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      What Will Marianne Williamson Do Next?

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      Marianne Williamson was invoking Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy and Thoreau, barefoot in a brownstone in Brooklyn. “If everything you’re doing is making everybody happy, you’re not doing the right stuff yet,” she said to a room of about 30 people.That September day, Ms. Williamson, the author, spiritual teacher and erstwhile presidential candidate, was wearing dramatic draping sleeves like a wizard’s. The attendees were mostly writers, including the playwright Leah Nanako Winkler and Derek Simonds, the showrunner of “The Sinner,” and were there by private invitation.What drew this crowd was the same thing that has pulled audiences toward Ms. Williamson for almost 40 years. It was the first time she had spoken at an in-person event since the pandemic began, a radical change for a person whose career is tied to public speaking. What Ms. Williamson ultimately advised, knowing her audience, was this: that each of us should sit down and pray, “Dear God, let me write one true sentence.”Ms. Williamson, 69, presents with the same fire that has fueled her career from the beginning, when she made a reputation for herself speaking around Los Angeles in the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis hit. (“In a very real way, gay men in Los Angeles gave me my career,” she said in an interview.)After ending her presidential campaign in January 2020, Ms. Williamson moved from New York to Washington, D.C. (by way of Iowa), where she has continued her speaking career on Zoom and churned out a virtual tsunami of content, including a daily newsletter, a morning meditation and a podcast with a political focus.But it was her presidential run that raised her profile, and earning potential, exponentially. Many Americans encountered her for the first time, via the persona — the parody version — that quickly enveloped her, that of a crystal-worshiping, anti-vaccine (this was pre-Covid vaccines), new-age weirdo who would dare talk about love in a political debate. Who would dare to make love the very center of her platform, in fact.Ms. Williamson announcing her presidential campaign at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills, Calif.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesThinking BigI first met Ms. Williamson in Los Angeles, late in the fall of 2017, at a conference called Summit, hosted by four tech entrepreneurs. Ms. Williamson was scheduled to give a speech.Before it began, I was looking for a seat when a woman introduced herself to me as a friend of Ms. Williamson’s. Earlier that day, she said, Marianne had broken her toe, so she was likely to speak sitting down, rather than pace the stage as usual. Yet a few minutes later, there was Ms. Williamson, pacing back and forth in stunningly high heels. She stayed on her feet the whole time, as if nothing were the matter at all.Ms. Williamson became famous at 40, when she published her first book, “A Return to Love,” and Oprah Winfrey, pre-book club, had her on the show. The book was inspired by and based on “A Course in Miracles,” by Helen Schucman, which Ms. Williamson credits with saving her from a rootless youth of cabaret singing and “bad boys and good dope,” as she writes in the book. (No more than what others of her age were doing, she is quick to clarify now.)But though she began by writing about miracles and is now preparing to write a book about Jesus — “for people who do not necessarily relate to the dogma or the doctrine of the Christian religion” — she is very direct about one point. “I’m a Jew,” she said. “You’re born a Jew, you die a Jew.” Her spirituality is intended as ecumenical, and she has been building and refining it for decades. She sees her effort to branch out into politics — running for a California congressional seat in 2014, then for president in 2020 — as a natural extension of her earlier work.“Spirituality isn’t some lane off to the side somewhere,” she said. “It’s an understanding of the dynamics that underlie everything. This isn’t a matter of ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if America decided to change?’ It’s a matter of ‘We must change, or we will lose it all.’”Diagnosis: ‘Kooky’One of Ms. Williamson’s top Google hits to this day is from The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts humor column, in which she is fictionally quoted as saying, “I’d like to reallocate the government money that we’re spending on vaccinating children to something useful, like taking mediums underwater to ask eldritch spirits, ‘Who are we? Why are we all here?’”Ms. Williamson has never been easy to categorize, and she believes there are deeper reasons for her ridicule. “Those who were invested in calling me kooky didn’t do it because they thought what I was saying was silly,” Ms. Williamson said. “Making me appear ridiculous was the chosen way to marginalize my message.”It was one week after her Brooklyn salon, and we were in the dining room of the Loews Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. There was extra security in the lobby and temporary metal detectors — it was rumored the Israeli prime minister was in the hotel — but Ms. Williamson had entered casually, having shown her required proof of vaccination.On that subject, by the way, she said that her views on vaccination are an example of the ways in which she has been misrepresented. During her campaign, before the coronavirus had entered the picture, Ms. Williamson called mandatory vaccinations “draconian” and “Orwellian,” but then walked her position back on Twitter the next day: “I am sorry I made comments which sounded as though I question the validity of life-saving vaccines. That is not my feeling and I realize that I misspoke.”Now, she told me, “it was one of several areas where the truth of who I am was deeply mischaracterized.” She also acknowledges, however, that she has questioned the pharmaceutical industry in the past, including the safety of some vaccines. In 2012, as Andrew Kaczynski reported on CNN.com, “Williamson said she ‘agonized’ as a mother over the decision to vaccinate her children and that she could see ‘both sides’ of the issue.”More recently, Ms. Williamson alluded to this background when she said to me: “What big pharma does, if you make any statement questioning the safety of vaccines, they call you anti-vax.”And don’t get her started on the crystals. “In all of my books, and in thousands of my online lectures and seminars,” she said, “you will never find the word ‘crystal.’” (On this point, I’ll have to take her word for it, such is the volume of output.)The Outsider OnstageThroughout her presidential campaign, she was dogged by criticisms that went beyond crystals: that she had been controlling and temperamental at organizations she created in the 1990s to provide free services to AIDS patients; that in her spiritual teachings, she had made some of her followers feel they should have been able to will away their disease; that her book on weight loss was anti-fat. And, more generally, and perhaps more fatally, that with her lack of political experience and her emotion-based language, she simply did not belong on that stage.Nothing could have highlighted her outsider status more than the optics of the first Democratic debate, in Miami, in the summer of 2019. In contrast to the unbroken line of candidates in dark blues and blacks, she wore a sea foam green suit and stood on the very edge of the stage. She did not speak at all until minute 14 of the broadcast, when she could be heard saying, faintly, “I’m sorry,” in an unsuccessful attempt to break into the discourse about student loan debt.Ms. Williamson at the first Democratic presidential debate in Miami in 2019, with fellow candidates John Hickenlooper and Andrew Yang.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut it wasn’t until Minute 27, well after a cringe-worthy intervention by Kirsten Gillibrand on Ms. Williamson’s behalf, that Ms. Williamson was finally granted the floor. This was when she was able to make her larger point: that the Democrats weren’t going to beat Donald Trump with a “shallow” health care plan. “Ladies and gentlemen, we don’t have a health care system in the United States,” she said. “We have a sickness care system in the United States.” Her first answer of the night earned rousing applause.Many of Ms. Williamson’s admirers are drawn to her progressive positions and the refreshing and unapologetic way in which she expresses them. She is against the “military industrial complex.” She has called for reparations for Black Americans since 1998 when her book “Healing the Soul of America” was published.“I do not believe the average American is racist, but I believe the average American does not truly realize how tilted our public resources are away from American black citizens and in the direction of America’s richer white citizens,” she writes in that book. “We do not have in America today a consensus that there is even a debt to be paid. What is this in our national temperament? Why is it that we resist the recognition of the tremendous moral debt we owe to a people brought here against their will and enslaved for centuries?”She was asked about reparations in the second Democratic debate. “It’s not $500 billion in ‘financial assistance,’” she said, echoing the moderator’s phrasing. “It’s 200 to 500 billion dollars of payment of a debt that is owed.” Around the time of the debate, she told me, she had been acutely aware that “race in America was about to blow.”Sipping an Arnold Palmer at the Regency, Ms. Williamson recalled that running for president was both inspiring and scorching. She was exhilarated by the primary state voters and their commitment to their role in American politics, but at the same time, “it is such a brutal and brutalizing experience to run, and in my case even more so,” she said.“I was the most Googled person in 49 states after the second debate, and clearly someone very high up said get that woman off the stage. If I had been in the third debate, I think I might have been an inconvenience to a few people.” Along with other candidates, she didn’t qualify because her campaign did not meet certain finance requirements.Ms. Williamson ended her candidacy on Jan. 10, 2020. By then, rumors of an infectious new virus were growing more insistent every day. She had run out of money, and most of the infrastructure of her campaign was gone.But Ms. Williamson now says she regrets stepping down when she did. At the very end, when she was deciding whether to quit, she noticed that it was her female friends who urged her to be done with it already and her male friends who urged her to keep going, often with sports analogies, like “you still have time on the clock.” Which amused her, because she knows next to nothing about sports. “I didn’t enter the race with the a tough enough skin,” she told me.“When people lie about you and create false narratives about you and misrepresent you, is that bruising? Yes. However, what is that compared to the fact that the Taliban has announced they are going to start public executions and cutting peoples’ hands off again? I have perspective.”And yet. “It took me a year to forgive myself and others,” she said.Molly Matalon for The New York Times‘Car Mechanics’ of WashingtonThe next time I saw Ms. Williamson, she seemed more guarded, more vulnerable, and a touch more exasperated than she had in New York. We met in her home in Washington, a modern glass-walled apartment less than a mile from the White House. She moved into it soon after ending her candidacy, she said, so she could “keep an ear to the ground.”To her, Washington is still essentially business as usual. “D.C. has a lot of good political car mechanics,” she said. “That’s not the problem. The problem is that the car is on the wrong road. The car is heading towards a cliff.”The week before, the Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel had tweeted a photo of Ms. Williamson and Andrew Yang, onstage at an event for Mr. Yang’s new book. Mr. Weigel quoted Ms. Williamson saying, “We don’t want to be Jill Steins, but in any other country, any other advanced democracy, they have multiple political parties.” The tweet predictably triggered speculation about what, exactly, Ms. Williamson intends to do next.She may not want to be Jill Stein — the Green Party candidate whose presidential run is often cited as a reason Mr. Trump won — but she also doesn’t want to dismiss Jill Stein. After all, Ms. Williamson said, “we need a viable other. I support any third-party effort that makes a thoughtful, articulate critique of the fundamental flaws in contemporary capitalism and its effects on people and the planet” When she ran for Congress in California, in 2014, it was as an independent.Ms. Williamson sees the two-party system of today as blighted and controlled by corporate interests. “Republican policies represent a nosedive for our democracy,” she said. “And Democratic policies represent a managed decline.” And yet she also believes that this is the year it will change. “The status quo is unsustainable,” she said. “There is too much human despair out there.”She is not willing to say whether she’ll run again, and dodged the question over the course of our many conversations. About two weeks ago, when Politico published an article suggesting that President Biden would face a primary challenge from a progressive candidate, “such as former Sanders campaign co-chair Nina Turner, 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson or millionaire and $18-an-hour minimum wage advocate Joe Sanberg,” Ms. Williamson declined to comment.James Carville, the longtime Democratic strategist, is skeptical. “She ran before and she didn’t get a lot of votes,” he said. “She’s kind of an interesting person to say the least, but I don’t think politics is her calling. She always struck me as a new age Bernie Bro.”In some ways, Ms. Williamson is like a Rorschach test: Many thrill to her message, while others doubt her sincerity and believe she is feeding into the speculation about a second presidential run only in order to linger on the stage.Ms. Williamson campaigning in New Hampshire in 2019. She is not willing to say whether she’ll run again.Elizabeth Frantz for The New York TimesThe night Mr. Trump was elected, Ms. Williamson was speaking at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York, as she did every Tuesday. A childhood friend, Geri Roper, was in the audience. Afterward, “sad and shocked,” the two women drank Lillet and Perrier cocktails at the bar at the NoMad Hotel, Ms. Roper recalled. “You should run for president,” Ms. Roper told her friend.There are a lot of things, big and small, that Ms. Williamson does not want in the public discourse. She is particularly private on the subject of her daughter. A single mother, Ms. Williamson has never revealed who her daughter’s father is, and is in fact a bit touchy on the subject — on the grounds of, this is 2022, why should she or any woman have to explain?Her daughter, India Williamson, 31, is newly married and is working toward a Ph.D. in history in London. She watched her mother’s campaign closely, and the two were in constant contact. She called the characterization of her mother as a woo woo new-age type in some of the media coverage of her as “so off the mark that it was humorous.”“She’s not crystal fuzzy,” she said, describing her mother as a fearless businesswoman. “The thought of her as the crystal lady is just not the woman I’ve known since the day I was born.”Though Marianne is guarded about her personal life, an accidental “we” slipped out when I asked her where she was on Jan. 6, as in “we watched it on TV like everyone else.” She may not reveal much about her intimate life, but she lights up when she talks about her father, the late Houston immigration lawyer Sam Williamson, whose politics still reverberate throughout her own.A favorite story of Ms. Williamson’s is from 1965, when American involvement in the Vietnam War was rapidly expanding. “I came home from school in the seventh grade, and I told my parents that my social studies teacher had said that if we didn’t fight on the shores of Vietnam, we would be fighting on the shores of Hawaii,” she said. “And I proceeded to explain to them the domino theory. My father’s face turned so white and he stood up, and said to my mother, ‘Dammit Sophie Ann, get them visas, we’re going to Saigon.’”The family flew to Vietnam, where Ms. Williamson remembered that her father “explained to us that the war was wrong. And he explained to us about the military industrial complex. And he explained to us about American imperialism.” Afterward, her mother said: “Sam, now that the children are adequately informed about the military industrial complex, can we please stop in Paris on the way home?”Ms. Williamson’s childhood friend Carrie Shoemake wasn’t particularly surprised when Marianne’s father took his family to Vietnam to witness the war. “The spirit of right and wrong moved more strongly in their family than in any other family I’d ever hung out with,” Ms. Shoemake said.Molly Matalon for The New York TimesThe ‘Horse Race’Ms. Williamson was resistant to providing a lot of details about how her campaign had affected her, perhaps because she didn’t want to sound self-pitying.Only after several repeated questions did she tell a story about the day when she was in her hotel room in Los Angeles and she turned on the news and there, Joe Lockhart, a former presidential press secretary, was saying she was “dangerous and crazy.”“I just sat there with my jaw dropped open,” she said. Later, she DM’d him. He replied, Ms. Williamson, said: “The difference between you and me is that my politics are based on logic and yours are based on feelings.”“I thought: This man knows nothing about my politics.” Ms. Williamson paused. “But that’s just part of politics.” More important to her, she said, were experiences on the other end of the spectrum. Like the woman who sent $10 to support her campaign and wrote, “When I get paid next week, I’ll send another ten.”In New York, Ms. Williamson had told me: “I’m not at an age where I can take any more five- or 10-year detours. I’m at an age where, whatever the last chapter is, it has to be deliberate, intentional and well done.”Asked again, this week, if she was ready to announce that she intends to run for president, she just laughed and declined to answer. Later she sent a text. “The media is always interested in the horse race, but to me that’s not what matters most,” it read. “What matters most is not just the who but the what. The ‘what’ is that we have someone, both as a candidate and as a president, who stands for a fundamental course correction.”So, that means … what, exactly? The text ended with this: “Whatever role I can best play in that is the role I’d like to play.” More

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      in Elections

      Fury Alone Won’t Destroy Trumpism. We Need a Plan B.

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      In his 2020 book “Politics Is for Power,” Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts, sketched a day in the life of many political obsessives in sharp, if cruel, terms.I refresh my Twitter feed to keep up on the latest political crisis, then toggle over to Facebook to read clickbait news stories, then over to YouTube to see a montage of juicy clips from the latest congressional hearing. I then complain to my family about all the things I don’t like that I have seen.To Hersh, that’s not politics. It’s what he calls “political hobbyism.” And it’s close to a national pastime. “A third of Americans say they spend two hours or more each day on politics,” he writes. “Of these people, four out of five say that not one minute of that time is spent on any kind of real political work. It’s all TV news and podcasts and radio shows and social media and cheering and booing and complaining to friends and family.”Real political work, for Hersh, is the intentional, strategic accumulation of power in service of a defined end. It is action in service of change, not information in service of outrage. This distinction is on my mind because, like so many others, I’ve spent the week revisiting the attempted coup of Jan. 6, marinating in my fury toward the Republicans who put fealty toward Donald Trump above loyalty toward country and the few but pivotal Senate Democrats who are proving, day after day, that they think the filibuster more important than the franchise. Let me tell you, the tweets and columns I drafted in my head were searing.But fury is useful only as fuel. We need a Plan B for democracy. Plan A was to pass H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Neither bill, as of now, has a path to President Biden’s desk. I’ve found that you provoke a peculiar anger if you state this, as if admitting the problem were the cause of the problem. I fear denial has left many Democrats stuck on a national strategy with little hope of near-term success. In order to protect democracy, Democrats have to win more elections. And to do that, they need to make sure the country’s local electoral machinery isn’t corrupted by the Trumpist right.“The people thinking strategically about how to win the 2022 election are the ones doing the most for democracy,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard and one of the authors of “How Democracies Die.” “I’ve heard people saying bridges don’t save democracy — voting rights do. But for Democrats to be in a position to protect democracy, they need bigger majorities.”There are people working on a Plan B. This week, I half-jokingly asked Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, what it felt like to be on the front lines of protecting American democracy. He replied, dead serious, by telling me what it was like. He spends his days obsessing over mayoral races in 20,000-person towns, because those mayors appoint the city clerks who decide whether to pull the drop boxes for mail-in ballots and small changes to electoral administration could be the difference between winning Senator Ron Johnson’s seat in 2022 (and having a chance at democracy reform) and losing the race and the Senate. Wikler is organizing volunteers to staff phone banks to recruit people who believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers, because Steve Bannon has made it his mission to recruit people who don’t believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers.I’ll say this for the right: They pay attention to where the power lies in the American system, in ways the left sometimes doesn’t. Bannon calls this “the precinct strategy,” and it’s working. “Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local G.O.P. headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers,” ProPublica reports. “They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.”The difference between those organizing at the local level to shape democracy and those raging ineffectually about democratic backsliding — myself included — remind me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.“We do not have one federal election,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. “We have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results. While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can’t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they’re spending, what technology they’re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.”An NPR analysis found 15 Republicans running for secretary of state in 2022 who doubt the legitimacy of Biden’s win. In Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, the incumbent Republican secretary of state who stood fast against Trump’s pressure, faces two primary challengers who hold that Trump was 2020’s rightful winner. Trump has endorsed one of them, Representative Jody Hice. He’s also endorsed candidates for secretary of state in Arizona and Michigan who backed him in 2020 and stand ready to do so in 2024. As NPR dryly noted, “The duties of a state secretary of state vary, but in most cases, they are the state’s top voting official and have a role in carrying out election laws.”Nor is it just secretaries of state. “Voter suppression is happening at every level of government here in Georgia,” Representative Nikema Williams, who chairs the Georgia Democratic Party, told me. “We have 159 counties, and so 159 different ways boards of elections are elected and elections are carried out. So we have 159 different leaders who control election administration in the state. We’ve seen those boards restrict access by changing the number of ballot boxes. Often, our Black members on these boards are being pushed out.”America’s confounding political structure creates two mismatches that bedevil democracy’ would-be defenders. The first mismatch is geographic. Your country turns on elections held in Georgia and Wisconsin, and if you live in California or New York, you’re left feeling powerless.But that’s somewhere between an illusion and a cop-out. A constant complaint among those working to win these offices is that progressives donate hundreds of millions to presidential campaigns and long-shot bids against top Republicans, even as local candidates across the country are starved for funds.“Democratic major donors like to fund the flashy things,” Litman told me. “Presidential races, Senate races, super PACs, TV ads. Amy McGrath can raise $90 million to run against Mitch McConnell in a doomed race, but the number of City Council and school board candidates in Kentucky who can raise what they need is …” She trailed off in frustration.The second mismatch is emotional. If you’re frightened that America is sliding into authoritarianism, you want to support candidates, run campaigns and donate to causes that directly focus on the crisis of democracy. But few local elections are run as referendums on Trump’s big lie. They’re about trash pickup and bond ordinances and traffic management and budgeting and disaster response.Lina Hidalgo ran for county judge in Harris County, Texas, after the 2016 election. Trump’s campaign had appalled her, and she wanted to do something. “I learned about this position that had flown under the radar for a very long time,” she told me. “It was the type of seat that only ever changed who held it when the incumbent died or was convicted of a crime. But it controls the budget for the county. Harris County is nearly the size of Colorado in population, larger than 28 states. It’s the budget for the hospital system, roads, bridges, libraries, the jail. And part of that includes funding the electoral system.”Hidalgo didn’t campaign as a firebrand progressive looking to defend Texas from Trump. She won it, she told me, by focusing on what mattered most to her neighbors: the constant flooding of the county, as violent storms kept overwhelming dilapidated infrastructure. “I said, ‘Do you want a community that floods year after year?’” She won, and after she won, she joined with her colleagues to spend $13 million more on election administration and to allow residents to vote at whichever polling place was convenient for them on Election Day, even if it wasn’t the location they’d been assigned.Protecting democracy by supporting county supervisors or small-town mayors — particularly ones who fit the politics of more conservative communities — can feel like being diagnosed with heart failure and being told the best thing to do is to double-check your tax returns and those of all your neighbors.“If you want to fight for the future of American democracy, you shouldn’t spend all day talking about the future of American democracy,” Wikler said. “These local races that determine the mechanics of American democracy are the ventilation shaft in the Republican death star. These races get zero national attention. They hardly get local attention. Turnout is often lower than 20 percent. That means people who actually engage have a superpower. You, as a single dedicated volunteer, might be able to call and knock on the doors of enough voters to win a local election.”Or you can simply win one yourself. That’s what Gabriella Cázares-Kelly did. Cázares-Kelly, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, agreed to staff a voter registration booth at the community college where she worked, in Pima County, Ariz. She was stunned to hear the stories of her students. “We keep blaming students for not participating, but it’s really complicated to get registered to vote if you don’t have a license, the nearest D.M.V. is an hour and a half away and you don’t own a car,” she told me.Cázares-Kelly learned that much of the authority over voter registration fell to an office neither she nor anyone around her knew much about: the County Recorder’s Office, which has authority over records ranging from deeds to voter registrations. It had powers she’d never considered. It could work with the postmaster’s office to put registration forms in tribal postal offices — or not. When it called a voter to verify a ballot and heard an answering machine message in Spanish, it could follow up in Spanish — or not.“I started contacting the records office and making suggestions and asking questions,” Cázares-Kelly said. “I did that for a long time, and the previous recorder was not very happy about it. I called so often, the staff began to know me. I didn’t have an interest in running till I heard the previous recorder was going to retire, and then my immediate thought was, ‘What if a white supremacist runs?’”So in 2020, Cázares-Kelly ran, and she won. Now she’s the county recorder for a jurisdiction with nearly a million people, and more than 600,000 registered voters, in a swing state. “One thing I was really struck by when I first started getting involved in politics is how much power there is in just showing up to things,” she said. “If you love libraries, libraries have board meetings. Go to the public meeting. See where they’re spending their money. We’re supposed to be participating. If you want to get involved, there’s always a way.”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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      Sarah Weddington, attorney who won Roe v Wade abortion case, dies aged 76

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      Sarah Weddington, attorney who won Roe v Wade abortion case, dies aged 76Texan lawyer and Linda Coffee won landmark 1973 case, safeguarding right now under threat from US supreme court

      How dismantling Roe v Wade would threaten other rights
      Sarah Weddington, an attorney who argued and won the Roe v Wade supreme court case which established the right to abortion in the US, has died aged 76.Susan Hays, a Democratic candidate for Texas agriculture commissioner, announced the news on Twitter on Sunday and the Dallas Morning News confirmed it.“Sarah Weddington died this morning after a series of health issues,” Hays wrote. “With Linda Coffee, she filed the first case of her legal career, Roe v Wade, fresh out of law school. She was my professor … the best writing instructor I ever had, and a great mentor.“At 27 she argued Roe to [the supreme court] (a fact that always made me feel like a gross underachiever). Ironically, she worked on the case because law firms would not hire women in the early 70s, leaving her with lots of time for good trouble.”The court ruled on Roe v Wade in 1973. Nearly 50 years later the right it established is under threat from a supreme court packed with hardline conservatives, in part thanks to a Texas law that drastically restricts access and offers incentives for reporting women to authorities.In 2017, speaking to the Guardian, Weddington predicted such a turn of events. “If [Neil] Gorsuch’s nomination is approved, will abortion be illegal the next day? No. One new judge won’t necessarily make much difference. But two or three might.”After steering Gorsuch on to the court – and a seat held open by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell when Barack Obama was president – Donald Trump installed Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Barrett replaced the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a champion of women’s rights.Weddington found her way to Roe v Wade soon after graduating from law school at the University of Texas. Represented by Weddington and Coffee, Norma McCorvey became the plaintiff known as “Jane Roe” in Roe v Wade. McCorvey became an evangelical Christian and opponent of abortion. She died in 2017.In her Guardian interview, Weddington discussed arguing the case in federal court. “I was very nervous,” she said. “It was like going down a street with no street lights. But there was no other way to go and I didn’t have any preconceived notions that I would not win.”She won, but the case continued.“Henry Wade, the district attorney, unwittingly helped us,” she said. “At a press conference, he said, ‘I don’t care what any court says; I am going to continue to prosecute doctors who carry out abortion.’ There was a procedural rule that said if local elected officials continue to prosecute after a federal court had declared a law unconstitutional, there would be a right to appeal to the supreme court.”‘Historical accident’: how abortion came to focus white, evangelical angerRead moreBefore the court in Washington, Weddington said: “It was impossible to read the justices’ faces. The attorney on the other side started by saying something inappropriate about arguing a case against a beautiful woman. He thought the judges would snicker. But their faces didn’t change a bit.“I had to argue it twice in the supreme court: in 1971 and again in 1972. On 22 January 1973 I was at the Texas legislature when the phone rang. It was a reporter from the New York Times. ‘Does Miss Weddington have a comment today about Roe v Wade?’ my assistant was asked. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Should she?’“It was beginning to be very exciting. Then we got a telegram from the supreme court saying that I had won 7-2 and that they were going to air-mail a copy of the ruling. Nowadays, of course, you’d just go online.“I was ecstatic, and more than 44 years later we’re still talking about it.”Weddington later revealed that she had an abortion herself, in 1967. “Just before the anaesthesia hit,” she said, “I thought: ‘I hope no one ever knows about this.’ For a lot of years, that was exactly the way I felt. Now there’s a major push to encourage women to tell their stories so people will realise that it is not a shameful thing. One out of every five women will have an abortion.”Weddington predicted: “Whatever else I do in my life, the headline on my obituary is always going to be ‘Roe v Wade attorney dies’.”In fact she achieved much more, as Hays detailed in her tweets on Sunday. “Those career doors shut to her led her to run for office, getting elected as the first woman from Travis county in the [Texas legislature] in 1972 (along with four other women elected to the House: Kay Bailey, Chris Miller, Betty Andujar and Senfronia Thompson).“She was general counsel of the United States Department of Agriculture under [Jimmy] Carter and enjoyed her stint in DC. Federal judicial nominations for Texas were run by her as a high-ranking Texan in the administration.“A Dallas lawyer she knew sought a bench. She had interviewed with him while at UT law. He’d asked her, ‘What will we tell our wives if we hire you?’ She told him he was wasting their time and hers and walked out of the interview. He did not get the judgeship.“Ever the proper preacher’s daughter, she would never tell me who the lawyer was. People don’t know that about Sarah. She was such a proper Methodist minister’s daughter. One of the few people I couldn’t cuss in front of.”Hays also paid tribute to Weddington as a teacher and a member of a “Great Austin Matriarchy” that also included the former Texas governor Ann Richards and the columnist Molly Ivins.In her Guardian interview, Weddington indicated she was at peace with being remembered for Roe v Wade. “I think most women of my generation can recall our feelings about the fight,” she said. “It’s like young love. You may not feel exactly the same, but you remember it.”TopicsRoe v WadeAbortionUS politicsUS healthcareUS supreme courtUS constitution and civil libertiesLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Alarm as Texas quietly restarts controversial voting program

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      Alarm as Texas quietly restarts controversial voting programProgram asks people on voter rolls to prove citizenship, sparking concern that eligible voters could be wrongfully targeted Get the latest updates on voting rights in the Guardian’s Fight to vote newsletterTexas officials have quietly restarted a controversial program to ask people on the voter rolls to prove their citizenship, sparking alarm that thousands of eligible voters could be wrongfully targeted.The Texas secretary of state’s office has identified just under 12,000 people it suspects of being non-citizens since September, when the program restarted (there are more than 17 million registered voters in Texas). About 2,327 voter registrations have been cancelled so far. The vast majority of cancellations were because voters failed to respond to a notice giving them 30 days to prove their citizenship.Texas Republicans pass voting maps that entrench power of whitesRead moreThe secretary of state flags anyone as a suspected non-citizen if they register to vote and then subsequently visit the Texas department of public safety (DPS), the state’s driver’s license agency, and indicate they are not a citizen.Local election officials in Texas’ 254 counties are then asked to review the names. If those officials cannot verify citizenship, they are required to send them a letter asking them to prove their citizenship within 30 days or else their voter registration gets cancelled.But election officials in Harris county, the most populous in the state, are concerned about the accuracy of the data being used to challenge voters.After the county mailed proof of citizenship requests to 2,796 people, 167 voters – nearly 6% of those contacted – responded with proof of citizenship. The state removed an additional 161 people from the list of people whose citizenship needed to be verified, according to a county official.“We are not confident in the quality of the information we are being mandated to act upon,” Isabel Longoria, the county’s election administrator, said in an email.In Fort Bend county, just outside of Houston, officials mailed notices to 515 people in October. About 20% responded with proof of citizenship and the rest were removed from the rolls, according to John Oldham, the county’s election administrator. Many of the people who responded said they had accidentally checked a box during their DPS transaction indicating they were not citizens, Oldham said.In Cameron county, along the US-Mexico border, election officials have sent out 246 letter since September, almost all to people with Hispanic surnames, according to the Texas Monthly, which first reported the program restarted. About 60 people have been cancelled so far.After the notices went out, a married couple who had heard about the notices came into the elections office to provide their naturalization papers, even though the couple’s citizenship wasn’t challenged, said Remi Garza, the county elections administrator.“It saddened me too,” Garza said. “People who shouldn’t have to be concerned about this type of proving citizenship felt that they had to do that.”Voting rights groups say they are trying to better understand the process the state is using, but are concerned eligible voters are getting targeted.“​​A US citizen voter who gets a challenge letter is understandably intimidated. And especially for naturalized US citizens, who went through an entire bureaucratic process to be able to vote, getting a letter that accuses them of being an ineligible voter is particularly intimidating,” said Nina Perales, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “People will naturally assume, based on this official correspondence, that they might have made some kind of mistake, or that they are not proper voters.”The program had been on hold since 2019, when a federal judge ordered Texas to stop a similar, error-filled, effort that he described as “ham-handed”. As part of a settlement in that case, Texas agreed to only flag people if they registered to vote prior to the DPS visit in which they indicated they weren’t a citizen. It also agreed to reinstate and challenge voters who provided proof of citizenship, even if it was outside the 30-day window.The citizenship check comes as Republicans have moved to blunt the rapidly growing political power of Texas’ non-white population. Texas prosecutors have sought criminal punishments for people, including non-citizens, who make voting mistakes and the attorney general, Ken Paxton, has zealously pursued claims of voter fraud, which is exceedingly rare in Texas and elsewhere.Bruce Elfant, whose office oversees voter registration in Travis county, said his office so far has internally been able to confirm that less than 100 of the 300 to 400 people flagged by the secretary of state’s office were citizens. Most in the group had been flagged because of clerical errors, he said. His office has not yet sent out any challenge notices and is waiting for more information before it does so.In El Paso county, state officials referred 4,000 suspected non-citizens for review, and around 300 had already offered proof of citizenship, said Lisa Wise, the county’s election administrator. The county isn’t currently cancelling the registration of any voter who doesn’t respond, she said.Federal law prohibits officials from conducting mass voter cancellations within 90 days of a primary election. Texas’ primary is on 1 March, so the state can’t remove anyone who doesn’t respond to a proof of citizenship letter until later this spring.Thomas Buser-Clancy, a senior staff attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said his organization was trying to understand why eligible voters were being flagged, but it was clear “something is not going right”.“Even if your system flags one eligible voter and threatens to remove them, that’s a problem,” he said. “If you have hundreds, and if you add it up across counties, you’re probably getting to thousands of eligible voters, being threatened with removal.”Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the Texas secretary of state’s office said he was confident in the data.“We’re following the settlement agreement exactly as we’re supposed to. If the counties have additional information where they’re able to cross people off the list who have in fact become citizens and they’re lawfully registered to vote, that’s great. That’s how the process is supposed to work.”But Buser-Clancy noted that those who were able to affirm their citizenship likely only represented a fraction of the eligible voters who were probably affected.“Those people are the lucky ones that both received the notice, like actually went through their mail, looked it up, and had the documentation on hand to send in,” he added. “What that tells you is that there’s some other percentage of people who are going to be removed from the rolls even though they’re eligible voters.”Download original documentTopicsTexasThe fight to voteUS voting rightsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Phil Waldron's Unlikely Role in Pushing Baseless Election Claims

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      Phil Waldron, who owns a bar in Texas, is a case study in how pro-Trump fringe players managed to get a hearing for conspiracy theories at the highest level during the presidential transition.A few days after President Biden’s inauguration put to rest one of the most chaotic transitions in U.S. history, a former Army colonel with a background in information warfare appeared on a Christian conservative podcast and offered a detailed account of his monthslong effort to challenge the validity of the 2020 vote count.In a pleasant Texas drawl, the former officer, Phil Waldron, told the hosts a story that was almost inconceivable: how a cabal of bad actors, including Chinese Communist officials, international shell companies and the financier George Soros, had quietly conspired to hack into U.S. voting machines in a “globalist/socialist” plot to steal the election.In normal times, a tale like that — full of wild and baseless claims — might have been dismissed as the overheated rantings of a conspiracy theorist. But the postelection period was not normal, providing all sorts of fringe players an opportunity to find an audience in the White House.Mr. Waldron stands as a case study. Working in conjunction with allies of President Donald J. Trump like Rudolph W. Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, a member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus — and in tandem with others like Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser and a retired lieutenant general — Mr. Waldron managed to get a hearing for elements of his story in the very center of power in Washington.Last week, the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 issued a subpoena to Mr. Waldron, saying that it wanted to know more about his role in circulating an explosive PowerPoint presentation on Capitol Hill and to Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s last chief of staff.The presentation, which Mr. Meadows gave to the committee (and which he said he never acted on), counseled Mr. Trump to declare a national emergency and to invalidate all digital votes in a bid to stay in power — the same advice that other election deniers gave him at the time.Committee officials have given Mr. Waldron, who retired from the military in 2016 and now owns a bar in Central Texas, until Jan. 10 to turn over any relevant documents. They have also tentatively set a deposition for the week after.When The New York Times sent a reporter last week to Mr. Waldron’s bar, outside of Austin, he told the reporter to leave his property immediately. He then called the local sheriff and described the reporter’s car, adding that the reporter was slurring his words and seemed impaired.Mr. Waldron, who owns a bar in Texas, above, became part of a network of Trump supporters pushing election fraud claims.ReutersIt remains unclear whether Mr. Waldron will cooperate with the House committee. But the account he gave in January to the podcast, Flyover Conservatives, and in recent news articles, may give investigators plenty to work with.Mr. Waldron opened his story by saying that his “research” into the 2020 election began that summer, when he started to examine what he described as a network of nonprofit groups connected to Mr. Soros, an outspoken supporter of liberal causes who has long been at the center of right-wing, often antisemitic conspiracies.Understand the U.S. Capitol RiotOn Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.What Happened: Here’s the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.Timeline of Jan. 6: A presidential rally turned into a Capitol rampage in a critical two-hour time period. Here’s how.Key Takeaways: Here are some of the major revelations from The Times’s riot footage analysis.Death Toll: Five people died in the riot. Here’s what we know about them.Decoding the Riot Iconography: What do the symbols, slogans and images on display during the violence really mean?Around that time, Mr. Waldron said, he and his associates — whom he has never named — developed a relationship with a Texas cybersecurity company, Allied Security Operations Group, which was co-founded by a man named Russell J. Ramsland Jr.According to Mr. Waldron, Mr. Ramsland and his team had made a startling discovery: that the Chinese Communist Party, through software companies it controlled, had developed a way to flip votes on American tabulation machines, particularly those built by Dominion Voting Systems. (Dominion has adamantly denied its machines have security flaws and has filed defamation suits against some of those who have repeated the claims, including Fox News, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell.)Beginning in August last year, months before Election Day, Mr. Waldron started to “raise an alarm,” as he put it, and tried to get anyone he could interested in his claim that the country’s voting machines were susceptible to hacking.He told the podcast hosts that he and his partners had reached out to officials in the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, all of which were run by Trump appointees at the time. Mr. Waldron said he also sent an email to Mr. Trump’s director of strategic communications, but all of it “fell on deaf ears.”But there was one person who listened, Mr. Waldron said: Mr. Gohmert, the Texas Republican and a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group that was traditionally loyal to Mr. Trump and ultimately played an outsize role in his efforts to overturn the election. By Mr. Waldron’s account, Mr. Gohmert promised to pass along his concerns about voting machines to the president, but apparently failed to do so until after the election. (Mr. Gohmert did not respond to questions seeking comment.)Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, expressed concern this month over the treatment of the Capitol rioters.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesOnce the votes were cast and Mr. Trump was declared the loser, Mr. Waldron embarked on what amounted to a two-pronged assault on the election. First, with Mr. Ramsland’s company, Allied Security, he funneled information about supposedly suspicious spikes in votes and other dirt on Dominion Voting Systems to Ms. Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer who filed four unsuccessful lawsuits accusing Dominion of a conspiracy to hack the election.According to court papers filed by Dominion, Mr. Ramsland was hired that summer by Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com and a Trump supporter, to “reverse engineer” the evidence needed to “mislead people into believing” that the 2020 election had been rigged.When the legal challenges failed, Mr. Waldron took a new tack. He partnered with Mr. Giuliani, who was spearheading Mr. Trump’s attack on the election, and joined him at a series of unofficial election fraud hearings conducted by lawmakers in a handful of swing states. Mr. Giuliani did not respond to questions seeking comment on Mr. Waldron, but he has testified in a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion that he not only knew and admired Mr. Waldron, but also had “substantial dealings” with him.Even as he toured the country with Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Waldron appeared to have been working on a third attack on the election results: assembling the 38-slide PowerPoint presentation that ended up in Mr. Meadows’s possession. In his podcast interview, Mr. Waldron said that he and his associates had managed to get a nascent version of the proposal — to declare a national emergency and use the crisis to order a recount of paper ballots in eight key counties — to Mr. Trump around Thanksgiving, far earlier than public accounts had suggested.Key Figures in the Jan. 6 InquiryCard 1 of 9The House investigation. More

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      Texas governor Greg Abbott stays silent on whether he will pardon George Floyd

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      Texas governor Greg Abbott stays silent on whether he will pardon George FloydParole board unanimously recommended pardon for 2004 drug arrest by ex-officer whose work is no longer trusted by prosecutors Doling out pardons is a Christmas tradition for Greg Abbott, who grants them typically for minor offenses committed years or decades ago. This year, one name stands out on the Republican Texas governor’s desk: George Floyd.Abbott has not said if he will posthumously pardon Floyd for a 2004 drug arrest in Houston by a former officer whose work is no longer trusted by prosecutors.Floyd, who was Black, spent much of his life in Houston before moving to Minnesota, where his murder by a white police officer, who knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes, led last year to a global reckoning on race and policing.Texas’ parole board – stacked with Abbott appointees – unanimously recommended a pardon for Floyd in October.Abbott, who is up for reelection in 2022, has given no indication of whether he will grant what would be only the second posthumous pardon in Texas history.“It doesn’t matter who you think George Floyd was, or what you think he stood for or didn’t stand for,” said Allison Mathis, a public defender in Houston who submitted Floyd’s pardon application. “What matters is he didn’t do this. It’s important for the governor to correct the record to show he didn’t do this.”A spokeswoman for Abbott did not respond to requests for comment.Pardons restore the rights of the convicted and forgive them in the eyes of the law. Floyd’s family and supporters said a posthumous pardon in Texas would show a commitment to accountability.In February 2004, Floyd was arrested in Houston for selling $10 worth of crack in a police sting. He pleaded guilty to a drug charge and served 10 months in prison.His case happened to be among dozens that prosecutors revisited in the fallout over a deadly drug raid in 2019 that resulted in murder charges against an officer, Gerald Goines, who is no longer with the Houston force.Prosecutors say Goines lied to obtain a search warrant in the raid that left a husband and wife dead, and the office of the Harris county district attorney, Kim Ogg, has dismissed more than 160 drug convictions tied to Goines.Goines has pleaded not guilty and his attorneys accuse Ogg of launching the review for political gain.Abbott has several primary challengers from the far right. His silence about a pardon for Floyd has raised questions over whether political calculations are at play. His office has not responded to those charges.Abbott attended Floyd’s memorial service last year in Houston, where he met family members and floated the idea of a George Floyd Act that deals with police brutality.But Abbott never publicly supported such a measure when lawmakers returned to the Capitol, where Republicans instead made police funding a priority.State senator Royce West, a Democrat who carried the George Floyd Act in the Senate, said he understands the politics if Abbott was waiting until after the primary in March. But he said the governor should act on the recommendation.“As he’s always said, he is a law and order governor,“ West said. “And this would be following the law.”TopicsGeorge FloydGreg AbbottTexasLaw (US)US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Map by Map, G.O.P. Chips Away at Black Democrats’ Power

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      Black elected officials in several states, from Congress down to the counties, have been drawn out of their districts this year or face headwinds to hold onto their seats.More than 30 years ago, Robert Reives Sr. marched into a meeting of his county government in Sanford, N.C., with a demand: Create a predominantly Black district in the county, which was 23 percent Black at the time but had no Black representation, or face a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act.The county commission refused, and Mr. Reives prepared to sue. But after the county settled and redrew its districts, he was elected in 1990 as Lee County’s first Black commissioner, a post he has held comfortably ever since.Until this year.Republicans, newly in power and in control of the redrawing of county maps, extended the district to the northeast, adding more rural and suburban white voters to the mostly rural district southwest of Raleigh and effectively diluting the influence of its Black voters. Mr. Reives, who is still the county’s only Black commissioner, fears he will now lose his seat.“They all have the same objective,” he said in an interview, referring to local Republican officials. “To get me out of the seat.”Mr. Reives is one of a growing number of Black elected officials across the country — ranging from members of Congress to county commissioners — who have been drawn out of their districts, placed in newly competitive districts or bundled into new districts where they must vie against incumbents from their own party.Almost all of the affected lawmakers are Democrats, and most of the mapmakers are white Republicans. The G.O.P. is currently seeking to widen its advantage in states including North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia and Texas, and because partisan gerrymandering has long been difficult to disentangle from racial gerrymandering, proving the motive can be troublesome.But the effect remains the same: less political power for communities of color.The pattern has grown more pronounced during this year’s redistricting cycle, the first since the Supreme Court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and allowed jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination to pass election laws and draw political maps without approval from the Justice Department.How Maps Reshape American PoliticsWe answer your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.“Let’s call it a five-alarm fire,” G.K. Butterfield, a Black congressman from North Carolina, said of the current round of congressional redistricting. He is retiring next year after Republicans removed Pitt County, which is about 35 percent Black, from his district.“I just didn’t see it coming,” he said in an interview. “I did not believe that they would go to that extreme.”Redistricting at a GlanceEvery 10 years, each state in the U.S is required to redraw the boundaries of their congressional and state legislative districts in a process known as redistricting.Redistricting, Explained: Answers to your most pressing questions about redistricting and gerrymandering.Breaking Down Texas’s Map: How redistricting efforts in Texas are working to make Republican districts even more red.G.O.P.’s Heavy Edge: Republicans are poised to capture enough seats to take the House in 2022, thanks to gerrymandering alone.Legal Options Dwindle: Persuading judges to undo skewed political maps was never easy. A shifting judicial landscape is making it harder.A former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Mr. Butterfield said fellow Black members of Congress were increasingly worried about the new Republican-drawn maps. “We are all rattled,” he said.In addition to Mr. Butterfield, four Black state senators in North Carolina, five Black members of the state House of Representatives and several Black county officials have had their districts altered in ways that could cost them their seats. Nearly 24 hours after the maps were passed, civil rights groups sued the state.Representative G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina said he was retiring next year after Republicans removed Pitt County, which is 35 percent Black, from his district.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAcross the country, the precise number of elected officials of color who have had their districts changed in such ways is difficult to pinpoint. The New York Times identified more than two dozen of these officials, but there are probably significantly more in county and municipal districts. And whose seats are vulnerable or safe depends on a variety of factors, including the political environment at the time of elections.But the number of Black legislators being drawn out of their districts outpaces that of recent redistricting cycles, when voting rights groups frequently found themselves in court trying to preserve existing majority-minority districts as often as they sought to create new ones.“Without a doubt it’s worse than it was in any recent decade,” said Leah Aden, a deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. “We have so much to contend with and it’s all happening very quickly.”Republicans, who have vastly more control over redistricting nationally than Democrats do, defend their maps as legal and fair, giving a range of reasons.Kirk Smith, the Republican chairman of Lee County’s board of commissioners, said that “to say only a person of a certain racial or ethnic group can represent only a person of the same racial or ethnic group has all the trappings of ethnocentric racism.”In North Carolina and elsewhere, Republicans say that their new maps are race-blind, meaning officials used no racial data in designing the maps and therefore could not have drawn racially discriminatory districts because they had no idea where communities of color were.“During the 2011 redistricting process, legislators considered race when drawing districts,” Ralph Hise, a Republican state senator in North Carolina, said in a statement. Through a spokesperson, he declined to answer specific questions, citing pending litigation.His statement continued: “We were then sued for considering race and ordered to draw new districts. So during this process, legislators did not use any racial data when drawing districts, and we’re now being sued for not considering race.”In other states, mapmakers have declined to add new districts with majorities of people of color even though the populations of minority residents have boomed. In Texas, where the population has increased by four million since the 2010 redistricting cycle, people of color account for more than 95 percent of the growth, but the State Legislature drew two new congressional seats with majority-white populations.And in states like Alabama and South Carolina, Republican map drawers are continuing a decades-long tradition of packing nearly all of the Black voting-age population into a single congressional district, despite arguments from voters to create two separate districts. In Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said on Thursday that the Republican-controlled State Legislature should draw a second majority-Black House district.Allison Riggs, a co-executive director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a civil rights group, said that the gerrymandering was “really an attack on Black voters, and the Black representatives are the visible outcome of that.”Efforts to curb racial gerrymandering have been hampered by a 2019 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that partisan gerrymandering could not be challenged in federal court.Though the court did leave intact Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial gerrymandering, it offered no concrete guidance on how to distinguish between a partisan gerrymander and a racial gerrymander when the result was both, such as in heavily Democratic Black communities.Understand How U.S. Redistricting WorksCard 1 of 8What is redistricting? More

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      ¿Qué hay detrás del giro a la derecha del gobernador de Texas?

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      La efectividad de la transformación de Greg Abbott, quien ha implementado medidas cercanas a la base más conservadora del Partido Republicano, se pondrá a prueba en las elecciones del próximo año.AUSTIN, Texas — El gobernador Greg Abbott sorprendió a algunos de sus colaboradores cuando este otoño llegó a su despacho con los planes de un nuevo decreto pandémico: una prohibición para que los empleadores privados de Texas no pudieran exigir la vacunación a sus empleados.La decisión marcó una transformación dramática para el gobernador, quien ya lleva dos mandatos, un tipo de intromisión en los asuntos de las empresas que Abbott siempre ha rechazado. De hecho, solo dos meses antes se había opuesto a este tipo de medidas. “Los negocios privados no necesitan que el gobierno maneje sus negocios”, dijo una portavoz en aquel momento.Su cambio de actitud suscitó críticas de los principales grupos empresariales de Texas, desde corporaciones como American Airlines, y de un importante actor de la política republicana local, Texans for Lawsuit Reform. También provocó frustración entre algunos integrantes del personal del gobernador.Quienes han conocido a Abbott y visto su ascenso —de abogado a juez de una corte estatal a procurador general y, finalmente, a gobernador— han quedado sorprendidos con su súbita decisión de alinearse con los activistas más estridentes del Partido Republicano.Pero como un gobernador que tiene un sentido atento de los vientos políticos, en un estado en donde el dominio republicano sigue siendo total, su prohibición a los mandatos de vacunación era una forma de ser coherente con su afición por interpretar el momento. Y en este momento, incluso en un estado como Texas, donde todo gira en torno a los negocios, los intereses corporativos están fuera de lugar y los culturales están en boga.Está supervisando una auditoría de los resultados electorales de 2020 en cuatro grandes condados de Texas, un estado en donde el expresidente Donald J. Trump ganó por más de 5 puntos. Pidió y aprobó legislación que restringe a los atletas transgénero luego de que cuatro años antes parecía haberse alegrado de que no avanzaran las restricciones en los baños para las personas trans en el estado ante la oposición de los empresarios. Pasó de ordenar el uso de mascarillas el año pasado, a prohibir dichas órdenes esta primavera.Su giro a la derecha será puesto a prueba el próximo año, cuando encara a su oponente más conocido y con más financiamiento hasta el momento: Beto O’ Rourke, quien anunció su candidatura a finales del mes pasado. Su enfrentamiento hace preguntarse cuánto puede ir un gobernador de Texas hacia la derecha y mantenerse frente a una ola creciente de demócratas en las principales ciudades y suburbios del estado.La elección también es una prueba importante de la fuerza de Abbott a nivel nacional, donde a menudo se le menciona junto con otros posibles candidatos presidenciales alternativos a Trump, como el gobernador Ron DeSantis de Florida, aunque sus asesores insisten en que no está interesado. Sus ataques a O’Rourke, así como al presidente Biden, se han intensificado.Estos días, Abbott se encuentra dividido entre el enfoque conservador balanceado que le ha ganado popularidad entre los círculos empresariales de Texas y un enfoque intenso en ganar en un Partido Republicano que evoluciona, según entrevistas con muchos asesores y exasesores y más de una veintena de amigos, excolegas, funcionarios electos y estrategas políticos..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Su prohibición a los mandatos de vacunación no fue suficiente para los ultraconservadores que han estado exigiendo una sesión legislativa especial para reglamentar su orden. Al mismo tiempo, negocios y hospitales han avanzado en sus requerimientos de vacunación, planeados o existentes, mientras que el estado ha hecho poco o nada para que la prohibición entre en vigor, indicaron los grupos industriales.Más de 200 vidas se perdieron durante la última tormenta de invierno, que causó cortes en la electricidad en Texas en febrero,Tamir Kalifa para The New York TimesCuando Abbott postuló por primera vez a la gubernatura, en 2014, presentó un rostro más moderado al enfrentarse a la legisladora estatal demócrata Wendy Davis. Un anuncio en español mostraba a su esposa Cecilia, nieta de inmigrantes mexicanos. En otro aparecía en su silla de ruedas —está paralizado de la cintura para abajo después de un accidente en 1984— desplazándose por un mapa para mostrar cómo los negocios se iban de California a Texas.Pero mientras que los republicanos han fortalecido su control del gobierno estatal, Abbott ha enfrentado desafíos de la base de su partido. Este año, Abbott se unió al revoltoso vicegobernador, Dan Patrick, para respaldar quizás las sesiones legislativas más conservadoras en la historia de Texas.Lo ha hecho incluso a pesar de que ya disponía de fondos de campaña por casi 60 millones de dólares y el apoyo anticipado de Trump, quien a menudo llama por teléfono celular al gobernador. (Trump lo ha llamado para ejercer presión por la auditoría del voto de 2020).Ha mantenido una actitud segura y ofrecido asesoría a otros gobernadores republicanos, en especial a los que han sido electos recientemente. Al llegar la pandemia, Abbott organizó llamadas semanales con sus pares para discutir las políticas y los ha liderado a plantar oposición contra la gestión de Biden y crear un enfoque separado, estatal, de justicia penal hacia los migrantes.Y sus ataques agresivos contra Biden en temas fronterizos le han asegurado apariciones regulares en Fox News.“Greg es un conservador archi archi ultraderechista, lo cual sigue sorprendiéndome”, dijo Pearson Grimes, socio en el despacho de abogados en el que Abbott trabajó en los años ochenta después de que la caída de un árbol lo paralizó de la cintura para abajo. Grimes ayudó al futuro gobernador a encontrar un abogado para su demanda por el accidente.“Cuando lo conocí hace mucho”, dijo Grimes, “nunca hubiera imaginado que esta sería su política”.Abbott, quien lleva a cabo pocas conferencias de prensa, rechazó las solicitudes de declarar para este artículo. Renae Eze, su secretaria de prensa lo describió por correo electrónico como “un líder conservador inquebrantable” y “defensor de los derechos constitucionales y fundamentales”, un hombre impulsado por su fe en el “excepcionalismo de Texas” y la necesidad de protegerlo.El expresidente Donald Trump y el gobernador de Texas, Abbott, visitan una sección incompleta del muro fronterizo en Pharr, Texas, en junio de 2021.Eric Gay/Associated PressUna lesión que le cambió la vidaAbbott, de 63 años, nació en el pueblo de Wichita Falls, Texas, una pequeña comunidad al noroeste de Dallas, y luego se mudó a Duncanville, al sur de la ciudad. Su padre murió de un paro cardiaco cuando Abbott estaba en el bachillerato y su madre, que se dedicaba al hogar, se puso a trabajar para mantenerlo a él y a su hermano mayor, Gary, quien es conocido como Bud.Para cuando acudía a la Escuela de Derecho de Vanderbilt, Abbott ya se había casado. Conoció a su esposa en la Universidad de Texas. “Tal como lo recuerdo, en aquellos años no era especialmente político”, dijo Fred Frost, un amigo de la facultad que ahora es el asesor legal ejecutivo de ExxonMobil.Fue cuando trotaba con Frost por el acaudalado barrio de River Oaks en Houston que la vida de Abbott cambió: un roble le cayó encima con tal fuerza que aplastó un Cadillac que estaba cerca. Abbott, quien solo tenía 26 años, perdió la sensibilidad en las piernas de inmediato.Estaba dispuesto a recuperarse. Frost recuerda una noche al salir en Houston que vio a Abbott estacionar su sedán dos puertas color guinda en un restaurante, tomar su silla de ruedas, subirse de un salto y dar la vuelta al lado del pasajero para abrirle la puerta a su esposa.Abbott consiguió un acuerdo que incluye pagos por el resto de su vida, que hasta el momento ascienden a unos 8 millones de dólares. El arreglo no impidió que más tarde Abbott fuera un defensor firme de poner límites a las demandas civiles por lesiones. Cuando era un abogado joven en Houston defendió al sistema municipal de autobuses en casos personales de lesiones.Después del accidente, su silla de ruedas ha quedado entrelazada con su identidad profesional. Como gobernador, le ha permitido conectar con los demás en momentos de tragedia, dijeron sus colaboradores, como sucedió tras el tiroteo masivo de 2019 en un Walmart de El Paso que dejó a 23 personas muertas, o luego del huracán Harvey en 2017.Aún así, a pesar de su historia personal, los analistas políticos en Texas a menudo se lamentan de que Abbott carezca de la gran personalidad de sus predecesores inmediatos: Ann Richards, George W. Bush y Rick Perry.“Es un conservador con ‘c’ minúscula, es decir, cuidadoso”, dijo Robert Stein, profesor de ciencia política de la Universidad de Rice.Abbot se ha erizado ante los desafíos que se le prestan desde la derecha por parte de Don Huffines, un exsenador estatal, y por Allen West, un excongresista por Florida que lideró fugazmente el Partido Republicano de Texas. Aunque los sondeos muestran que Abbott es muy popular entre los votantes republicanos, ha parecido concentrarse en una pequeña cantidad que lo ha abandonado.Incluso antes de empezar su campaña, ya recorría el estado para reunirse con votantes republicanos y organizaba asambleas telefónicas por invitación. A menudo reserva parte de su agenda diaria para dedicar ocho horas a hacer llamadas de recaudación de fondos.El gobernador de Texas, Greg Abbott, reza después de una vigilia en El Paso después de que más de 20 personas murieran en un tiroteo masivo en un Walmart.Ivan Pierre Aguirre/EPA vía ShutterstockLa prueba del primer mandatoUna primera prueba de su liderazgo se presentó durante el primer año de Abbott como gobernador, cuando entre los círculos conservadores se originaron teorías de la conspiración de que un ejercicio militar estadounidense, conocido como Jade Helm 15, en realidad era un plan secreto para invadir Texas. Abbott quería decir algo.“La gente había estado interactuando con él por Twitter”, dijo un asesor. “Se sintió obligado a responder. Para él, esta es la gente de base que participa en la política partidaria. Son los que van y tocan puertas en tu nombre” para hacer campaña.Al final el gobernador decidió enviar a la Guardia Estatal de Texas, que forma parte del departamento militar del estado, a “monitorear” la operación.Para algunos de sus aliados fue un error. Para sus críticos demócratas, fue un momento emblemático de un gobernador que no estaba dispuesto a enfrentar a los marginales de su partido.“Abbott es simplemente un tipo que, en mi opinión, siempre está temiendo algo”, dijo Chris Turner, el líder demócrata en la Cámara de Representantes de Texas.Antes de la pandemia, Abbott había logrado unir al ala afín al empresariado del partido con el extremo más de derecha. Pero en tanto el virus dividió al estado el año pasado, Abbott enfrentó un momento crucial. En julio de 2020 emitió un mandato estatal para usar cubrebocas, una decisión que sus colaboradores dicen que tomó siguiendo su propio lema de ignorar la política y “hacer lo correcto”.A algunos conservadores no les sentó nada bien. La reacción ayudó a impulsar la energía insurgente y le dio una bandera a sus contendientes republicanos.Huffines, su opositor más vocal en las primarias, también empujó al gobernador hacia el muro fronterizo, al pedir que el estado construyera uno en mayo. Para el mes de junio Abbott ya había anunciado que tenía intención de erigir un muro.Y, días antes de que Abbott decidiera prohibir que los negocios exigieran la vacunación obligatoria, Huffines pidió al gobernador que hiciera justo eso. “Ningún texano debería perder su trabajo porque no quieren vacunarse contra la covid”, dijo Huffines en un comunicado de prensa.Abbott ha adoptado políticas idénticas a las de miembros mucho más conservadores de su partido.Callaghan O’Hare para The New York TimesEra el mismo mensaje que los asesores de Abbott dijeron que el gobernador había estado escuchando durante semanas en sus eventos por todo el estado.Cuando Abbott le comunicó a su personal que quería emitir la orden, los asesores dicen que se desató una discusión. Algunos se oponían a la medida. Luego del debate con sus colaboradores, Abbott decidió avanzar con la orden.David Carney, su asesor de campaña, dijo que Abbott quería proteger a los pequeños negocios de tener que despedir a los trabajadores por la política “torpe, incoherente” de requerir vacunación obligatoria para las empresas con 100 o más empleados, que entrará en vigor el 4 de enero y que el mes pasado Abbott desafió en una corte federal.“Esto siempre ha sido impulsado por los pequeños negocios”, dijo Carney, y no por la política republicana.J. David Goodman es el jefe del buró de Houston, que cubre Texas. Ha escrito sobre gobierno, justicia penal y el papel del financiamiento en la política para el Times desde 2012. @jdavidgoodman More