previously upheld. In a 2014 case, Mr. Roberts wrote that campaign finance regulations that pursue objectives other than eradicating quid pro quo corruption or its appearance “impermissibly inject the government into the debate over who should govern. And those who govern should be the last people to help decide who should govern.”In this brief passage, Mr. Roberts implicitly distances his own institution from “the government” of which it is obviously a part, implies that the court stands outside the processes of governance, and suggests that there is something self-dealing and borderline corrupt about campaign finance laws passed by elected legislatures.In these same cases, the justices have described nonjudicial political speech in terms that make it sound kind of … icky. It involves “sound bites, talking points and scripted messages that dominate the 24-hour news cycle,” in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words. This sort of speech deserves protection for the same reasons that “flag burning, funeral protests and Nazi parades” do, in Mr. Roberts’s.Yet there has been one glaring exception to the majority’s hostility to campaign finance regulations: In the context of state judicial elections, they have upheld restrictions that they would be highly unlikely to tolerate in the context of nonjudicial elections. Tellingly, these cases describe judges in a manner that starkly contrasts with how they have described nonjudicial officeholders.As Mr. Kennedy put it in a 2009 case about when campaign spending required a state judge to recuse himself, “Precedent and stare decisis and the text and purpose of the law and the Constitution, logic and scholarship and experience and common sense, and fairness and disinterest and neutrality are among the factors at work” when judges consider cases — a far cry from the “sound bites, talking points and scripted messages” of nonjudicial political speech.And in a 2015 case upholding a Florida law that forbade candidates for judicial office from personally soliciting campaign contributions, Mr. Roberts, anachronistically appealing to the authority of Magna Carta, wrote that judges “cannot supplicate campaign donors without diminishing public confidence in judicial integrity” and concluded that “judges are not politicians, even when they come to the bench by way of the ballot.”Mr. Roberts’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, judges are political actors, and striking down federal election laws is an aggressive act of governance by the judiciary. And the justices’ language in these cases, holding up judges as noble instruments of the law and denigrating other officeholders as power-grubbing and superficial, serves to reinforce and justify the notion that they are uniquely qualified to govern us.Congressional OversightOn one day in 2020, the court decided two cases dealing with very similar subpoenas for information about President Donald Trump’s financial and business dealings. One set of subpoenas came from congressional committees; the other came from a New York State grand jury.Mr. Roberts wrote both opinions. In the case dealing with congressional subpoenas, he worried that Congress may aim to “harass the president or render him ‘complaisan[t] to the humors of the legislature.’” Accordingly, the subpoenas must be superintended by the courts, lest the legislature “‘exert an imperious controul’ over the executive branch and aggrandize itself at the president’s expense, just as the framers feared.” (The internal quotations there are from the Federalist Papers to provide a patina of antiquity.) He thus announced a multipart balancing test that applies only when Congress seeks the personal papers of the president.While that decision made the president a supercitizen vis-à-vis congressional subpoenas, the other opinion emphasized that he is just a regular citizen when it comes to judicial subpoenas. Unlike Congress, apparently, a grand jury requires “all information that might possibly bear on its investigation.” Whereas Mr. Roberts worried about Congress harassing the president, “we generally ‘assume[] that state courts and prosecutors will observe constitutional limitations.’”Not only do these opinions stymie congressional oversight — the papers were not handed over to the committees until nearly two years into the Biden administration — they also do so using language that elevates judicial institutions while denigrating legislative ones.Federal RegulationCongress is not alone; administrative agencies also bear the brunt of the justices’ disdain. In a series of recent cases that, for example, struck down the E.P.A.’s clean power plan for addressing climate change, the Republican-appointed justices have invented the so-called major questions doctrine. If they consider an issue major — and they have not told us what makes a question major beyond “vast economic and political significance” or “earnest and profound debate across the country” — then they will not allow an agency to regulate in that manner unless Congress has clearly stated that it may.To use an analogy: If a majority of justices determine that eating an ice cream cone is a major question, then it is not enough that Congress has empowered the agency to “eat any dessert it chooses.” It must legislate that the agency can “eat any dessert it chooses, including ice cream cones.” But Congress has no way of knowing whether eating an ice cream cone is major until it sees what a majority of justices have to say about it.In justifying this doctrine, the justices have raised the specter of out-of-control bureaucrats intruding on the liberty of citizens, undermining legal stability, serving only special interests and invading the domain of the states.You might think that this doctrine is meant to protect congressional power, except that it dictates to Congress how it must legislate, despite the fact that Congress has no way of knowing in advance what issues will be considered major. Moreover, as the legal scholar Beau Baumann has noted, Justice Neil Gorsuch and his colleagues have justified the doctrine on the grounds that Congress is too eager to delegate to agencies in order to avoid political responsibility, so the courts must keep Congress in line. In other words, the justices are paternalistically claiming to protect Congress from itself.***In all of these areas and in plenty more, the justices have seized for themselves an active role in governance. But perhaps even more consequentially, in doing so, they have repeatedly described other political institutions in overwhelmingly derogatory terms while either describing the judiciary in flattering terms or not describing it at all — denying its status as an institution and positioning it as simply a conduit of disembodied law.This is the ideological foundation for the Roberts-era judicial power grab.It is also worth noting that this ideological project is bipartisan. Republican-appointed justices dominate the court and have for many decades, but their Democratic-appointed colleagues — while dissenting in many individual opinions — evince no desire to contest the underlying disdain for other institutions or elevation of their own. When Mr. Roberts recently refused to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, nothing stopped Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan or Ketanji Brown Jackson from volunteering to testify, but they did not. Nothing is stopping them from publicly calling for a binding ethics code or from questioning not just the correctness but also the legitimacy of their institution’s assertiveness, but they have not.Recognizing the justices’ ideological project also points to the beginning of the solution. We ought to begin talking about the justices the way we talk about other political actors — recognizing that their first name is not Justice and that they, like other politicians, should be identified by their party.We should stop talking about another branch’s potential defiance of a judicial opinion as an attack on “the rule of law” and instead understand it as an attack on rule by judges, one that may (or may not) be a justified response to some act of judicial governance. And those other branches should be more willing — as they have at other moments in American history — to use the tools at their disposal, including cutting the judiciary’s funding, to put the courts in their place.In recent years, the judiciary has shown little but contempt for other governing institutions. It has earned a little contempt in return.Josh Chafetz (@joshchafetz) is a law professor at Georgetown and the author of “Congress’s Constitution.” This essay is adapted from a forthcoming article in The St. Louis University Law Journal.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

  • in

    Ron DeSantis Floats ‘7-2 Conservative Majority’ on Supreme Court

    With his 2024 campaign imminent, Ron DeSantis pointed to how he could tilt the court further to the right. He also highlighted his ability to serve for eight years as president, unlike Donald Trump.On the eve of declaring his candidacy for president, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has begun articulating a new rationale for why Republicans should nominate him over former President Donald J. Trump, saying he could “fortify” the Supreme Court’s conservative majority during a potential eight years in office.“You would have a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court that would last a quarter-century,” Mr. DeSantis said on Monday during an address to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Orlando. “So this is big stuff, very important that that gets done right.”His comments seemed to signal a new avenue of attack against Mr. Trump, who could serve for only another four years in the White House. Conservatives have praised Mr. Trump for establishing a strong 6-to-3 majority on the court, which overturned Roe v. Wade last year, a decades-long ambition of Republicans.Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to declare his candidacy this week, suggested that he would appoint similarly conservative justices — but that he would have the opportunity to do so for longer than Mr. Trump.“I think if you look over, you know, the next two presidential terms, there is a good chance that you could be called upon to seek replacements for Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito,” Mr. DeSantis said, referring to two of the court’s most staunchly conservative members. “And the issue with that is you can’t really do better than those two. They are the gold standard for jurisprudence.”The governor also seemed to criticize Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005 but has sometimes voted with the court’s liberal wing. Mr. DeSantis warned that replacing a justice like Justice Thomas with a jurist in the mold of Justice Roberts would “actually see the court move to the left.” He also indicated that the next president could have an opportunity to replace Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal who has been on the court since 2009.In Florida, Mr. DeSantis has reshaped the State Supreme Court with conservative justices, removing a potential roadblock to enacting his agenda.While Mr. DeSantis has not talked much about his faith on a national tour ahead of his presidential run, he told the audience of Christian conservatives in Orlando about bringing home water from the Sea of Galilee in Israel to baptize his children. He also praised the nation of Israel, calling it “the cradle of our Judeo-Christian civilization.”“Those are the values that undergird our Constitution and our republic here in America,” Mr. DeSantis added. More

  • in

    Why the Supreme Court Is Blind to Its Own Corruption

    The scandal surrounding Justice Clarence Thomas has further eroded the already record-low public confidence in the Supreme Court. If Chief Justice John Roberts wonders how such a thing could have happened, he might start looking for answers within the cloistered walls of his own courtroom.Over more than two decades, the Supreme Court has gutted laws aimed at fighting corruption and at limiting the ability of the powerful to enrich public officials in a position to advance their interests. As a result, today wealthy individuals and corporations may buy political access and influence with little fear of legal consequences, either for them or for the beneficiaries of their largess.No wonder Justice Thomas apparently thought his behavior was no big deal.He has been under fire for secretly accepting, from the Republican megadonor Harlan Crow, luxury vacations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, a real estate deal (involving the home where his mother was living) and the payment of private school tuition for a grandnephew the justice was raising. Meanwhile, over the years, conservative groups with which Mr. Crow was affiliated filed amicus briefs in several matters before the Supreme Court.That sounds like the very definition of corruption. But over the years, many justices — and not just conservatives — have championed a different definition.The landmark case is the court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. A five-justice majority — including Justice Thomas — struck down decades-old restrictions on independent campaign expenditures by corporations, holding that they violated the companies’ free speech rights. It rejected the argument that such laws were necessary to prevent the damage to democracy that results from unbridled corporate spending and the undue influence it can create.The government’s legitimate interest in fighting corruption, the court held, is limited to direct quid pro quo deals, in which a public official makes a specific commitment to act in exchange for something of value. The appearance of potentially improper influence or access is not enough.In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens accused the majority of adopting a “crabbed view of corruption” that the court itself had rejected in an earlier case. He argued that Congress has a legitimate interest in limiting the effects of corporate money on politics: “Corruption operates along a spectrum, and the majority’s apparent belief that quid pro quo arrangements can be neatly demarcated from other improper influences does not accord with the theory or reality of politics.”Citizens United opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate spending on behalf of political candidates and to the influence that spending necessarily provides. But the decision didn’t come out of nowhere: The court has often been unanimous in its zeal for curtailing criminal corruption laws.In the 1999 case of United States v. Sun-Diamond Growers of California, the court unanimously held, in effect, that it is not a violation of the federal gratuities statute for an individual or corporation to have a public official on private retainer. The court rejected a theory known as a “status gratuity,” where a donor showers a public official with gifts over time based on the official’s position (that is in contrast with a more common gratuity, given as a thank you for a particular act by the official). The quite reasonable rationale behind that theory was that when matters of interest to the donor arose, the past gifts (and hope for future ones) might lead the official to favor his or her benefactor.That actually sounds a lot like the Crow-Thomas relationship. But the court held that such an arrangement is not unlawful. The gratuities law, the court ruled, requires that a particular gift be linked to a particular official act. Without such a direct link, a series of gifts to a public official over time does not violate the statute, even if the goal is to curry favor with an official who could act to benefit the gift giver.In the wake of Sun-Diamond, federal prosecutors increasingly turned to a more expansive legal theory known as honest services fraud. But in Skilling v. United States, the court ruled that theory is limited to cases of bribes and kickbacks — once again, direct quid pro quo deals. Three justices, including Justice Thomas, wanted to go even further and declare the statute that prohibits honest services fraud unconstitutional.The court proceeded to limit its “crabbed view of corruption” even further. In the 2016 case McDonnell v. United States, the court held that selling government access is not unlawful. Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia and his wife, Maureen, accepted about $175,000 in secret gifts from the businessman Jonnie Williams, who wanted Virginia’s public universities to perform research studies on his company’s dietary supplement to assist with its F.D.A. approval. In exchange, Mr. McDonnell asked subordinates to meet with Mr. Williams about such studies and hosted a luncheon at the governor’s mansion to connect him with university health researchers.A jury convicted the McDonnells on several counts of corruption. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit — hardly known as a bastion of liberalism — unanimously affirmed the convictions. But the Supreme Court unanimously reversed, holding that the things Mr. McDonnell did for Mr. Williams did not qualify as “official acts” under federal bribery law. Selling official access may be tawdry, the court held, but it is not a crime.Those who think Justice Thomas may be guilty of corruption may not realize just how difficult the court itself has made it to prove such a case. Now only the most ham-handed officials, clumsy enough to engage in a direct quid pro quo, risk prosecution.Viewed in light of this history, the Thomas scandal becomes less surprising. Its own rulings would indicate that the Supreme Court doesn’t believe what he did is corrupt. A powerful conservative with interests before the court who regularly provides a justice with vacations worth more than his annual salary is, as the court said in Citizens United, merely the “appearance” of potential corruption. In the court’s view, the public has no reason to be concerned.But the public clearly is, and should be, concerned over the ability of the rich and powerful to purchase access and influence unavailable to most citizens. Unfortunately, Citizens United is here to stay without a constitutional amendment or an overruling by the court, neither of which is very likely.But it’s still possible for the rest of the country to move past the court’s naïve and inadequate view of corruption. Congress could amend criminal corruption laws to expand their scope and overturn the results in Sun-Diamond, Skilling and McDonnell. It could increase funding for enforcement of the Ethics in Government Act and increase the penalties for filing a false financial disclosure form (or failing to file one at all). Beefed up disclosure regulations could make it more difficult for officials to hide financial interests and could make it clear there are no disclosure exceptions for enormous gifts of “personal hospitality,” contrary to what Justice Thomas claims he believed. And Congress could pass legislation like the proposed Disclose Act, to require transparency regarding who is behind political donations and spending.Congress so far has shown little interest in passing such reforms. But that’s where the remedy lies. It’s time for Congress to act.In his Citizens United dissent, Justice Stevens observed, “A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold.” That’s exactly how it now appears to the public — and that applies to Supreme Court justices as well as to politicians.Randall D. Eliason is the former chief of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and teaches white-collar criminal law at George Washington University Law School. He blogs at Sidebarsblog.com.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

  • in

    Supreme Court to Consider South Carolina Voting Map Ruled a Racial Gerrymander

    A unanimous three-judge panel found that a congressional voting district anchored in Charleston, S.C., violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said on Monday that it would decide whether a congressional voting district in South Carolina should be restored after a lower court struck it down as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.A unanimous three-judge panel of the Federal District Court in Columbia, S.C., ruled in January that the state’s First Congressional District, drawn after the 2020 census, violated the Constitution by making race the predominant factor.The district, anchored in Charleston, had elected a Republican every year since 1980, with the exception of 2018. But the 2020 race was close, with less than one percentage point separating the candidates, and Republican lawmakers “sought to create a stronger Republican tilt” in the district after the 2020 census, the panel wrote.The lawmakers achieved that goal, the panel found, in part by the “bleaching of African American voters out of the Charleston County portion of Congressional District No. 1.”The new House map moved 62 percent of Black voters in Charleston County from the First District to the Sixth District, a seat that Representative James E. Clyburn, a Black Democrat, has held for 30 years.The move helped make the new First District a Republican stronghold. In November, Nancy Mace, the Republican incumbent, won re-election by 14 percentage points.Republican lawmakers acknowledged that they had redrawn the First District for partisan gain. But they said they had not considered race in the process.The panel ruled that the district’s boundaries must be redrawn before future elections are held. But the panel rejected challenges to two other House voting districts, saying that civil rights groups had failed to demonstrate that the districts had been predominantly drawn to dilute Black voting power.The Supreme Court has called for very close scrutiny of a state’s actions when race was shown to be the predominant reason in drawing legislative districts. That principle, rooted in the Constitution’s equal protection clause, is often invoked to limit the creation of districts that empower minority voters.In the new case, Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., No. 22-807, the challenge came from the opposite direction, saying that the map hurt Black voters by moving them from one congressional district to another.The Supreme Court will soon decide whether to allow a congressional map drawn by Republican lawmakers in Alabama. A lower court had said the map diluted the power of Black voters, violating the Voting Rights Act. The South Carolina case poses different questions, centered on the Constitution’s equal protection principles.In their Supreme Court appeal, South Carolina Republicans argued that the panel should have presumed that they had acted in good faith, as required by Supreme Court precedent, and analyzed the district as a whole.“The result,” the lawmakers wrote, quoting from an earlier decision, “is a thinly reasoned order that presumes bad faith, erroneously equates the purported racial effect of a single line in Charleston County with racial predominance across District 1, and is riddled with ‘legal mistakes’ that improperly relieved plaintiffs of their ‘demanding’ burden to prove that race was the ‘predominant consideration.’”The challengers, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told the justices that “the panel correctly found that race was the gerrymander’s primary vehicle.”“That predominant reliance on race is impermissible even if mapmakers used race as a proxy for politics,” the challengers’ brief said. More

  • in

    Something’s Got to Give

    It’s been 52 years since Congress passed, and the country ratified, a constitutional amendment — the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18 in the wake of the Vietnam War and the broader disruption of the 1960s. (The 27th Amendment, ratified in 1992, was passed in 1789.) It’s been 64 years since Congress added states to the union — Alaska and Hawaii, in 1959. And it’s been 94 years since Congress capped the size of the House of Representatives at 435 members.You might be tempted to treat these facts as trivia. But the truth is that they say something profound about American politics. For more than 50 years, the United States has been frozen in a kind of structural and constitutional stasis. Despite deep changes in our society — among them major population growth and at least two generational waves — we have made no formal changes to our national charter, nor have we added states or rearranged the federal system or altered the rules of political competition.One reason this matters, as Kate Shaw and Julie C. Suk observe in a recent essay for Times Opinion, is that “several generations of Americans have lost the habit and muscle memory of seeking formal constitutional change.” Unaccustomed to the concept and convinced that it is functionally impossible, Americans have abandoned the very notion that we can change our Constitution. Instead, we place the onus for change on the Supreme Court and hope for the best. Out with popular sovereignty, in with judicial supremacy.There is another reason this matters. Our stagnant political system has produced a stagnant political landscape. Neither party has been able to obtain a lasting advantage over the other, nor is either party poised to do so. The margins of victory and defeat in national elections are slim. The Republican majority that gave President George W. Bush a second term in the White House — and inspired, however briefly, visions of a permanent Republican majority — came to just 50.7 percent of the overall vote. President Barack Obama won his second term by around four percentage points, and President Biden won by a similar margin in 2020. Donald Trump, as we know, didn’t win a majority of voters in 2016.Control of Congress is evenly matched as well. Majorities are made with narrow margins in a handful of contested races, where victory can rest more on the shape of the district map — and the extent of the gerrymandering, assuming it holds — than on any kind of political persuasion. That’s the House. In the Senate, control has lurched back and forth on the basis of a few competitive seats in a few competitive states. And the next presidential election, thanks to the Electoral College, will be a game of inches in a small batch of closely matched states rather than a true national election.Past eras of political dynamism often came from some change in the overall political order. Throughout the 19th century, for example, the addition of states either transformed the terrain on which Americans fought partisan politics or opened avenues for long-term success for either one of the two major parties. States could be used to solidify partisan control in Washington — the reason we have two Dakotas instead of one — or used to extend and enlarge an existing coalition.Progressive-era constitutional transformations — the direct election of senators, women’s suffrage and Prohibition — reverberated through partisan politics, and the flood of Black Americans from Southern fields to Northern cities put an indelible stamp on the behavior of Democrats and Republicans.We lack for political disruption on that scale. There are no constitutional amendments on the table that might alter the terms of partisan combat in this country. There’s no chance — anytime soon — that we’ll end the Electoral College or radically expand the size of the House, moves that could change the national political calculus for both parties. There are no prospects, at this point, for new states, whether D.C., Puerto Rico or any of the other territories where Americans live and work without real representation in Congress.There’s nothing either constitutional or structural on the horizon of American politics that might unsettle or shake the political system itself out of its stagnation. Nothing that could push the public in new directions or force the parties themselves to build new kinds of coalitions. Nothing, in short, that could help Americans untangle the pathologies of our current political order.The fact of the matter is that there are forces that are trying to break the stasis of American politics. There’s the Supreme Court, which has used its iron grip on constitutional meaning to accumulate power in its chambers, to the detriment of other institutions of American governance. There’s the Republican Party, which has used the countermajoritarian features of our system to build redoubts of power, insulated from the voters themselves. And there is an authoritarian movement, led and animated by Trump, that wants to renounce constitutional government in favor of an authoritarian patronage regime, with his family at its center.Each of these forces is trying to game the current system, to build a new order from the pieces as they exist. But there’s nothing that says we can’t write new rules. And there’s nothing that says that we have to play this particular game.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